7 May 2020. Homeward Bound.
So many things missed--on purpose, as best as I can recall. The songs seemed too middle-of-the-road, the sentiment too easy--they appealed to a generalized sense of the alrightness-of-things, with just a touch of angst, carefully moderated and assuaged. As opposed to Artaud, let's say--not that we could emulate Artaud, even at our most extreme. The arrival of the plague ship at a port in medieval France, that kind of thing--but still, the very extremeness was compelling. As if all that was taken for granted--the ease of life in middle-class America, the availability of everything, nothing the result of a struggle. We didn't know what that struggle might be, actually--only imagined it--or better, yearned for it...
Maybe that's why walking one of those first mornings on the edge of the street market in Buenos Aires (I was not quite 16), where the wash-down water stood in small pools at the curb--fetid, robust, so urban--from a place that implied vitality. Little did I know, of course, what had preceded all this, the years of hope, chaos...
____
Here I am at maybe nine. The drawing makes me a little younger--that's because the shape of the head was what carried me in--a shape which must be lodged in memory from the twin paper-cuts made of Peter and me at the Del Mar Fair. Framed side-by-side, always there on the wall of my parents' bedroom. A kind of acknowledgement...
Like the hoopoe bird on the wall at C's...
I'm holding a wooden puzzle box--one of those extemporaneous gifts given to us by my parents over the course of our drive from San Diego to San Francisco. Early April--both our birthdays, so the day-by-day gifts were a special kind of excitement.
I can remember the feeling of the wood (one of those 50's imports?) and the way the parts slid back and forth. And also the tension of the challenge of figuring it out. Which had to be done in real time. None of this understood then, but it must have encouraged a pattern of curiosity--acting on curiosity...
Like learning a song--even this morning, the Paul Simon--he's seated with a group of handsome Swedes on a television stage--the setting intimate, nicely lit for atmosphere. The host asks him to play a song, and a guitar appears. Then first acoustic notes--still rather sophisticated, the way he handles them--and then those even-and-odd rhythms, engaging, lulling--he's sung it so many times, but you can still see him finding something new...
_____
Note: Buenos Aires--when I was not quite 16. Also, on the shape of the head--Ernst Gombrich would say that we learn how to make a picture by learning the schemata--the shapes of the heads in those paper-cuts. Richard Wollheim would counter that it's a matter of seeing in--the artist make a line, a mark--and in the same instant the meaning appears. The drawing here reminds me that of course it's always a combination of the two...
Note II: Homeward Bound (with alternate lyrics) has been a staple here for the 6 o'clock Miramar sing-alongs. I decided to learn it. Out of curiosity, I looked into Paul Simon--Bob Dylan--I'd forgotten the tension. And the Graceland controversy. It was actually good to revisit all this from a fresh point of view--especially after watching Simon on the Swedish sound stage, in 2018, looking a touch worn, but still with that same sense of distance--maybe suspicion--as if he never quite knew what to make of people's reactions to his songs. His human presence, however--which I'd come to to learn the song--was compelling. Maybe because of the above...
