What kind of place is this world? Is it a planet governed by scientific laws and economic realities or is it a magical sphere that follows the artistic steps of a dance of its own creation? My mind tells me that it is the former and my heart yearns for it to be the latter, but is there a way to end this duality and blend my heart and mind?

When I was a child, religion accomplished this blending with time tested ease. I lifted my voice in song to praise the Lord at Sunday Service. I gazed with awe at the pictures of Jesus that my mother and great-grandmother hung in our home. I memorized long pieces for Sunday school recitation. Later in my youth, I embraced the clean slate provided by the confessional. I studied the lives of the saints. I cheered the election of a pope.  I embraced the new mass. I felt the holy power of communion. But as I looked more and more at the things that were done in the name of Christianity, I became disenchanted first with the religion and then with the god himself.

What was the purpose of suffering in this world? Why were we all to be looked upon as sinful creatures who needed to blame each of our failings on ourselves and attribute each of finer qualities to a higher power? Why did the churches and the all-powerful God allow for injustice? Why did Christianity seem to have no relationship with the natural world of plants and animals and the forces of nature? Why were our natural instincts base? What about us was so flawed? If it were true that we were created in the image of God, didn’t that also mean that he was flawed?

I turned to the study of older faiths, those that were in tune with a natural world. Those faiths used the concept of deity to explain the power of this world. They personified nature. They created an anthropomorphic world where animals and plants possessed spirit and life as we know it. They did not have disdain for this life and use it as a trial that gets you to another world, invisible and everlasting but totally lacking in humanity.

These are not uncommon struggles for any thinking mind. They are quite the norm until one is overtaken by the day to day joys and needs of adulthood. However, I found an escape route. It was a love of literature and song and the acts of creating both. It was a love of teaching and knowledge and the magic of that temple that I came to know as the classroom. Here I was able to transmit a love of language and literature and glimpse at an eternity that was very human. Homer lives. Shakespeare lives. Confucius lives. Their glimpse of the divine was real. I wanted to become part of that divinity. I wanted to work my vision into that eternal mosaic. If I could just be a thread that wove its way into that fabric, the unrealized eternal joy of my youth would be satisfied.

The catch is that one can still go to a hell of sorts. Suppose your creations mark you forever as a producer of poor writing and song? Do you then wind up as eternally without real talent? Forever marked as a talentless wannabe?

 

In order to escape this fate, one had to learn one’s craft and then one had to have some sense of vision. But where did this vision come from? Was it just the way that the language sounded in certain combinations that created the magic of insight? Should fine sounding phrases and lines be cherished in their own right because they sounded so good? Would the insight provided come later? Was it the beauty of the combinations that actually produced the insight? Or was this an example of style without substance? Was there a way to weave the style into the substance without losing either but having each uplift the other?

Poetry found its way into my soul. I’m not really sure how this happened. It was the sound of it and the way that it resonated in my body when I heard it. I found that once in a while I had some talent for it. Talent is a strange thing. In athletics, you find your body moving with a certain slow motion grace that is going full speed. You throw a ball the way you’ve never thrown it before, and your body remembers the feeling. Something changes. You want to throw it that way every time because it felt so good and the results were a success. With poetry, it is much the same. Something that you didn’t know that you had inside comes out and you stare at it in disbelief that it came from you but at the same time you know that you found a way to express that something that you had never been able to express before and you want to do it again.

Of course all of this is the residue of hard work and deep experience but you know almost immediately that is not all that it is. Hard work and experience do not guarantee it. There is something else that is also at work. It helps you to believe in the magic of the world.

It does not feel the same as the power of the natural world but it feels akin to it. It is not the sea but it expresses the feeling of the sea and there is almost that sense that the sea is aware of what you have done. It surges inside of you like an emotional orgasm. You feel connected. You become part of the mosaic. You have your own unique thread.

The process of creation is a search for that sense of connection but it is the difference between the pretty girl who smiles in your direction and the lover with whom you wish to luxuriate forever. Having been in that place makes you yearn to return to it or find another like it, or even another that has as yet not been experienced, the unknown sense of connection that sets the world in tune.

These moments can also occur in the classroom when for that time you become more than who you were a few moments before and more than you will be a few moments after it is over. It is alignment. It is transitory. It leaves you wanting more until you have exhausted yourself and need to replenish so that you can have it again. It becomes that star that guides you.

When your faith in a magical world is shaken, you are thrown off balance. If you cease to believe that you can have that experience again or when you question the authenticity of what you have experienced you feel lost and empty. You are no longer connected. It is all as flat as a TV screen and you are a passive viewer. Instead of being the SCUBA diver you are staring at a fish tank.

Religion provides you with a portal into a magical reality but it also defines the nature and scope of what you can achieve. The picture has already been painted. You are singing a song that someone else wrote. This is not to say that it cannot be a beautiful song but once you have crossed over into a world that you create, it is no longer your song.

Is the world indifferent to these experiences? Does the world create them? Are both things simultaneously true? Are these experiences alive anywhere outside of our minds? Does the spirit actually exist as more than a manifestation of our thoughts and feelings? What is its nature? Are these questions that I will ever be able to answer?

The stock response to this is that asking the question is where the beauty is. Sometimes that is enough of an answer but other times it leaves me with the feeling of being pacified by a cliché. There is that voice inside me that says that I always want more and that I am never satisfied. But then the words of William Blake echo in my mind: A man never knows that he has had enough until he has had too much. These words frighten me.

So I come back, armed with my questions and bolstered by my faith in a magical world and gnawed at by the clinging doubts that whisper that faith begins in innocence and is what we fall back on when logic fails us.

I am an obsessive person and I enjoy the intensity that this facet of my personality provides. I think that is true for most obsessive people. The obsession that I have held to with the most longevity has been football. My earliest football memories are when I was a small boy and I lay on my bed on Sunday afternoons listening to football games on the radio that were not being broadcast on TV. My team was the New York Giants and they were a good team. Their competition often came from The Cleveland Browns. They were not a good team but they had the greatest player of all time on that not good team. Jim Brown was a man who could strike fear into anyone, particularly a young boy who rooted with the belief that he could help his team to victory through an act of willpower.

 

The indoor games of my childhood were centered around football. I was alone most of the time and as long as I did not break anything or I could fix or hide what I broke, I had the house to myself. I would stack pillows and blankets as high as a tackling dummy on the living room hide a bed. I’d run at the pile, flinging myself either into or over it, depending on the rules and my role in that day’s game. There were twin sconces on the wall over the couch just about the correct width for miniature goal posts apart. Throw pillows made excellent soft projectiles to kick and throw. Over and over again, day after day for all the hours that I was able, I slipped into the world of competitions that I knew I could win, of challenges that I knew I could overcome.

 

I was a pretty big kid and so when we started to play football, I was expected to be good and I was. As bad as I was at baseball, I was good at football. It was an icebreaker with new friends and earned me a respect in kidworld that was not offset by the fact that I was a good student. When I went to a new school and was invited into a game, I went with confidence. On one such occasion the team lined up on one side of the field and I lined up on the other. They threw me the ball and I ran at them. Their job was to try to tackle me. I did not realize that it was an initiation and I rushed at them  with the ferocity that I had learned from the games of my imagination and with what I had seen and heard of the great Jim Brown. The strangest thing happened. They were unable to knock me down. I ran at them over and over again and went home that night as light of heart as I was sore of body.

 

I played high school football, making JV in my freshman year. I found out that no one was afraid to hit there, but I also discovered the thrill of hurling myself through the air and colliding with another person. I found it to be a truly remarkable joy. Then came injury.

 

The first time was in a game on an unremarkable play. Playing defense, I crashed down from the side on a running play up the middle. I dove to make contact with the runner and felt my arm hit his hip. The impact spun me in an awkward way and when I hit the ground I felt a loud pop that came from my left knee. It was followed by currents of electrical pain that jolted my body. I wanted to “pop “ it back and tried to keep playing. With each new pop and each new set of spasms, I told myself that it was going back into place. I told myself that the world would be alright again.

 

I finished the season getting my leg tapped more than a dozen times. The local doctor drove a hollow needle into the junction of my knee and removed vial after vial of fluid. But I was still able to play and I knew that my knee would heal.

 

The first surgery was extensive because of the repeated injury and the surgeon said that I should not play anymore. After the next season, I had my right knee cut, but I knew that it was not the game that hurt me. It was my body that had let me down. And so I became a slow lineman rather than a quick linebacker. After the third operation, I knew that I couldn’t play anymore. Each time I felt my knee opened up like a can of tuna and thought that it would never move again. Each time there were new numb spots and stiffness that did not go away. But the game was alive in my mind.

 

When I became a coach, football re-emerged in full blown obsession. The body which had let me down would be given another opportunity. Now it was my mind and spirit that would carry me through. I had been a teacher for some time, but when I stepped out onto a field, I felt my heart speed up and my blood boil. I was in love again. Football had come back to me! The feel of the locker room, the smell of the practice field, the anticipation of the encounter were fires that burned in me. I was a student studying the ins and outs of the game for the first time. On the sidelines, I stalked the opponent, glaring across the field, screaming exhortations at my team, my extension.

 

When the teaching and the endless hours of work that football took were over, I went home and watched it on TV. I corrected essays with tapes of games playing in the background. I could feel that the game was going to save me, was taking me back into the circle  of its embrace, was going to make me young and whole again.

 

In 1986, football was magical. The team I was coaching won a league championship. The team for which I had spent my entire life rooting won the Super Bowl. The player, who I had come to know was even better than Jim Brown because he played for my team, was spectacular. My obsession was in full bloom.

 

I taught my classes and loved my family, but inside my mind I lived on the field. The players and the people with whom I coached forged an alliance that comes from winning and from a shared obsession.

I coached for another few years after that but then my career turned down a different path. My obsession with watching the game continued. Sundays were the days on which I read papers and watched football. On Monday afternoons, instead of lunch I took a nap so that at night I could watch football.

 

And then one day in a January, I went online. My obsession has a new point of focus.

The auditorium at the state college was packed. I sat with my girlfriend in a front row seat off to the left of center stage. It was 1973, and I was excited. My poems were flowing with what I was sure was a never ending regularity. I was in love. I had just given my first public reading. What more natural thing to do than to go and hear Louis and Allen Ginsberg read?

We sat politely through the father’s reading.  I’m sure that I don’t remember a line but I applauded. In retrospect, the old man must have felt a mixture of pride and embarrassment while the audience waited for him to finish do that they could hear his son.  Louis had written regular verse for the now defunct Paterson Morning and Paterson Evening News.  I remember thinking what kind of a poet wrote for a 3^rd rate newspaper?

The Dean of Humanities at Montclair State introduced Allen.  The audience stood for the dark haired, paunchy, bespectacled man who said when he reached the microphone, “I wanted to come here to read because my brother attended this college for four years and never got laid.” We laughed hard as the flustered Dean tried to be gracious. We forever bookmarked Montclair State as a place where no one had sex.

His voice was an unearthly thing that came from inside of a different place from what we all have. My girlfriend took hold of my arm. He sang and roared and uncovered the beauty of words with elongated lines that were like enormous breaths of consciousness.  He read Howl. He read from the collection of poems that was to become The Fall of America. He sang the songs of William Blake and accompanied himself on a strange looking squeeze box that he said was like the one that Blake had played. He stretched the possibilities of who we could be. He taught us that the war in the Middle East was a battle of the gods. He rode language through the air as if he were an enormous gliding bird floating on the dizzying currents of wind that soared through our canyon. When he was finished, we cheered.

There was a small crowd of people around him on the stage. He was packing his notebooks into a knapsack, slumped forward in a chair with a pile of poems scattered in front of him, a dark shag of hair covering his face.  I stood in the center of the ring and spoke in my clearest voice, “I love the way that the language dances for you.” He parted his hair with his hands and looked at my lean body and smooth face. I felt the power of his eyes on me. Then he got up and folded me into his arms and kissed my mouth. He whispered into my ear, “You are a beautiful boy.”

My mind and body went into shock. I wanted to squeeze my girlfriend’s breasts and feel the rhythm of her hips beneath me.  But a famous poet thought that I was beautiful and he must know.  All I could say was “thank you.” I waited for him to say something else and I suppose he waited for me or dismissed me as one more well-wisher. I’ll never know.

His words were in my mind. The feeling of his inspiration in my heart, but also the feel of his lips were on my face.  She teased me for the rest of the night but knew that I needed to expiate my pettiness with sex before I slept.