In such a dream as this it is wise not to underestimate the effect and gravity of such a powerful complex as this tower of mine. In real life, it would be no big deal to detour around it, but in the dream, there is no bypassing it until it is owned, decoded, broken-down, depotentiated and only then, assimilated. This work takes time, and it often requires help from someone who is trained to pose as a mirror to reflect back the shadow elements of the the nigredo and the fool's gold, while asking just the right questions!
So, as I write or reflect on my legacy as a writer, I have to deal with this gold trophy-tower that looms as a kind of nose-thumbing to time. I believe the tower is similar to the giant statues that the Soviet Union constructed during its existence, that were also phallic, in the sense that they were erected to overcompensate for a huge inferiority complex. Inferiority? What inferiority? Why would I feel inferior? I would argue that most introverts of my generation have wrestled with the question of self-worth because of our introversion. What we did, how we lived, how we processed was (is), in general, not valued by our culture. We had to somehow prove our worth, not just to ourselves, often to our families, and to our communities, but depending on how ambitious we were, to the world. Some introverts make it, but many, too many, fall through the cracks and what they learned during their lives of struggle, that helped them to survive and sometimes flourish was lost in time! So here I am in this dream, arriving at a place where I can finally see that the journals welded into the lockbox in the tower, don't need the tower anymore! They can stand on their own, and they should be allowed to stand on their own. I don't need the tower either. It has lost its usefulness.
Now I would like to turn to the storm. Why Catonsville?
Catonsville, as I have mentioned, is where my son, Evan, was born and it was where I stepped up as a poet to assume a more public voice. I arrived in Baltimore with a self-published book of poetry, The Blue Man, my ticket to qualifying for the job of poetry editor for City Paper, a position I held for 5 years. (I will have more to say about the The Blue Man later.) A word about storms: All my life storms have symbolized violent but necessary, revolutionary change. When we were little I remember how we couldn't wait to go out after a thrashing, booming storm had passed. I always found it exhilarating that everything had been disturbed and stirred up and disheveled and charged up by nature's fury: branches on the ground, if it was summer, green leaves plastered to the road, worms venturing out of their holes. Birds silent as if dazed, as if waiting for the sun for permission to sing. A tree might be uprooted. One time the pony's shed was upended and Matik was charging all over the pasture like a wild pony. At 16 I wrote: "Death swooped down on the windy ways of a water-slashed and groaning night / on wings that weighed both sides of darkness." And, in a poem I called "Storm 2": "I have watched its spirit growing / on every tower of the city. / The iron horse turns as the wind yanks the reigns. . ." Age 17: "Now, as I approach the gate / before it is too late / and darkness (of the storm) widens the breach between the gate and the house. . ." Age 19: "The storm I waited a year to see / caught me on a mountain's shattered keyboard. . ." In 13 Seeds there is a chapter titled "A Storm will come" in which I sit "straight-backed against a stone" watching a storm "dragging velvet curtains across the valley". . .
Catonsville had it's own revolutionary storm hit in May of 1968. Later referred to as the Catonsville 9, nine Catholic activists broke into the draft board and poured real blood (obtained from a hospital) on the files; they brought metal wastebaskets of documents into the parking lot where they poured homemade napalm on them and burned them, with the intention of being arrested. I found out about this right around the time we moved there, and was exhilarated. I felt I was living in a place with a history of storm, a place that in my mind had been disturbed, stirred up and charged up. I was inspired to be living there. Daniel and Phillip Berrigan were local heroes of almost mythic stature in activist circles around Baltimore.
But, now, what is this storm I am watching in my dream, that is shredding Catonsville? This is not a political storm, or a storm of revolution, and it's not the kind of storm that dishevels and stirs and charges things up. This is a storm that simply obliterates everything in its path, and here it is destroying the place where I became a father and stepped into my poet-calling.
Whenever I begin writing something that touches on my core issues, I can't avoid addressing the core issues of my time. In a poem I wrote fifteen years ago I put it this way: My storm is your storm / is our storm, is The Storm.
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