Our divided selves - Repost of "Saturday Night Pink"

“Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.”
― James Joyce, Dubliners 

If you don't know The Band, if you don't know The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,  playing it loud is better than playing it softly.  If you do know the band and this song, I don't need to make the suggestion.  As I listened just now - acknowledging that I am not sure where my mind and emotions have gone other than to admit they were last seen limping away from a jump made from some great height, which is to say I scarcely know what I'm thinking and not a clue why - I heard an American voice whose plaintive cry has yet to die away.

I haven't the experience of a lifetime of mindfulness training, of how to be consistently unified within my fragmented, human and opposing selves,  and spend what seems too much time trying to resolve inner conflict.  Not big things, just whether to allow my shrieking control-driven aspect to shout down the calm, compassionate and almost wise voice.  We may not at this moment be standing in formation on two sides of geographic lines wearing uniforms of different colors but as I look at us it seems we are every bit as deeply at war with each other as we were when our country split in half.  If we are really paying attention, we are at the same time working to call home our personal vagrant parts, the bits that drifted away when leaving seemed to offer the best chance of surviving trauma, loss and uncertainty.  As the minstrels able to show us who we've been and who I believe we still are The Band has no modern equal.

This updated preamble and the repost itself demonstrate my own diverging paths of thought.  I hope no one expects the necktie to match the hankie.

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.

Say yes to dancing stars

Corita Kent's art, Friedrich Nietzsche's quote

“Our lives unfold in ways that we cannot fathom beforehand. That condition of not knowing produces a sense of wonder and openness to what may come.”  Roger Housden

(The Housden quote is from an audio series called Teaching What We Need to Learn, hosted by Raphael Cushnir.  As of Oct. 16, the programs were still available for listening or downloading here.  The link will take you directly to the recorded talks but there you will find a link to the HOME page which will give you more context.)

As evidence, which I gather on all topics because it seems wise to have as much proof as one can amass, on the morning I began writing this I found a link on FB to a new Pema Chodron title about change and uncertainty, obvious indicators of chaos.


If we are dancing stars born from chaos, then it really IS all physics, which I had begun to suspect.  But in a human and not a celestial body, as sentient beings, comfort and the awareness of chaos make difficult playmates.  Being part of a naturally-occuring process does not quarantee a quiet mind.

However, chaos as an antonym for complacency and not comfort takes on the aspect of quest, seeking/seeker, more of my favorite metaphoric rocket fuel to propel us beyond settling, being stuck.  We all know the water needs to boil to cook the noodles.

We churn, suffer our gastric juices.  We yearn and fidget, dream and try to foresee how we might map our lives as dancing stars, knowing we have not been endowed with such vision.  We reread the contract, looking for the loophole that permits explosive miracles to be born from tranquility, a sure passage to our hopes of greatness without the need for volcanic shenanigans.  Chaos, what an unexpected new best friend.

Fox 1, Squirrel somewhat less than 1

This pensive fox and his traveling wardrobe are the work, I am told, of Russian illustrator Nalogina Lubov who works under the name The Takiyaje Dolls.  My thanks to Under the Blanket for information and links.

There is no explanation.  Sometimes squirrelly comes over me like beach fog.  Suddenly every imagined twinge is sinister - was THAT here before? - every possible malformation expands beneath probing fingers and I am off and running on adrenalin fueled by the unknown.  Which creates a problem, since all that is is mostly unknown.  I don't consider these episodes magical, more like Robert Mitchum arriving in town fresh out of prison to stalk and terrorize Gregory Peck and family in (the original) CAPE FEAR.  The mind as tormentor of self.  I'm sure there are clinical names for this, pathological descriptions.  It seems to be part of the human condition and its arrival cannot be foretold.  The extent to which we let the squirrels run the show (and no offense to squirrels, who are blameless) determines where we stand in the big field.  Are we fairly close in to where people are gathered, participating and keeping the threads together or are we out of shouting range, barely able to distinguish and probably misinterpreting arm signals in the dwindling light?

So - that happens.  I am not entirely clear about whether what lightens our hearts, soothes our jitters and quiets our doubts is the product of events best described as "in spite of" or "because of" for it feels like a combination of the two.  In my mind the game of Old Maid had a tightrope walking character, which is probably faulty memory.   Like MAN ON WIRE , she navigated the empty space between tangible points.

In spite of suffering, loss, fear, bad news, in spite of everything, there are handmade foxes in white undershorts, the existence of which can sweep away the ashes.  And because our separate and collective ineffability joins us like Legos, we rise and for a moment or longer know only that we are the gift we bring.