I have been tweeting recently with someone calling herself Slum Goddess. I immediately asked if she was an East Village Fugs fan. As it turns out she is an expat American, living in London, whom some juvenile judge had banned from Greenwich Village when she was fourteen. Her screen name is drawn from a Tuli Kupferberg song, the chorus of which is:
Slum Goddess put away that knife
Slum Goddess come and be my wife.
Slum Goddess of the lower East Side
For those of you too young to remember even parts of the sixties. The Fugs, led by Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg, were the original underground rock band. They took their name from the euphemism that Norman Mailer’s publisher had forced on him when he published The Naked and the Dead, in the days before the fuck barrier had been broken. In those days when obscenity was still a challenge to the establishment, their name and some of their lyrics issued a clarion call. They were also interested in poetry and their rendition of William Blake’s “A Sunflower Weary of Time” still remains one of my favorite interpretations of Blake.
This twitter exchange sent my mind spinning and sent me back to my last night in New York before I went to Botswana in the Peace Corps. I and several of my compatriots went pub crawling through the East Village and ended in up in the offices of the East Village Other where we duly made “southern African correspondents.” I don’t think any of us ever filed a story.
I remembered people I hadn’t thought about in years and wondered what had happened to them, but not enough to google them and find out.I remember the brash, confident, and fairly foolish young man I had been with more fondness than chagrin. But mostly I marveled at how memory can serve up images that seem really fresh, even though I know they are over 40 years old. I regret nothing have done, but know that too many of my days have not rendered up images that will sustain me. I was happy to discover this one still does.
Tagged as:
Botswana,
Ed Sanders,
Norman Mailer,
Slum Goddess,
Tuli Kupferberg,
William Blake
We moved furniture around last week and I had to empty a bookcase. In it, I discovered several old journals. Now, I must admit to being a very irregular journal keeper. I’ll start with a burst of enthusiasm. Make near daily entries for a month or so. Then slowly taper off, stop, and when some pressure or enthusiasm enters my life, I’ll start again. I keep the journals though. My earliest is 1966-67 when I was in the Peace Corps and is a folio sized composition book sold in school stores. Later I went to ruled and un-ruled sketch books.
I sat and read a journal that covered the years 1991 to 1996, the period between my divorce becoming final and my remarriage. In it were my usual scraps–descriptions of events, an odd and not very good poem or two, a trying to reason out what I felt about this or that, some goals and wishes, and a comment or two on what I was reading. A stranger reading my journal might note some reoccurring themes–a struggle with weight, a good deal of earthly ambition, an attempt to understand my life experience in terms of the politics and culture of my day, and an ongoing search for both spiritual and sexual connection.
My pleasures, of course, lay in remembering these events and looking at my goals achieved or not some fifteen years later. Laughing at how God had arranged that my goals be achieved in ways I couldn’t imagine. Remembering fondly an afternoon in August, 1992 on a mountaintop outside Vancouver when unsought and unexpected an experience close to the mystical occurred to me. My journal says I felt whole after feeling asunder for very long, I write about the beauty of the view, and about driving through Vancouver rush hour with “an almost Zen-like calm.” An experience I intectually believed possible was now emotionally real.
My father died a month after my remarriage and three weeks after his seventy-ninth birthday. Entries exist on both sides of this event. Nowhere do I write about my feelings toward him or the week I spent with my mother and siblings watching him die and then burying him. My first journals contain several unsent angry letters to him and many pages in several of them try to understand my relationship with him. Just before my remarriage and his death we made some peace–more than a truce, but not a full reconciliation. But the gap, this lack of writing, the glaring lacunae struck forceably on this rereading. Why hadn’t I written. Did (do) I consider it a closed chapter?
Socrates says, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” The unremembered life is not really lived.
Tagged as:
Arts,
Death,
Journal,
Peace Corps,
Zen
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