Rollerblades

Well, I had a stupid income for what I do.
-- Angelina Jolie, actor, on why she gives one-third of her earnings to charity

I am poor not in material things but in the truth. I've been called a thief, the biggest ever... [Philippine officials] think they have taken everything away from me, including my shoes.
-- Imelda Marcos

What happens to a person visited by extravagant wealth? Imelda stockpiled shoes. Million-bucks-per-show Seinfeld collects cars. Bono trots the globe for the down trodden. Angelina, Bill & Melinda, Peter B. give it away.

I'm curious about the effect of wealth on an artist's creativity. Starving artist -- a nice internal rhyme -- but is there synergy between hunger and output, desire and truth, satiation and barren wombs? Not being a rich girl, I can only speculate.

Water seeks its level. Artists seek theirs. Does a world stage pull unknown capacity from an artist? Or would the Claude Monets, Bob Dylans, JK Rawlings paint their master works on cave walls if canvases were scarce?

How should I know? There's only this: minute by minute you do what's possible with an eye, an ear, a skin cell to the impossible. You don't need money or fame or servants or limpid pools to help or hinder, you need your soul wide open and your wallet sewn of grass.

3D-construction

On the way to the pool today I caught a radio piece about Susan Barry who, at fifty, couldn't see in 3D. Her visual world was mono, everything laid out on the same plane. Born cross-eyed, which surgery corrected when she was two, Susan's brain lacked a capacity to interpret data sent to it from her eyes to perceive depth. Nobel prize winning scientists declared the condition irreversible, so that was supposedly that. Until she consulted a specialist who taught her a series of exercises and proved that even Nobel prize winning scientists can get it wrong.

One morning, after dutifully practicing the eye-brain routine, Susan got in her car and found 'the steering wheel floating above the dashboard.' Since I was glued to the story in the pool parking lot, I looked down to see, indeed, my steering wheel was hovering in mid air. Surreal. The narrator went on to describe the woman reaching up to adjust her rear view mirror which, amazingly, popped out at her in space. I looked up to see my mirror behaving in much the same obstreperous fashion. The story ended beautifully with Susan Barry hurrying from work on a lunch break, stopped in her tracks by the snow. Instead of falling in a uniform plane shared by buildings, shrubbery and pedestrians, the pudgy flakes drifted in a tapestry of depth which drew Susan into their choreography, cradled her with joy.

And as I stepped out on the asphalt under the storm cast skies of late June, I was two years old again, blinking at a visionary's wonderland that laughed at this flatlander's mindset, caroling, 'honey, let's play!'

Solstice

Last night's concert was rain on the roof in the middle of the night. Live music, live audience, live thunder punctuating wet extravaganza. From my onstage view, I could write a book of imagined stories about the listeners who entertained the entertainers. Instead, consider the rainbow that is Eric.

I can't say how we met; it happened via the radio, I the musical guest, Eric the regular listener. When he did eventually come to a concert, he struck me as shy, gently incapable of small talk. His thoughts run deep and unrelenting. Should you tap into Eric's underground, prepare for graceful candor.

After that concert Eric said, 'Susan, the only difference between you and a mega celebrity performer is that you don't know your music is in that league.' Eric has a way of challenging your wisdom, rewiring your expectations.

During the gabfest after last night's show, Eric the loquacious barely pauses to gather his thoughts. They spill over and into my own.

'Susan,' he says, 'when you talk to people you are completely present to them.'

'I guess it's just my thang,' equivocates Susan. 'I don't really know another way to be with people.'

Eric steps across to his next observation. 'Some can feel more free to communicate openly with you, a public persona, than to someone they might know better. This is a burden I'm not sure I could handle.'

Usually when you hear mega celebrities grouse about their lack of privacy, it's a litany of crude paparazzi maneuvers and obnoxious fans in the checkout line. You don't hear them say, 'people confide in me with more trust than I can handle.' Eric thinks I represent something to people because of what I sing and how I perform. I offer a mirror, a canvas, a challenge to conventional wisdom, a sharpening of the lens.

In this capacity, Eric the philosopher priest and Susan the singing mermaid are droplets in the self same sea.

Underworld

Plain women know more about men than beautiful ones do.
-- Katharine Hepburn

There's a book that recommends the morning splat (my term) -- a writing catharsis where every inchoate denizen of angst and spin is sprawled across the page at dawn to cleanse the dreamer for her art. I don't buy this theory. It might have been Ms. Hepburn who said a man doesn't need to know everything a woman thinks and feels and so it goes, I guess, with muse and artist.

At the railing of an ancient steamer, bundled in tweed coats and soft scarves, we stare at the sea, let silence speak, more eloquent than we in all our bluster. Glistening creatures rise and fall and spray our open eyes with plunging tails.

Our tongues rapt in reverence. Our minds wrapped in awe.

Eden's tongue

Our speech interposes itself between apprehension and truth like a dusty pane or warped mirror.

The tongue of Eden was like a flawless glass; a light of total understanding streamed through it.

--Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

We who paint language on yawning canvases taste truth with parched tongue. Understanding is a thirst quenched, tenuous and rare, by the masters. Why does a mind crave masterful prose, poem, lyric? That she may see. That she may live brief moments of clarity within her cluttered span.

The information age is here. Googlbloggopedia connects us to a swarming ether fog of fact and fiction. We are sucked into a pixelated vortex of ones and ohs, these and those, cons and pros. We know this even as we hazard educated guesses, publish hunches, wax and wane the starry night away.

Some words draw attention to themselves or to the mastermind who chose them. Smudgy windows. Meanwhile, l'artisan exhales her crystal globe around a paradise so good it must be true.

Gen dig

Sometimes you have just a couple of squat minutes to press a fingerprint on a lined page before the practice itch stitches you to your stratocaster for two prescient hours of godland. So here it is and there it went.

Two boys, preteens, on a bench by the pool, fully clad, porky but not rotund. The smaller one twiddles a baseball cap in dimpled hands, the larger fondles a silver walkman into which his ears are plugged, dipping his head in rhythmic jabs at the cool morning, ignoring his companion as utterly as olympus scorns the toad. From my vantage in a lap lane 10 foot hence, I watch them.

Music man, affecting coolness, is not cool in stature nor aplomb which would make him almost laughable were this voyeur not a mother by her rights and therefore fond of children in their wayward ways of aging, foibled and oblivious, fits and spurts and acrobatic anecdotes withstanding. When my kickboard brings me back around to budding teendom, there is cool one chatting on his cell phone, pacing in his pocket laden shorts and burnished tee, replicating someone with a deal to broker. He now flips his phone shut, snaps it in his holster, rejoins the mute companion.

Just as I would sigh for the lost boys of tetherland, doesn't this mini-borg turn to his bench sitting cohort with a sweet grin and say a word of air on cords through tongue and lips and doesn't the twirling cap master hunker down to pour his lonely heart into the daybreak which has Susan in her water home, admiring.

Disciple

A song requires a feeling, a knowing, a desire. A certain fulness. This fullness asks for space. In the mind. In the body. I think it may require a need. A songwriter needs to shun the prepackaged conclusions hyped by media, religion, business, politics and even, dare we say, relations. She needs her slate blank. Because if she already knows what her song has got to say, believe me, she might as well chronicle the rain -- yesterday's, today's, tomorrow's -- every dull rumbling of a temperate clime. I don't say a writer seeks adventure. Thrill. Abandon. Rock stars and hippies preach that mumbo and maybe a song leaks through but rarely a masterpiece. The master sets her peace on a pristine tablet long before commandments chisel in. She crouches in her work worn rags and asks the world one favor.

Come.

Things you know

Two thin women. The tall one, neatly clad, is hand in hand with a lady who's easily lost six inches to the curving of her spine. Out from under penciled eyebrows and rouged cheeks this small creature grins at me warm as the midday sun on Thursday's cars and asphalt. Her escort is not a nurse, home helper, neighbor -- she is the woman's daughter. I know this as I eavesdrop on their lives.

'What a fantastic store!' says the smiler.

'They fill the bags just right. I told the checkout woman this is a farther drive for us but we like it.'

'Oh yes!'

This is all quite loud -- I'm setting my bags down several cars over.

'It's nicer to come where the people are the same.'

The same what? Same as 'we' are? Same as each other? Same ones who've always worked here? I don't know, but I'm fairly sure these two do.

I'm watching them before I back out of my space. The mother's ample stretch pants float above her ankle socks and gym shoes. Her checkered jacket celebrates the outing. I'd like to say she wears a Yankee cap down over her fine white hair but I can't make out the logo as she turns to clamor up the steps into the van. Daughter pulls the seat belt deftly out across her mother's chest and tiny arms.

And here I am all soggy eyed, recalling.

I once held my mother's veiny hand, took her on excursions that slowed me down and perked her up, talked in code and pushed away the coming of her leaving. Enchantment followed us, and perfect strangers, with our charms.