……………the moment
when what we thought was rock, or
…………………sea
………became clear Mind, and
what we thought was clearest Mind really
………….was that glancing girl, that
………………….swirl of birds
Lew Welch, Ring of Bone
xxx
It was a morning in early summer. A silver haze shimmered and trembled over the lime trees. The air was laden with their fragrance. The temperature was like a caress. I remember—I need not recall—that I climbed up a tree stump and felt suddenly immersed in Itness. I did not call it by that name. I had no need for words. It and I were one.
Bernard Berenson, Sketch for a Self Portrait
A few years back, in his essay collection Thlink, Aram Saroyan sought to suss political implications of “This is it” moments. Forty years after the Sixties (and a few seasons after OWS), he wasn’t out to push a hippie program. Still, in his clear mind, experiences of visionary fusion gave the lie to over-individuated spins on the American Dream. A greed-head is the opposite of Itness.
I’m sure Gerald Hausman, author of Little Miracles, shares Saroyan’s sense the vision thing isn’t trivial or apolitical. He’d probably prefer to smoke Jamaican herb (with notes that remind him of the taste of blueberry pancakes on a Maine morning) than main line current events, yet he’s not disengaged from the haze of politics. One wise chapter in Little Miracles evokes his own political consciousness in its infancy. (Back when he was a child in the odd Chambers of the late Forties and early Fifties, the word Communist signified a scary “Calmness,” Nazis were “Gnatsies,” and the Civil War came down to a color-coded conflict between Old Blues and Old Greys.) It’s no wonder The Education of Henry Adams makes Hausman’s list of “Books to read before you Die.” He may not be an Adams with a Founding Father and another president among his ancestors, but, on his mom’s side, his family goes back to the Pilgrims. Like Adams’ Education, Hausman’s memoir invites you to share fruits from his own Learning Tree. His stories of America resist this country’s atavism. His scope there is wide and deep too. He’s rapped with Mr. Rogers and rolled with Rambling Jack Elliott. (I bet he felt the Mississippi shiver at the end of Elliott’s great “912 Greens”.)
Hausman’s sense of place is one key to Little Miracles’ exaltations. His ramble-write roams from Greenwich Village to Florida’s Barrier Islands. He’s been high in the Berkshires and the Rockies. His run through the world has been shaped by his immersion in Native American cultures. Black Atlantic lore has given him more tools for living. Jamaica is one of his great good places. No doubt the Rastas’ rendering of socialism—“social living”—speaks to his own politics. Hausman, though, is a humanist who’s more than a humanist. At home in the wild (or the ocean), at ease with beasts, he’s a Marleyesque natural mystic.
Aram Saroyan once placed Hausman in the tradition of Zennish mountain-men like Lew Welch, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen (see Saroyan’s Q&A with Hausman above). When I read Hausman, though, this New York man flashed on Saroyan’s own little miracles in the city:
…waiting at the corner of 79th Street for the cross-town bus, I glanced over at several women also waiting for the bus. It was a lovely spring afternoon, just then advancing toward twilight. The women, their complexions and the colors of their clothes they wore, appeared so vividly beautiful to me that for an instant I couldn’t have said what I was seeing, where I ended and it began.
Another episode occurred when I was a passenger on the bus. It was a winter evening, and we had crossed Central Park and were now on the West Side. I wasn’t a very good student and was dreading a lot of homework I had to face when I got home. Then I noticed that lights were beginning to go on in the windows of the big apartment buildings that lined both Avenues, and that the sky visible above the buildings would soon be dark. In that moment, my dread disappeared and I fell into a kind of enchantment with this big process I inhabited–the bus, the night, the city, the universe.
Saroyan (Try The Street!) and Hausman have both written memoirs that meet the standard upheld by Jack Kerouac who said books should offer good companionship. I’m sure Little Miracles will be one of my longtime companions.
A writer I respected once warned: “Never meet the author of a book you like.” But I’ll risk disillusion when it comes to the author of Little Miracles. (It’s not just that Gerald Hausman seems to share a lot with me; his memoir kept bringing me back to my late brother’s back pages.) Hausman lives in Santa Fe now but he’s still got a cabin in the Berkshires that’s pretty close to where my family has a house. Who knows if we’ll ever get it together to meet in person, but in the meantime I believe this e-mail exchange hints why I’ll keep hanging on his every word…
Hey Gerry – Your cabin is about 45 minutes away from our joint, which is in Worthington…– Grew up in Amherst – not a bad spot for a 60s kid – so you might imagine I was a little skeptical when my teen self found out ma and pa had gone country…A-frame on a bare blasted slope…What were they thinking? – but my mom was a gardener and they had a notion! Place began to look sweet and homey before too long… The gardener is gone now but the place is still restorative…
I need those GREEN GREEN hills… Though I’m not really a woodsy guy – When I was a kid I tended to find my miracles in spots between back yards and the neighborhood’s no-man’s lands…– loved to play in those spaces – war games in my head mainly – Realized (way after the fact) what I liked most was getting lost in a familiar (i.e. non-scary) place. Not a helluva lot has changed on that score…
Just musing on Memory Gerry. (Swings more than Kerouac’s Memory Babe!) – Lost my brother a couple years ago…– we hung real tight…I came and lived w/ him in the same apt. or down the block in NYC for 40 years…You guys would’ve dug each other. Along with all the music and poetry you had in common – there were the actual places – JA/reggae, Florida islands, New England, and even out West – I’ve got his Once Upon a Time in Leone-Land duster! …I was telling his wife yesterday how much Tommy would’ve loved “Miracles” and “Mystical Times” and (no doubt) you!
Hope we meet for real in the fullness of time…b.
xxx
Hi, Benj
We used to have friends in Worthington. I believe the poet Ron Atkinson lived there or very close by. He wrote one really fantastic book called Looking For My Name, which we published at Bookstore Press in Lenox. Ron could read aloud better than any poet I’ve ever heard. About three years ago I read somewhere that he’d become a kind of street person and died in Amherst. I’d long ago written a poem for him about how we drove past the trout hatchery in New Marlboro at night and Ron put his hand out in the dark (he was feeling the same trout music I was) and we passed the hatchery holding hands. It was a bond, a sacrament for all things beautiful, baitful, and impermanent. I was best friends with Ron and also Paul Metcalf who lived in Becket. Both gone but ever present in memory.
I think there was a little oddball African restaurant in Otis. After a while it moved to Great Barrington. The chef’s kids used to file past their dad, each one saying very formally, “Good evening, Hassan” – must’ve been at least five of them – as they went off to bed and we had our African espresso. “Crush the cardamon pod and stir it in.”
To me, those times are not gone. I can call them back at any given moment. I used to think I had to write it down, but now I just re-live it.
Your brother Tommy sounds like a great guy. Yes, we would’ve liked each other. Maybe he will “dream me” as they say in JA and then I will know him in spirit. I always thought we dreamed them, but my Rasta friends corrected that when they said, “dem dream you, mon.” Now, every night is a sort of sleighride into that dreamscape of lost and found friends!
One love,
Gerry