Camille Flammarion was the French astronomer who was a great popularizer of the study of the heavens. He used this wood engraving by an unknown 18th Century artist in his many books, often described as a seeker of wisdom, peering into the mechanism of the universe.

Something like a great force of gravity happens when you decide what your life’s work will be, and if you decide on a career as a miner in the ‘made-up” world of art, that gravity can densify and go to super nova. And, if you do it for a long time, something fixed, a permanent piece of furniture in the mind’s mansion, holds its ground. How is this different from the mind of “make a market” of the business world? A world of derivatives, of puts and calls, of financial instruments….business is as abstract as art making and yet fortunes rise and fall like the very real cities funded by the make-a-market world of finance. It is a different species of human interest but still in the same family of focused energy and we’ll get to it in a bit. Science is another territory in the magical world of thought brought into the world of “stuff”. We’ll visit that country of proofs and curiosity mingled with the certainty of maths and science. The .gov, .edu, as well as .com have mapped these domains of human interest but to to get us started, to lift the skirts of my magical world of art, we go to senior English class in a boy’s boarding school at a time when the Vietnam War seeped its malevolence into every crevasse of the culture. A time when the original sin of America (slavery) was showing signs of receiving absolution in MLK’s dream and Cassius Clay’s (not yet Muhammad Ali) impertinent righteousness. 1965. The counter-culture was a vague perfume wafting in from California, in on the heels of Beatnik, not yet codified by LIFE Magazine.. “Are you in the movement?” I’d be asked a year and a half  later at GWU.  Freaking out on my first sampling of strong weed soothed back to some kind of calm center by Otis Redding’s Try a Little Tenderness on WOL (the station that brought the nitty gritty to the Capitol City), that same week a sock in the jaw at a peace march loosing a tooth, I’d have to answer the question, “Are you in the movement?” with “I guess so.” Volunteering as a tutor at DC jail would fill out my “movement” credentials. Just 18 months had passed from “Ruling Class High” boarding school to dope smoking long-hair “relevance” so swiftly had that train of culture gained momentum .

Lake Forest Academy (LFA) boarding school was located on a “Robber Baron’s” estate approached down a mile-long oak lined driveway.  The Armor Estate, Mr. Armor gained his fortune in Chicago’s famed stockyards supplying beef to feed the Spanish War and then WWI. We went to classes in the bedrooms of the estate and ate our meals in a marble-walled ballroom with a carved marble fireplace, backed with a dribbling fountain at one end. We studied in a wood paneled dream of a library with birds and fruit worked out in black walnut by old-world craftsmen. We wandered in a clipped formal garden ending with a pergola of Italianate design.

The Robber Barons fled Chicago after the Haymarket Labor Riots of 1887, incorporating the town of Lake Forest as the largest “village” in the US by gifting a large piece of land to the government to create Fort Sheridan as a buffer between the seething anger of oppressed labor and the ruling classes.

Or family had money enough, never lacking, but to be in such opulence even at 100 miles from home made me cringe; classmates were the sons of industrial captains, bank presidents, etc. The grandson of Igor Strvinsky was a cohort. How did I get to this place? So far from the small-town life of Kankakee, Il? A familiar story of “taxpayer revolt” The short-sighted folks of Kankakee County thought they could get awway with not funding schools. Foreign languages were cut. Art classes? Who needs it to work at the Roper Stove plant? The high school went to tripple shifts. About 20 of us were sent “away.” We’d see the same thing a decade later in the state-wide debacle of Prop 13. California went from #1 nationally to #49 competing with Mississippi for the bottom in funding for education.

My first longings to do and be something “authentic” took root in those days. The paradox of feeling weak in the face of wealth-being-unearned, coming from a blue-collar farm & factory town 100 miles to the south. “Little Richie Rich”gave birth to the feeling—that to feel you deserved your good fortune—you were owed such abundance—you must be some kind of sociopath. The nascent world of do-it-yourself-liberation formed the core of what would become cool in me and in the coming counter-culture.

So this is the moment: Kennedy is dead, Johnson is getting his social agenda through Congress by giving the perfidious yahoos a jihad against the Commies, troop levels in Vietnam at 350,000 and rising, skirts are inching up and nipples are sprouting like spring crocus. Truth be told, this fills 98% of my head space—sex and war, but there was a space that opened up for art and it happened in English class in this boy’s school.

We were doing American lit, Poe in the docket. What do we mean by the “Sublime” in literature? Finding what lies under the rocks, the gooiest darkness, The Pit and the Pendulum, and the rest of Poe’s box of terrors. There we would find ample sustenance to feed the sublime, that undiscovered country where terror would change the heart of a story. Make you pay attention. Where is the contemporary version of the sublime? The thing you could almost understand, but not really. We were given Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp published just a year before where Andy Warhol figured to be the new American Poe. The horror of consumer culture. No, not with terror but with Camp. Wow, this was hard. Camp was a Brillo box posing as art. I mean “Art”. For like Poe, Andy was all pretend, so far out there, it was thought crawling with pretend seriousness, the bugs under a rock scurrying to hide like difficult thoughts. Did I understand? Only one thing.

I understood that the pretend world of Poe was somehow linked to the pretend world of art, to theatricality and in the Sontag piece this theatricality was linked to the Homosexual World of High Fashion and the giddy placement of quotes around anything. A breadbox becomes “a breadbox”, a car becomes a “Car”. I knew this world, introduced to my family by an interior design couple, Bob and Ralph. Not yet signified as gay, they were truly gay. Of course they were homosexual, but I learned what high-minded fun was.  Dinner parties at our house were very much fun; high times. My parents were (though small-town, were hardly rubes) “beautiful people” in the making. So, the Sontag piece set my mind a flame. I understood and had witnessed something first-hand that was at first blush hard to understand but became a pole-star in my personal firmament.

That year would prove to be a watershed year. On a field trip to the Art Institute to see the Giacometti retrospective I was slammed by and carried away by the seriousness of high art which opened me to ineffable tragedy of human existence. Giacometti was the über existentialist saying to me “life is a grim singularity” just get on with it. Sontag by way of “notes”, opened me to the campy world of Pop art. Life was gay and light-hearted floating by on fairy wings, lifted impossibly by abject terror. The two worlds of High art and low-down Camp became poles on a continuum containing the mystery of the creative life.

I graduated that June of ’66 and just days after found myself bound for Germany for a three-month family stay looking beyond the dome of my little life, and diving into the heart of the beast. It would become a moment of terror, a play called A Jew Visits Der Vaterland. All this high-minded thinking would vanish like “snow on the water” as the world changed in an instant with the 60’s full throttle roaring away, but I often came back to the “sublime” the effort to find my place on the continuum.