My Life-Long Vocation of Bedazzlement
Turns out, you can make a living at it. Ask any fool. WRITTEN & ILLUSTRATED by PETER MOORE
When the mood strikes, I run excerpts from A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG NINCOMPOOP, my coming-of-age-travel-memoir-with-funny-drawings. (The first entry is here. Most recent one is here. If you become a paid subscriber, you can access the complete archive here!)
My memoir details my road through Paris, London, and god help me, Zagreb, in search of the ultimate destination: a life worth living. The story so far: Young Peter arrived in Paris, occupied a dorm room at the Alliance Française language school, tiptoed out onto the the Paris Metro, and roared off on the road to elsewhere. I was lost, but that’s the only way to be found, right? After Paris, I moved on to Olde England, to check out where that Shakespeare guy lived. In this excerpt, I’m living in southern England, embracing procrastination as my working methodology, and sticking my thumb out for a ride on the road to elsewhere.
“TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT,” I wrote on the one-month anniversary of daily-journal keeping, “was my before-dinner walk up on The Downs. I walked uphill with purpose and once on top of the open ridge I became aware of the moonrise. It leapt above the horizon as I gained perspective. After hopping a fence I found a perfect spot of closely cropped grass to lie upon, and dusk gathered. How can I describe such times? I was Emerson’s ‘transparent eyeball,’ alive to the wind, the approaching clouds, the grass that grew above my head, the wild daisies, the lights in the village below, and the River Arun. I would have liked to stay until complete darkness came, but I had a responsibility to a warm meal in Amberley, and I arose and went there.”
Block that literary illusion!
I’m not sure where I pulled the Ralph Waldo Emerson reference from; I never read him as an undergraduate. “I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing,” he wrote, in his poetic ramble Nature. “I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.”
I wasn’t far off from that—especially the “I am nothing” part, rather than the “part or parcel of God” part. But my channel was open to those divine currents, even as a beginner atheist. Something was stirring within, and it wasn’t just hunger for the warm meal Elinor was then preparing for me. I was open to gloria mundi, and trembled as it (she?) brushed against my sensitive skin. I was briefly able to strip away all that intellectual pretense, and my social awkwardness, and absorb the silvery light. Whatever other locations would welcome me through life, moonrise was the ultimate destination. I had launched my life-long vocation to be bedazzled.
I WASN’T JUST WRITING ODD SCRAPS in my journal and gazing dreamily at the ecliptic. My college friends were circling around, initiating rendezvous.
On December 19th, my journal shows, I imposed on my professor’s family for yet another bath, plus a bowl of porridge, and accepted a phone call from my friend Catherine, who had had sent me a poem, about me of all subjects, in the mail. It was calligraphed on parchment, and clearly meant as a declaration of some sort, but 22-year old me, and Catherine’s poetic evocation of me, were off by many degrees of separation.
Still I was flattered, and briefly loved myself a little more.
In fact, the poem is an embarrassing artifact, not because of the poetry, but because of the false hopes it casts in verse. It references a novel I had written for my senior thesis (bad), my smile (“taunting”), my plans (“divine,” i.e. artistic), and my intended “return to Byzantium” (William Butler Yeats got there first) to be fitted for the Brocade Mantle of Literature.
They were good ideas, creatively couched. They just had nothing to do with the life I would eventually lead. Instead of Byzantium, I would soon find employment in Knoxville, Tennessee. There’s adult life for you.
But in receipt of Catherine’s laudatory poem, still in pre-life fantasy mode, I’d agreed to visit her at her JYA roost, in Wales. And so I quit my story-writing mission in Amberley (literary-history’s loss!) and headed north, on a procrastination tour.
My professor's wife sent me off after a breakfast of pancakes, bacon, toast, and coffee, in hopes I’d never return. The calories sustained me during my hitchhike north, to within a Tube-shot of London. Soon I was standing next to the A29, the London Road, thumb out, holding one of Elinor’s watercolor sketches with my destination written in block letters on the back side. After five minutes of indifferent drivers, I was snatched up by a man who informed me that he’d picked me up because, as he said, “Oi thot you wuz a bird.”
That is: A young woman.
I was familiar with the tension over my secondary sex characteristics. I was always a little too petite and gender-confusing for my own good, especially after the Beatles started all males on hair-growing missions. After leaving my barber behind in the U.S., I developed a luxuriantly curling thatch, but had no capacity to raise a mustache.
The Village People had just released Macho Man, but I wasn’t much of either, it seemed.
My benefactor on the A24 rebooted on my sexual identity, and then we settled in for a companionable run up to London. He worked in production on The Daily Mirror, a London Tabloid that, during the 1960s, had a daily circulation of 5 million copies, or just under 10% of the country’s population. But at the time of my ride, it was losing a decades-long battle to its competitor The Sun.
The driver seemed untroubled by the threat to his livelihood, leading me through discussions of the excellent design of his Citroen, the desirability of fusion energy, the miracle of bird migration, the underappreciated intelligence of animals, the reality of UFOs and a coming close encounter with space aliens, the horrors of war and the folly of military expenditures, the untapped resources of the human brain, and the complexities of computer typesetting.
After I had spent two hours as his conversational captive, he dropped me at the Waterloo Tube stop in London, near the National Theatre, for my date with Judi Bowker in The Double Dealer. It wasn’t the only time I’d crash into romantic illusions on this jaunt.
“The fool who persists in his folly will become wise.”
William Blake
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Two questions. What do fools eat? What foods are guaranteed to create bedazzlement?