Tom Veitch 9/26/1941- 2/14/2022

 

Part Spiritual Avatar & part reincarnated Extra-Terrestrial, Tom Veitch was born on this day 83 years ago in Bellows Falls, VT. During his time on Earth Tom was a poet, a prose writer, a cloistered Benedictine Monk (three years in Weston, VT) a spiritual journeyman, an auto mechanic, an electrical technician, a Jungian Scholar, a writer of Underground Comics,  a publisher, a printer, a book seller, a cult buster,  a script writer, a collaborator on graphic novels, a writer for Star Wars comics & books, a Consultant on Star Wars films, a Husband, a father...a guy who hung out with Grace Slick and Paul Kantner in Bolinas, CA and wrote promotional copy for Jefferson Airplane's Grunt Records label....damn, what didn't Tom do?

When I met Tom in August of 1985 (at a cabin by a lake outside Stockbridge, MA) he appeared to have stepped directly right out of one of his novels - with a brilliant iridescent aura and parallel light beams shooting from his eyes,  he carried himself with an unaffected humility w/ wife & child in tow. By then I'd read everything he'd published at least twice and had published a poem of his in my magazine Blue Smoke (edited with poet Phil Good).  He'd just returned from years living in the Bay Area and was working as a printer in MA. It was, without doubt, one of the strangest nights of my life (for a few reasons) and one I treasure in the ole memory vaults as sacred.  Getting caught up with old friends (the hosts of my visit to the cabin), it was like listening to someone read their psychedelic autobiography... And like listening to a long, exquisite Grateful Dead jam -  beautifully vivid & entrancing.

To read Tom is to be totally transported to an altogether other realm. His work defies categorization, as William Burroughs' does (in fact, they were friends). He has, at times, incorporated Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms & Jack and the Beanstalk into his prose. He broke the rules, storming the reality studio unafraid. I'd never encountered anything like it before (or after).  I am proud to say that I own three copies of Eat This including a signed copy. It is a tour de force printed by Don Donahue on pink paper at legendary Apex Novelties in San Francisco . Find it and read It!

Tom and I kept in touch throughout the years up until his death in 2022. He scolded me for feeling a devastating, almost crippling, sadness at the death of my Tibetan teacher Bardor Tulku Rinpoche in 2021, telling me that this act of transcendence was not a sad one but one to be celebrated. Already ill, Tom encouraged me not to mourn him but to be happy for his final journey as he himself was unafraid and sort of looking forward to the adventure. Amazing. The only mourning I did was purely selfish as Tom was about to take me on as a sort of (spiritual) student. Tom had a healthy contempt for ego. A contempt that made him value collaboration and the concept of the third mind.

In my 2015 Amazon review of  his book Visions of Elias I said Tom was a true (American) original deeply rooted in the underground literary scene of the 1960s. A post WWII, post Beat, Vietnam War era phenomena who had also collaborated on some wildly dark, irreverent underground comics with artist & tattoo master Greg Irons. Tom wanted to use my review, in part, as a blurb for a second, revised edition of Visions of Elias but it never came to be. So be it, I was honored just the same.

On a recent trip to Bellows Falls, VT  I couldn't help but think I was on a sort of secular, spiritual pilgrimage. And I guess I was. 

Tom's was a life well lived.  Truly worthy of celebration. 

 Tom Veitch reading in 1969

 

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