Early Days in the Vortex/ Part Two (of three)

 

My working-class neighborhood in South Worcester was a great place to grow up—if your interests were such things as baseball, basketball, bike riding, tree and railroad bridge climbing, kick the can, fighting, trespassing, and urban spelunking. Unless it rained, my friends and I spent most of our time outdoors. It was not, however, the best place for a budding avant-gardist. By the time I graduated high school, I had become aware of just how limited I was, like the city that produced me, a city I would only years later come to love. 

If you had a car, you could drive from my neighborhood to Boston in an hour. I didn’t have a car, however. I didn’t take Route Nine. I went by way of the abyss. I worked eight hours a day as a janitor at the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, cleaning ink off all the presses, and also as a counsellor at the Worcester Crisis Center, learning to treat the problems of heroin addicts and would be suicides as being almost as important my own. I then would spend most of my free time at the Clark University Library, going stack by stack in my search for any trace of the Philosopher’s Stone. An abyss had opened, and I entered it. We became good friends, more or less, not that I was presented with any other option. In the two years after high school, I chose to act as my harshest critic. There was lots of catching up to do. To do something once was to do it many times. I saw, I heard, I was led, I learned a lot, but each small gain felt deliberate and laborious. 

And then, in September, 1974, when I moved to Boston to go to art school, my self-imposed atonement came suddenly to an end, as though I had closed the book that I was reading with a snap. Don’t ask for what crime I had been sentenced to atone. A kind of antigravity took over when I stepped from the Greyhound bus. The top of my head flew off. The days appeared to physically grow brighter. The sun moved closer to the Earth. I was as happy as one of the roaches that scurried in my 92 dollars-per-month apartment. 

Did my kitchen not have a stove? Did water leaking from my ceiling destroy a dozen drawings? Was my wallpaper starting to peel off? Did the mice make so much noise that they kept me up at night? What of it? Such hardships fit my definition of adventure. So as not to grow too comfortable, a few days per week I would add to these hardships by sleeping on the floor. In Worcester, I had put my shoulder against an almost immovable wheel. In Boston, in search of the later-day descendants of Bohemia, on the cusp of a cultural moment that I had not yet discovered, not the effort but the sense of difficulty disappeared. 

I had intended to rent an apartment a few blocks from my school. Hopelessly ignorant of the city, I ended up a mile away. What luck was mine! My location was a perfect one, across the street from the Northeastern University Library, whose books would gladly welcome me when I fled from my apartment. Was this place the result of a series of wrong turns? No. I had accepted Baudelaire’s invitation to go with him on a voyage. I had gone where the Old Ones sent me. I was where I was meant to be. If the most important changes are internal, having to do with one’s subtle relationship to events, then there are also times when outer changes are essential, when one would die inside without them. These outer changes then shift the balance between the subject and the object, so that events begin to articulate the psyche, so that the psyche appears to be present in the most random of events.

Continue reading at Scene4: https://www.scene4.com/0423/briangeorge0423.html

Image: Andre Masson, Transformation of the Lovers, 1939

My first book of essays, Masks of Origin: Regression in the Service of Omnipotence, is available through Untimely Books: https://untimelybooks.com/book/masks-of-origin/