A letter from my Father: musings on “light and death”
This week, in honor of Father’s Day, I asked my dad if I could interview him for my blog. My father, Todd Pinney, is, I think, a writer first and foremost. He is a poet and a songwriter, holds a PhD in American Literature, and had a long career teaching composition, poetry and literature at the University level. Growing up in Boulder, Colorado, I saw my dad read his poetry and even shared the stage with him at the iconic Penny Lane coffee-shop on Pearl Street when I was a kid. Later, as a teenager, I performed songs I had written on that same stage. My dad and I have always shared a love of words, and I think we’re both people who feel more comfortable expressing ourselves through writing rather than through talking.
Partly for this reason, instead of doing an interview over the telephone, I thought it might work better for him to write in response to my questions. I sent him a long list of questions, and what I initially received back was a beautiful and pretty lengthy “essay” inspired by my first question alone. After reading what he sent, I felt it was best to abandon the idea of an “interview” in the traditional sense, and simply share this piece of writing.
Partly a letter to me, partly autobiography, I treasure receiving this piece from my dad — especially during this time when the threat of COVID-19 has made it uncertain when we’ll be able to see each other next. I feel honored and proud to be able to share his writing with my readers, as I think it is a beautiful reflection not only on my dad’s own relationship with creativity, but on the strange times we’re all living through.
I asked my dad, “What inspires you to create?” This was his response:
I’ve been thinking a lot about light and death lately. When I imagine my own life story I mainly see an autobiography of light. First memory: the “projects,” Windham, Ohio, I’m outside, a street corner, maybe I’m three, maybe I’m with Aunt Ruth, maybe there’s a dog, but mainly it’s the sunlight that revealed me as a person, in place, in a way I’ve never forgotten. Or my early adoption of fascination with shifting patterns of light I see with my eyes closed. I believe this “habit” developed early, and partly out of my annual end-of-summer Ohio hay fever allergies (Ragweed!). Rubbing my eyes not only relieved their irritation some, but also triggered the behind-eyes light show. In fact, a human eye is capable of making a bit of its own light, like a firefly or sea star. Research says, Phosphenes! Biophotons! Manipulable with “light” massage! Lately I try to imagine a visual art project representing these “sights.”
Or I find the true “dharma” of my family of origin in a few scenes of north Ohio Northern Lights! I’m 7 and/or 8 or so, the six of us all there in peace, love and wonder with great capes of dark pastel colors shifting and dissolving, framing vivid stars.
Sometimes I’ve tried to guess why I was accepted into NYU Film School in 1970 with excellent but not spectacular grades and test scores, and no notable accomplishments from a mediocre high school in the suburbs of Pittsburgh. Lately I remembered the movie I imagined making in my application essay. Maybe it was unusual then to propose a film about “light” instead of “plot”? Well, I guess there was a sort of plot of proliferation/reproduction (mirrors?) of light; (cameras on slides)? Who knows. One thing I do know is the way the nighttime sidewalks of Lower Manhattan glittered like a kind of magical stage set was central to my dropping out of film school after one semester. It would have been two years of film history, film theory, fulfilling general education requirements before getting my hands on any film equipment.
That first semester I had a pretty terrific poetry teacher; I remember him talking about the “landscape” a metaphor crosses over and “secretly” illuminates. The time was apocalyptic, as it is now. Malcolm X and Dr. King were dead already. Angela Davis was on her way to jail. The Vietnam War, and protests against it, raged. In four months the National Guard would murder four peace protestors at Kent State, my father’s alma mater, and in my Ohio neighborhood. Poetry simply struck me as a more directly available “career” choice. I could start right away. I already had.
Lately, largely due to your suggestion that I do so, I’ve been gathering and going through my 50 years of mostly unpublished poetry, and there’s no question “lighting effects” have been a primary preoccupation. The earliest poem I remember feeling deeply satisfied with is a blow-by-blow account of a spectacular sunrise over Lake Hopatcong, NJ. Also, on a less “cosmic” level, there, at Kids Camp, where grade-school students were bused up daily from Newark, I composed the shiny lines, “My hands flash in the hot water/washing silver”; and I’ve pretty much enjoyed doing dishes ever since!
Of the four unpublished books of poetry I’ve put together at various times, One of them, A Barrel of Monkeys, is made of thirty sunrises and 30 sunsets “recorded” in one month on a little “neck” of land overlooking the sea above Good Harbor Beach, Gloucester. One of the favorites of my own songs (it’s “to” you, Siena, with music by my songwriting partner Dwight Holmes) is “Try Your Name” written at Emerald Isle, NC. It moves from morning, through sunset, to moonlight over the ocean. Another of my own songs I especially love came at Lake Atitlan, Guatemala, has golden and silver light, skipping a perfect stone, “moon fun,” “the hand of sky” and “a rising sun in the twinkling of an eye.” Truly water and light are my ecstasy! And the name I’ve chosen for this current project of poetry gathering/possibly online presenting, is One Bright Morning in the Middle of the Night, the first line/title? of a short/terrifying/complete “folk” song I memorized on one hearing from my Ohio cousin around age 6.
And I haven’t forgotten I began this response committing myself to saying things about “death” as well as “light.” There’s a “surplus” of death these days, including the prominence of the (usual?) murders of black people by white people, and the extra 100,000-plus COVID-19 deaths. As an elderly man with a (mild) chronic upper respiratory condition, it’s at least as easy as ever to imagine my own death. I’ve had three (or four?) near-death experiences, all of them involving some stunning “visuals.” After the first time (age 19?) I had/made a “vision” that I’d live to age 88 (8 is “my” number), and I’ve generally accepted/believed (“sounds good to me”) that. After my first Ayahuasca experience (then 24 hours of silence) about 10 years ago, my teacher told me she sang to me the whole time (sometimes welcome, sometimes annoying) because she sensed I was on the verge of “going away” and she definitely didn’t want me dying there in her kitchen. On the other hand, she said, when my time to die really came to be at hand, she’d be happy to take me up in the mountains for a proper ceremony. When I told you about this, you said “O I want to be there”!
And that’s what I was thinking of in my most recent finished song, one “about” the virus, when I ended with “I’m really not afraid of dying/I’m just scared to die alone.” While I do still appreciate the rhetorical power of these lines, and I’m struck deeply by sadness of so many victims dying without loved ones near (on ventilators, in nursing homes, for example), I’ve determined I can be OK with it. Sure, it’d be sweet to die with loved ones on hand for goodbyes, but I needn’t count on it.
Recently I took a “desperation”/”gotta get out of this place”/”need a fresh start” 700+ mile drive (just 2 “clean” stops in each direction, masks, gloves, sanitizer, etc. no maid service during Super 8 stay) to Fairfield, Iowa, to look at houses and imagine moving there. Perfect light blue skies and greening fields all across the Midwest. At the first property I was shown, I found a dead man in the bathroom. When I found his obituary 3 days later, I felt him a kindred spirit and passed it along to some of “my people” suggesting they might try to give him a little lift along his “way,” if there is such a thing, which I don’t necessarily believe. Today at least, here’s how I see it, for me: I’m barely there. It’s VERY DARK. Maybe there’s just the tiniest sign or sense of something like a closed-eye phosphene. I follow it.
In closing, I want to share one of my dad’s poems. This is an early one, written when he was a counselor at a Kids Camp in New Jersey. In a recent poetry reading he referred to this poem as “kind of a psychedelic experience.”
Morning Glory
Sunrise is a big enough surprise to go to sleep after
not having to think of everything that happened.
I take completely new breaths and hail the freedom
to unfold the flower in my brain on trellises,
a high climbing heavenly blue even the moon
shows up just in time to see. An alteration
in the atmosphere of bug-eyed clouds,
the first glare off the lake
breaks the day into mad birds arguing
my mood to write this down. A dark cloud bank
on the horizon imitates the treetop forms
over the shoreline and two wooded ridges already
barely turned pink. Leisurely see you later
shapes float every which way. The moon withdraws
coldly unto its whiteness from the darker whites
and light blues that ripple in the breeze’
sweet breath setting cross currents lingering
no longer impatient after two days of storm.
Encroaching land makes a mouth into the main lake
from our cove and the sky shows a film
between me and it. Mist advances outward in a jetty
spelling purple apparitions that tap dance faintly
trailing fragrant traces of this this morning’s composition
and signed by the artist in the corner who
shakes my hands and lets the day up out of them.
One volcanic cloud lays a wide red band
on water the lopsided sun emerges from.
The ribbon turns to gold you could walk on.
Sun rises and rounds and flicks out flames
a little distracted from being further flowerings
precisely timed to the end of my exercise.
I hold back perfect shape against wrinkling heat.
Snake on the glass turns green and strikes my forehead
to find my hand with a lot of time gone by in it:
High as a tree toad and dry as hide
Todd Pinney