Freaks?

"For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command or faith a dictum. I am my own God. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us."

                                                            --Charles Bukowski

One day when I was scanning the newspapers, a face suddenly popped out at me from within the ranks of robotic expressions--someone had a face with eyes, that had seen something. He was grizzled, nearly entirely toothless, and the skin around his eyes was so wrinkled that it looked as though he had never had a good night's sleep in his life. But a strange, inimitable life twinkled there. He was homeless. A painter who lived in a tent next to the river, the article said. His name was Brian Joyce.

I have never idealized the homeless person as a seer or prophet. I know from experiences talking to homeless people that most of them are vague, mentally foggy people, having suffered so much that they can no longer think clearly or impart anything coherently. Most of them are genuinely crazy, and by crazy I don't mean that they don't fit into society's plans, or that they are tormented by horrible thoughts. I mean that they no longer feel happiness at all. (By this criteria many of the people in our society are nearly nuts, but that's another article). That doesn't mean we can't learn anything from them. It just means that they aren't usually teachers. Their very bodies, twisted with pain and hardened in defeat, are living prophecies of what is going to happen to all of us if we don't demand a more intelligent, less destructive way of life.

But Brian Joyce wasn't fragmented. Everything he said in the interview was intelligent and focused, and you got the impression that if he tried hard enough he could earn himself a "respectable" place somewhere in society. He simply didn't want to. He remarked that he'd often been asked if he saw himself as being oppressed, and had always responded that "I don't think of myself as among the crucified, any more than we're all among the crucified". His paintings, surrealistic in construction (the reporter compared them favorably with Dali), showed a clear understanding of form and craft, and the few shown on the pages of the Boston newspaper showed strong ideas and real talent, the kind of talent that gets other people exhibited in museums.

Every morning, Brian Joyce wakes up early in a ramshackle tent made of large tarps sown together by his own hands, next to a rushing river. Occasionally, only in the winter, he seeks the comfort of soup kitchens and shelters, usually only for a night or two, only when it's so cold that his spit freezes before it hits the ground. He roams the streets of Boston rummaging in the bottoms of trash cans for discarded cups of coffee, always finding that most people throw their cups away with a good portion of coffee left in them. He lives on other people's throwaways, which in our country are plentiful. He pours the leftovers into a canteen and drinks the whole thing quickly to get a caffeine rush that sustains him through his further hunting for scraps of food. A few good souls in Boston, who know of his existence and his methods because of his art, sometimes leave full cups of coffee and uneaten food at the bottoms of trashcans in his browsing area.

While in the convenience store, I often experienced a feeling of impending doom; I thought I was right in the middle of hell. Surely I was in the midst of a lot of waste and stupidity, needless, mindless overproduction, and greed. Convenience stores are poor meccas of unhealthy food, gambling games with lousy odds, overpriced fuel, and other, more obvious addictions, chewing tobacco, cigarettes, caffeine and alcohol, all carefully taxed so that the state can profit from people's weaknesses. I would watch the customers in line, and watch myself serving them, and the visions of impending apocalypse that I'd been inundated with while growing up in an orthodox Christian home had begun to reoccur.

Surely this grim procession had to end soon. In fact, even if I myself was to be among the damned when the promised cataclysm fell, I wanted it to happen. I wanted a huge, punishing heavenly hand to glide over the parking lot and sweep our little shop of horrors into the ocean. When I glimpsed the face of Brian Joyce I knew why; our world forces many of its finest human gifts to the sidelines to be trampled on. Some of them survive, and create, but only against great odds. We have built an empire in which feeling that your own life has a meaning independent of civilization's is highly unacceptable and dangerous. Only a moment's realization of impending doom separated the average customer, temporarily sedated by our pathetic products, from joining Brian in his tent next to the river.

Once, when I was in Boston, I tried to find him. I was homeless myself, and I talked to bums on sidewalk after sidewalk, asking if they knew Brian. One of them did, but he didn't know where to find him. I was disappointed, but I wasn't surprised that I hadn't tracked him down. Somehow I knew that I would get to meet characters like him on the road ahead.

Several years later, finding myself broke and homeless, driving a car that was literally flying apart, I arrived in a vaguely familiar town, out of gas, and was forced to stay for several months in a homeless shelter. The house in which we stayed was occupied by about 14-16 men, most of them twice my age (I was 22), a few of them even younger. Most of them were ex-cons, former or current drug addicts, and a few cleaner-cut types just temporarily short on ideas. And there was Jack, a strikingly blonde long-haired middle-aged man who looked like a Def Leppard roadie, who snorted coke with regularity and spent his afternoons walking around main street in short denim cut-offs and a wife-beater t-shirt, showing the ladies his finely tanned and toned calves. His vivid descriptions of "getting that clean pink little pussy" from willing women all over the East Coast were some of the finest narrative poems I've ever heard, and I say that without sarcasm. He remains one of the funniest, most engaging people I've ever met. Even when he wasn't high on coke, he glowed with almost ridiculous optimism. But when I first arrived I wasn't so appreciative of him. I came to the shelter only out of desperation because it was very cold, being deep winter. Despite our mutual predicament, I was still the snob who had looked on most of the customers at the convenience store as lower forms of life, and at first I inwardly scoffed at the low-brow sense of humor of most of these men, at their apparently inane activities. They were "rednecks".

But one of them caught my attention immediately; he usually stood in the corner of the kitchen quietly sipping coffee. He had a large mustache and his eyes looked older than the rest of his face, though his hair was grey and he was obviously at least in his late fifties. One day he spotted me sitting at the dining room table with books by Walt Whitman and Hilda Doolittle, scribbling in a notebook, and on his face I saw the expression of a man waking up from a long nightmare. I could tell he was thrilled to have someone who read books in the house where he stayed. He began to recite Yeats and Keats, one poem after the other, with crystalline memory, through his mostly toothless mouth, his voice numbed by anti-psychotics. As he recited his voice began to fill with light and warmth, and the numbness retreated. I had never heard such depth in poetry recitation before, and don't expect to again any time soon. This was not a man being paid to study poetry--this was a man who had been to the bottom of hell and brought only the best verses back with him. His voice rumbled and slurred with old emotion like an ancient singing a hymn, his lack of teeth only adding to the effect.

We began to spend long nights together talking about art. He showed me his paintings, which were better than most pictures I've seen in museums. One of them pictured a small group of Native Americans standing around a bright campfire on the White House lawn. The dome of the capital building was caved in, and vines climbed the pillars. An apocalypse of his own kind, and to his own satisfaction. This man became a friend of mine, and I found that he didn't measure up to any of my initial visions of a peaceful hobo; it was rumored by people not known to be gossips that he had, while staying at a campsite, repeatedly tried to seduce a barely post pubescent girl, and that the girl's father had responded by bashing his teeth in, explaining his lack. I don't blame the father. And so I can't idealize this man, or claim him as a neglected, perfect messiah of peace and joy in a corrupt culture. But an incredible beauty of creation flowed from him, even if the flow had been stemmed by bad choices and passions out of control, sometimes crazed.

All his paintings showed a future time in which our society had literally collapsed; some of his most vivid paintings showed the regrowth that would come out of this necessary collapse by portraying the gears of machines stilled, rusting, with vines and flowers growing across them. He also depicted the Social Security Administration as a labyrinth through which naked, frail bodies walked on treadmills, to be funneled into meat-grinders. He didn't bother with cheap gore to portray their doom--all their agony was captured in their translucent, naked skin, in their fragile bodies and in their hurt posture. He had subtlety and grace even in dealing with the harshest revelations that a human being can experience.

After my re-entrance into polite society (can a person be replaced back into the womb?), managing to hang onto a job and a room of my own, I still always find the greatest, most honest struggle for beauty to be present in the most alienated of artists, in those whom the powers-that-be would rather not hear from. And the words and images of these people touch me deeply, coming from a place where so much has been suffered that it is no longer possible to think of being marketable, a place where the self-censoring mechanism has been permanently broken. I read the words of the great neglected Swedish-Finish poet Gunnar Bjorling, who spent most of his life in a dirty basement, left out of the mainstream of his culture partly for practicing his homosexuality, which was a crime in his country at the time in which he lived (from 1887-1960), and partly for his craftsmanship, which was uncompromisingly honest and original and which he refused to, or was unable to, edit for mass consumption. I read his words in the poem "Sungreen" and think of my friend's paintings:

I want
cars, breasts to split apart,
houses to stand on their roofs and the ground to hover in the air
all the lines, the forms to be hurled up in the air
like a topsy-turviness,
the colors to scream kaleidoscopically
and the horn burst in a clap of thunder,
and all shall be as is,
from the inside out. That we stand in balance
on opened street's abyss's walls
and hold house and eyes together.

This is not polite poetry, not a human being hidden behind a veil of too-carefully crafted images. It is the eruption of powerful longing for violent renewal, a universal need depicted from the very bottom's depth of alienation. When you've been pushed to the brink of insanity by your own overwhelming sensitivity to life, and by your own inability to be accepted as yourself, able to be accepted only on the condition that you lessen your best qualities and heighten the worst, it simply isn't possible to be false any longer without being greeted by internal pain as a result. The only catharsis is to portray your genuine feelings even if it gets you killed. I used to think of these people only as beautiful rarities, apart from the mainstream of humanity, but now I see that their own feelings are common, that they in fact speak for large portions of us. And that is part of why they must be driven to the outskirts; if they were really insane, how could anybody find them readable, and thus identify with them?

But all of us recognize the human feelings in this poem, whether we acknowledge them regularly in our own lives or not. It is easier to view these words as the enchantments of a hopeless misfit; harder to recognize and welcome that dark passion on our everyday lives, and risk being expelled. When "Howl" was brought to court on obscenity charges, it wasn't because Ginsberg publicly declared the delights of being fucked in the ass by "saintly motorcyclists"--it was because of the outcry, against a heartless mediocrity that we all help to support on a daily basis. Most people simply believe that it takes too much work to overturn the destructiveness of mainstream civilization. The authorities weren't as horrified by the word "fuck" as they might have claimed--they were terrified by the indictment of mediocre living that it carried with it, and the dissatisfaction it was capable of sowing in the human heart.

When I was trapped in that store, looking at the picture of Brian Joyce, I knew that his existence was a reproach to my own way of life. In a world full of people, including myself, who complained constantly of their entrapments while doing nothing to escape them, his own words in the brief interview were positive, lucid, resigned to his place on the outskirts. He was happy enough scrounging up money for painting supplies to do his work, and he didn't feel that he was any more persecuted than anybody else. Which shows us something; that his existence is a hair's breadth from us. His way of life is not that remote. I found that out the hard way when I spent time living in a tent myself; out in the woods, there was no impending apocalypse. The apocalypse is something you long for when standing impatiently in line in Burger King. Walking naked on forest paths at night, the beauty of the world is infinite, and free of charge. The hardest part is to return to a day-job the next day and face the plodding, excruciating efforts of a humanity determined to avoid that easy ecstasy at all costs.

When I was young, I had not yet discovered these alienated voices. I grew up in church, surrounded almost entirely by people who seemed at ease with their collective convictions, at least on the surface. I had no such sense of ease, and constantly wondered why. I thought that these people were robots whose programming my questioning nature disturbed. My questions were often greeted with bafflement; people found it bizarre that I should be so at odds with G od's supposedly perfect love. I couldn't get any perceptive advice from them. And early on in school I was almost entirely without companions, so I couldn't seek secular advice either. I used to wonder why the instructions I received seemed to be weightless, illusory, why the life being planned for me had no reality. It wasn't until I found these desperate, wounded voices that I found my own. While the leaders and followers of our society plunge on their supposedly straight paths, spouting language that has no ring of reality to it, these "outcasts" often know far more about humanity than any paid preacher, guru or political leader. A Biblical passage that I heard often in church sums up the "struggle" of most of the public world, especially the public media-driven portion, but, held from a different angle, it can also capture ours:

"Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in high places." (Eph. 6:12).

Yet there is another way to use that passage, and that is the way I myself take it, the way I believe that many of these eternal hobos have taken it: that you must not expect to be treated well by other human beings for being yourself. Or expect the world to become good overnight because of your efforts, especially artistic efforts. You must not try to bludgeon individual human beings out of existence because they don't notice the beauty that you pride yourself on noticing, or pretend that everyone's need is the same as your own. Or mentally dehumanize them because you don't yet relate to them, or put too much of your need upon any one person. Our task is bigger than that, bigger than the responses of our time. Expecting the immediate admiration of people for following your own deepest, purest longings dooms you to unhappiness.

Our struggle is so large, and against such huge forces, and we recognize that other individual human beings are caught up in the same mess, whether they (we) realize it or not. Our fundamentally dishonest president is a human being, capable of positive change (how easy it is, at times, to forget that), though we don't know what kind of personal cataclysm might bring him there. That's what I should have realized when I saw Brian's face next to his in the paper (instead of merely holding him up as a reproach); that the other people pictured in the newspaper, and the ones standing in line, were just as human as Joyce, that he revealed their humanity in a more intense form, not dwarfed it. Now, instead of elevating the alienated artist to a place remote from humanity, I let the artist's work bring me closer to every person's real and potentially precious existence alongside mine, which is, conscious or not, a part of its intention.

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