A REMEMBRANCE OF BRUCE LOWNEY

by

His friend: RON BRILL

 

I didn't know Bruce Lowney over a long time -- and lost track of him after graduating from Burroughs.  I don't remember him because we had a long or close friendship.  But to this day, I'll never forget the creative experience Bruce and I had when in history class we decided to collaborate and do an unusual project on the Elizabethan Era.  Years ago when I originally learned he had died at a relatively young age, the memory of that creative experience arose deep and clear.  My dad was a commercial artist and talented illustrator, so I recognized and admired Bruce's early age cartoonish artistic ability -- in the Akela, and as the illustrator half of our diorama on "Elizabethan Manners."  I recall our collaboration because it was unique in my young life.  I learned the transcendent value and joy of joining my creative writing with his vivid imagination and drawing talent.  We had sparked each other's talents by joining them.  Together we created a large series of panels in the form of a commoner's 17th Century "etiquette guide" (like popular manners columnists of that time).  I don't know what happened to those panels, or which class or teacher we did the project for.  But I do remember discovering with Bruce the exhilarating power of collaboration.

In those days both Bruce and I were pretty much introverts, who expressed ourselves mostly through our respective mutual interests and talents in drawing and writing.  What made that school project experience so special was that it set a "standard" of how satisfying it was to find a "kindred creative spirit" with whom we could "bounce ideas off each other" -- and use our abilities to create something unique from within that was rare and precious.  In my entire life I've never been able to replicate that "high" I remember so fondly hanging out with gangly Bruce whipping out cartoons to visualize "gross manners" that were considered "proper" during Elizabethan times.  (At communal dining tables those days, I remember the "upper crust" were seated higher up so they could "look down on commoners," "spit, cough, regurgitate" or throw half-eaten bones of meat upon the lower classes seated "below the salt".)

As a grown man I many times yearned to find a creative collaborator with whom I could re-create that blending of minds and talents in such a deep, satisfying and memorable way.  But I never have.  Throughout my life I've searched in vain to find a "creative match" like the one with Bruce.  I now know just how rare is such genuine creative collaboration.  Bruce helped me to realize the possibilities of my own creativity.  Thinking back to that singular exhilarating experience it was just one, "silly" collaborative act -- I created the text and he visualized them in his zany cartoon style.  Through that experience I learned how exquisite the blending of two peoples' talents into one could be.  I wish that I hadn't lost track of Bruce over the years, because I'd have let him know how much that joyful and silly -- yet transcendent and synergistic creative experience -- deepened my appreciation of the possibility that two imaginative people could blend their skills so seamless and effortlessly. 

After I lost my first wife to the ravages of mental illness, I was a single parent for over a decade.  I decided that before I died I wanted to find a mate -- who like Bruce and me -- longed for that kind of rare and magical collaborative connection.  I wrote lyrics for a musical about inmates in an insane asylum who discovered it was they who were sane and honest, and those on the outside who were emotionally "dishonest and self-deluding".  I've never met anyone interested in orchestrating the musical.  The title of the musical is "Hats".  Hats represent the way so many of us cover up our true feelings.  Instead of working alone on the musical, I decided to write a book about "Emotional Honesty."

***Ron has his book: "EMOTIONAL HONESTY", in our CAMPUS BOOK STORE, for sale***