The Rocket Man

The splendor, the radiance, the continuum of color, convex, and constellationism.

What a world, what a world, what a world of beauty.

I was a crippled saint who had sat upon my lawn to paint the colors of the day. Now, the lawn rippled below me in vibrant green waves, but my umwelt spiraled far away from the solid ground, floating in a Van Gogh-esque stellar geography.

It was 1972 somewhere.

My favorite line from my favorite song suddenly was penned in icy blue letters on a white light canvass.

“All the science, I don’t understand

It’s just my job five days a week.”

I fixated on those words for five long days of a wobbly week. So, so coldly blue. So, so true. I didn’t understand the science, not one bit. I was just a little rhesus money in the nose cone of a thin-skinned eggshell. I was at least 93 percent human in terms of genetics and perceptual cognizance.

But when I gazed back down at the blue-green spheroid floating below me, I cried human tears. I remember the electrolytes, oils, and proteins touching my extended tongue. Yes, I was human, but my circumstances were meant for something altogether dissimilar. The beauty of it all was just too damn real.

So, I opened my eyes, just as one opens a parachute.

Downward, downward, a drag against gravity preventing a life-crushing free fall. All the science, I don’t understand.

Just like that, the five-day week was over. Back to my seven-day weekend of hum drum life.

I strained to recapture the splendor, the radiance, the continuum of color, convex, and constellationism. To no avail. The city streets were formed with hard asphalt. It was 1972 here and now. My friends were off at college, I struggled to gain my footing as I strode across the charcoal-colored asphalt.

It was then and there that I decided to hitchhike from Pennsylvania to California. Maybe, I reasoned, all that splendor and radiance was hiding in Haight Ashbury.

Both Plato and Aristotle claimed beauty was something we discover, not something we invent.

I was wondering if they were off the mark on that one. I was ready to explore and find out.

Thus, from 1972-1980, I became a professional traveler. It was just my job five days a week.

I thumbed my nose at conventional employment and employed my thumb to traverse the external continent from the Delaware River across the prairielands of the great American Midwest, to a stopover in Wichita, to the Mesa rising from an ancient desert at the Zuni reservation, to the rainbow skyscapes of Taos, past cacti castles on Arizona’s roadsides, underneath the shade of a Live Oak in Pasadena, up coastal Route One to the magic beaches beneath the cliffs of the Big Sur, and finally, landing at legendary Haight Ashbury…but never landing…always moving in search of that elusive splendor and radiance. Always, engaging in argument with Aristotle and Plato along the way.

I once made it all the way from Denver to Philly with a quarter in my pocket. I picked apples for 50 cents per bushel in the orchards around Winchester, Virginia. I joined a crew of locals bringing in the hay in McConnellsburg, Pennsylvania. I wrote poems and stories that were never published and never earned a dollar. I made my living as a writer.

I lived life to find beauty.

I thought I found it once inside a small, withered, grey-green button that found me in the sun-scorched Chihuahuan Desert. I became very sick. I vomited grey-green trauma from the years coming of age in the Catholic Church. Convinced I was going to die, I surrendered my agency. It was then that I caught a fleeting glimpse of the splendor and radiance. I stared at a flowering Yucca for what seemed like five days. But I had to move on. I left it behind it the desert.

Once, in a meditation hall at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, it flickered past my eyes wide shut. When I looked for it, however, I only saw holy people dressed in robes or denim shirts and blue jeans.

I swore I must have tasted it when eating a bowl of veggie chili served with homemade wheat bread at The Farm commune in Summertown, Tennessee.

Perhaps, I felt it once while making love on a beach at the Jersey shore.

The problem was holding onto it. If I tried to put it safely and securely inside my jeans pocket, it dropped through a hole that hadn’t been there just a moment before.

Always, at such points in time and place, Plato and Aristotle would remind me that beauty was something to discover, not something to invent.

I resisted their insistence.

“And I think it’s gonna be a long, long time

‘Til touchdown brings me ‘round again to find

I’m not the man they think I am at home.”

No, I wasn’t the man they thought I was at home, and I wasn’t the man I thought I was away from home, either.

Home or away from home, I kept touching down to find I couldn’t find it. It could not be found in traveling the external states, nor, sadly, could it be found within the internal states of my mind, either.

It was 1980 somewhere when I quit trying and flying from hither and to, from inside to outside, from outside to inside. I made my peace with Aristotle and Plato, or at least suspended the argument.

I became a community organizer, which requires a more rooted, saddled, and settled life.

No regrets. I have four children, three grandchildren, and many satisfactions somewhere here in the 21st century.

I’m retired now.

I’m thinking, once again, about the splendor, the radiance, the continuum of color, convex, and constellationism.

I’m fairly certain that I won’t find it—or them—or whatever—in a pill or in a plant, on a road, or atop a mountain. I’m leaning toward the proposition that beauty is something I will discover, probably unexpectedly, rather than something I can create.

It’s such a timeless flight.