Saturday, April 21, 2012

Saturday Night Pink


                                                 
Of The Band's five members, only Garth Hudson and Robbie Robertson remain after Levon Helm's death this week.  If you're interested, Wikipedia has background on The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down here.  That Helm, it reports, never again performed the song after this concert, filmed for Scorsese's The Last Waltz, tells a story.  His "Saturday Night Pink" would be enough to make me want to be a writer, wishing for such a phrase to drift in on a summer-like wind, if that wasn't already my plan.
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Moving on to a separate topic which is not, as far as I know, connected at all to the paragraph above.
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The scraps of paper - envelopes, the backs of on-line craft store receipts, bottom of a page listing color pencil product numbers - on which we preserve the you-never-know fleeting thoughts,  are repositories of the arcane.  In front of me is a note that says, "phrase - suicide mollusk."  For now, I'm viewing this as a misfire, not an internal prompt, not a Sherlock-worthy mystery to which I have been assigned.  It might be easier to draw than write: a colossal squid holding its breath.

Wonder is an appropriate response to the creeping, dawning illumination that we are actually amphibians, afloat in the infinite sea.  I think, I suggest: write how the inexpressible feels, choose words for the horizon-to-horizon journey as what we were certain did not exist begins to take vaporish form.  Can you explain, I ask myself, the ways in which life as an out-of-body experience differs from being here?  Or are they different?  One of my favorite characters on television is John Noble as Dr. Walter Bishop in Fringe.  His advanced state of "otherness" may be the result of long-term experimentation with mind-altering drugs but I suspect they were merely enhancements for his true nature.

Refrigerator words will not help me now.  I'm not certain there are words in contemporary reality that don't pare down and blanch our vibrant possibilities.  At last I've awakened to the allure of science fiction as a medium of revelation.  (Mad Men's Ken Cosgrove finds or found an outlet, moonlighting as a sci-fi writer, for plots that would not fit into ordinary fiction.  *smacks forehead*)  Fantasy, speculative fiction, science fiction, the shape-shifter that is called magical realism, create opportunities for telling stories that may well be true but unprovable, real yet invisible.

When I began this post, first wanting to give a farewell wave to Levon Helm, then hoping to give credible voice to what presently rolls through my mind, I didn't know we would end up together in the section where Dune, Farenheit 451 and Slaughterhouse Five reside.  But here we are.  And I get to consider that languages of other worlds may be the source of words that are so elusive in this one.

5 comments:

Elisabeth said...

It's wonderful the way your mind weaves through the sublime to the arcane to the ordinary and back again within such a glorious aesthetic. your words to me are sheer poetry. Thanks, Marylinn.

All my own gorgeous scraps of paper, refrigerator words, that carry obscure meaning are fluttering through my mind.

Marylinn Kelly said...

Elisabeth - Thank you, a comment to pull out and read on those days when that mind has a different opinion. I can see a portion of my scraps from here. xo

beth coyote said...

I think we all do this-the bits with a word or a phrase for later, to make a poem or story with. Sometimes they don't fit anywhere and no one ever sees them.

Still.

Don't you wonder what eucharistic adoration IS?

XX Beth

Marylinn Kelly said...

Beth - Sometimes they become, if found, curious by-products of a churning mind, far from inspirations.

I Googled eucharistic adoration and, as I have never belonged to any of the religions that practice it, can only absorb it in theory. Being Druid with a Baptist veneer, I am out of my depth. xo

beth coyote said...

I was astounded that people pray to a cracker for 24 hours. Wow.