Do You Wanna Dance?

Today I began reading “definitive” biographies of possibly my two biggest heroes. Damned To Fame and Catch A Wave both have been cited as “ the” biographies of a lifetime, following, in great detail, the lives of Samuel Beckett and Brian Wilson (respectively). Starting them at the same time may prove to be too much, as I was a mess today – emotions all over the place. Chapter One brought me near tears in both book’s case (early childhood), and I can’t imagine what the rest has in store.

I have found the lives of these two brilliant artists very mournful for, often times, elusive reasons and their apt biographers have begun to unravel the mystery for me. What specifically were these emotions I was experiencing all day? Where did they come from, and why couldn’t I shake them off?

I believe the first, most natural, response was an ever-increasing sense of wonder at how these men emerged the artists they were. Beckett’s highly sensitive hearing capabilities sent his imagination soaring as a child, as he watched the oft-referenced lurches from his bedroom window. He drifted to sleep countless nights with the far away bark of dogs, the whispers and cries of the trees, the grass, and even the smallest grains of sand skittering across the driveway.

“Everything cries out,” the young Beckett must have thought.

Wilson, weeks before his first birthday, rode contentedly on top of his soon to be highly abusive father’s shoulders. In high spirits, Murray Wilson began singing “When the Caissons Go Rolling Along.” To his amazement, two verses into the tune, his eleventh month old boy began humming along in perfect pitch.

“Finally, a break has come! This boy will be my bragging right,” Murray may have whispered to himself. Columnated ruins domino?

What promise. What exactly the spirit and brains and guts of these two men cost them may be forever debated.

I began to ponder my own childhood. What promise.

Then came feelings of restlessness. What am I doing? Where am I going? There is something bubbling, something working to the surface that needs release. What is the cost and is it worth it? Will I enter decisively? Am I capable of choosing death? I wonder about the times that Beckett pondered these questions. I wonder what Brian would say, in a parallel universe in which he is still emotionally available and engaged. Was it worth it?

Wilson once said more or less that his father beat hit records out of him. He literally once publicly said that. One time. What did he spend his time publicly talking about? Love. Hope. Good vibrations. These signifiers appear in countless Wilson interviews (before and after his “fall”).

Where did Beckett find the love to create people with enduring spirit in a godless wasteland? This, to quote Winnie, “is what I find so…wonderful.”

Before this becomes aimless, I will close. There isn’t a moral here. There is no value in placing someone like Beckett or Wilson or (insert your hero here) on a spinning plate, high in the air saying, “I have to be this good before I die.” I just have to be willing to enter decisively, because, well, my surf’s up.

Seth.