In my life: my Masters

These men and women baptized, fostered and mentored my spiritual and creative imagination and understanding :

My Parents: Molly Stewart Dean & William Wynant Dean



When I was one, my mother was paralyzed with polio. I grew up doing what I could for her....which was a lot.  I came home directly from elementary and secondary school so the help could leave and stayed with her until Dad came home....and in those 2 or 3 hours every day, she informed my mind and my intellect.  She was an intellectual, a Smith graduate (and had met my Dad at Yale Nursing/Med). She read prodigiously, fiction and non-fiction.
But her greatest gift her daily witness of courage, love and the indomitable transcendence of spirit.

My father taught me artisanry and curiosity, my mother, heart and spirit.  The two of them showed me how a bonfire of love can laugh and sing in the face of disaster and affliction.  They encouraged and supported me in every interest, talent and enthusiasm I had.  They never pressured me to ambitions or success, perhaps because their own trials has burnt away everything to the centrality of love and spirit.

I speak of both of them here...





Jerrold Maddox




This is a relatively recent picture....he was much younger when he taught a wonderful, light-filled studio art class and became my Independent Study mentor at Amherst College (which transformed a C+ indifference there to a world of visual imagination and a cum laude graduation) .  He was subsequently and very duplicitously black-balled by the head of the Art History department when his tenure decision came up.



Paul Caponigro



... who taught me darkroom fine work (alas, now a thing of the past), large format camera, the Zone System and imagery.  Some of his work; page left and right at the little "View" link at the bottom right. I never saw his equal in black and white.  He looked like an Italian dock worker...but was a concert-level pianist, a Gurdjieff master and a man of delicacy and incredible perception. 

Rudi (Albert Rudolf)

...who showed me the way of kundalini yoga.  Without artifice, without dogma, without domination, without false magic.  He manifested, hosted and gave away the experience of immanent godhead.  I had the enormous fortune to have my life run parallel to his for two years....being in his presence was like being in a room with thunderbolts.

...not quite last but hardly least, the women who have partnered with me...

Mostly my (serail) wives: Patti Rogers (briefly), Susan Sachs (for 32 years) and Carol Francisco who abides with me now.  All have put up with me, who have shown me my failings, who have been the better half of the parenting I have struggled with.  What a gift.

...and life, the master of us all

“Dad,” said Will, his voice very faint. “Are you a good person?”

“To you and your mother, yes, I try. But no man’s a hero to himself. I’ve lived with me a lifetime, Will. I know everything worth knowing about myself — “

“And, adding it all up…?”

“The sum? As they come and go, and I mostly sit very still and tight, yes, I’m all right.”

“Then, Dad,” asked Will, “why aren’t you happy?”

“The front lawn at let’s see…one-thirty in the morning…is no place to start a philosophical…”

“I just wanted to know is all.”

There was a long moment of silence. Dad sighed.

Dad took his arm, walked him over and sat him down on the porch steps, relit his pipe. Puffing, he said, “All right. Your mother’s asleep. She doesn’t know we’re out here with our tomcat talk. We can go on. Now, look, since when did you think being good meant being happy?”

“Since always.”

“Since now learn otherwise. Sometimes the man who looks happiest in town, with the biggest smile, is the one carrying the biggest load of sin. There are smiles and smiles; learn to tell the dark variety from the light. The seal-barker, the laugh-shouter half the time he’s covering up. He’s had his fun and he’s guilty. And men do love sin. Will, oh how they love it, never doubt, in all shapes, sizes, colours, and smells. Times come when troughs, not tables, suit our appetites. Hear a man too loudly praising others, and look to wonder if he didn’t just get up from the sty. On the other hand, that unhappy, pale, put-upon man walking by, who looks all guilt and sin, why, often that’s your good man with a capital G, Will. For being good is a fearful occupation; men strain at it and sometimes break in two. I’ve known a few. You work twice as hard to be a farmer as to be his hog. I suppose it’s thinking about trying to be good makes the crack run up the wall one night. A man with high standards, too, the least hair falls on him sometimes wilts his spine. He can’t let himself alone, won’t lift himself off the hook if he falls just a breath from grace.

“Oh, it would be lovely if you could just be fine, act fine, not think of it all the time. But it’s hard, right? with the last piece of lemon cake waiting in the icebox, middle of the night, not yours, but you he awake in a hot sweat for it, eh? Do I need tell you? Or, a hot spring day, noon, and there you are chained to your school desk and away off there goes the river, cool and fresh over the rock-fall. Boys can hear clear water like that miles away. So, minute by minute, hour by hour, a lifetime, it never ends, never stops, you got the choice this second, now this next, and the next after that, be good, be bad, that’s what the dock ticks, that’s what it says in the ticks. Run swim, or stay hot, run eat or lie hungry. So you stay but once stayed, Will, you know the secret, don’t you? don’t think of the river again. Or the cake. Because if you do, you’ll go crazy. Add up all the rivers never swum in, cakes never eaten, and by the time you get my age, Will, it’s a lot missed out on. But then you console yourself, thinking, the more times in, the more times possibly drowned, or choken on lemon frosting. But then, through plain dumb cowardice, I guess, maybe you hold off from too much, wait, play it safe.

“Look at me: married at thirty-nine, Will thirty-nine! But I was so busy wrestling myself two falls out of three, I figured I couldn’t marry until I had licked myself good and forever. Too late, I found you can’t wait to become perfect, you got to go out and fall down and get up with everybody else. So at last I looked up from my great self-wrestling match one night when your mother came to the library for a book, and got me, instead. And I saw then and there you take a man half-bad and a women half-bad and put their two good halves together and you got one human all good to share between. That’s you, Will, for my money. And the strange thing is, son, and sad, too, though you’re always racing out there on the rim of the lawn, and me on the roof using books for shingles, comparing life to libraries, I soon saw you were wiser, sooner and better, than I will ever be…”

..and lastly, my children (Aaron, Mara & Ari) and many friends along the way...

Thank you.  You have all been my mirror, my lesson plans...warmth in my life and counter melody to my music...

Such as these we can never repay, we can only pay it forward.