Here's an attempt to show a more lucid side of "fatherly insights." This note is my last to her, following a year of notes saying "good job with your grades/good luck with your tryout)
Daughter,
I’m happy to give you a copy of this movie, Big Sur, and someday learn what you think because it reminded me of you.
One reason I love Big Sur is because it’s a special place for you, your mom, and for me. I’ll take credit for bringing our family to the “greatest meeting of land and sea on Earth.” But where Big Sur takes you is a book you haven't written yet. I showed it to your mom in 1996 a decade after I found it. We laughed about whether coworkers would notice we took the same 10 days off and catch us dating. We were so new to love and so happy to escape together we didn't care. We three are different from most of the Big Sur crowd flowing through. They wind a few miles in from the north, stand in the safety of scenic overlooks, then return to Carmel before sunset. They tell people back home “it was really pretty” and go somewhere else next year. But Big Sur soaks into some people deeper than words can capture. They carry the weight of special lenses with sharper glass that let through deeper feelings, more colors, and softer light.
You are one of those lucky few. The proof is how you made friends with the people at the Buddhist retreat when you were just 8 years old- when you inserted yourself into their conversation to explain that their views of the afterlife echoed those of ancient Greeks. The proof is you "Borrowed" my copy of Howl. (Did it inspire that poem you wrote about you?) You know City Lights is a book store. You enchanted the guys outside Vesuvio with your counter-culture insights about not trusting the government. You see Nepenthe as more than a restaurant with pricy burgers, roasted garlic, and a great view. It’s only natural you would love the writers and artists who anchored in Big Sur.
I found the Big Sur movie like I found the place - by accident. I started watching without knowing what it was actually about. The first time I saw it was for 5 minutes fast forwarding through the scenery, just like the tourists who zip through. Then I watched, listened, and dug in. Turned out it's the movie version of the book by the same name written by Jack Kerouac. I ordered a DVD for you before I finished watching the film. Given your time roaming the place and browsing the Henry Miller Library you probably already know Kerouac is a literary pioneer of Beat Generation. His work careens between Catholic spirituality, jazz, promiscuity, Buddhism, drugs, poverty and travel. All powered by attempted escape from an inner prison. Maybe you could watch the movie and write me what you think of it.
Sharing this movie with you takes me back there. One of my favorite photos is you kneeling at one of the ‘lovely Sur Rivers and dipping your arm in up to the shoulders;’ a shot scripted by the lines in the Jeffers poem, “Return.”
I count myself fortunate to have taken you there; and to watch you going back with your mom to stack weathered gray rocks at Pfeiffer beach, attend a session at Esalen or watch the whales swim by.
But for fewer still Big Sur is also a humbling place. The waves and steady wind are pounding those mountains into sand. A hidden ocean of molten rock is folding them up again slower than a fingernail grows. The redwood giants guarding the mist seem immortal but even their 1500 years are a flicker. Still, everything natural there lives in balance, beautiful, and eternal. It's what we bring and take from Big Sur – like life - that counts forever. Are we just playing it safe passing through or dipping our arms in all the way? Kerouac’s downfall was imbalance. He never could make the right choice between that peaceful cabin in the Redwoods with the woman who loved him and the hedonism of North Beach. He under-weighted the power of Catholic good and Buddhist humility and overweighted the other themes he wrote about. So the movie captures the feeling of alcoholic deterioration, loneliness, and an inability to connect with people that pervaded Kerouac's novels. And ultimately ended his life in an alcoholic fog at just 47. Like the Hippie generation he helped found, Kerouac learned free love and rock and roll (and self interest) are fun but never really enough. Grace, faith, patience and hard-won love are what last.
Daughter, one of the reasons you are here is because of Big Sur. The countless hours roaming those hills and valleys helped get me outside myself just enough to get clean and sober. Just a start and far from perfect but by God still alive. Big Sur helped make it possible for me to meet your mother, and for you to come along and show me what love really is. You make the world a far better place. I hope you can work there for a summer and maybe even live there for a while like I did so you can dip in deeper. Maybe in a tent with the other volunteers behind the Henry Miller Library If you find somewhere better, by all means, go there instead! That place must be Heaven.
Love forever,
Dad
RETURN (I included a copy of a photo of her dipping her arms into a Sur river. )
Robinson Jeffers 1887–1962
A little too abstract, a little too wise, It is time for us to kiss the earth again, It is time to let the leaves rain from the skies, Let the rich life run to the roots again. I will go to the lovely Sur Rivers And dip my arms in them up to the shoulders. I will find my accounting where the alder leaf quivers In the ocean wind over the river boulders. I will touch things and things and no more thoughts, That breed like mouthless May-flies darkening the sky, The insect clouds that blind our passionate hawks So that they cannot strike, hardly can fly. Things are the hawk’s food and noble is the mountain, Oh noble. Pico Blanco, steep sea-wave of marble.