The Beginning of the Journey Inside

2010_5_04 The Beginning of the Journey Inside
In all the recordings of my life pattern it always starts, not with my youth in Wisconsin or the kind of home life that I had, but later on, during my Junior year at UW in Madison, when by the luck of an impulsive decision I decided to accept a summer job in Oregon as a fire-fighter, and that decision changed everything for me. That was in June 1957. All that went before was mere prelude to what unfolded for me after that. Leaving for the West Coast was the first step on a road to liberation and the pursuit of what I later called “Individuation.” If I hadn’t made that ‘escape’ from my past I tremble to think where I might be at today. If I had listened to Dr. Porzak I would still be working at Hamilton Beach or some other factory in Racine. Porzak was an English instructor who thought I was a dunce with no potential, and like my father and mother, fit only for factory work.
After three years at UW I snagged that unexpected employment in Oregon through the positive intervention of ‘three wise men’ from Pulaski, Wisconsin, a suburb of Green Bay, fellow mates who lived above THE PUB in Madison. I had a job lined up in my home town, working at the same Municipal Swimming pool I had worked at for peanuts the summer before. It would be an easy gig but the idea of spending another boring, uninspiring summer was too much, so I leaped at the chance to do something more adventuresome and daring. It was actually an itch that went deeper than being just a lark—not that I knew that at the time. I was just following my nose while telling myself I’d be back in Madison in September to finish my senior year. I had a hidden need to get away from family and Catholicism, to strike out on my own to find out who I really was or could be.
Another significant factor was a broken romance with a fresh-faced rosy-cheeked pretty girl from a farm in northern Wisconsin. I met her at a dance at the beginning of my sophomore year and we were a number until the middle of the following summer, when she got swept off her feet by some older businessman from Milwaukee who had once given her ride to Racine to see me. It was another chance event that this time ruined a fine romance. I was so devastated that when I went back to classes in the fall of 1956 I hardly felt like dating through that entire year. But the positive side to that was my grades went up and my intellectual capacities came out of the closet. On weekends I either played pool or poker with the Jewish guys from New York who lived with me above THE PUB. My mother knew how unhappy I was and she tended to blame that broken romance for my impulsive decision to head west. It was certainly involved.
Once we were west of Chicago my psyche, sensing an air of liberation on the road, began to stir. I began to entertain a visual fantasy that seemed to come out of the blue as our car sped down the open road. It was my first conscious experience of synchronicity, in this case an inside event being the measure of what was taking place on the outside. Of course it was all pure instinct because I did not know a damn thing about Jung or his Metapsychology. Every time a got a wee bit drowsy in the back seat this recurrent image would appear before my mind’s eye. The image was a dream-like shorthand of my feelings as I moved further away from my 21 year old anchor in Wisconsin. It was a revelation that I grasped right away. What I saw was this: I saw a barrel-chested bald-headed circus strongman who had chains wrapped around his naked chest, and with great strain and muscular effort he kept breaking the chains and throwing his arms out in a gesture of freedom. It was the perfect metaphor for what was happening to me. It was a dramatic affirmation of my decision to split from the Midwest. The image came up spontaneously out of my personal depths—that’s what I mean by instinctive. It came on me like a jack-in-the-box. When we got to Roseburg, Oregon, little did I know I never would go back to Racine or Madison. To visit yes, to live, no.
The second link in this new chain of inner images that was leading me to new growth and a different orientation to inner events was a very powerful dream I had sometime in 1958, a year in which I was working in California and trying to save money to go back to school there, rather than return to the UW in Madison, as I had originally planned. In the dream I am standing outside a bombed out Gothic Cathedral. However, some of the structure was still intact, for example, the brick foundation, most of the apse, and the Rose Window above the altar. It was a nighttime scene, quite dark, except for the Rose Window which was like a beacon in the gloom of the environment. It was as if a light emerged from behind the color wheel of the circular window, like sunlight striking a prism. It was a light that had a mysterious power source and it was the only note of joy and promise in the scene. All the rest was darkness and destruction. Then I began to remove all the broken stones inside the foundation and made triangular pyramidal piles around the outside of the building. I told myself this had been a sacred precinct, a functional and thriving space now in total ruin and I felt I had to reorganize it, return it to its previous glory. I stood there pondering where to begin this restoration project…and that’s when I woke up.
I had “lost my faith” in Madison, as I had stopped going to church in the winter of 1957, but, probably through travel and escaping the clutches of family and priests, I had become open enough to receive a message from the unconscious, from a new source of authority inside myself. And, given the nature of the symbols and the crisis they projected, I felt in contact with what I would later recognize as the Archetypal Psyche, the ground of being that would feed me images and clues to progression over the next several years. This eloquent dream had come on the heels of my rejection of the Roman Church, the religion of my youth. It clearly signaled that I was free of its strictures and weight; I was liberated from its oppression and sin-philosophy, but at the same time it showed me that I may have become a non-believer, but that I was no atheist. I may have abandoned the institution of Christianity but a spark of neutral spirituality was left aglow in the hearth of my soul. A spirit quest was still alive and breathing, even if it did not take center stage for several years, as I had to beef-up my ego first. Nonetheless, I felt my future task had been laid out for me and that was Restoration of the Temple. Now by temple I wasn’t referring to building a new edifice, a brick and mortar church, but more a Temple of the Mind, something that could be embodied in my art, a Gnosis or reflection of the self-knowledge I might attain over time. I would eventually seek to transform the rubble of the old religion into something eclectic but quite different than the Faith that fewer and fewer people were looking to for guidance and salvation.
The dream also was a link with what I came to call my “Toys in the Attic Syndrome.” My creative play as a youngster is a river that feeds into what I am doing now. (My education is like an Arch through which the primary influences flow.) The Attic on our William Street house was my playground as a kid and mine alone. It was a big open space my parents used mainly for storage. I spent many an hour up there by myself playing with some toy red bricks which looked like real construction brick, not like the plastic Legos of today. The foundation of the cathedral in the dream was brick and Hamilton Beach, the factory where my dad worked for 35 years and where I had worked a couple of summers while still in High School, was wholly a red brick complex. The attic and those red toy bricks were the primary tools of my childish imagination, along with many pencil drawings I did in those days. ‘Toys in the Attic’ were the matrix of my lonely creativity. The attic was also the context for my sexual growth, as it was the space where I learned to masturbate. So one could say I suppose that the space was a real auto-erotic boon in more ways than one.
A final word about the Rose Window is in order. That glowing circle was my initial experience, totally spontaneous and self-generated, of an inner Mandala, something that has become a staple form in my visual vocabulary. There will be many further discussions of the importance and meaning of the Mandala in my Art and life.