The life of friendship

I've been reading biographies lately--Edward Hopper, Carson McCullers, and Claude Levi-Strauss. I'm not sure that I learn anything from them other than that my own life is both a great success and a tragic failure.

"Every poem is an exaggeration carefully trammeled to fit the mood," Robert Frost supposedly said to Edward Hopper at one of their few face-to-face meetings.

My friend John Phillips (pictured at left, sitting in front of our treasured Monique Prieto) came to visit yesterday. I've known John for almost 50 years. At one point in his life, John read a lot of history & philosophy--he was in one of Kenneth Rexroth's seminar classes at UCSB in the late 1960's--and he can still run down the Greeks, the Romans, leap to Marx, Nietzsche and make connections to Orwell, Huxley, Vonnegut.

We talked for a couple of hours, then I took him for a drive. Down Clement to Lincoln Park and the Legion of Honor, through Golden Gate Park and then down Haight. Ex-hippies, we stopped to see the Grateful Dead house on Ashbury. John told me a story about Grace Slick of The Jefferson Airplane picking him up once in a VW van when he was hitch-hiking. At least he thought it was Grace Slick.

John's life has been as different from mine as mine has been from his. John surfed and played classical guitar, I played basketball and wrote poems. John got married late, I married early. John was in the public sector as a schoolteacher, I was in private enterprise.  There were long periods of our lives where we seemed to lose contact, but one of us would always reach out from the silence to call to the other and always at the right time.

I've been thinking alot about Frost's statement. The key words--exaggeration-carefully trammeled--mood--are so good. I've started to apply it when thinking about the shape of my life, as I do now with increasing frequency, having  lived a lot of it. Involuntary birth (exaggeration), political & social responsibilities (carefully trammeled), and the rights of the individual (mood.) There are tensions inherent in the making of anything--a poem, a piece of pottery, a painting, a business, a life--and the acknowledgment and possible resolution of the tension is what creates the art, whether it is a piece of art one is trying to make or a life. 

I ran this thinking by John as we drove around San Francisco. He didn't say much of anything.

Later, at dinner, we talked about old friends, most all of them still living, and some of the good and bad trips we'd had. The sixties were a magic time, but they'd never happen again. 

John's pretty happy with his life now, doesn't read much but listens to a lot of music and loves to work-out. He retired from LA Unified School District a few years ago.

"I really like living like I don't have anything to prove," John said.