Memoir 2- I saw magic differently. Then. And now. Willing suspension of disbelief was a way of life, not a prelude to skepticism. The apprenticeship of young Arthur to Merlin sank in so deeply deep. It wasn’t about sleight of hand. It was a full on embrace of mystery. It was science taken to its most primal level. When you get to the cells, to the DNA, to the nucleus, you are still ultimately left with a mystery. Science did not exclude magic. I found it everywhere. I was going to be a marine biologist because that would make me a traveller between worlds. I found magic everywhere. I found it in collecting rocks, in my chemistry set. I found it in the wounded pigeons and cats I brought home to heal. I found it in the garter snakes who never ate and the burbling through the night of the wonderful swampy scent of my fish tanks. I didn’t want to own occult power. I wanted to observe it, to know about it and recognize it. I wasn’t interested in being alpha. I grew up in mixed and changing streets. Haitians, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Irish and African Americans were my everyday. I was a street nerd. That’s different than a geek nerd. Street nerds read books and couldn’t play ball too well but they got girls. They got music. They survived by making bullies laugh. I went to sleep at night to the sound of rumbas on Riverside Drive. The polyrhythmic sensuality of summer nights in Washington Heights will stay with me forever. I was second-generation American, my parents were not religious. I wandered way beyond past the classic Jewish parameters of neighborhood and culture. I went to synagogue for the pure joy of ritual when I went. I was stoned for my barmitzvah and the reception was in a Chinese restaurant. I didn’t reject those roots I just saw them as intertwined with everyone elses. Outside my windows lived the rest of the world and all I had to do was walk out of my apartment to get there and follow the ethnic mix of savory food scents, all garlic based, to get to the steamy dance of the sidewalks. You have to understand the power of drums. , the influence of them on me subliminally all my life from the guaguanco of those streets to the purr of ceremonial drums in the hills of Kenscoff in Haiti. Even now , seeing the sun set over the next river over I hear the drums. I am back there, they played most of the night till random cops shut them down. Those passionate tone poems only silent in the dead of Winter. The mambo line of generations imprinting on me. Those sounds striping the night in zig zag patterns so deadly tight in their syncopated precisionism. It was never in question that I was going to go to Haiti. It was only a question of when. It was delayed by events though. By the complete meltdown and dysfunction of our family when I was fourteen, by the full on onslaught of the sixties and acid and mescaline and music and the dislocation of any sense of home and continuity. The Vietnam War destroyed my linear education as college hit us with pass or fail instead of grades. Life was out on the picket line, demonstrating and participating in the sanctuaries for AWOL soldiers and in the addictive beds of hippie lifestyle. I left home when I was 15 basically. I left the Hyppolites and the paintings my father had bought in 1947. I left the bullying and the intellectual abuse, not realizing the art was already deep in my head. Deep in my blood. I wanted to go to Haiti. I had to see what people without my privilege did when their only company was the Muse.
Posted on: Wed, 14 May 2014 14:41:29 +0000
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