13
You Can’t Go Home Again
Why,
I don’t know, but I never read Thomas Wolfe in high school. Not only was he a
contemporary of my high school hero and literary mentor Ernest Hemingway, but
he was mentored by the same editor as Hemingway at Scribner’s, the legendary
Maxwell Perkins, as was another of my favorite writers F. Scott Fitzgerald who
introduced the young Hemingway to Perkins. Perhaps, as I suspect, the books that
we read choose us; and Thomas Wolfe wasn’t on the trajectory of my life path.
Nonetheless, he was responsible for the phrase “you can’t go home again,” which
came to mind after my visit to my hometown of Nipigon, Northwestern Ontario
after a painfully protracted eleven year absence.
Actually,
Thomas Wolfe can’t take credit for that memorable line, which became the title
of his posthumous novel You Can’t Go Home
Again; he got it from a woman when he related his experience of going back
to his hometown of Ashville, North Carolina after a deliberate eight-year
absence because of his first novel Look
Homeward, Angel, a thinly disguised autobiographical novel that caused a
big stir in his hometown.
“But
Tom, don’t you know you can’t go home again?” replied the lady when Tom told
her of his horrible experience with some of the townspeople of Asheville who
harbored deep resentment for him because of how he had portrayed them in his
novel, which I could relate to because of the animus that I had stirred up in
my hometown after the publication of my first novel What Would I Say Today If I Were to Die Tomorrow?
But
that’s not uncommon for writers. Our own Nobel Laureate Alice Munroe replied to
Shelagh Rogers on CBC radio when Shelagh asked her what the people of her
hometown of Wingham, Southwestern Ontario thought of her stories, “I don’t
know. They don’t speak to me,” replied Munroe. And there are descendants of people
in Orillia, Ontario that Stephen Leacock satirized in his book Sunset Sketches of a Little Town and
other stories that still harbor a deep resentment for the great writer. And my
hero Hemingway had to suffer for the rest of his life the animus of his friends
whom he fictionalized in the novel that launched his career, The Sun Also Rises. But where do people
think great literature comes from, anyway?
“Art
is an act of the imagination that transforms reality into a deeper perception
of what is,” said the American poet Adrienne Rich. Actually, she said “poetry,”
not art. But this applies to prose writing as well as poetry, and all Thomas
Wolfe and Alice Munroe and Stephen Leacock and Ernest Hemingway did was
transform the reality of their own experiences into works of fiction by an act
of the imagination that revealed the deeper truth of their characters—hence the
animus of the people that inspired their characters.
But
that’s not the only reason why I felt I could never go home again; it went much
deeper than that: it had to do with my new state of consciousness, which will
require a spiritual musing to explain. So, if I may be permitted, I’m going to
call upon my Muse…
As
anyone who has read my books and/or spiritual musings knows, I was a seeker
from a very early age; high school, actually. And I was one of the lucky ones
who found what he was looking for, which I expound upon in my literary memoir The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway; so I
can speak with the confidence of gnostic certainty about man’s journey of
self-discovery because I did find my true self. And herein lies the crutch,
because when one finds his true self he/she speaks from a state of
consciousness that is unique to themselves alone, which is separate and
distinct from his family, friends, and acquaintances.
It
is practically impossible to convey this experience unless one is up on the
literature, such as books like Frequency,
the Power of Personal Vibration, by Penny Pierce, which conveys the
perception that every soul has its own vibrational frequency, and to change
one’s life one has to change their frequency; but that’s material for another
musing. Suffice to say that when one leaves their hometown they step out of the
frequency of their hometown vibrations and begin to experience the frequency of
their new surroundings.
Inevitably
then, one’s state of consciousness changes as the frequency of one’s personal vibration
changes. To make my point, I had a dream one night several years after we moved
to Tiny Township, Georgian Bay that spells this out so clearly it may just stir
up more animus from the people of my hometown; but before I relate my dream,
let me just say that I have been studying my dreams most of my life and have
come to the same conclusion that Carl Jung did when he said, “Dreams are the
guiding words of the soul.” In short, our dreams don’t lie. Our dreams, as
North America’s greatest psychic Edgar Cayce said, “work to accomplish two
things. They work to solve the problem of the dreamer’s conscious, waking life.
And they work to quicken in the dreamer new potentials which are his to claim”
(Edgar Cayce On Dreams, by Harmon H.
Bro, edited by Hugh Lynn Cayce, p. 16).
It’s
a little more complicated than this for me, though; because being a seeker who
devoted his life to finding his true self, I became acquainted with teachings
that precipitated the process of self-discovery, like Gurdjieff’s teaching of
“work on oneself.” And I changed the frequency of my personal vibration so
quickly when I got caught up in the throes of this teaching that my mother said
to me one day, “You change before my eyes.”
In
my dream then, I’m walking down the Main Street of Nipigon (I ran a pool hall
and vending machine business on the Main Street in my early twenties), and as
I’m walking down the street I cannot help but notice that everyone I meet is
walking in slow motion. I’m walking at my normal pace, but everyone else is
walking so slowly it feels like I’m running; and this puzzles me when I wake
up. But after some reflection I realized that this spoke to my new state of
consciousness, which is not to judge my hometown; my dream was simply pointing
out that we vibrated at a different frequency.
This,
of course, explained my inherent dissonance. And this is why after an eleven
year absence from my hometown I felt I could never go home again. And to honor
Thomas Wolfe for giving expression to this puzzling observation, I’ve put on my
Amazon Wish List three of his books (which I know Penny will get for me for
Christmas), his novel Look Homeward,
Angel, which alienated Wolfe from his hometown; his posthumous sequel, You Can’t Go Home Again; and, just for
good measure, The Complete Short Stories
of Thomas Wolfe. That’s the least I can do for the writer who indelibly
impacted Earl Hamner, the author of one of my favorite television characters,
the impressionable young writer John-Boy Walton. Now, like Thomas Wolfe, I’m
ready to write my own sequel whose ironic title came to me long before my
protracted visit to my hometown—We May Be
Tiny but We’re Not Small.
