“We mistake induction for generation."
I gather with a group of men a couple of times a month. They range in age from their late 20's to late 70's. Although we're supposedly gathered for prayer and spiritual discussion, generally we speak about home improvement, trailering techniques, pickup truck liners, and cell phone plans. Personally, I find this somewhat of a relief as most, if not all, of my conversations are about spirituality. Not that I have a problem with that, but I also want to know other men's experiences in using the 2 inch ball hitch.
However, the other week we veered into spiritual territory as we were lamenting the absence of a role in contemporary mainstream Protestant Christianity for men. I observed how the language of spirituality had changed, too, in recent decades, as we tend to value the feminine empathetic over the masculine pragmatic. While both are necessary, it is increasingly difficult to convince men that churches are anything other than women's clubs.
We began to speak about the importance of men as spiritual role models, and it was then that the conversation became more interesting, especially as I recalled, with vividity, watching as a child my father pray in church. As he had been raised a Methodist of the frontier tradition, he knelt on one knee with his forefinger knuckle pressed to his forehead. I was maybe five-years-old at the time and imitated him to the best of my ability. That moment of what's called mimetic identification determined much of my subsequent life, both professionally and personally.
In turn, those present spoke of how their fathers modeled spirituality for them and, as these are the most active men in the parish, how those early, often non-verbal, images remained.
Mimetic identification is common among the young, of course, as it is a normal part of human development. During my years teaching in independent schools at the secondary level, I would note each class' understanding of what was and was not "cool", what language, attitudes, and postures would be mimicked and from whom they would imitate. Honestly, I wish that I'd kept a list.
Naturally, we can also see mimetics at work in our cultural history, as artists and musicians all have heroes whose style, even down to their choice of apparel, cigarettes smoked, and apartment accouterments, are imitated. Thus, Howlin' Wolf inspires Keith Richard; Muddy Waters inspires Jeff Beck, Soren Kierkegaard inspires Albert Camus, and so on.
In the late 1950's, Richard Farina, a Cuban-Irish college drop-out born in Brooklyn in 1937, showed up in Greenwich Village with a dulcimer and a slight repertoire of folk songs such as people had never heard before. Turns out he was also adept at writing, having had short stories and poems published while still a student at Cornell. Being of an attractive and rakish nature, he hung out at many of the favored bars of the creative class, particularly the White Horse Tavern [where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death; Norman Mailer drank and punched people; Jim Morrison of The Doors drank too much, Jack Kerouac drank such a prodigious amount that he was banned from the property; and Delmore Schwartz, come to think of it, drank himself to death, too].
There he met Tommy Makem, one of the founding members of The Irish Rovers, and folk singer Carolyn Hester, soon to be featured on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post. These two new friends helped Farina get started as a performer and, as he became Hester's manager and husband, enough time to write publishable poetry. They toured the United States and Europe together, eventually winding up back in New York at the recording studios of Columbia Records. Here, as Hester was in need of a harmonica player for some of the tracks, Farina hired a young man from Minnesota to fill that role. They would become good friends, with Farina serving as the young man's mimetic hero.
Farina began to explore the possibilities of folk music beyond simply performing the old tunes or re-visiting the music's classic themes. He found that, if merged with the differentiated social concerns of the 1960's, folk music could have a role in the expanding consciousness of the era. While songs were once about coal mines or natural disasters, now they could also explore racial inequality, the obtuse war in Vietnam, and the world-view of the post-WWII generation.
It's no wonder that Farina's harmonica-playing friend so idolized him. So much, that the friend copied Farina's style, his method of composition, his walk, his manner of speech, and even his apparel. Also, in homage to the former and famous habitue of The White Horse Tavern, the friend would change his name from Bob Zimmerman to Bob Dylan.
Farina's relationship would Carolyn Hester would end right at the time his relationship with Mimi Baez, Joan's sister, would begin. Not long after his divorce from Hester, Farina would marry Baez and begin recording original works with his sister-in-law and her friends, including Pete Seeger.
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| Farina, Seeger, and Baez perform on TV |
However, Farina was not limited solely to folk music and poetry printed in obscure journals. In 1966, Random House published his novel, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me, to critical success. In fact, it is considered second only to Ken Kesey's One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest as the best representative of 1960's American literature. As one critic mentioned to me, it is "The Great Hippie Novel". [It may be the only one, too, as the decade was not noted for its traditional forms of literature.]
The novel, based on The Odyssey, is a picaresque, a lightly plotted ramble through the protagonist's college experiences and his travels in the western U.S. and revolutionary Cuba. It was recommended for a number of literary awards and has remained in print for over fifty years. The younger critics of the era and many university students placed it on their shelves next to Jack Kerouac's On The Road, acknowledging the novel's link to the literature of the Beat Generation and that of the new counter-culture, the so-called "hippies".
I've often wondered what would have become of Farina as his talent matured. Clearly, if indirectly through Dylan and the Baez sisters, he made his influence on folk music known; and, while I find it a bit sophomoric these days, there is enough artistic merit in Been Down So Long... that I can't help but see the emergence of a new voice that would have continued to develop and define a generational experience.
Farina would attend a book-signing at a store in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California a couple of days after its publication and, later in the day, a party celebrating both his new book and his wife's 21st birthday. It was, according to an acquaintance who attended, one of the happiest occasions of the mid-sixties; one of those nights when it seemed as if the world had shifted into a better consciousness.
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| A rare quiet moment for Mimi and Farina |
While we know Dylan better than Farina and, come to think of it, Joan better than Mimi, we can experience something of Farina's talent through those other performers. None of them, however, have ever shown such a trans-artisitc ability, and that's the pity in what was lost.
Richard Farina's recordings may still be found. As was noted above, Been Down So Long... is still in print, although one does not know how much longer that will be the case since the novel is considered "triggering" to contemporary university students. Despite their self-defined conviction that they are the most liberal, free-thinking generation ever to grace the planet, contemporary youth seem to be not much more than tedious "church ladies" imbued with the worst aspects of neo-Puritanism and the vague bouquet of totalitarianism.
In other words, they are the very people against whom Farina railed, and that's a marvelous irony.
