John Lane

The first record album I bought was Abbey Road. It was the fall of ’69, and I’d just turned fifteen. I went straight home and spun both sides. I listened and sat in my room pondering the cover. Was the barefoot Paul dead, as my junior high friends were saying? Were the other three Beatles dressed as preacher, undertaker, and gravedigger? What exactly was an octopus’s garden, and was Maxwell’s silver hammer a metaphor for something larger and more important than I could imagine?

This adolescent search for meaning was reinforced less than a year later in the summer of ‘70 when a rich aunt took my cousin and me to Europe. On the tour’s off hours, we wandered alone on the streets of Rome. Sitting in a sidewalk café, I remember seeing two Italian girls pouring over the cover of Abbey Road, reciting in broken English the lyrics to the songs and discussing them in Italian in what seemed to my ears great detail and passion.

I see now that those first album purchases taught me how to begin thinking like a literary intellectual of my sixties-seventies generation. Buy enough albums and I could find meaning anywhere. There was meaning, I was told, in the order of the songs, their lyrics, and liner notes. I was primed by popular music to become a poet at an early age. An album was like a book of poems, to be pondered and consulted like a muse.

Since that purchase I continued to feed my addiction to meaning through music, film, books, and folklore. As the ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s, and half the ‘00s reeled off time’s spindle, I hurled myself against the ruling zeitgeist of meaninglessness and commerce. Outside I stayed straight, but inside I let my freak flag fly. Outside the world moved on. If I could have found one, I would have given it all to a child of God walking along Joni Mitchell’s Woodstock road. Along the way, the reality (and centrality) of my favorite decade receded into time.

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A few years ago, I was teaching at the Antioch Writers Workshop, a popular, well-run conference whose idealistic origins were twenty-five years in Yellow Springs, Ohio’s past by the time I was invited. The Antioch Writers Workshop is not to be confused with Antioch College, an institution many associate with the sixties, whose doors closed on July first,just a week before we writers arrived for the 2008 session.  Village residents started the workshop but the campus nurtured it for many years. Now it shares the name of the shuttered college but has long stood on its own legs, a nonprofit that balances its budget with grants and conference fees. Most of the communal programs—readings, lectures—take place in a round, stone building tucked into the hardwood margin of Glen Helen, a one thousand acre nature preserve across the street from the crumbling, desolate liberal arts campus.

When I arrived in Yellow Springs, I borrowed a bike and rode past Antioch’s twin-towered main building, brooding and decrepit. It’s hard to kill a college, but it looked like Antioch had somehow pulled it off. From a height of more than two thousand resident-students in late-sixties and early-seventies, the college had diminished to only two hundred by my arrivial.