Ladies & Gentlemen:
While I enjoy a rare moment of peace & privacy in this all-too-hostile hostel, mercifully located within easy walking distance of Baptist Hospital (in case I should resort to drastic coping measures), I thought I would amuse you with a few inspirational words. They come to your attention via the weird miracle that is the World Wide Web, a technology apparently spun by some greedy spiders in a corner office near Silicon Valley, California.
I promise to make this brief because life's too short to be tedious or, what's worse, to inflict one's tedium on others. Fortified by Tazo Zen green tea & a banana, I attack the task despite the midnight hour & my failing eyesight. Tonight in my bunk -- by the way, I share a small room outfitted with steel bunkbeds alongside a closeted gay slob, a human paradox indeed, but a silly young cartoon fan who serves a good purpose: he makes me, a hypersensitive aesthete, feel macho by comparison.
Anyway, I was reading a letter dated June 26, 1959, written by Hunter S. Thompson. At the time, he was an unemployed 22-year-old ex-journalist & Air Force vet living hand to mouth in a remote cabin near Cuddebackville, New York. His addressee was a paramour in Florida with the unfortunate name of Miss Frick. In that charming letter (HST kept carbon copies of his vast typewritten correspondence even then) he assures her that, despite setbacks in his attempts at publishing fiction, "They ain't throwin' dirt on my coffin yet."
This was 7 years before his first literary success, the insightful & delightful "nonfiction" book "Hell's Angels: The Strange & Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs" (1966). The Doctor had plenty of struggle ahead of him before the glory years at Rolling Stone magazine. And, of course, his life-story ended sadly: like his early hero Hemingway, Hunter eventually put a gun in his mouth & pulled the trigger.
But he quotes a poet in that Frickian letter, composed by an ambitious & talented youthful misfit from Louisville - a quote which bears repeating & glossing:
"To be nobody-but-yourself -- in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you somebody else -- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting." - e.e. cummings.
If you prefer a musical paraphrase of that idea, try this one:
"Well, I try my best / To be just like I am
But everybody wants you / To be just like them."
- Bob Dylan, "Maggie's Farm" (1965).
Perhaps you are engaged in that endless campaign of self-realization. If so, I salute you. If not -- if, in fact, you have already surrendered to what Dylan once called "society's pliers," i.e. its constant conformist onslaught, well, I suppose I can only pity you. All I can say for sure is that I am doing my damnedest to be & remain nobody but Myself. And I have the scars (as well as the bunkbed) to prove it. But they ain't throwin' dirt on my coffin yet, are they? Now go think for yourself. I'm tired.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Very well put, JCM, and I can call to mind a few other examples of similar sentiment: T. S. Eliot's poem, The Hollow Men, the repeated reference by A. Crowley to "the black men" (nothing to do with race, rather, it seems to refer to those with a dead "self-will"; they are "black" because they have surrendered to the imposed "communal reality"- as I tend to call it: that skyscraper up yonder exists because enough people think it does; if they didn't, nature would replace it)
ReplyDeleteBut could you be or do anything but? A particular kind of knowledge can be a double-edged blade: one is raised to a higher level of awareness, and simultaneously isolated from those who sleep.
Keep truckin'...