No one escapes childhood unscarred. The raw animalism is crudely sculpted by events and best intentions. Drives designed to survive and thrive in a world we have long concreted over thrash against screens and surge with sugar. And now in practice, as a dad, my tender sentimentalism is tested by the iron will of a toddler – ‘I’ll nurture that wild and perfect spirit’ at 3 a.m. becomes ‘Oh God. Oh dear Lord, make this fucking child go to sleep’. Does anyone cross as vast a terrain as the Rousseauian idealist turned parent? If a conservative is a mugged liberal, a dad is a knackered Jesus.
No child is awake enough to appoint a mentor, you take what you are given; it isn’t until adolescence that we grope beyond the boundaries of Mum & Dad, or whoever was doing that job. Some boys give that job to peers in gangs, some girls give it to ponies but, for all of us, beyond these narrow roles are scores of Ben Kenobis and Maya Angelous just dying to pass on a lifetime of twinkling wisdom. Worth noting that if the teen craving for an idol is soaked up by vapid consumerism, all that hormonal good intent could get splurged on a digital Kardashian or wrung out on a beatboxing pipkin in a backward baseball cap. Yes, yes, the adolescent wants coitus but what does the wanting want?
Our glacial days of digital perennialism place us in a constant ‘now’ without ever really being present, and icons are torn apart. No sooner does a hero rise than she is exposed as a hypocrite. Malcolm X was a rent boy, Gandhi had some odd nocturnal habits and even Che, the obligatory teen portal into rebellious sentience, was a homophobic murderer. Too Much Information; the iconoclasm of our omniscient but omni-dumb days unweaves the carpets that we may have walked upon and leaves us in the wasteland of the ‘only human’.
Before I was awake to such things as conscious mentorship, I adored my older cousins and they begat Morrissey, who shone the torch of adulation on Jimmy Dean and Oscar Wilde. Each retains a place in the ‘constellation of self’ as I blaze into my middle years. My cousins with their chip-toothed Essex cool, Moz’s elevation of suffering, Dean’s sexy damage, and Wilde is a little too complex to skip over with a handful of adjectives but, God, the tragedy, the wit, the ambiguity, the social conscience and the contradiction.
We make ourselves, consciously or unconsciously, building patterns in the infinite, holding on to strands amidst the limitless, sometimes grasping through fear, sometimes clutching with desire. Through proper mentorship, a transition of skills, a nurture of energy can take place that instantiates an adult from the beautiful wreckage of childhood, a sober man from the drunk, a master from the student, a mother from the girl.
When I was sixteen I left home in search of my misfortune and quickly found it. It was in Bermondsey. There’s enough misery in South London for everyone, it wasn’t as cool then as it’s meant to be now. There I holed up with some Lost Boys, two years older and a great deal wiser, and in my mind I made them legends. When I look back now at these eighteen-year-old lads I see that they were herberts but I needed them to be cool, so cool is what I saw. Question: is there an objective ‘reality’ or a series of interdependent mental projections? In other words, was Hitler a kind of nationally conjured totem to re-energize castrated and enraged Germany? Were The Beatles a quadrant of awakening shamans that carried a generation from plodding rock, to sexy pop, then psychedelia and ultimately consumerism? The events in the outer world are governed by subtler energies, many of which pass through our collective psyche. No doubt meteors and hurricanes shape environment but culture, by definition, is the manifestation of human drives. There are patterns, shapes and archetypes that recur.
At nineteen when I first saw the already dead Bill Hicks I felt a bodily transference. I’m not claiming to be entitled to the mantle of the great American stand-up, there’s enough people doing that, but I felt empowered and inspired by him. Inspired – he put breath into me. And breath is life. It is curious to me that in early life my mentors were remote. Famous or dead or both. It wasn’t until Chip Somers that I chose to emulate another man in order to move from one state to another.