There’s a lot in Twain.  And if you’ve run into people, looked at them fair and square, you know what Twain is writing about in his tales.  Creativity.  This is all the tension he needs.  The possession of those with free will to continue on with the imaginative creative stance, in the face of public disproval, the great lack of faith versus those who do wish for such examinations.

In Twain’s world creativity is natural, a given thing, like fresh water.  The narrator’s imagination reveals the natural intellectual devices, the wrinklings of native human species genius...

Huck goes down the river, with, of all people, Jim.  He is heeding the oldest of takes of moral conduct, recognizing the equality of a fellow being, rich or poor. Huck is already fairly established at being outside of normal polite society.  He has an alcoholic father, from whom he is escaping by going on adventure that is psychologically justified.

Being somewhat on the margins, it is no earth-shattering offense to normal polite society and the chamber of commerce if such a youth goes off on travels.  It might provide a little outside commentary, a chance for an outing of comic wit, at least a break from the norm.

Twain’s prose keeps us happy, content, entertained, amused.  We don’t have the burden of mid-life yet upon us, we don’t have to bring our own imaginative experience here.  We do not have to right away bear with the potentially profound and terrifying thought of the what if we ourselves were to do such a thing, picking up and moving out into the unknown like a railroad tramp.  We are content with the refreshment of an outdoor adventure, a camping trip in good strong capable hands, a clever narrator who will keep us filled in as far as what to see and how the campfire is doing.  The big river...  I’ve never done that.

Twain takes us in through a genial backdoor to bear witness to the hypocrisies of society...


Creativity, of course, is a private individual thing.  We might go about it genially, in our spare time, or not.  But we have within, always, this great potential, even hanging about us, like Jesus’s ability of drawing parables, or like an imagined higher and more refined being like ourselves but developed as if on planets far away, were we to operate on a plane of higher and purer wisdom.


As we know, it takes great amounts of time to get anything done, it takes great amounts of travels.  And, furthermore, no, you can’t really talk about any of it, not one bit, without being taken as a reckless crazy wild person.

And so, to be realistic, you have to grow to accept that someone near you, innocuous, might be going about a wonderful creative personal life, imaginative works one has no idea about.

But woe unto the world, the world cannot handle all the creativity...

And it is, after all, one of the great insults to snub the creativity of another, as long as it isn’t offensive, up there with the Rejection at Nazareth.  A failure of education.


So there I was, not doing so well, or so it seemed by acceptable standards of adult life. My mom, when I could not restrain myself for correcting her at dysfunction, hey, she would say, I’m 80.

What could I say, to anyone...  I’d wasted the supposedly best most vigorous 30 years of my life spent in the world of adult creativity.  Guess what, folks.  It left me with nothing.  We might all feel that way.


But Twain reminds us.  We are given the room to be creative.  We are out in lost channels of the wide river in heavy fog, disoriented in the current, spinning round.  A kind of creative self destruction or a reorientation.  We get to know ourselves better, and perhaps it is our burden that our own self is all we really know, even as we are lucky to get the surprises of generosity from other people, as their own individuality will allow.



I twist the current, falling, lost.  And in this sort of dream it comes to me, here, up at my mother’s, where I linger on my camping mattress, that the old Princess from that book I wrote, with all its strange echoes and connections and half-parables, takes up the same space, the identical psychological shape in my head as my mother.  In the same way, a lot of space, from all angles, so that one is left without a leg to stand on.  The vain attempt to work, even apologetically, with the otherworldly logic of the female mind.

Now as her memory fades so that conversation is weighted down by repetition, her moodiness and tirades of justifiable anguish and vulnerability, and I being stuck here in the same boat, the similarity between her and the old princess shocks me almosr.


And the long drive, to escape, long, charged itself, to a place that is uncertain, tenuous, is fraught.  How will I rescue myself, how will I find an answer practical but also suitable, bearable for the writer, who has too long sought to create himself, building up his own little self as a cottage industry, and now having been given the time away from toil, has wasted this time, taking up the duty of another, having to cringe at the weight, an adult reverting in old age to childhood and baby talk, and even the larger the weight of finding a way to provide a secure life for himself now in a changed world.

Between such heavy psychology presences, domineering, in need of constant placating to the point of my own dishonesty, how do I live, find my own way if I wrest myself free....


There is that tie from Ahab to Huck Finn.  The journey, the adventure for meaning, creative flights, the destruction of self, finding a deeper self as one becomes informed at the peak and pit of his lostness.