Hughlings Himwich

This I Believe

I believe in the Road.  

When I was a sophomore at Brown University, I returned home for spring break and asked my father to read some of my own poems and others by Rilke. My father, a pioneer in the study of the biochemical basis of mental illness, told me that my poems and those of Rilke revealed schizophrenia. I left home within the hour, on foot, never to truly return again. Before my father died, I had forgiven him and loved him as a father should be loved. Now, I am grateful to him. Grateful for endowing me with the same passion with which he lived his life, however imperfectly. My own life has been no less imperfect. That night, as I walked down a dark highway, singing to myself the Woody Guthrie song “Going Down the Road Feeling Bad,” I vowed never to allow another person’s assessment of me to determine how I felt about myself, my ideas or my poetry. I did not then return to Brown. When I did, I was married and a father.

That first long night on the road lead to two years of aimless but purposeful hitchhiking. There were others on that road. One bad man, the owner of an art gallery in Austin, Texas, lured me out to his ranch and tried to force me to have sex with him. I refused. Quietly but definitely. His hired man pulled out a knife. I said, “I will not.” Quietly but definitely. I was not afraid. He did not touch me. In that precarious moment, I knew myself. It was as if life had asked me a question and I had answered. 

Since that time, I have found myself in other precarious situations, as I do even today. I will not chronicle these critical moments here except to say they put the integrity of my life in question.  Each of these situations required of me an answer beyond any philosophy I had ever read. Philosophy does indeed ask essential questions, but it is only with our actual lives that we answer those questions. Such philosophical questions as Do we have free will? What is truth? Or Justice? are all too often illusions like the paradoxes propounded by Zeno. The illusion comes when we mistake the arena in which these questions are to be answered. What is truth? Observe how I live, not what I say. I necessarily live out my answers to what is true and good. I am my philosophy and all that I have suffered I own.   

I am always on the road, aimless but purposeful, knowing that the road is where my true self is revealed. For me the literal and metaphorical road have become one. I know I have at least one great road trip still in me. We may pass by each other in the East Mountains or between here and there. Know all is well even if I look sad, ragged and tired. Pass on. All is well. 

A Boy at Play

I celebrate youth, both the youth in my students, young and old, and the great unspent youth in myself. When I was growing up, my parents allowed me to run free of any apparent supervision. I literally leapt from one building to the next, dodged trains on the railway tracks, gathered tobacco from cigarette butts to smoke in my corncob pipe, roughhoused with friends, often leaving each other gleefully black and blue, ran naked in the summer rain before disapproving eyes, imagined myself a good guy in combat with all manner of monsters and evildoers, and everywhere I looked for a risk worth taking. In short, I came to know myself through play.

Of course, some of these adventures did not turn out well. In one instance, I opened a large gash in the back of my head from a tumbling fall. I was in hot pursuit of an outlaw and tried to leap over the railing of a porch, intending to land on my feet about 8 feet below. Where I took stitches still occasionally aches. I lost teeth, broke bones, and often came home crying. But I survived my own recklessness and I now see that such adventures have become the stuff of which my life has been and continues to be made. I will not speak here of my adolescent and young adult adventures, except to say that they took on a more consequential turn. I was told at various times in my life that I was unpatriotic, irreverent, and even mentally ill. And for all these judgments there were warnings, threats, and consequences. I now see it all as a happy adventure, though a few of the individual episodes could have cost me my life. There was one occasion as I was hitchhiking about that a man told me he would kill me unless I had sex with him. I refused and I survived, intact. That and other experiences taught me that there are no guarantees.

Now, as I look back and forward, I see that most, but not all, of my outward exploration has turned inward. I understand my writing of poetry as an inner version of that youthful play. I play at ideas and images and words, and there is a risk. I speak not here of the risk of ridicule, though that is real, but the risk of losing the very meaning of life -- because words and ideas by which we explore the meaning of our lives may turn out to be nonsense. And worse yet, unlivable.

Play reveals meaning. Some will see this as a frivolous idea. So let us begin our play with the idea of universal justice, that all men are created equal. Absolutely equal! Without qualification or reservation. No serious person would ever propose such a reckless idea, let alone try to live it. It lives first in the imagination of a boy at play. I remain on the lookout for a risk worth taking.

A Fool's Errand

It seems, without my knowing it, I’ve earned the privilege to have a brick engraved with whatever I like at the top of the walkway under the blind Academy arches.  Mine will not bear my name, but it will say in Latin (of course!): 

Noli sequi
in vestigiis
sapientium.
Quaere novas
vias ad
veritatem.

‘Don’t follow In the footsteps of the wise.  Seek new paths to truth.’ This is what I’ve always tried to do.  I half suspect the truth is a mirage, but I feel drawn to it, believing that though it is an illusion, it nevertheless gives life its meaning and value and allows us to become truly ourselves.  As Melville says in Moby Dick, such a phantom is the key to it all:  

        And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting,
        mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves
        see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.

Was Ahab an absurd, tragic figure? Surely by the conventions of this world he was, but every half-step that towering, one-legged old man took was taken on a path that was heroically his own. He sought meaning in a meaningless universe, what Melville called the Whiteness of the Whale, and went prodigiously mad.  It was a fool’s errand, but Ahab was a grand fool and achieved the full, senseless glory of what it is to be human. 

I am no such staggering figure. There is no white whale that haunts my dreams, unless it be that I would speak a few poetic words or lines that would make this meaningless, soundless universe betray itself in song.  Call it the Music of the Spheres . . . human voices flickering alive and then dying out into deepest night as if there had never been any sound at all, no word, not in the beginning or end, such markers being themselves but illusions. Nothing ever begins or ends except that which is always beginning and always ending. 

Would you join that chorus of dying voices? To take your place there you must follow your own path,  passionately seeking a phantom that is no more than a reflection of yourself and mocks you at every turn along the way.

Call it a lie and a fool’s errand. Yet, it is a truth worth living and dying for, even though that dying be in my particular case but slumber, a comedy unworthy of an Ahab or a Quixote.