Chris

About me:

"I was born in Dixie in a boomer's shack....." Well, not really, but this opening to "Freight Train Blues" on Bob Dylan's eponymous first album, SOUNDS right. The whole point of people like me is that we were creating ourselves from one minute to the next until we figured out who we are, and just went from there. I've got to acknowledge the indulgence of my editor at The Stylus for letting me write up a review of Martin Scorsese's "No Direction Home" and so figure this out about myself. Or at least begin to articulate it. We were all trying to find our way home, and ended up by discovering or creating it. What we figured out about ourselves is that on the levels in which it is possible to be different, we WERE different. We also at some point discovered that what we had thought were the burdens of being different carried another weight in the cosmic scale of things than we had thought. Not more or less weight, but just, well, DIFFERENT. There was a lot of stuff about making judgements that we found out were, well, DIFFFERENT than what we had thought them to be. To the extent that we acommodated ourselves to these differences, the more successful our lives were. My entry into this way of thinking was by way of Ken Kesey, or at least the version of him in Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test." This parallelled the understanding of human culture that I developed from my contact with the work of Joseph Campbell (another Mick whose apostasy from Catholicism wasn't traumatic, but just a matter of normal development as a person whose life was lived mostly in twentieth century America("bliss it was in those times to be alive," quoth Wordsworth, "but to be young was very heaven." Hey. It's still that way if you look at it with a certain perspective. Start with Martin Buber's "I And Thou." and follow your nose until you discover the divinity at the heart of yourself. (Who am I talking to here? You know who you are, Boss.))). Remember, the last word in James Joyce's "Ulysses," the defintive version of our collective oddysey, was "Yes!" And that's "yes" with an exclamation point!