www.scene4.com

April 2023

Early Days in the Vortex/ Part Two

Brian George

Description: A picture containing text, colorful, painting, painted  Description automatically generated

Andre Masson, Metamorphosis of the Lovers, 1939

My working-class neighborhood in South Worcester was a great place to grow up—if your interests were such things as baseball, basketball, bike riding, tree and railroad bridge climbing, kick the can, fighting, trespassing, and urban spelunking. Unless it rained, my friends and I spent most of our time outdoors. It was not, however, the best place for a budding avant -gardist. By the time I graduated high school, I had become aware of just how limited I was, like the city that produced me, a city I would only years later come to love.

If you had a car, you could drive from my neighborhood to Boston in an hour. I didn't have a car, however. I didn't take Route Nine. I went by way of the abyss. I worked eight hours a day as a janitor at the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, cleaning ink off all the presses, and also as a counsellor at the Worcester Crisis Center, learning to treat the problems of heroin addicts and would be suicides as being almost as important my own. I then would spend most of my free time at the Clark University Library, going stack by stack in my search for any trace of the Philosopher's Stone. An abyss had opened, and I entered it. We became good friends, more or less, not that I was presented with any other option. In the two years after high school, I chose to act as my harshest critic. There was lots of catching up to do. To do something once was to do it many times. I saw, I heard, I was led, I learned a lot, but each small gain felt deliberate and laborious.

And then, in September, 1974, when I moved to Boston to go to art school, my self-imposed atonement came suddenly to an end, as though I had closed the book that I was reading with a snap. Don't ask for what crime I had been sentenced to atone. A kind of antigravity took over when I stepped from the Greyhound bus. The top of my head flew off. The days appeared to physically grow brighter. The sun moved closer to the Earth. I was as happy as one of the roaches that scurried in my 92 dollars-per -month apartment.

Did my kitchen not have a stove? Did water leaking from my ceiling destroy a dozen drawings? Was my wallpaper starting to fall off? Did the mice make so much noise that they kept me up at night? What of it? Such hardships fit my definition of adventure. So as not to grow too comfortable, a few days per week I would add to these hardships by sleeping on the floor . In Worcester, I had put my shoulder against an almost immovable wheel. In Boston, in search of the later-day descendants of Bohemia, on the cusp of a cultural moment that I had not yet discovered, not the effort but the sense of difficulty disappeared.

I had intended to rent an apartment a few blocks from my school. Hopelessly ignorant of the city, I ended up a mile away. What luck was mine! My location was a perfect one, across the street from the Northeastern University Library, whose books would gladly welcome me when I fled from my apartment. Was this place the result of a series of wrong turns? No. I had accepted Baudelaire's invitation to go with him on a voyage. I had gone where the Old Ones sent me. I was where I was meant to be. If the most important changes are internal, having to do with one's subtle relationship to events, then there are also times when outer changes are essential, when one would die inside without them. These outer changes then shift the balance between the subject and the object, so that events begin to articulate the psyche, so that the psyche appears to be present in the most random of events.

Description: A picture containing text, stone  Description automatically generated

Brian George, The Enigma of the Calendar, pictogram, 2002

So: one Sunday night, having finished all of my art school projects for the weekend, I decided to check out a writers workshop held at the Widener Library at Harvard. There, I met two poets, Jack Kimball and Don Quatrale, who invited me to a poets' gathering to be held on Joy Street on Beacon Hill at 6:00 the following night. My role: just being in a place, and later on: a nod of assent. Jack said, "Your work is young, but there are signs pointing to some future breakthrough into vision." "Oh?" I responded, "How nice." Should I interpret Jack's analysis as rude? It was a close call, and I almost didn't go.

A hair's breadth of a difference separates the right from the wrong action. We may reasonably shame the actor for not making perfect choices, yet timidity may be the most important sin. One life stops; another life begins, at one and the same moment of remembrance. We do not know what we know. Yet it is possible that our ignorance is also a non-issue. The contraption once built by the oracle runs as smoothly as a broken clock.

Upon opening my eyes, I found that I was standing in front of a Second Empire townhouse. Joy Street. Number 23. (This was back when you didn't have to be a millionaire to live in a rundown apartment on Beacon Hill.) At 6:00, I rang the bell and slowly climbed the stairs. I knocked on the door, it opened, and a cloud of incense smoke poured out. Will Bennett, wearing a bath towel and eating a hotdog, explained that he was actually a macrobiotic vegetarian. (Such was the lure of the proto-punk scene that it had infected his until then pure beliefs.) At 8:00, the poets started to trickle in. I mostly watched. When I did attempt to speak, my comments would be met with silence, and vaguely paranoid glances would be flashed my way. Since I had recently cut my hair short when most men in such circles still wore it long, I was regarded as a possible narc or at best an MIT nerd.

Description: A picture containing text  Description automatically generated

Victor Brauner, The Fashion, 1937

The group read, contributed lines to spontaneous poems, made "exquisite corpse" drawings, and spoke of Lautreamont and Rimbaud and de Chirico and Ernst and Vallejo and Lamantia, all of whom were influences, all of whom I loved. Finally, at 2:30 a.m., I was able to take advantage of a quiet moment to read several of my pieces. The themes of my not especially good poetry were archetypal. My reading style was eccentric, a bit like Tibetan chanting. It had evolved during those two years of near solitude in Worcester, and it did not resemble any of the current styles of performing poetry. It had been known to scare people.

I read one piece without incident, but a minute or so into the second piece, something unexpected happened. Many group members started to laugh, hysterically, as they rolled around on the floor. They slapped the arms of their chairs, shrieking. They hooted and barked. They threw pillows around the room. Should I be offended? Did they hate the work? As it turned out, the exact opposite was true. They were pleased that first impressions could prove to be so wrong. Many in this group were to remain my friends for the next 10 or 15 years. Chance: the displaced effect of a cause that we have long ago forgotten. Thus "accident" may not be different from "intent."

In an earlier draft of this essay, I had listed the names of all the people at this event. I have edited these out. There is no particular reason that the reader should care about these people or share my sense of why they are important. None are famous. A few have won prizes. A few had started small literary magazines, back when there were such things and poets gathered at bookstores to discuss them, and a few are still well known in small literary circles today. I was surprised, however, to find how limited a presence the majority of them have on the internet. I doubt that any I'm not aware of have spent time searching for me. Most are now strangers. How far away they are—stylistically, geographically, metaphysically. They are as distant from me as they were before we had ever met, and yet, without them, I would be living in an altogether different world. If my story had not led me to that cloud-filled room in a Second-Empire townhouse, and if the third-floor door had not been opened by an almost naked vegetarian eating a hotdog, then I would not be who and what I am. I would not be writing what I write, and I would never have met you, my reader, however far away you are. Even now, I am grateful. I gasp with relief.

Since 2007, I have been out of touch with Jack Kimball. We had a pleasant talk on the phone. Don Quatrale passed away in the early 1990s. I feel guilty. I don't know the exact date.   

Description: A picture containing text  Description automatically generated

Max Ernst, Loplop Introduces Loplop, 1930

In five thousand or so years, some avian monk may compile a catalogue of all of the obscure writers of our era. By then, if all goes well, if there are lands whose labs have managed to peek above the ocean, if a derelict reactor becomes the Virgin Mother to New Humans, if we somehow learn to live on seeds and sulfur and mercury, if a homeopathic distillation of cursed mummy wrappings becomes the drug of choice, our sonic technology may be able to track the spin of each electron in the universe. We may be able to assess, objectively, the stature of each writer and the importance of each friend. The synchronicities that drew me to my band of bohemian catalysts may then reveal themselves in all of their perfection. On a cold day, squinting, the avian monk will then reunite my circle with a footnote.

 

Share This Page

View readers' comments in Letters to the Editor

bg,-photo-clr-2

Brian George is the author of two books of essays and four books of poetry. His book of essays Masks of Origin: Regression in the Service of Omnipotence has just been published by Untimely Books at
https://untimelybooks.com/book/masks-of-origin. He has recently reactivated his blog, also called Masks of Origin at https://masksoforigin.blogspot.com/. He is a graduate of the Massachusetts College of Art, an exhibited artist and former teacher. He often tells people first discovering his work that his goal is not so much to be read as to be reread, and then lived with.
For more of his writings in Scene4, check the Archives.

©2023 Brian George
©2023 Publication Scene4 Magazine

 

 

 

 

www.scene4.com

April 2023

  Sections~Cover · This Issue · inFocus · inView · inSight · Perspectives · Special Issues
  Columns~Adler · Alenier · Bettencourt · Jones · Luce · Marcott · Walsh 
  Information~Masthead · Your Support · Prior Issues · Submissions · Archives · Books
  Connections~Contact Us · Comments · Subscribe · Advertising · Privacy · Terms · Letters

|  Search Issue | Search Archives | Share Page |

Scene4 (ISSN 1932-3603), published monthly by Scene4 Magazine
of Arts and Culture. Copyright © 2000-2023 Aviar-Dka Ltd – Aviar Media Llc.

sc4cover-archives-picSubscribe to our mail list for news and a monthly update of each new issue. It's Free!

 Name

 Email Address
 

        Please see our Privacy Policy regarding the security of your information.

sciam-subs-221tf71
Thai Airways at Scene4 Magazine
calibre-ad1