Poet of The Heart

That's me and Timm mugging for the camera in 1988, when Timm came to Florida for Molly's wedding. Are we kin in art as we are in heart?

Timm, I believe, had yearnings much like mine, personified in the women he loved and metaphorically distilled through his creations. I don't think either of us are special in that respect. For a long time, Timm's yearnings were distant and unattainable; infertile. He writes a song in his journal of 10/21/1997:

I remember light blue eyes
Cold as winter by candlelight
And they spoke of a love
Just beyond my grasp.

I remember a purple hat
Cocking my way, to remind me that
She is there, just beyond my grasp,
Always beyond my grasp

chorus:

And I'm still standing here waiting
waiting for the time to be right.
No more grasping at old dreams
No more
One chance to finally make it
One chance to be proven right
To claim the love that was denied me
And allow me to finally be right.

I see a vision, always up ahead
In the sunlight, it always fades
And as it goes, I realize how much
I miss it.

And I drive from coast to coast
Ever chasing the elusive ghost,
Ever grasping, hoping to finally find,
Ever grasping, with empty hands.

I know it's there, just up ahead,
Cross the river, round the next bend,
I'll finally find the part that's ...

Missing? Lost? Perhaps mistakenly -- yet fittingly -- the song ends without a last word. I wonder if this was a song of his own composing -- I'm guessing it was -- and whether he ever set it to music. If it's a song by someone else, its amazing for nailing what I think was a great part of Timm's restlessness, seeking intimacy outside of himself, in the next love, the next town over the horizon.

Timm surf-fishing off New Smyrna Beach in 1986.

Following those lyrics he writes in his journal,

The above song is so true. I have always been lured by that which is just beyond my grasp. As if by finally obtaining "it" (love, position, place, etc.), the missing piece will finally be replaced. It's like I never "connected" when a child with my parents like I needed to & the result is that I was cheated and deprived of stability. The only thing I can liken it to is an astronaut floating in space trying to hook his lifeline or rope to something - anything - so he won't just float aimlessly, spinning, being upside down or backwards. When I am too far or too long disconnected or threatened with severance - I panic. I feel the panic now - I'm not connected. Mik was distant & distracted on the phone - "I'm severed" - I start to spin aimlessly & float away.

* * *

The child of a difficult marriage, Timm's marriage to Mik, perhaps inevitably, was also difficult. I remember him standing on the outdoor stage where he and Mik were married in 1994 that fine autumn day in Canby; he looked out over all of us and said, in a loud voice, "Divorce is NOT an option." Yet his journals record strife between them from almost that day. Lots of arguments, counseling, anguish, therapy, acting out - a tough, tough road. Committed to hang in there, he took (and probably in his own way administered) a rather severe beating. They divorced in 1998.


Timm's journals of 1997-8 are the most consistent that I've seen so far. (Christie holds on to most of his recent ones.) In them he does the bucket work of recovery - praying, digging up dark nuggets of truth about himself and his past, ranting, raving, raging, crying. But most of all, he's believing, trusting the process, hanging in there. What does he come to know through this anguished process? On Feb. 9 1998, Timm writes,

This morning while kneeling & praying, I envisioned God's hands reaching through my back, trying to get a hold of something, but could not. I asked Him, "what do you want from me?." "Your heart" was His reply. I took my heart & placed it in His cupped hands. He raised his hands to his mouth and spoke/breathed "Poet" to my heart.

The night before 2 things had happened. The first was a conversation w/Mik where I stated that I wanted to write. She asked for some ideas for articles and I shared these. I struggled to convey more than vague concepts. Then on TV there was a travel show that talked of New England and a poet William Wadwsorth who, the narrator stated, lived a simple life to concentrate on higher thoughts. I guess I could kind of relate to this. However my poetry has not been attempted in years.

I have noticed since California that I've been thinking & talking much more symbolically than I ever had. My disease took so much of my imagination, nothing was left for anything else. I need to go back to work. When I get back I need to write about the canvas that God has given me to paint my life.

Here I think Timm's creative calling took root. If God took Timm's heart (yikes) and breathed the word "Poet" over it, certainly his revival from that disastrous marriage into the life he would make had a creative spirit to it -- "pneuma" or breath of God: An exhalation of joy and wonder and beauty. Ten years later Timm wrote two poems (found on his laptop) which suggest that Timm's relation with his lost Other -- personified, perhaps, with the woman he loved, but also bridging into his own, whole self -- had greatly healed. This poem is dated March 6, 2007:

If the eyes are the window of the soul
Then I will dive through and fall, fall
For never has there been such a lovely soul
That beams through the eyes that now haunt me.

And as I fall into that beautiful abyss
I will say to all who might hear
Whatever you do don't rescue me
Let fall, let me fall, let me fall

And this from March 7, 2007:

When my name is on her lips,
And her hand caresses my cheek.
Her eyes shoot their arrows
Deep into my heart.

There is a song that she sings
That I alone seem to hear.
It woos my heart
With her feminine soul
And drives all others
From my mind.

Creature comforts seem to pale
In their ability to soothe
Instead only point me
To the potency of her love.

Is Timm writing to a woman - Christy perhaps? Yes and no, I believe. There is always a personified function of soul for that artist - in men, the muse often takes the form of a listening, encouraging woman - but in the weird ways of art, the muse behind the woman is one we can only reach from the inside. In these poems I think Timm is discovering the "feminine soul" of his own heart, wakened by God those years ago.

Timm wasn't a prolific poet, at least, I haven't found that much by him yet. Photography and music remained the greater, more ruddering loves. But maybe we shouldn't be so literal about the word "Poet" as in "writer of poems." In his essay "The Poet," Ralph Waldo Emerson calls the poet the "sayer, the namer, and represents beauty ... God has not made some beautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe." To create is to love beauty, and to love beauty is worship God. I think it's easy to say that Timm became a poet in the truest sense of the word, pouring out what God breathed into his heart.



When you look at Timm's pictures of flowers, the intensity of color and form which he captures in them give a clue to the sort of connection Timm was forming with that inner soul of his. This passage from "The Poet" makes me think of Timm:

It is as secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things; that beside his privace of power as an individual man, there is a great public power on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him; then he is caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals. The poet knows that he speaks adequately then only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or "with the flower of the mind;" not with the intellect used as an organ, but with the intellect released from all service and suffered to takes its direction from celestial life; or as the ancients were wont to express themselves, not with intellect alone but with the intellect inebriated by nectar.

Among Timm's possessions I came across a very fat binder stuffed with sleeve after sleeve of flower photos - an immense catalogue which Timm, uncharacteristically, had labeled with the flower's scientific name. Those slides are now being scanned by my father-in-law Wade, and I hope to be able to share them here in the near future. I

Suffice to say at the end of this post that at the end of his life, Timm had found his happiness not in getting what he wanted over that ever-disappearing horizon, but in wanting what he had - an immense outpouring of visual and musical poetry, smiling, as one of God's dear children, on the world. Quite a transformation.

* * *

I know I'm taking liberties with Timm's story, spilling my own into it, pulling something to view which is for general consumption. (Of Timm's demons - or mine - I say little here.) While I'm running out of material in one way, the memorial process doesn't yet feel finished. Last night back from the gym I cried hard for Timm, missing him all the more for having got to know him this way. A part of my own self, perhaps. Last night I dreamt of three scenes which all had to do with Timm in a way. In the first I worked in a row house in some city - New York, it seemed, though it may have been Chicago - where the office cubicle of a dear old friend was suddenly emptied out, leaving me to carry on his work, as well as explain his absence to my boss. In the next dream I was diving to the bottom of a great dark sea where I knew a great sea beast lurked - it was almost like following a script from some old movie like "20 Thousand Leagues Under The Sea" - I knew that when I flashed a light out of the window when we hit bottom that a huge eye could reflect back - the beast; knew that we would be devoured whole and reside there while the rest of the world panicked. In the third dream scene I wanted to spend time with Timm so I got in to his coffin (which was floating down a river) and proceeded to read his journals and play his guitar.

Too close, perhaps, but that suggests the proximity I feel somehow with Timm, with his story and history, albeit read in a slightly different way. My emotions about the past are I think distant from Timm's, but my feelings about our present - about the lives we grew into - are very intimate. "Let me fall, let me fall, let me fall" --- this line from one of Timm's late poems suggests that his fear of intimacy had slowly changed into wonderment, a welcome. Those wide gorgeous blooms he photographed had healed him in their sweet fragrant wombs.