Dick is a surrealist, or a neosurrealist, which is the fashionable mode of the day; he produces vast amounts of “automatic writing” and then culls from the random outpouring the images that strike him, forming incantatory poems which often value the life and color of images over the workings of the restrictive intellect. He believes in the wisdom of the unconscious, and the beneficent and tutelary powers of chance. (He is an avant-gardist, of course, but these principles seem to me now the signature faith of that age: the gates of Paradise are closed to those who seek them with the light of Reason.) He prefers the French pronunciation, sur-ray-a-lism; he reads French, and he talks about Breton and Eluard and St. John Perse. I’ve never met anyone like him; he’s a walking introduction to another realm, himself a sort of Poetry Center incarnate in a human body, his erudition organized and directed by love, his passion for the art.

And in this way he’s even a more powerful teacher to me, his identity more instructive than his advice. Poetry is the way he lives, the arts the element in which he moves. For him everything centers around the compelling power and charm of what people make. I visit his house in the desert, where he lives with his wife and son, who is a few years younger than me and plays a cello as tall as he is; I do odd jobs for them around the garage and garden. The first time I walk into their house, Lois sits at the piano, a black baby grand which hunkers before a window looking out across the valley and the distant mountains. She seems to partake of the mountain herself, firmly perched there, formal, implacable. She is blond, rather feline, self-contained, with a placidity that suggests a lake surface shimmering over incalculable depths; like her husband, she’s only partially knowable. She is a soprano who performs with local choirs, in musicals Shirley has directed, in an opera troupe—and today she is singing Kurt Weill, “Pirate Jenny,” from The Threepenny Opera, in German. The chords are heavy, mordant; her voice is sonorous and chill at once, full of history and resonance. I’m supposed to be fetching a bucket or something, but I don’t move. I stand transfixed, imagining what it would be like to have these people for parents, suddenly full of envy for their son, feeling I’ve been permitted entrance to a life so far from anything I’ve known. Then Lois notices me, but she doesn’t stop playing, she simply looks right at me, acknowledging my presence as her listener, though her face seems entirely filled by the music, haunted by it, as she sings, “And the ship, the black freighter, turns round out to sea….”