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.

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.

Oblations and obligations

I ask my father what his mom was like. I'm curious because a childhood friend of his who hadn't seen me for a good decade once burst into a big grin to say, "Susan, you remind me so much of your Grandma Frieda!" Thinking the resemblance might be deeper than skin, I wonder what else I inherited from our clan's Swiss matriarch.

I have her obituary, a yellowed clipping from a country paper of the day. She was a church woman, she helped people and organized other people to do the same.

Mrs. Weber, having raised three sons of her own, was particularly interested in the religious welfare of young people and many times would go out of her way to see that some boy or girl had a ride to church or Sunday School. One of the last things she did was help to organize the Singing Club of the Dingman’s Ferry Methodist Church. Without her help, and that of her devoted friend, Mrs. Paul Schuepp, this Club would never have been started, since almost half the young people relied upon these two kind ladies for transportation.

Dad has told many a story about their early days in a New Jersey enclave of Swiss immigrants. His mother learned English, put up with cockroaches and kerosene lights after leaving a bug free, electricity emancipated life in Europe, raised three sons and buried her husband before he came to old age. Spinster sisters Lisa and Liny joined her at the homestead in PA adjoining Child's Park, a place of magic for the grandkids. The Swiss inflected voices of my grandmother and her sisters laced their plum and apple pies with a certain old world flavor.

As far as I know, Grandma Frieda published no words (her husband Theo and his father were the poets). She left us no recording, she never formed a band or went on tour. So what had she passed to me besides a strong chin and earnest eyes? What was she like?

My Dad, just rebounding from his own health imbroglio, spares few words about his mother. "People said she was serious. But she was friendly. And she was happy."

And if she left me these ingredients for my own swiss-english pie, I smell a rite of passage baking.

Squirrel traps

What fascinates me about the film, Capote, is the elusiveness of the protagonist's character. It's as though Capote is walking around in one of his books, not quite sure if he's the hero or the villain. Harper Lee, his friend and counterpoint, punctures the messianic bubble with her blades of integrity.

Business schools take a page from Harper Lee.

At Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, about half the grades are handed out for work that's done in teams; members of each team provide one another with anonymous feedback, and the school has hired counselors to help students absorb the lessons from this criticism. "In the past, you could go through business school and nobody would say you were coming across as a jerk," says Paul Danos, dean of the Tuck School. "But that might have been the most important factor in your future success as a manager."

Experienced sound engineers pay attention to the way a recording's inner workings come across to the listener. George Massenburg recently told a Sweetwater masterclass:

There are two types of balance with any kind of mix: internal balance, referring to the relationship of the sounds in a piece of music to one another, and external balance, which is how your mix relates to the outside world...

I see the internal balance in a mix as not being so technical, I see it as more musical. An external balance would be, "okay, when I play it in my car, I can't hear the kick." Or "I can't hear the cowbell," or the playback circumstance is such that it just doesn't work.

On the world stage, our I'm-the-decider president reminds us who's boss as Rumsfeld digs the mass grave in clueless spades, behavior coaches nowhere to be found.

Why we fight

Fear is the main reason. Hubris the second. Ignorance the limping third. Ironically, it all boils down to love, the milk and honey of desire.

What's the point of a loveless life? What if there is not enough love for you to get your portion? You can't make people love you. It's not a thing you earn. It's not a right. It's a gift. So you wake up in the morning, you don't feel particularly loved (or lovable?) and angst crawls in under the covers. Abandonment. Loneliness. Emptiness. Better fill the void. Stockpile ambition, ostentation. Erect billboards that tell the world, 'look! I exist! I've got all this stuff. I'm important! You gotta love me, right? Right?'

You're after love, you fall for pride instead. Ah, but hubris wears the tailored suit with a rosebud boutonniere. Hubris tips the maitre d' in twenties. Hubris parks the SUV in VIP garages. You think I'm talking rich people here? You can have your biggie fries and a chip on your shoulder, both. Vanity is classless, and clueless. From Donald Rumsfeld to Ronald McDonald, all you need is empty calories in your hungry gut to send you off to fight your wars. Once you're weaned of love by demon pride, respect is what you're after and nothing fills the bill like the cantankerous guns of Generalissimo Ignoramus.

Contrary to the staid annals of rational inquiry, thought is not well served by the passionless mind. Passion comes bundled with conscience. Love is a lubricant, if you will. Without it, heat and friction wear your brain to smithereens. You begin to think in riddles. What's the best way to signal Stalin we can crush him? Nuke the Japanese! How to tell jihadists we're the superpower here? Occupy Iraq! Terrorize civilians, here and abroad, in the wake of unmitigated angst, unconscionable ego, unfathomable ignorance.

As I watched Why We Fight, frame after frame of military-industrial-congressional-thinktanking crowded me, gasping, into the shadows. Eisenhower warned us not to follow love lorn weapons dealers to this monstrous state. We ignored him and now we are citizens of New Rome. Who am I, a serf, to stir the ashes?

If there is a merest spark of hope in this, it is to be found in the finest capacity of a human will. In a word, love. Not the smarmy pretense that got us here, blind and foolish, breathless at the sight of the headless maiden's breast. My countrymen and women can do better than swallow Caesar's vapid lies.

We can study the curves in the broad sands of compassion. We can liberate our flawed logic from a tendency to expect love, respect and wisdom to bore into us from without. We can fight with impassioned desire to create an empire of expansive beauty that emanates from within each unblemished being.

And when our children ask us why we fight, we'll have an answer. We fight for milk and honey, dear, we fight for you, we fight because we love.

Yellow submarine

On a dust plain, much is made of a hot air balloon the Beatles plan to ride. One by one the dear lads coaster in on parachutes, John and Paul intrepid, Ringo with a prone thud, George an afterthought. Their handlers herd them brusquely to the blimpish buggy. John and Paul go arm in arm, the sherpas. The airship owner sways and stokes the flame. Reporters ask him where he learned his trade -- he shrugs and says he never really learned it.

Beatles entouragers climb inside to party for the boys who can't be bothered. Someone's whisked them to a private berth. The crowd gets motleyer and louder as the hot air rises. At the last minute, a young man offers me the sky. "Sit on this platform, you can join the party once we're in the clouds." I don't believe him, really, but I'd love to meet the Beatles so I fool myself, pretending I can handle heights -- I do it in my sleep!

Cut to later. Amidst the mill of revelers, a sober woman dubious of entropy, a lighter and a kid anointing boxes that fall into the cosmos and explode.

Through a glass

Sometimes, in the studio, I forget the performance angels floating just beneath the skin of engineer, producer, session player, writer. But a strange thing happens when I listen back to a freshly minted song, like Wide Open, with a Hammond organ whirling its signature sound from intro through denouement. I remember watching Chris play the part, sideways to the keyboard, nonchalant and focused, both. But when I hear the finished song, I see a band in full regalia, pounding out the sounds, organ player juiced and joyful. My mind flips back and forth between these images of studio and stage, session and performance, focus and abandon.

To say there is a performance artist in every human is to recognize this flip-flop game of the mind we play out on formal and informal stages. Some of us never step beyond the studio -- kitchen, office, gym -- to serve our muse. Others of us leap onto stages at the least provocation, flashing our potential at the wide eyed crowds.

After all is said and sung and done in either sphere, there enters excellence. This is where the artist sheds her mortal skin and for some time bound eternity, reveals her muse's world. This can happen sitting sideways to a keyboard, it can happen under colored lights and amped up airwaves. Its requisite preamble is a passion honed to near perfection over years of unquestionable fondness for the muse.

Miracle road

Christian bikers did not spoil Walter's sound check last night, nor did the dog poop. When you book a rock show in a folkatorium on April 1st, I guess you take your chances. The bikers took their confab elsewhere and the next door neighbor's guard dog lost all interest in my bassist-manager and his freshly odoriferous loafer. Walter, the road warrior, spritzed his sole with holy water Fantastik and proceeded with load in.

Midway through sound check entered the Hendersons and Krista. Peter, having recently stared down countless health demons, looked terrific, though his smile-at-the-ready can often fool you. Ann and Krista settled him in and beamed their own beacons around the shipyard. One by one, the listeners -- weldor, therapist, contractor, teacher, chef, working mom, Marine -- docked at Scott's Folkatorium, dipped into Ann's meatless chile and Dottie-mother-of-Scott's potato salad and plopped down to feast on music.

A successful show feels to me like some kind of miracle. With theater, suspension of disbelief is to be expected, as stage sets, costumes and extra ordinary scenarios draw you in. Music, where imagination reigns, has neither bread nor circuses to prop up the puppet regime. You rely entirely on the integrity of your songs, the quality of your musicianship and the willingness of your audience (and you) to be transported. And inspired.

Last night's show seemed all the more miraculous because my laryngitis-laced voice was still recovering from the flu. It occurs to me at times like this how fragile is the borderline dividing earth and heaven. All the careful song craft and disciplined practice, in the end, brings you to a lover's leap where anything, from bikers' alleluias to canine skank to audience malaise might land you on the rocks below, hugging your broken bones.

As we tore down the set, Doris showed me some of her filigreed poems and one by Daniel, her son, as husband Kevin looked on and spoke of his sculpting muse. An artist family, honoring my art. The road to miracle is paved, it seems, with delicate invention.