Nothing Changes the Scent of Biological Humans, Humans of Body and Soul, to Rule the Planet and Reach for the Stars Beyond it!

Nobody knows. It always ends with “nobody knows.” Fate is merciless to the living who lack flesh and blood. And nothing changes the scent of biological humans, humans of body and soul, to rule the planet and reach for the stars beyond it. “You cannot build a culture with Devils out of Hell.” The Hell I can’t is my answer. It comes to that after centuries and centuries of vain hope. You can gaze on the struggling beings around you with a sad detachment. And you can thank Heaven for ignorance, for simple beings who do not long to know anything. The search for a common denominator among Bowery Men always beings—and frequently ends—with the finding that they are all alcoholics. However, this scarcely makes a reliable distinguishing hallmark of the species, because, in the first place, most alcoholics do not become Bowery Men and, in the second place, drinking, while certainly part of life on the Bowery, is not usually an important reason for being there. To insist that a man is on Skid Row because he drinks is like arguing that a man becomes a millionaire because he wears a top hat. Furthermore, if you expect to find the grim, solitary, ugly drunk drowning massives doses calculated to lay one out cold in the shortest possible time, you are less likely to find him in a Bowery saloon than you are among the family men who inhabit the cocktail bars of commuters’ trains. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

A somewhat limited but interesting survey by Alcoholics Anonymous found that ninety-two percent of the moneyed and family class of chronic drinkers are solitary addicts. However, on the Bowery and other Skid Rows only ten percent habitually drink alone, according to a study of Alcohol and the Homeless Man by sociologist Robert Strauss. The same conclusion may be reached with less scientific certainty, perhaps, but more pleasantly by taking a walk along the Street. You can see the Bowery drunk spiking his Cherry Ripple or White Muscatel (inexpensive wine also known as wino wine) with raw alcohol and passing the bottle among his friends, or even among strangers. He drinks to fend off loneliness, or sometimes the lesser chill that the wind sends slashing through his rags. He aspires only to warmth and everlasting “highness,” rarely to total oblivion. On that sunny plateau the Bowery Man has the camaraderie that is more precious to him than love or friendship of the sort so highly valued in the dank valleys of sobriety. He does not want friends—with the incessant demands upon him—but he craves the illusion of friendship. He wants good fellows about him who can help to kill the time that weighs like an albatross about his neck. For him alcohol makes possible a World with rounded, smooth edges—a World of brothers, but not of brotherhood and all the dreary responsibilities which that concept entails. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

The Bowery Man is a social drinker with a sense of group responsibility. He panhandles for liquor money (which is where the “Panhandle District” gets its name) to hold up his end of the bargain so that he may contribute his mite to the collective fund. Then, when the bottle goes around, he takes only one gulp at a time, and that is nicely proportioned to his investment in the bottle. If one’s particular drinking group stakes him to a drink, he repays it with scrupulous correctness. There is an elaborate courtesy in these circles that only a gauche newcomer from uptown would violate. For example, when a man is pitching a line to someone who might give one the price of a drink, he is not to be interrupted or distracted. If he fails, another can try, but there is no uncouth struggling over a “live one” as the prospect is respectfully dubbed. These decorous manners may perhaps serve to distinguish the Bowery Man from an ad agency executive, but they do not mark one as unique. If not alcohol, what else sets these beings apart? What makes them a community? Certainly the do not look alike. They make no gray and faceless mass. Here Swedes and Irish and Poles, Midwesterners, Southerners, New England farm boys to run seed, Black boys, tall and rangy, with life still in them, and old Blacks with the beards and eyes of patriarchs. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

There is in this limiting a nonmaterial character, a spiritual character if you will, that is necessary in all creativity. Our discussion demonstrates something else that the object you see is a product both of your subjectivity and external reality. We not only know the World, but the World at the same time conforms to our ways of knowing. Our perception is determined by our imagination as well as by the empirical facts of the outside World. Here are disabled people and well men, sullen and simple. Some laugh as they shoot crap on the sidewalk and sing karaoke from the juke box with a huge colorful glowing orb. Some just stand in their several layers of rags and look with mild, vacant eyes at the scene and at the stranger who walks among them from the World uptown. Sociologists have counted their noses, tabulated their previous occupations, the first names of their grandparents, and the color of their skins. Psychologists have distributed Rorschach tests free to the needy. Conclusions from all these efforts vary in many respects, but these efforts vary in many respects, but there are some hard, unassailable facts in the picture. There are many Irishmen on the Bowery, for example, very few Italians or Jews, and almost no Chinses, although Chinatown is handy. There are obvious reasons for some Irishmen to linger among the Home Guard. When they fled the famines they became wild geese scattering over the whole World, and many too to the sea. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

The sailor, until he was organized into a trade union, was the traditional foot-loose wanderer from whom no home was really possible, who cultivated a scorn for the landlubber. For seamen who were beached, the Bowery became a shelter. Many Irishmen who did not take to the sea went into one form of transportation or another. They built railroads and ran them. They dug canals and skinned the mules that towed the barges from Albany to Buffalo. Men in transport are men on the go, homeless men who in between jobs, or after the last job, find their home with the other homeless. There is therefore an historical reason for the Irish on the Bowery, but psychologist tend to dismiss this explanation as superficial. The important factors are to be found in family life, they say. Dr. Boris Levinson, who has reported on the Bowery men for the Psychiatric Quarterly and other learned publications, studs his papers with charts that would bring a look of astonishment to his subjects, the quiet old bags of bones asleep in the Bowery doorways. He finds the Irish family to be dominated as a rule by the mother. This generality seems incontrovertible—as generalities go—and even the Irish attest to it willingly enough. The Irishman’s mother tends to be a Madonna and other women—particularly those who would lower themselves to go with him—are likely, in this view, to be women of the evening. He is likely to marry late and then set his wife upon a pedestal. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

In the psychologist’s opinion, marriage to a saint is not conducive to a healthy life in pleasures of the flesh, but the normal Irishman can take all this in his stride and become a poet, a politician, a bus driver, a priest or anything else. However, an Irishman who has some unusual weakness in his moral fiber may refrain from marriage altogether and run away from the woman he fears. He takes a drink easily because the Irish traditionally do not look upon alcohol as repulsive. Alcoholism, it itself, says Dr. Levinson, implies tendencies to homosexuality. In fact, though, homosexuality is present but not rife on the Bowery. When the brothels on the street closed, it was for lack of customers, not because the girls had competition. It seems that there is a flight from all sexuality on the Bowery. There is, in part, the atmosphere of a monastery—a silent withdrawal from all the joys of the World save the passport to Nirvana contained in a little alcohol. Psychologist Marvin K. Opler drew this comparison between the Irish family and Italian families: “The Irish family tends to be dominated by the mother; the father is often a weak and shadowy figure. In the Irish home active expression of emotion is frowned upon; feelings in regards to pleasures of the flesh are clouded with conceptions of sin. All this is reflected in the personality of the male offspring. The Irish male is apt to be quiet, repressed, shy or fearful of woman and as his literature attests, given to fantasy as an outlet for his emotions.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

Opler’s Italian family looked quite different: “The dominant figure is the father. He rules the family with a sometimes benevolent, sometimes rough hand. Emotions and passions are allowed free expression. Little or no sin or guilt is attached to pleasures of the flesh. As a result the Italian male is proverbially excitable, given to acting out his emotions and sometimes hostile to his father and older brothers (to whom the father may delegate authority over him).” This is not to say that the freewheeling, uninhibited Latin may not end up in worse places than the Bowery, but apparently he does not usually seek out this secular, creedless monastery. He has no talent for self-obliteration. The African American is yet another story. As we have seen, he was on the Bowery when the Dutch of New Amsterdam set him free so that he could take the brunt of an Indian attack. Later he was moved down to the squalid tenements of the Five Points near Mulberry Bend. After that he did not reappear in this city’s history until mobs made a victim of him during the draft riots. However, the depression brought a new wave of African Americans to the Bowery. They were a younger group of men than the Whites who were tossed up by the storm and beached on the Bowery. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

Nose-counters and interviewers discovered that the average African American on the Bowery in those days had done more traveling on the road than his white counterpart, but that he was also more likely to have been married, and more likely to be free of the neuroses and psychoses that marked his White brothers on the breadlines. Were the African Americans’ wives displaced, lost, stolen? Why did the storm uproot more stable, wholesome, settle African Americans than Whites? The answers seem to lie more with the economist than the psychologist. Perhaps the economic soil in which the African American families grew so thin, the roots so close to the surface, that even the strongest could not resist. In depression times the steadiest African American family lived in marginal soil close to the hunger line, and the wind that might make a White family man shut the blinds was enough to rip the African America up by the root and set him adrift. Perhaps, too, economic troubles were less traumatic to the African American than to his White brother. He was more used to them. As human beings, we have unlimited potentialities. However, when these movements try to throw form or limits out entirely, they become self-destructive and noncreative. Never is form itself superseded so long as creativity endures. If form were to vanish, spontaneity would vanish with it. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

Research in self-disclosure has shown that what a person will disclose to another is a function of many variables, including the subject matter to be disclosed, characteristics of the person, the setting in which discloser is to take place, and—more important—characteristics of the audience-person. The most powerful determiner of self-disclosure appears to be the willingness of the audience to disclose oneself to the subject to the same extent that one expects the subject to confide one’s experience. This is termed the “dyadic effect.” It asserts, as a general principle, that disclosure begets disclosure. Now this is not, by any means, the only condition under which a being reveal one’s experience to another. One will often disclose oneself unilaterally, without reciprocation, when one believes that it serves one’s interests to do so. This is what happens, for example, in much psychotherapeutic interviewing. The patient discloses much more about oneself than the therapist does, on the implicit promise that is one does so one’s lot will improve. When we allow individual projects a definition of the situation when one appears before others, we must also see that the others, however passive their role may seem to be, will themselves effectively project a definition of the situation by virtue of their response to the individual and by virtue of any lines of action they initiate to one. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

Ordinarily the definition of the situation projected by the several different participants are sufficiently attuned to one another so that open contradiction will not occur. I do not mean that there will be a kind of consensus that arises when each individual present candidly expresses what one really feels and honestly agrees with the expressed feelings of others present. This kind of harmony is an optimistic ideal and in any case not necessary for the smooth working of society. Rather, each participant is expected t suppress one’s immediate heartfelt feelings, conveying a new of the situation which one feels the others will be able to find at least temporarily acceptable. The maintenance of this surface of agreement, this veneer of consensus, is facilitated by each participant concealing one’s own wants behind statements which assert values to which everyone present feels obliged to give lip service. Further, there is usually a kind of division of definitional labor. Each participant is allowed to establish the tentative official ruling regarding matters which are vital to one but not immediately important to others, for instance, the rationalizations and justifications by which one accounts for one’s past activity. In exchange for this courtesy one remains silent or non-committal on matters important to others but not immediately important to one. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

We have than a kind of interactional modus vivendi. Together the participants contribute to a single over-all definition of the situation which involves not so much a real agreement as to what exists but rather a real agreement as to whose claims concerning what issues will be temporarily honored. Who, upon seeing them, has not been seized by wonder and perplexity at the gargoyles leering from their perches just below the roofs of Hearst Castle in California? These half-animal, half-human creatures eating other animals alive, these satanic figures with the tongues stuck out at the hordes of people in the city square below the mountain, with expressions of contempt carved in stone, who sit watch in broad daylight over San Semeion—are they in some way the devil’s hostages? No such evasive answer is possible. They are expressions of a tension that exists in all of us, a dialectic between light and darkness, good and evil. These expressions of the daimonic are critically important to the fact that this American nation could construct castles that emanate such beauty. For the artist who lights up our World, as those sculptors did, lives and breathes with the daimonic. What we used to call beauty (a work we should not use very often in our day) is impossible if we cut loose our connection with this nether World. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

The artist faces an ancient and powerful interdiction in the second of the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven images, or likeness of anything that is in Heaven above, or that is in the Earth beneath, or that is in the water under the Earth.” This is an interdiction against the worships of idols. It is also a prohibition of magic placed upon the ancient Hebrew, and interdiction of the primitive way of getting power over an animal or a person by drawing one’s likeness in the sand. People around the Mediterranean are to this day skittish about having their snapshots taken—apparently a carry-over of the early feeling that if you got their image by means of camera or crayon or paint, you captured part of their soul. The “graven image” must relate to the form of the person, something that one experiences as crucial to one’s autonomy. I cited this as a “primitive” idea, but it is a sophisticated insight as well. For the portrait as drawn or painted by any competent artist is related not so much to the appearance of the subject but rather to what the artist sees in the subject, which will be something of the latter’s underlying form. However one phrases the problem, it is a sign of courage that a person commits oneself to becoming an artist in the first place. One has to have considerable rebelliousness to set oneself against the archetypal prohibition. #RandolpHarris 12 of 17

Art is a substitute for violence. The same impulses that drive some persons to violence—the hunger for meaning, the need for ecstasy, the impulse to risk all—drive the artist to create. One is by nature our archrebel. I am not speaking of art as social protest: it can be that, as it was with Delacroix, and artist are almost always in the front line of social causes. I mean rather that one’s whole work is a rebellion against the status quo of the society—that which would make the society banal, conformist, stagnant. Often this takes the form of rebellion against the academic tradition in art itself—vide van Gogh, Cezanne, Picasso. However, the essence of the rebellion is in the new way of seeing nature and life. The art consists of the discovery and expression of this new way of seeing, which in turn is related to the artist’s originality, one’s sense of newness and freshness, one’s criticism of the past and present in the light of future possibilities. Artist teach humankind to see. However, the artist teaches us the possibilities of new forms as well. This inner form of art comes from the poet, and consists of the passion he or she puts into the poem. The organic aspect of form causes it to grow on its own; it speaks to us down through the ages revealing new meaning to each generation. Centuries later we may find meaning in it that even the author did not know was there. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

Artists show us new options of perceiving and responding to the World and each other which did not exist before one saw them and pointed them out. One does not impose form on a chaotic World as the thinker does; one exists in this form. Hence it becomes significant form. As long as the artist can create, one does not have to resort to violence. As a person one is generally an unbellicose, unaggressive type and exists by the live-and-let-live code, although we find that in heated discussions one can be stubborn and reach heights of passion which in someone else would be expressed in violence. Hence the artist has a proportionately harder time in periods of transition like ours—harder, say, than the doctor, whose subject (the human body) remains relatively constant even in periods of social upheaval. Contemporary artist may feel this difficulty keenly, as they will reveal in conversation. This is the first age in which the artist has had to create one’s own community. However, some artists now say that there is no meaningful society into which they can fit. They have no community. Society appears to worship the artist, but this is pretense; actually contemporary society buys and sells one, and any individual with money can buy up all an artist’s canvases and dump them into a big hole in a field. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

Society can enthrone the artist—very much like they did in the case of the scapegoat king. This happened to Jackson Pollock. He appeared on the cover of Life magazine—that highest throne in those says of the beginning of mass communication—with the caption, “Is Pollock the Greatest American Painter?” He was acknowledged a great public success, and such acknowledgment is very hard to take. Shortly afterward he ended his life by driving his car off the road. Mark Rothko became financially successful and then committed suicide. These and other artists’ suicides may mean many things. However, they also seem to support my artist-friends’ claim that society only pretends to value the artist. The artist is actually a second-class citizen; one is accepted as the frosting and not the bread of life. The age that admires art as a financial investment, then goes merrily on its way with technological gimmicks. To see this we need not look far. The skyline of New York, once one of the wonders of the modern World, has been progressively ruined by the conglomerate, haphazard erection of skyscrapers thrown together with no reference at all to an over-all form or vision. Yes, they are built with glass and glistening aluminum and all sorts of other interesting materials. Once can build a cesspool out of interesting materials. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

The contemporary artist finds oneself in a strange bind and is tempted to fall into despair. Some of them say that Mondrian, for example, went as far as anyone could in rebellion, and his rebellion has had precious little effect on anyone. They also point out the war in Vietnam is too vivid, with the bombing of villages and the defoliation of the land, all of which is accepted apathetically by the citizenry. How can you force people to see—which is the artist’s function—with such competition? However much one may talk of Charles Manson was groomed for his later violence by the postgraduate training in crime he received during his thirteen years in prison, his satanic cult illustrates how actual murder can be recorded by the murderers themselves on film and in music as an artistic experience. One can and must note these things. True, my concept of the artist as rebel can be exaggerated to the degree of pathology, especially when it occurs in a technological civilization characterized by built-in violence on the roads and in actual motor cars and in imaginary TV programs of violence in any city on any day. However, the fact that something can be pushed to a pathological extreme does not make it the norm, nor is it any argument against the norm. Crimes involving pleasure of the flesh are no argument against healthy experience of pleasures of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

These disturbing facts make the thesis of the artist as rebel more serious and more real. The artist as rebel is a gadfly to the culture. One’s task is still to follow one’s talent of perceiving and showing us the new forms in which we, too, can see and experience the World around us. If we wish to learn what the spiritual content of our new World will be, we must pay attention to the artist. The stages of the Quest for Truth pass by degrees from the disciplining of the ego to the opening of consciousness to God. One this journey there are stages of ascent, stations of understanding, lights of peace, and shadows of despair. The Quest must traverse the three level of body, mind, and spirit. “Therefore, blessed are they who will repent and harken unto the voice of the Lord their God; for these are they that shall be saved. And may God Grant, in his great fulness, that people might be brought unto repentance and good works, that they might be restored unto grace for grace, according to their works,” reports Helaman 12.23-24. Our power is possessed in keeping ourselves busy with constant service of humanity. One can awaken some persons to this divine presence within themselves, but not all. One may do this mysteriously by some unknown process, or one may do it deliberately and with the display of one’s technique. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17Cresleigh Homes

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