Ghandi walking

His greatness lay in his doing what everyone else could do, but doesn't.
-- Louis Fischer, The Life of Mohandas K. Gandhi

Any songwriter can start a band.
Any player can get better.
Any brain can launch a business.
Any jock can handle touring.
Any will can self control.
Any dame can gaze beyond her navel,
hear the neighbor's belly,
feed the children amber waves of grain.
Any fool can fall in love,
or schmooze the anaconda in the briar.

Love the righteous, baby,
when you set your world afire.

Obsidian

No one wants to grow up. But everyone needs to grow.
-- Jo-Ann Armao, The Washington Post

The 'grown-up' bumps her head on the glass ceiling of molten sand and broiled air. She crouches in the vestibule of time, making notes on match books and candy wrappers, puzzling the odds of her escape.

All the world, a google eye of warning, calls her mad when she glides her mind beyond the artificial strictures of her station.

Growing. Glowing. Gone.

Peace

Clichés' Eden

It cannot therefore be said that God 'wonders' -- because the knowledge of God is perfect... Only a being who does not know fully can wonder.
-- Josef Pieper, The Philosophical Act

So. God. You can't wonder.

You say you're the rich dude in the gated community, eternally bored by your velveteen lawns and angel buds, camping out with us hobos one fine night? Here we are, calling you wise and, what d'ya know, you're just a logic man, hungry for the salty stew.

Are you telling me (pass the corn) you'd rather be human, it's no fun knowing how the movie ends and you don't dream because imagination's moot? You're not making sense, brother -- what's not to like about the infini-cruise you got floating up there? No fuss. No muss. No bills. No ballyhoo. You're kidding, right? This is one of your domestic eavesdropping stints, that's it, right?

Got to admit, though, you had me going. Seemed almost likely (life's that crazy) you might need us more'n we need your type, all dripping in hyperbole and what not (Thought hobos stuck to small words, did ya? Honest mistake -- naw -- didn't steal a thing, it comes from reading -- still free, last time I checked). Imagine, the boss man bummin in the skids with a bunch of losers, tryin to convince us he's loony up there in his great white way. Got milk, mister? Ha ha! Just yankin your chain! Heard about your wife, though. Derned shame how she died in childbirth. Say again? Oh -- it was her heart give out cuz her kids never called her by name and you, her good companion, we kinda forgot about too?

You know, you do have a story or two up your sleeve (is that polyester -- I notice it don't wrinkle) -- and as for being Mr. Know-it-all, I beg (respectfully 'course) to disagree. I doubt you'd a come all this way lookin for handouts if you already figured we'd share what little we had with a big shot like you. I doubt you even know my name. Well it's Leander and if you're wonderin if I'm a man or a woman, how old and what manner of believer or disbeliever, welcome to planet earth. Wonderin's common as dirt around here and you do appear to have a knack for pickin philosophers for friends.

Go on. Dig in. Grub's gettin cold.

Toil and moil

I have never bothered or asked in what way I was useful to society as a whole. I contented myself with expressing what I recognized as good and true. That has certainly been useful in a wide circle; but that was not the aim; it was the necessary result."
--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1830

The German painter, novelist, dramatist, poet, humanist, scientist, philosopher and chief minister of state at Weimar died in 1832. The quote is found in Josef Pieper's essay, Musse und Kult (Leisure the Basis of Culture) which makes a case for 'a contemplative attitude, a receptive attitude... the capacity for steeping oneself in the whole of creation.' If you would drink this holy brew, try silence:

Only the silent hear and those who do not remain silent do not hear. Silence, as it is used in this context, does not mean 'dumbness' or 'noiselessness'; it means more nearly that the soul's power to 'answer' to the reality of the world is left undisturbed."

Pieper's 1950's world is enamored with work. Rational thought is king. Action and effort are gods. The essay lays out a society's frenetic absorption in accomplishing goals to the point of... sadness. Cognitive striving rooted in a person's 'despairing refusal to be oneself.' (Kierkegaard)

Metaphysically and theologically... a man does not, in the last resort, give the consent of his will to his own being... Behind or beneath the dynamic activity of his existence, he is still not one with himself, or, as the medieval writers would have said, face to face with the divine good within him, he is prey to sadness.

From Hemingway to Cobain to (your name here), artists have a leaning toward sadness. My theory, that hypersensitivity to the groanings of reality gnaws at the artist heart, is upended by Pieper, who pairs sadness with a profound lack of sensitivity, a driven hyper insensitivity to that divine good inside you. Prozac according to Pieper: be quiet and listen up.

It is in these silent and receptive moments that the soul of man is sometimes visited by an awareness of what holds the world together, only for a moment, perhaps, and the lightening vision of his intuition has to be recaptured and rediscovered in hard work.

And here, it seems, perfectionism finds a worthy companion to her unrelenting mad devotion.

Vetted sperm

'So what's the life span of the African water frog?' she asks.

'No idea,' says the woman handing her the can of floating food sticks and calling, 'Hey Lester, do you know how long water frogs are supposed to live?' to the groomer heading out to lunch.

The frog owner elaborates. 'The frog's 4 inches long and still kicking. It was a tadpole when my son was in kindergarten. Sunday, he graduates from college.'

'No kidding?' -- three mammals grin in unison at the amphibian's accomplishment.

'Your frog's got some serious longevity going there,' says the groomer.

Serious longevity.

A friend tells me she stopped writing songs once she moved beyond her divorce. The songs soothed the monster but as grief gave out, my friend laid down her pen. We stand beside the circulation desk, in sisterhood, pondering. The poet's strangled need yields squawks of rage; acceptance finds her famished but inert.

'Words fail me.' Oh sure, observes the lexicon, blame your writer's block on words you can't come up with. Diaspora is not of words but of the pen holder's nerve endings, dissolving in shades of gray. What does it take to bundle synapses into the fire breathing, word snorting, talon flexing wonderbeast? Agony gets the job done. But who endures that hell for long?

Longevity.

Pollywog in captivity: sprout legs, kick up sediment, scrounge for factory food in a glassed pond. Or, it's goddess incarnate, checking out the humanoids.

Ribbit, dollbaby, let's go boogie down tonight.

738 mph

Ha Jin. Decorated Chinese-American writer invited by Cleveland's public library to read his work. He chooses a short story about a composer's devotion to a mute parrot. The library's air, stagnant. The author's accent, heavy as my narcoleptic lids. I'm impressed by the holding power of the man's non-theatric presentation. Easily two hundred Clevelanders belie the culture's inclination toward glitz. This crowd could be just as happy in our own recliners, hammocks, porch swings -- surveilling the writer's words incognito. But here we all are, literature groupies, entranced.

I scribble some words that don't make sense now, two days later. 'Affectionate without being soft. Sorrowful without anger.' Ha Jin might have used these words to describe his protagonist. They fit the writer perfectly, too. A man without guile or affectation.

After the reading, he answers questions. He would not recommend to anyone to be a writer. Friday's newspaper quoted him on the physical demands of writing the novel:

Just to carry the book around in you is exhausting. A good part of your mind must be devoted to it.

So we circle around like the story's laconic parrot to the question of devotion. A young man asks Ha Jin if he writes for his audience or for himself. The writer says an ideal audience is neither a group (too fickle) nor yourself (too partial?). Find one person you respect and devote your writing to this audience of one.

I accept the golden kernels from the master's hand. He's earned my trust several books ago. I think about the yackety parrots of this world, each with her own glib affront to stillness. I wonder about the decorated Chinese American author and his solitary audience. I consider the burden of carrying around your book, your composition, your painting for the sake of one winged miracle of receptivity.

I listen to Ha Jin and marvel at the velocity of silence.

Tarnished opal

Jack Benny had an adage: 'A comic says funny things. A comedian says things funny.' An art form has a language its best practitioners master as the wannabes effortlessly mangle the nuances. How mysterious, creative minds. How can one spin out poems, another speak oil-on-canvas or hand-on-keyboard? Why can most of us dream stories while very few dreamers translate their imaginations into novels?

Another mystery: Harvard's Kaavya Viswanathan, the young writer accused of plagiarizing Megan McCafferty's work. Was Viswanathan naive enough to think nobody would notice the similarities or, as she says, had she internalized the passages so completely, she thought they were her own?

Readers, bloggers, finger waggers assume the worst, a get-rich-heist of another author's intellectual property. But many a songwriter has wondered, when a phrase comes dazzlingly into consciousness, 'did I really write this, or did I hear it someplace?' The cauldron's a thick soup of old bones and grizzled memories.

Intellectual property is vulnerable to poaching. Who will keep watch? Maybe someday a computer will have 'plagiary check' to run creations through, so the art vigilantes can take a break and, who knows, go throw some clay, carve some wood, sculpt their own fictional masterpieces.

Girdered loins

Acrophobia's my middle name, notwithstanding the Swiss blood flooding my veins. This worker apparently has no such qualms about high places. The Empire State Building on which he sits was the world's tallest when it opened 75 years ago today. Immigrants and Mohawk ironworkers melded steel, aluminum, granite and limestone into a life sized tribute to our nation's primal instinct. Pride un-toppled by the World War II bomber that lost its way in a fog, butted the fortress' north side, killed three crew members and eleven office workers. Pride incumbent still.

It's the worker's nonchalance, not the panorama, that takes my breath away. If you told me the gentleman fell to his doom after wrestling with strongmen, I'd be shocked but not surprised. If you wanted to show me an artful film about the struggle, I'd pass.

United 93 debuted to the tune of $11.6 million over the weekend, music to Hollywood's collective ears. Nikki Rocco, head of distribution for Universal Pictures says,

It's about the fact that the American public spoke out... This is a wonderful result. What they said was that it wasn't too soon for a film about Sept. 11.

Fling wide the gates, let the disaster movies roll. Shall we stoke down popcorn and slurp cokes from our stadium seating as the entertainment moguls fatten up their bottom line?

Our local paper had the grace, in weeks following 9/11, to forgo the ads in pages covering the tragedy. No maidenform bras, no cellphone deals, no turbo charged wonder cars vying for our bucks. I appreciated the restraint. In retrospect, I guess nobody knew how to do business as usual with a gutted public. Over time, the gleam of glamour stuff resumed its chummy relations with the news.

I won't be going to United 93. I see it as a for-profit distraction from the liberties being whisked away as we watch. Around here, musicians have their sound unplugged by stage owners who don't like the band's anti-Bush tee shirts (or lyrics). A woman faces jail time for 'abusing' policemen who manhandled her for refusing to take down anti-Bush flyers.

Freedom's on a lunch break, nodding off. Taller the skyscraper, more perilous the fall.