Zen and the Art of Hitchhiking

Question: “So, how would you define yourself in a single word?”

Reply: “I’m a Hitchhiker.”

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That question was indeed posed to me some thirty years ago by a co-worker, and although I did respond precisely that way, I didn’t fully understand why that particular word jumped out of my mouth the way it did. My reply was completely instinctual and flew out before I even properly considered the question. But how can that be? How could I have an answer readily available to a question that I had never been asked? Even at the moment I made note at the ease it rolled off my tongue, and the sheer novelty of it instantly registered as something to looked into further. Although I did take a swing at it all those years ago, I feel the need to circle back and tighten up a few loose threads from that original essay. Why? Well, because it is still absolutely relevant. I am still that hitchhiker, I’m just thirty years further down the road.

When I look back on it all now I can see my response as a type of epiphany, one of those sudden intuitive leaps that illuminates some obscure association in my mind I wasn’t even aware of. I clearly recall the moment, because I instantly felt the truth behind it. But why? It flashed into consciousness like a supernova and escaped as fast as a prisoner darting through an unlocked cell.

Now, I realize at this point a question is likely bubbling up to the surface regarding what I’m going on about. Epiphanies about Hitchhiking? What the hell does that even mean? Well, the shorthand version is this….. I’m a traveler.

Ok, that likely didn’t help my cause much, so allow me to do a bit of excavating to state my case.

First, I’ll need to peel back a few decades to expose the seeds of my lifelong passion for hitchhiking. Speaking broadly, I like the metaphor that our lives resemble a type of tapestry, stitched together from all our past experiences, the good and the bad, all woven together into a reasonably coherent garment that we call our lives. Some sections may provide us warmth, while others irritate the skin, but that’s the reality we all feel. Yet, in my life, there is a single thread that if isolated and yanked out, the entire tapestry of who I am, certainly the man sitting here digressing on the virtues of hitchhiking, would completely unravel.

That particular thread occurred on December 8^th of 1980, when John Lennon took five bullets to the chest. Of course, we all remember the gatherings around the world as our collective shock played out, but his death had a surprising, and completely unexpected effect on me personally, because it redirected the entire focus of my life, and I mean that quite literally. Please understand that I used the word “redirected” there quite loosely, because it sounds as if I were heading in some direction beforehand and was blown off course, but the fact is that I had no direction at all. I find it embarrassing to admit, but at that point in my life, at nineteen years old, I was aimlessly drifting along without any purpose whatever. The tiny little raft that I could have called my self-awareness had no rudder guiding me through the waters, and certainly no steward at the helm. I simply floated aimlessly downstream from one experience to the next with no discernable level of purpose, curiosity or passion.

Then, Lennon’s lightning bolt struck and every pore in my body screamed to learn all I could about him. Even to this day I cannot explain the force behind it. A deep nerve had been hit, and with it an all-encompassing immersion into his story began. And as I moved through his life and music, a profound shift took place in the way I viewed the world, with “I” being the operative word there. This was not hero worship in the standard sense, but rather the ideas streaming in that resonated down to the marrow in my bones.

From that starting point, Lennon became something of a spirit guide as I digested everything about him that wasn’t nailed to the floor, and what I learned enlightened me in the way artists think, their intuitions and insights. Lennon expanded the canvas, as it were, and colored everything I experienced from that point forward.

Now, allow me to offer a few examples of what that looks like at ground level. Consider when Lennon recorded “Tomorrow Never Knows”, a trippy song from the Beatle’s “Revolver” album, when he instructed producer, George Martin, to make his voice sound as if he were a “Tibetan Monk singing from the top of the Himalayas.” Or consider Jimi Hendrix recording “Little Wing” with producer, Eric Kramer, when Hendrix asked to make his voice sound as if it were under water. But when he heard the results the following day, he told Kramer, “no, I meant ‘blue’ water.”  Or consider another example from Lennon’s “I Want You” from “Abbey Road”, a song about his crippling love for Yoko. An interviewer asked him to respond to criticism regarding the simplicity of his lyrics there, which mostly amounted to him repeating the line, “I want you; I want you so bad”. Lennon replied that critics miss the point entirely. He said, “when you’re drowning, you don’t say, ‘pardon me, perhaps someone will noticed that I am drowning and offer me a float’,  no…..you just scream.”

Each of those examples, and others as well, became a type of operating manual that provided the first clear glimpses into another world, not only of form and composition, but the metaphoric and esoteric intentions of the artist came into sharper focus. Suddenly whenever I came across a piece of art, my gaze was no longer passive but focused with intent. In computer lingo, Lennon’s death caused a major firmware upgrade that provided another way to consider art, a type of lens that penetrated far below the surface of the thing.

With that said, allow me to provide an exert from something I wrote several years ago that can be viewed as a clear byproduct of my immersion into the world of aesthetics. This was written after seeing a violin concerto, written by Mozart, that included two world-class violinists, one playing a Viola, the other a Violin, which becomes surprisingly poignant.

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“Once the piece was underway, it soon became apparent why there were two separate instruments, a violin and viola, for each spoke (sang) in uniquely different tones. The Stradivarius (Viola) with its larger body produced a deeper tone and felt to be taking on an adult, more seasoned voice, the voice of maturity, while the violin, with its higher pitch sounded playful and carefree. The effect was unmistakable to my ears.  As the two musicians worked their way through the composition, it became clear that a conversation was passing between the two; the voice of wisdom and the voice of youth……..there is a deep wisdom at play here, and one that must be considered. Perhaps Mozart’s intent was to inform us that it’s possible, if not a necessity, to live with both voices singing in our lives; that perhaps innocence and wisdom are not as mutually exclusive as we’ve been told. It may sound quaint, but I believe both voices offer their own unique aroma to the life we experience; one gives us the opportunity (and it’s only an opportunity) to experience our lives with childlike fascination, while the other gives us the wisdom to realize what a privilege that is.”

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Clearly, that firmware upgrade had given birth to quite a different fellow. With Lennon riding shotgun as my guide, this is how I began to see the world. The influence is unmistakable. But there were also others, outside the realm of art that had something to say as well, as another spirit guide appeared in the form of Joseph Campbell, the legendary mythologist who introduced the idea of “affect images.”

I could spill a lot of ink at this point detailing Campbell’s influence, perhaps even eclipsing Lennon’s, but in sticking to my purposes here let me say that he provided a crucial insight into this theme by explaining how “affect” images strike the mind differently than others. Affect images, as he described them, strike far deeper, below the layer of thought and logic, and speak directly to our emotional response center, where they elicit an immediate reaction. Consider an image of Jesus hanging on the cross, which for a Christian delivers its punch without explanation. As such, Campbell most often referred to affect images within the context of mythology/religion, where images are often used to break through everyday consciousness in order to strike a deeper, more penetrating chord. Or as Campbell beautifully stated.

“the (affect) image ignites a kind of throb that resonates deep within, which is responding like the answer to a musical string equally tuned.”

Just recently, I was fortunate enough to discover the legendary German filmmaker, Werner Herzog, who would clearly endorse Campbell’s point on this point. In one particular interview, Herzog passionately described the need (for cinematographers) to capture “new” images, and by that he meant images that shock the viewer into a sense of awe. His career as a filmmaker has been to search out and capture the sublime, which he sums up perfectly here.

“We must ask of reality: how important is it, really? Of course, we can’t disregard the factual; it has normative power. But it can never give us the kind of illumination, the ecstatic flash from which truth emerges.”

“…the ecstatic flash from which truth emerges” ………that perfectly matches Campbell’s ‘affect images’ in that both are describing the same jolt of illumination as the image delivers its punch directly to heart and soul, while the thinking mind scrambles to catch up.

This is a critical point, so allow me to linger here for a moment. We have to remind ourselves that what we think of as our minds, and I’m referring to the frontal lobe of our modern brains, with all its powers of logic and rationale, is simply an evolutionary upgrade riding atop of our true mammalian original. And it’s there that over eons of time that we developed the highly sophisticated ability to recognize patterns in our environment, allowing us to predict the future in a way, and react accordingly.

Now here I don’t want to get ahead of myself because this is a key point. First, we must realize that pattern recognition is so central to every moment we experience that we fail to notice it, even when it’s right in front of our eyes. For instance, take the simple task of picking up a tall Styrofoam cup full of hot coffee from a countertop and notice how your fingers already knows the amount of pressure to exert to the sides of the cup without spilling or crushing it, which is a different level of pressure exerted when we see the cup empty. The mind seamlessly calculates both scenarios based on memories of the flimsiness of Styrofoam and the weight of a full cup of liquid. It easily predicts how much pressure to exert based on the visual patterns of data streaming in and works out all the necessary motor skills without a thought. Broaden that out and you’ll see this is how we all move through the world, physically, socially, and emotionally. Patterns are the fabric, or if you prefer, the matrix, to our moment-to-moment lives. We are constantly reacting with, or against the patterns our minds extrapolate from our environment, from driving in traffic, to converting the sounds coming from someone’s mouth into a language we can understand, to navigating the mood of a spouse or boss, or even catching a baseball. We are constantly reacting to patterns. 

With that brief setup, allow me to shift the focus a bit, because that unique piece of neurological software also has direct import into the arena of art, particularly in how patterns can be manipulated by artists. And please understand these “affect images” are not limited to an image, but includes other mediums as well, such as cinematography, music, literature, etc. Just consider poetry, where the “flash of illumination” mentioned by Herzog can take form in the guise of words instead of images. There a poet can make brilliant use of our innate pattern recognition tendencies by manipulating it.

Poets achieve this magic by establishing a certain cadence, or flow that our minds detect as a pattern of thought and meaning, which it naturally attempts to predict what will come next. That’s when a poet will release their arrow by introducing an unexpected word that shocks our expectation, or perhaps an unexpected idiom that openings up an entirely new realm of possibilities, a type of rapture, in other words. When the expression is authentic and the medium true, artists can fool us, ever so briefly, out of the tedium of our daily routines and charms us into the realms of enchantment. Just consider this masterwork from Uncle Walt.

Speaking purely for myself, it means letting go, to stop “thinking” and allowing the expression to take me wherever it pleases. The passion of my life is to find those illusive pieces of art that invite exploration. Images, words, movie scenes, nature, or anything that will charm its way into my inner sanctuary will always hold my attention, because they deliver the goods. Peter Gabriel’s “Solsbury Hill” captures the effect perfectly with the wonderful line, “it makes my heart go Boom, Boom, Boom“, which has become the mantra of my life. When all the ingredients come together, Art can make the scale of the universe seem trivial.

Therefore….. and I do not say this with a misguided sense of profundity, I believe Art (capital A) is a means of transportation, if you will; a way of traveling to aesthetic and even spiritual landscapes not reachable by any other means.

So, you ask me to explain myself in a word, fine…… I can handle that with ease. When prompted, I will admit to flying the Hitchhiker’s flag, because I am always thumbing for my next ride.