13: You Can't Go Home Again

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.