Walt Whitman would be worth remembering if all he had ever written were the following lines:
"Do I contradict myself?
Very well then. I contradict myself.
I am large. I contain multitudes."
Whitman was personifying America when he wrote those words, yet I've always applied them to humanity rather than to a body of land, anthropomorphism notwithstanding. One reason I have long favored that bit of Walt's wisdom is that it has described my own state of being as well as anything ever put to pen or palate.
For example, I used to be a belligerent nihilist, railing against the falsity of bourgeois society. I still rail against it. The only difference is I have no interest in negating everything, mainly because my nervous system can no longer endure the majesty of chaos. Intellectually I still understand that the phrase "I is anarchy" to be philosophically more accurate than any words in the twentieth century. And yet emotionally I am more comfortable being comfortable, which is to say I like my chaos managed, as sure a contradiction as anything I've ever walked around believing to my core.
These conflicts that in any rational world would cancel out one another are as central to understanding me as any MRI could ever hope to be. To give an instance of this: I am a devout agnostic and have been so since at least the age of eighteen. All the same, I cringe whenever I hear one person belittle another's religion, despite the sanctimony of the believer's position. One would think I would be out there mocking the nine inch nails, but on the contrary, I'm the one giving aid to the crazy sap who takes solace in fairy tales. I remember quite clearly when a friend named Michael introduced me to his fiance Sherry over dinner. Michael was quite pleased with himself and at first Sherry looked to be quite the catch. Then as the evening wore on, Sherry chose to introduce religion into the conversation, culminating in her demanding that I tell her my spiritual persuasion. I explained that I was reluctant to share it, what with her own views being so heartfelt, but as she kept insisting, I revealed my agnosticism. This admission cost me the price of our three dinners because upon hearing it she grabbed Michael by the wrist and dragged him along with her as she stormed out of the restaurant, the winds of hell nipping at her skirt hems.
Here's another contradiction: I love my solitude so much that I can go weeks at a time without ever interacting with anyone and in spite of this curious fact I often need with intense desperation that band of gypsies I call friends, without whom life would not only be not worth living, its very existence would be called into question. This is true as much for those with whom I see on a regular basis as for those I have not seen in far too many years, in the first case being my best friend and long-suffering roommate, Ms. Lisa Ann, as well as the gang from Ottawa, the neighborhood rascals and the others I am privileged to see from time to time, and in the latter case being those inspirational throngs I knew in high school or college, some of whom I've reconnected with via various social media and even the occasional telephonic device and in a few cases even face to face contact. So, yes, I'm a mass of contradictions.
Another strangled cord of DNA that simultaneously is and is not a big part of me, and maybe of you, is what I favor reading. Oh, on the one hand I am fascinated with the Shakespearean tragedies, the epic poems of Homer, the transformative Renaissance works of Erasmus, Castilgione, Machiavelli, and that whole tribe, and yet I am every bit as enthralled by the more pedestrian (as opposed to motorized) illumination of Raymond Chandler, Lester Bangs, Harlan Ellison, and Richard Brautigan, about whom it is my pleasure to happily turn at long last.
The book I have loved more than any other for more years than I can recall has been Trout Fishing in America. As an agnostic I deny there is anything cosmic about this thin tome, yet as a truth-teller I cannot deny that somehow the damned thing has entered and reentered my life over the last twenty-odd years and always at times when I just so happened to be emotionally receptive to that very kind of trippy naturalist life-loving chicanery, which is the only way I can think of summarizing the book. More than Macbeth, more than "Of Myself I Sing," more than The Iliad, I love the book bearing the photograph of Brautigan and a woman named Michaela Clark LeGrand standing in a park with a large statue of Benjamin Franklin. I love that book so much that for several years I couldn't quite bring myself to read it and yet I had no trouble burning through the pages of A Confederate General from Big Sur and Willard and His Bowling Trophies with all the rapidity of a man possessed. I have heard from others that they experienced something akin to a religious awakening upon reading Trout Fishing in America and when at long last I carefully opened the tiny book I knew what they meant. The personification of an activity--a holy personification, at that--inspired me to write a bunch of short stories using Hemingway's short novel The Old Man and the Sea in a similar way. I treated the book as a living entity, one that came along whenever the need arose and with which I had conversations whenever the need presented itself. But Trout Fishing in America is a much better book than The Old Man in the Sea because it comes closer to pure poetry. It also has cool chapter titles.
So, yes, I recommend Trout Fishing in America even more than I recommend Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, although both changed me in ways from which I have yet to be changed back. That I was never able to convince people who are now dead but whom I knew well when alive that I knew what I was doing as I sat leaning against heavy oak with random manuscripts--some profound, some merely found--that I knew true happiness, that my life was opened at the chest as warm and inviting breezes intoxicated my heart, that I was simply a better man on account of what I read--well, I wish I'd had these words then to explain what I explain now.
I am not the kind of man to harm himself. I like being alive far too much and I have put mighty struggles into making sure than I stay on this madly spinning orb for as long as possible. Yet certain mad geniuses, such as Mr. Brautigan, were not able to endure what they could not understand, or understood too well. He blew his own head off with a .44. When his body was found a month later, there was a suicide note which read, "Messy, isn't it?" It's hard to know whether to laugh or cry. The answer's in the book. You should check it out.