Frankly Speaking

Striving for Wholeness
Pt. I: A man of many parts

NOTE: Two issues ago, Frank’s article, “A Glance of Inward Regard,” pinpointed the first step towards “getting a life,” a real life: stop all the inner and outer scrambling for a moment, sit down, look inward and sense your own actual existence.
Now, in this first part of a two-part article on the necessity for wholeness Frank takes the next step, beginning with his personal, painful experience of the lack of wholeness.

Maybe I knew it before. Maybe I experienced it many times. But the time that strikes home and overrides all the other times came when the first poem I had ever written was printed in the school literary magazine, given a page to itself, with the pen-and-ink drawings I’d done surrounding it. I was trembling inside because I’d never written a poem before, and Susan who sat next to me who had been a poetess since she was seven had encouraged me, and Mrs. Eisensweig said she knew I had it in me; so I went ahead and wrote those lines which they both concurred was a poem and should go in the magazine but I didn’t know what my friends and other students would think of it (and me) when they read it! I didn’t like being naked and out in the open like that.
They had told me, Susan and Mrs. Eisensweig, that I should write about what I knew, but when I sat down to consider it, I realized I didn’t know about anything. I was only 16, what could I know? In my thrashing desperation, I picked a topic I was interested in. Actually it was something I was obsessed with. The topic was Da Vinci. Leonardo Da Vinci. He was my hero. He was the total, the complete man. He was a real super-man. Not just a painter, but a sculptor, a writer, a poet, a musician, an inventor, a scientist, an anatomist, a botanist, an everything. He was interested in everything, investigated everything, was great at everything. He was the original man of many parts. I wrote about him.
Leonardo’s an immense subject, so I had to pick something that I could do, that I could fit on a page; that was short enough to get by as poetry and not give away the fact I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. So I picked the moment when he performs the great experiment of his life. He believed that man could fly. He was preoccupied with this idea, in all its ramifications, from boyhood. They say he would buy doves in the market place and release them so he could watch them and learn the secret of flight. After years of drawing and building and testing, he finally made a set of wings capable of being flapped by a man – his “flying machine.” And one day he took it up to the top of a hill called the Great Swan and took off. That was the setting for my “poem.”
I called it simply “First Flight.” In it, in the first person, Leonardo talks to his apprentice; a dramatic monologue. A short dramatic monologue. Only 20 lines, but what’s the point of just talking about it. Here’s how it appeared in The Burning Flame, our school literary magazine. Oh, yes, prefaced by a quotation from Leonardo’s notebooks.
“The great bird will take its first flight upon the back of the Great Swan, filling the whole world with amazement and filling all records with its fame.” — 1505 A.D.
(Leonardo to his apprentice)
Ah my lad, how strong the wind blows here,
O high upon this green and lofty summit,
There you may see Pisa; there is Florence,
Below us lies the Arno’s churning waves
Stopping here, and there, but flowing always.
What strangeness lies beneath its dreamy depths.
I planned the under-water craft for divers’ needs.
Yes, ‘twas only yesterday I these destroyed.
One like me must do what serves for all
Not for just a few, nor e’en one country.
That madman Machiavelli, who sets forth
Fools all, the alchemists, the astrologers;
But you are very young, my dearest boy,
And with your youth comes all the futile follies.
Ask not my notebooks; nay, I shall return.
There still is much creation in my mind.
Come now, my boy, check the right and left strap,
Check alike the steering gear, fall-breaker.
And, lo, the wind is right!
Well, there it is. Not much as poems go. But it did glide into print. And there’s the pain of it.
They printed it, but only 19 lines of it. I’d written 20. I knew when I read it something was wrong, something was missing. The excitement of seeing it, my very own words—well not my very own words but my very own arrangement of mostly common English words—played havoc with my eyes and the wiring between my eyes and brain. I couldn’t figure out why the poem seemed so off. I stared and stared, reading and re-reading…A line—a whole line—missing!
On my first shot, my first appearance in print, the printer’s devil had bushwhacked me. I called it the printer’s devil but it was ye same olde devil, the same old adversary who was ever busy undoing my best efforts. I needed a fall-breaker, like Leonardo. “My God,” I cried in the hidden chambers of my heart, how could you let them do that to me?” Alas, there was nothing to be done, even though I showed it to Mrs. Eisensweig and Susan Landy and they looked at it piteously and looked at me pitifully. Alack, all the copies were out, all delivered. People had probably read it and thrown it in the trash-bin already.
“Maybe no will will notice,” Susan said, being as she was fond of the bright side.
No one may have noticed; but I noticed. I noticed and I couldn’t take my mind off what I had noticed and what I knew. I had known it before, but now I really knew it—I knew the lack of wholeness in my gut. My chest felt like a tin can crushed in. I groaned. I agonized. I could not bear leaving it that way—just part of the poem printed. Incomplete! Most of it printed, yes, but a whole line left out. Imperfect! The sense of it was lost, broken. Aieee!
At that time of my life I had no idea how incomplete and imperfect the poem was. Not only as a poem. Even as typography. There were mistakes in punctuation; there was even a misspelled word. At the time I missed all that. (I’ve made the proper corrections in the copy printed above.) All I could feel then was the longing for that missing line. Finally when I could bear it no longer I went to my father.
I showed it to him in the kitchen—under the fluorescent light that gave everything in our kitchen a greenmoldish glow, at the kitchen table. You had to get my father at the right time. He could be very unsympathetic, sometimes. But I was too distraught to pick my time. I dumped it down in front of him. He pored over the poem.
“You’re sure there’s a line missing?”
“Dad, I wrote it. I know there’s a line missing.”
When he was finally convinced—after I showed him the handwritten copy in my own handwriting—he got very gloomy. Then he turned to me and grumbled “What do you want me to do about it?”
I could see he was sympathetic. He felt sad for me. He liked perfection himself. He was a compositor. He’d worked with type all his life. At that time he was working for The Daily News. What I wanted him to do was simple. It was for me. A favor. I wanted him to set a line of type, the same style lettering, but smaller so it could fit between the two lines. The missing line. He promised to do it.
Two mornings later he called me into the kitchen. He showed me the line. He had used the facilities of “New York’s Picture Newspaper” to set a variety of sample lines, and he’d printed them on some nice shiny paper. We looked them over and picked one out and he took a razor – he was a very precise man—and cut the line out very carefully and pasted it on the printed copy of the poem. He always came through for me, my father.
“So now,” he said, “all we gotta do is collect everybody’s copy and paste it in.”
That was the first time I’d laughed in a week.
Oh, the line—you might want to know the line. Here
it is:
“His foolishness for other fools to share,”
It goes between the lines—oh, but you can figure that out for yourself. It’s still not a good poem, but I felt better after that.
I go into this because it was the first time the full impact of incompleteness hit me. The pain of having only part of what should have been there, what could have been the whole, what should have been the whole.
And it was appropriate that it had all come about around my admiration of Leonardo. Appropriately ironic. Ironically appropriate. He was the original man of many parts. He could do everything, yet not to his satisfaction, not wholly, not completely, not perfectly. He was tortured by the elusiveness of perfection. He spent ten years on the Last Supper and still felt it was unfinished. He lugged the Mona Lisa on his back from Florence to France, never quite ready to let it go; it wasn’t what it could be; it was not wholly perfect.
Taking into account how difficult, how well-nigh impossible it seems to be to bring the simplest things, things outside us to a state of completeness, wholeness, perfection, how can we ever bring ourselves, our own being, to that state? Is it just a dream? A hopeless hope? Something we can never attain to? Would it be better to settle into the level of ordinary life, dominated as it is by dim-witted platitudes, and equate being human with imperfection, as in: “I’m only human: I make mistakes.”
Or should we give heed to one of the brightest beings who has ever walked the earth and try to work in the direction he pointed to: “Become perfect like your Heavenly Father is perfect!” If he said such a thing in all likelihood he meant such a thing, and knew it to be possible. n
NEXT MONTH: Striving for Wholeness Part Two: The Whole-Body Experience