Harry Smith As Young Man

More about Harry Smith As Young Man

He was in his late twenties then, that hinge-age when the skin still glows with youth but the mind has already unspooled into its private infinities. Harry walked the city—Seattle or San Francisco, it hardly mattered, for he carried his own weather about him—like a man tuning a radio between stations, catching snatches of worlds that brushed past his skull and left their ghost-frequencies humming. His suit was second-hand but carried with it the ceremonious dignity of a parish vestment; his tie knotted as if for a ritual; his sunglasses an indigo shield between his eyes and the blunt noon of other people.

He lived in a room that was not a room but an archive of his obsessions. Shellac discs stacked like geological strata, each layer a vanished continent of song. Paper charms, string figures, small bones, paint jars with skins forming like old fruit. A film projector he treated as a heretical altar. In the evenings, he would lace a reel through its metal intestines and watch his own dreams shiver upon the wall—drawn, scratched, dyed, a cosmos in epileptic flicker. The neighbours heard the whirr and muttered, but Harry heard something else: the secret pulse beneath appearances, the rhythm that stitched the universe together in a mad embroidery of patterns.

When he spoke—and he seldom did unless compelled—the words came like sparks from flint, sharp and necessary. He could discourse on the phonetics of Lummi chants, on the esoteric behavior of certain pigments, on the mystical correspondences between Appalachian ballads and Byzantine icons. But he spoke not to impress; rather, he was translating for the world a little of what he was forced to endure: the incessant clamor of meaning behind things.

Some nights he wandered alleys, gathering cast-off artifacts—bits of wire, scorched paper, bottle glass—and saw in them what no one else did: the fragments of an unwritten scripture. He felt himself less a collector than a medium, summoned to rescue the overlooked. In the bars he scribbled diagrams on napkins, spirals that became ladders, maps of nowhere, embryonic alphabets.

And yet for all his inward blaze, there was the gentleness of a man half-astonished by his own persistence in the world. A shy, crooked smile under the streetlamp; a murmur of thanks when someone handed him a match. Harry Smith, twenty-something and already ancient, walked the trembling bridge between the seen and the said, harvesting the invisible as if it were his birthright.