My first imaginary friend came when I was a little boy laying on a wooden floor and rolling a marble. It was a voice that had a presence. It frightened me with its intrusion but I was happy for the company. I didn’t see a face. It was before I ever had a friend and that voice taught me what a friend was like. The friend was my imagination but I didn’t know it, and it was shy and a bit reluctant to be revealed. It created a conversation about what I was doing.

Aren’t friends those people with whom you feel at home? That presence that brings the comfort of acceptance? But maybe that feeling is just a re-enactment of your imagination that has placed a face and voice in someone else. Maybe all friends are imaginary.

I don’t wish to offend but I can’t help asking questions long after I should stop. Friends make you vulnerable. Friends hold promise and sometimes along with promise comes disappointment.

Reading is like having an imaginary friend, if you discover the voice.  My first such voice was that of Clarence Darrow in his autobiography called simply, The Story of My Life. I remember sitting in an elementary school classroom and creating a “cover” for the book. When my teacher saw what I was doing, she said, “Kenneth, it has to be a real book.” I told her who it was about and she looked a little shocked. “Your parents allow you to read that kind of book?” she said with a distinct air of disapproval.

Darrow made me want to be a lawyer. Perhaps it was a voice to which I should have paid more attention. In those days, I read anything that was considered too old for me to understand. As long as I could hear the voice and had a dictionary, everything was ok. It was his voice that taught me about injustice. I repaid him with my devotion. But was he ever my friend?

My boyhood friends are about sports and fistfights. Those friendships didn’t survive and I doubt that I have a place in their history. Why do they live in mine? Is it that I think my life something so special that everyone should remember it? Is it that I try to capture moments and hope that they can live beyond their moment? To what end do I need to do this? Can a friendship be one sided?

There was that time of elation when I thought that friends constituted a new tribe. We were something new. We were more special than blood. Combined imagination trumps blood, or does it? Is imagination just a form of subterfuge? Have I dedicated my life to a form of camouflage?

I never wished to believe that friends were temporary, but they are, aren’t they? They are a product of time, place, and interest. But they seem like so much more at the time. Memory revives but perhaps advanced directives are more appropriate. Do not resuscitate. Let those moments go.

Memories are leftovers. It is rare that they taste as good as they do at first serving. Maybe it’s the preservatives. Maybe they aren’t as fresh. Maybe they shouldn’t be food. Perhaps they should be tossed into the garbage or fed to pets. I have trouble doing that.

I believe that there is bravery in friendship. After I doubt, I believe in the sanctity of imagination. I hope that it doesn’t sound like religion, but part of it feels like it does.

Experience teaches the difference between colleagues and friends, but is there one? Aren’t colleagues people who are rooted to time and place and interest? Are friends really so much different? Time is more deceptive than place and interest. They are easier to categorize. Time has a way of seeping into other things. At least for me it does.

Time and friendship:  are they allies or adversaries? Maybe they are a bit of each. An imaginative form of natural selection. What is saved and what is deleted? What does the selective process say about us? Do we know the criteria that we use to select?

 

Unlike Clarence Darrow and the voices that followed his, music was different. My first voice was Little Anthony singing “I Think I’m Going Out of My Head.”  That was followed by the Duprees. Their versions of “Have You Heard” and “You Belong to Me,” were strong but the song that resonated in my head and became my soundtrack was “Ebb Tide.” It was the seductive power of the kiss of the sea. It spoke to my soul like friendship.

 

Love and friendship are different. Love without friendship is vicious. Friendship masquerading as love is soft and sad. One sunny afternoon in Westfield, New Jersey, my girlfriend came home and told me that she had met a boy in the park. He played the drums. He was a jazz musician. We went to his apartment and he said in an excited, almost manic tone, “These are my friends,” as he pointed to his vinyl records. We drank juice and talked about friendship while he played his records. I have no idea of what became of him but I know that in that time and place all his eggs were in the same basket.

 

I have learned to be friends with creatures that require a different form of communication. When you communicate with plants, are you really just having imaginary friends? When you think that you feel the spirit of a horse or the kinship of a dog, are these just manifestations of your own imagination?

 

When I feel that I encounter the spirit of a horse, I am in awe of the strength and speed but feel that an eagle and a horse are more alike that either is to me. Does that remove the potential for friendship? Is there little common ground?

What does friendship require? Is it a combination of need and opportunity? Perhaps it is a mutual agreement. Something like “our minds are good for each other.” Or maybe it is that friends can put each other at ease though some kind of alchemy. The common element seems is purity.

I had a comical imaginary friendship with Jackson Browne. It began when my friend Tom came back from California after learning that his friend Steve was no longer alive. He played “Song for Adam” from a new record by this new singer songwriter. He looked at me with a profound sadness and said, “This guy wrote a song about his friend who died.”

Jackson became one of my favorite imaginary friends. He once auctioned that he would go into a recording studio and work on a song with a person who donated enough money. I bid everything that I had, which was all of $12,000. I was outbid at the last moment. But later I had a recurring dream that Jackson was my friend. He came to me in dreams and we were light and easy with each other. I was embarrassed to share these dreams with anyone. And then they went away. Friends require a certain kind of maintenance.

Perhaps genuine friendship does not. I read this piece to someone who said, “Do you feel that your friends will be offended by being called imaginary?” I thought about that.  I decided that if they knew me, they would not.

My literary snobbery is in retreat. Although, there is a chance that it is a strategic withdrawal. Snobbery is like that. It is more an act of refusal than an act of acceptance. It maintains a standard of rejection and calls it taste.

I was taught that Whitman was so much better than Ginsberg that Allen’s poetry made him apish to a degree that indicted him for irrelevance. I was encouraged to dismiss him on that basis. It was kind of an agreement of what was at the top and a sneer to what was considered below.

I resisted because Ginsberg’s poetry touched me. I learned to play with his mockers and find ways to twist their judgment back on them. They were decidedly not in favor of this approach.

But the snobbery had left seed that had taken root. I wasn’t interested in James Michener or Leon Uris. They were just story tellers although there was that similarity to Charles Dickens, to Homer, to Shakespeare. I allowed my snobbery to sweep the newcomers aside. I felt affirmed and erect. Then, I began to read Michener and Uris. Funny how that changes things, isn’t it? It is so much easier to dismiss the unfamiliar.

Michener is magic. He is fathered by a blend of some Neanderthal with those instinctual memories, who has mated with one of the new people. The ability to adapt and still have the instinctual memories. Jane Auel came close to describing it, but we never truly learn what became of Ayla’s son. Ayla had a son with a Neanderthal, but she was forced to give him up and accepts the loss. I know that her books are considered cultish, but I like what she has to teach.

A person wishing to learn about Hawaii would profit from reading Michener’s novel.  And The Source reveals the pagan foundations of Judaism.  Some people say that they would not read a work of fiction to find out about a place. Wouldn’t a travel book be for more useful? But would someone interested in exploring the Asian cultures of Japan and Hong Kong not profit from reading James Clavell? Would they not also learn something about how environment shapes people over a time? What travel book provides that glimpse of the relationship between people and place the way that Michener and Clavell do?

It saddens me that they aren’t read anymore. Maybe it’s the pacing. They wrote long books. We seem to like to have our books more resemble a quick snack now. But maybe that’s just another form of snobbery.

I understand that any form of snobbery is meant to maintain a standard. It is a form of natural selection that discards things of lesser value. However, the value is measured by the constraints of the snobbery.  That almost sounds like a belief system, a religion.

The proponents of such a belief system will contend that they believe in veritas or perhaps gravitas, but what they finally adhere to is the comfort of their code.  Does it close or open their eyes?

I have a friend who believes that strings on a popular song relegates it to schmaltz. I found a recording of Mark Knopfler playing “Brothers in Arms” at a benefit concert after the volcanic eruption in Monserrat. I played a cut of Frank Sinatra’s saloon version of “One for My Baby and One More for the Road” and he told me that the exceptions proved the rule. Strings are schmaltz.

There is a time when hairs stand up on the back of your neck. My less sophisticated friends call this the “shit detector” and of course snobbery accused that vernacular as being vulgar and limited.  Perhaps it is just too scatological.  Unless snobbery morphs into fetish, that is unacceptable.

Michael Crichton and John Grisham and Thomas Harris were a triumvirate of popular success authors who were viewed and still viewed as pandering. But before the creation of Harris’ Hannibal, the name signified a barbarian who managed to cross the Alps on elephants, but now- Hannibal the Cannibal. Forever changed. But perhaps the change isn’t for the better. Who is interested in the inner workings of a sociopathic serial killer who ingests his trophies? I wonder if Poe would have found him of interest.

One can trace the path of a mind in Creighton. It is a mind that sought answers and questions and loved them both. But although popular in his lifetime, he failed to toe the correct party line. Then the ultimate silence of dying.  Technology marches on and Creighton was all about technology. Would Jules Verne agree?

John Grisham’s writing evolves. He tries to come to an understanding of the world, although pieces like An Unpainted House and Bleachers, and the non-fiction effort, An Innocent Man are largely ignored. After all, he is rich off of his writing.  What could he possibly have to say? Would Faulkner have the same opinion?

Some fiction is passed through the gate of literary snobbery under the guise of a guilty pleasure. This places it in a realm that is akin to intellectual pornography- it’s not really good but we are somehow drawn to it. But is it not from those things to which we are drawn that we learn the most about ourselves?

Pop culture is an easy target for the snob’s disdain. There goes that Tom Wolfe.  Even though A Man in Full and Back to Blood hold a Voltaire-like mirror up to the culture of the times, we are told that Wolfe has stopped writing true fiction and decided on culture assassination. No chance that he was redefining fiction is truly allowed. Not in the world of the literary snob.

I remember an apartment in lower Manhattan. In a small bedroom was a poster of a man sitting surrounded by piles of books.  He was an older man. The caption read, “I only have time for the best books because I may not have time to read them all.” He sat alone in the room and seemed very sure of his convictions. I used to admire that caption, but I do not any longer because I think the word “best” is more than a little subjective and more than a little condescending.

My own snobbery extends to Stephan King. I cannot deny his creativity but I feel more used by his formulas than for example a Michener whose formula was a vehicle for exploration. King’s seems more to be a way of resolving questions. That is a bit boring and ultimately brings a sigh of disappointment rather than the shimmer of a dancing question. But I know that this expression of my snobbery tells me more about myself than it reveals about King.

I believe that there must also be a snobbery of economics, of politics, of law and even of geography. There is surely historical snobbery. I am not a fan of seeing things and people explode, but I am drawn to the explosion of ideas and the ways that those explosions reconfigure things.

The origin of the word snobbery applied to someone who imitated people of a higher social class. Is it ironic that those same people eventually adopted it as faith?

I became a true student when I was able to say with sincerity, “I don’t know but I want to know.” I became a teacher when I was able to help those who asked the same question.  Is a snob able to express sincerity of interest and admit not knowing or is it required that it be hidden for purposes of appearance, or perhaps a belief that it would go unappreciated?

How is snobbery different from taste? Does the cultivation of one result in the development of the other? Is it all about finding that system of belief that provides reassurance and therefore comfort?

I suppose the term itself has an inbred negativity. Maybe it’s just a harsh judgment. I don’t know for sure, but do you ever call yourself a snob and smile with satisfaction at the implications?

 

What is it about memory that so intrigues and at the same time can frighten us? I confess that I did not complete the works of Marcel Proust. I did examine the idea of island memories though, those early glimpses of land when adrift on a sea of an unconscious babyhood.
My father held me in one arm and talked into the telephone to my mother. “You can’t have him. I want him with me.” Oddly, I can see the face of my great-grandmother, sitting, pained, watching what she considered to be just another tragedy unfold. She died when I was seven and so I never got to ask her about it, but I did question my mother and father. They were aghast and absolutely sure that neither of them had spoken about it with me. The memory was detailed and intact down to the furniture and its placement, two mice in a trashcan in the bathroom-
The talent for memory is magical but sometimes savage. One can see oneself at the most humiliating times and not be able to shut it out. There is a need to come to understanding, as the idiom says, “…to come to grips with it.”
I remember tripping my great-grandmother when she was old and had difficulty walking. I just did it. I was immediately sorry. She wasn’t hurt, but the malice of that second plagues me. I am told that she died calling for me, but that isn’t a real memory. It’s just something that I was told. The memories of being told something are different from those that we experience in the now.
I remember reaching into a jacket, it was yellow gold. It was a spring jacket that was short and elastic around my hips. I found money that we didn’t know that we had. We went to a movie with that money, my mom and me. I can feel the surge of happiness when I showed the money to her. The excitement at what we did with it.
When you remember something that you are told, it’s different. You remember how you feel at being told that something happened. You remember the face and sometimes can hear the voice of the person that told you, but you don’t relive what you were told.
The talk about memory and computers interests me. I’ve gone and reread emails. I’ve been told that others have transcripts and relive moments that we shared. It isn’t the same. It doesn’t penetrate with the same precise acuity. For me, it does not paint a living portrait but I know that it may for others.
I’ve written books where memory has been the basis of plot and I have marveled at the way that it can shape events into a story. Sometimes I worry that the allure of that process may constrict the possibility of new experiences. It does not extinguish them. I am yet to learn about its constriction. I do not truly get lost in my memories, but I do attempt to use them as vehicles.
And where exactly is it that I choose to travel? Is life susceptible to over-examination? That feels like a myopic state of being. Some people call it narcissism, but is it only narcissism if you envision the world with you at its core and everything else in orbit around you? I don’t see it like that. I don’t feel it that way. I feel the need to understand what I live. Sometimes, the absurd need to make it real.
Two people have told me that they choose to forget. One said it with a smile, the other with denial. I did not find it possible to accept either approach. Maybe the smile was denial. Maybe the act of remembering was the path to … to hope? To where? I don’t know, but I do believe that it is my path.
Memories aren’t chains, they are doors. They are rooms and open spaces. They are unique to us. Sometimes I am called on what I do not remember. I am always embarrassed. People who know me expect me to recall everything and think that those things that I have forgotten were just not important enough to me. Sometimes that is true. Sometimes, I just forget even though it was important. Maybe I forget because it was important. Maybe that’s why my friend smiled when he said, “I forget.”
Forgetting and letting go are not the same. I think that letting go has more value and is adulterated by forgetting.
In the Jane Auel series of books, Neanderthals had a deeper sense of memory than modern people do but their memories defined what they would do all the time. They were incapable of adapting. Living with memory is not an easy existence because it does strive to take over. Incorporation is tricky if you wish to move forward.
Some memories need to be suppressed, at least for a time. People who have survived catastrophe may need to bury it for a while. But how do we bury things? Haven’t we learned that covering them up leads to eventual disclosure? Some choose incineration. Some choose drowning. But others try coexistence.
I think that memory is part of the emotional mind. Is truth impaired by emotional influence or essential to it? Is it both? Is truth baggage? Is it fuel?

Most of what we remember was important to us, but why was it important? Is that not one of the essential questions to allow access of the emotional mind? What creates importance?
How do thought and emotion comingle? Do they make something new or just a picture of something old?
Someone said, “There are things that I just don’t want to remember.” And I wonder if that is not the emotional mind, juvenile and proclaiming that it will hold its breath until it gets what it wants. Or is it just a golden spring jacket, with money in the pocket.?
Remembrance of Things Past seems redundant, doesn’t it? Isn’t remembrance committed to the past?
Maybe a hellish eternity is cold oblivion and so we try to be cuddly or so sharp that a scalpel stands back in admiration. Flesh cuts easy but bone has density and the brain is mercurial. Maybe we just try to make things warmer.
I have a new friend. He says that he remembers every bad thing that has ever happened to him. I wonder if memory sometimes mutes the pain with inculcation. Repetition can heal even if it’s painful. My friend is skeptical and keeps a distance but maintains an air of possibility. We really don’ have anything to remember between us yet but perhaps we are moving closer.

 

I’ve noticed that I cry more. I don’t think it particularly unusual. People reflect more when they step out of that day to day pursuit. The day to day continues but the focus shifts. Tears are not an uncommon result. I wonder if some people who avoid stepping back have some apprehension about the upcoming experience.

Jackson Browne wrote and sang, “Now there’s a world of illusion and fantasy in the place where the real world belongs…” I find that line applying to me in that I cry for movies. I am touched by song. Words can move me to tears but not events so much. I can witness with compassionate detachment. Unless I am crying over a movie.

Horror doesn’t move me to tears. I prefer not to witness it and yet feel drawn with George Carlin’s admonishment about tragedy porn throbbing in my mind. So, sometimes I watch, but not for long and not obsessively.

I cry for fiction. That is what moves me the strongest and I do not understand why. A song that does this is Vonda Shepherd’s I Know Him by Heart. The singer had never met her perfect love but kept that ideal alive inside of her, like fragile hope.

I know that I yearn for the existence of that idea in the world, but why does it move me to tears? Do I not think it possible, or possibly requited? What makes me cry this way? I need to understand. Is it the sadness that accompanies the hope? Is it the futility of a romantic view of the world, where forces and nature are alive and do have a consciousness.

How is a person who is not moved by the imaginary different from one who is? Do the imaginary believers perhaps see fantasy as reality: doesn’t that have an allure? I know that I have walked that path and that I will walk it again. Sometimes imagining is immature? Is the ironic twist of that attitude of those who stop believing that keeps their imaginations infantile? That voice says, “Be careful of what you wish for,” and then the dark forms of insanity flash.

People tell me that crying is catharsis. I agree but want to know where the catharsis comes from. Does it come with a clear or even a riddled message?  Why is it a riddle? Is it me that makes what is clear into a mystery? Is the mystery expressing itself through me? What kinds of combinations of those things might possibly exist?

Understanding why I cry for fiction is part of understanding the nature of my consciousness. What hasn’t been moves me more than what has occurred so far. After my mother died, I played a nonstop barrage of Frank Sinatra. My mom didn’t particularly worship him. She thought he was good. But for some reason he became a vehicle to my tears for her. I wanted to cry for her, but I needed music and words and images to help me.

Understanding why I don’t cry for reality is a different matter. Something about spilt milk and the milk that is just about to spill, but may not.

I can remember the first visual image that made me cry. It was Lassie. The face of a TV dog in a cameo while credits rolled and music played. I didn’t want Lassie to go. I was so young and my needs so immediate.

Much later, it was The Parent Trap and I sat in a theater, by myself in the dark and watched these twins struggle, sometimes humorously, to reunite their family. I remember feeling weak and stupid and wishing that I had a twin. Later, I learned that Haley Mills had played both parts. And I dreamed that I could be in two places at once and be my own twin.

There is a distance that creates intimacy. There is the open portal of imagery. There is a language beyond words. There is a beauty to words and to all languages and it makes me cry sometimes.

I think that I have learned to live with the tears and to accept them, but I also think that a distanced part of myself sees this as a necessary bargain. Sometimes I fear that this is the real me, accepting necessary bargains but to achieve what?

Depth is not meaning.

I know the Randall Jerrell poem 90 North, but I never believed that pain equaled wisdom. I did think that depth did.

There is this little know Kevin Costner film, A Perfect World. Its conclusion made me cry uncontrollably. I don’t know why, but I want to know. Is it the wanting to know that assigns me to this circular progression? Is it unknowable?

I cry for animals. My friend, my puppy Keats’ death caused an absolute eruption in my being. Warhorse made me cry. Is this a weakness in my character or an opportunity? Or does weakness sometimes bestow opportunity? Is it what comes next that matters?

If depth does not lead to knowledge, what is its purpose? It cannot be an end in and of itself. Depth inspires more weight than light.

Here I am, asking with flickering answers and attaching my hopes to a flashlight.

 

 

Recurring dreams are seldom pleasant but sometimes they are, in retrospect, amusing. As a young man, I had this dream over and over again about waiting with some message and then being shot and waking up in a hospital bed with people gathering around. At the time, I thought it was a very scary dream, a nightmare. But when I look back on it, the hubris of youth shows through. There was never any blood. There was never any real pain. People gathered to pay attention to the wounded me and I guess that I liked or needed that enough to go back to that place over and over again. I was never sure who was shooting me, although I suspected it was a grandfather that I never met.

One sometimes wishes that the recurring dreams were happier, like the time that I dreamt that I was pregnant. I could feel the life moving in this warm, liquid balloon that was growing happily inside of me. It was pleasurable and sensual, but I never had the dream again. Obviously, once was enough and when I told my friends about it, they laughed at me. I would like to have that dream again, but I am passed my child-bearing years.

The one that has been waking me up recently is different. It actually happened. I was about ten years old and we were playing ball and the ball rolled between a concrete building and brick building. I shimmied in to try to get it and then got stuck. The fire department had to be called and it took a long time to get me out and I was embarrassed because I was filled with scrapes and people were angry and asked how I could have been so stupid as to get myself caught like that.

When I first returned to that experience in a dream, it was horrifying. I could feel the stone pressed against my body. I was trapped. As it has returned again though, the space has gotten a little wider and I can see that there is a way out, just one that I didn’t understand because of my fear and the panic that caused me to swell up until I was immobile.

This falls under the category of the “being trapped” dream. It is supposed indicate that I am in some kind of rut or life circumstance which will not let me go. It appears on the list of categories for most common types of recurring dreams, along with falling, being chased, having your teeth pulled out or fall out, flying, being submerged in water, being publically exposed in some humiliating fashion, wandering in a house that keeps changing, or having something stolen from you. Checking over the list again, I see nothing about being shot.

My most frightening nightmare was discovering that I had a consciousness that was eternal but that after death it was alone in a complete void forever. I still shudder when I recall that one. Thankfully, it did not return.

The film Ground Hog Day is a recurring dream brought to fictional life. Happening over and over again, until Phil figures out what he needs to do to make it stop. But suppose you didn’t want your recurring dream to stop? Suppose it became like a song that you wished to play and then replay? Would your dreaming self just give up trying to communicate the message? Maybe the experience is the message. Or maybe, like Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea, the dream would bring you comfort before and after struggle.

Sometimes my dreams are very silly and happy. These are the ones where waking up can make you want to go back. They reveal us in ways that often expose places where we hold on to childhood dreams. A few years ago, Jackson Browne offered an item up for auction. It was studio time with him to work on a song of your own creation. I bid on it but got shut out at the end. A few weeks later, I dreamt that I met Jackson and that we became friends. That was the strangest recurring dream because it was like a mini-series with installments. But as soon as I told anyone about them, they stopped. Are some dreams meant to be kept secrets?

Shakespeare wrote, “we are such stuff that dreams are made on.” I wonder if he meant nightmares and recurring dreams too.

Finally there is that wonderful line from Bob Dylan, “At dawn my lover comes to me and tells me of her dreams with no attempt to shovel the glimpse into the ditch of what each one means.”

Sometimes we need to know what they mean and sometimes we just need to sleep with them.