Capacitance

My dear father knows a great deal about frugality, magnanimity, cheese and bees. He can distinguish himself in a card game, tossing out helpful tips and random quips, all the while creaming his opponents. He’s aggregated funny and wise, humble and proud, stoic and wry into his crossword puzzler’s brain over ninety plus fruitful years.

But there’s one thing he’s wrong about, and I’m about to tell you why. One Sunday morning of my impressionable youth, Dad pointed out that a pair of hymn singers into microphones had little to write home about because their sets of pipes were enhanced by technology. I, the wee girl, proceeded to disrespect my natural singing voice for just about the rest of my life.

Enter the iPhone.

Today, after Walter and I recorded ‘All Along the Watchtower’ on his phone, I slid the file into GarageBand, juiced up the reverb and listened, dumbfounded by the transformation.

You’d think by now my long hours in the studio belaboring sound waves would have cured me of the misapprehension that only a naturally voluminous voice is worth its salt. But alas, until today, I felt like impostor mom raising fertility drug quintuplets on borrowed pampers.

Nevermore. A quiet shred of evidence enters my tender mind, a whispered brushstroke signifying truth. Philosphers challenging the sea, actors strutting the Globe, sopranos warbling to the rafters, Streisand any day of the week - those are another species entirely from the studio rat, the circus mime, the no-name dame who shares her glory with programmers, engineers and the miracle knobs they twirl and tweak.

A song that touches your inner ear, rushes through your veins, roars out your soul and changes how you are because a microphone stands open to the singer's breath, this is a force of nature nurtured by the congregate contagion of civilization.

Photo Ben Köhler, Patti Smith performing in Finland, 2007 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

I can't compete with Santa

The challenge and lament of kindergarten teachers the week before Christmas strikes a winsome chord in me as I wind down from a spate of arts residencies in far flung public schools. Ponder days disappeared from my date book mid Fall. Early excursions o’er gray interstates to small Ohio towns took my imagination elsewhere.

As small fingers smush graham crackers and gum drops onto frosting spackled milk cartons on the last day of school before that jolly benevolence and his friendly team of mammals drop in, I’m home at last, watching snow fall on black branches, without a thought to the snarled traffic at 55th and Woodland.

I heard this week, while driving, an interview with Alan Menken. He writes soundtracks for movies like The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin. Asked if it delights him to have his creations glued, like gumdrops on butter icing, to popular consciousness, how could he answer but yes?

That some of my songs are now ear candy for select grade schoolers in the midwest delights me too. Scale that up by a factor of millions and I might have an inkling of fame’s delight. Is delight scalable, I wonder, or does fame bring a sack of antidotes to the progeny of joy?

This morning I putter in the kitchen, Bob Dylan’s Every Grain of Sand flooding my ear canals. How many songwriters stand in awe at the fact that a young man from nowhere (pardon me, Hibbingers) rose to fame and fortune on a sleigh named song? Access to stunning women, valiant musicians, world travel and the never-ending press parade - all are his because of words he conjured up to sing us.

Dylan’s fame became more than celebrity - neigh cult yet short of worship. The volume of his resplendent work, dependable as Old Saint Nick, assures us of his mystical existence. We don’t quite care if the cherry nose is from too much sherry or too long stints in the barren winds of inspiration. We love him, our fond jester. This clause is non-compete.

Except for the miracle workers who teach our kids to love school, competing with Santa is moot. His job, disguised as Dylan or parents or other consummate sages, is to twinkle and bestow. Ours is to anticipate, provide ballast in our reverence, and to glory in the magnitude of good.

Photo Norbert Aepli, Santa Clause on skies in Adelboden, Switzerland, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license

Short takes

I’m at Target with Tom in search of Merona boxers, Andrew’s brand. A shopper scrutinizing Fruit of the Loom points us to the next isle and joins us as we ponder. Her son is keen on Meronas too. Here we crouch and murmur, two grown women, conversational in the nostalgia of picking out underwear for our grown sons.

What size, really? Medium looks too small, doesn’t it? She says her son’s an athlete - something rigorous like curling. Andrew rides a bike all over Toronto, I tell her. Trim waistlines. Mediums then.
Knit or woven? The knits are softer, Tom interjects. But which ones? Something fun - the green flamingos? Andrew likes green. Or maybe the understated black with thin gray stripes.

As we hand mediums back and forth, the other mom reminds me of a happily married Liz Lemon, eloquent and droll, easy to like. I want her to take the last of the wide green and navy stripes in her son’s size. ‘Naw, go ahead, I’m not attached to them,’ she grins. Tom and I proceed to check out as she squints at the penguin print.

Here I am two days later, folding clothes and wondering what that was. Pawed through racks at Target felt like the backyard fence, the coffee klatsch, the hair salon. What is it about women that has us relaxing into the company of strangers?

As I set down the laundry, a frail finger cut rips wide open on the basket of socks and undies. Were my Target compatriot at hand, I’d show her the welling blood. Attuned to small time adventure, she’d warmly fuss as mothers do.  Not that men do not, or cannot do the same. Women are just more practiced. As the men catch up, we are all the wiser.

Painting by Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, The Marquise de Pezay (or Pezé), and the Marquise de Rougé with Her Sons Alexis and Adrien

Godiva

About to descend to the kitchen world

I remember slipping into another state of grace,
words kept in a tiny tin of alabaster sheaths
held by invisible selves, mustachioed and grave,
who steady their taut arms against willow bark
to snip the bronze tips of Madame Godiva's mane.

John Collier painting of Lady Godiva

Verlaine and Rimbaud

"Situations have ended sad
Relationships have all been bad

Mine’ve been like Verlaine’s and Rimbaud

But there’s no way I can compare
All those scenes to this affair

Yer gonna make me lonesome when you go"
Bob Dylan, You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go


I’ve been reading Verlaine and Rimbaud who, by the way, did scarcely censure underbelly fare.

Here's some morning verse de moi à toi.

Ignore the glial pundits
Analysis assaults the brain
exhausting bright ideas that turn
to excavate the breach.

Cobwebbed attic 'musements
There's gold that looks like rat poop in these rafters.

Now that's a pretty taste

of what's to come!

Arrival
Scorn the chilling splendor

of your youth.

Disenfranchise feelings
of despair.

Aristocrats await you
in their shady goal

emboldened by their shame.

Gustave Courbet painting of Paul Verlaine

Digging Dylan

A 34 year old Yale paleontologist appreciates good music as he scrutinizes origins:

For inspiration I listen to Dylan while reconstructing fossils.
Nick Longrich, Discover December 2010

Playwright Sam Shepard has pondered Dylan’s original gifts from time to time:

Watch the transformational energy which he carries... the kind that brings courage and hope and above all brings life pounding to the foreground... it’s no wonder he can rock the nation.
Sam Shepard, Rolling Thunder Logbook

What is this strange, haunted environment he creates on stage, on record, on film, on everything he touches? What world is he drawing from and drawing us all on as a result? It is right here in front of us but no one can touch it.
Sam Shepard, No Direction Home

Dylan’s contribution to poetry, music and the muse within us all garners critical acclaim merged with urgent gratitude.

Dylan reminds me of an American Brecht, the Brecht whose poems were meant to be sung. There is the same cold humor, the same ironic warmth, the same violent and splintered imagery, the same urgent idiomatic involvement in the way things actually are.... Dylan returned poetry to song.
John Clellon Holmes, Books 1965

By leaving things out, he allows us the grand privilege of creating along with him. His song becomes our song because we live in those spaces. If we listen, if we work at it, we fill up the mystery, we expand and inhabit the work of art. It is the most democratic form of creation.
Pete Hamill, Blood on the Tracks liner notes 1974  

Dylan’s instinctive distinction between polity and poetry has fed the sensibilities of many a fan. A distant poet forebear of the bard understood this well.

Yes, Art is independent of Morals and politics, Philosophy and Science.... The end of Poetry is beauty, Beauty alone, pure Beauty, with no alloy of Usefulness, Truth or Justice.
Paul Verlaine in his 1865 study of Charles Baudelaire

Dylan, world class icon, has reminded us to be thankful for pleasure large and small:

People don’t value their obscurity. They don’t know what it’s like to have it taken away.
Bob Dylan, No Direction Home

He respects the demands on his dueling spheres of expertise:

The writing part is a very lonely experience, but there’s strength in that loneliness. But I’m a performer too, and that’s an outward thing. One is the opposite of the other, and it makes me crazy sometimes because I can’t write with the energy I perform with. I can’t perform with the energy I write with. There just has to be time for both.
Bob Dylan, No Direction Home

Today let us eat, drink and appreciate the appreciators of beauty, unpretentious and unabashed.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Photo of Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg by Elsa Dorlman, GNU Free Documentation License

The ten cent rule

When I was a kid, my dad had a standard question when he handed out my 10 cent allowance. ‘Are you going to spend it or save it?’ he asked.

If I said, ‘spend it,’ that was that. But ‘save it’ produced another dime from his pocket. I used to think my depression-era parents had ruined me for life with thrift. But today I’m grateful for the capacity to relish life in slow motion.

I don’t know how his Hibbing folks approached fiscal education, but ‘madman-jester’ Dylan’s ‘hilarious love of the wisdom and idiocy of words' (Gabriel Goodchild in Robert Shelton’s ‘No Direction Home’), in a canon vast and deep, let his pen wildly savor experience.

Dylan’s ebullient wordage pulls emotion and meaning from a culture where words are a dime a dozen. I think about this in a metro hospital waiting room, TV set to the winter boot parade, a new survey of pop celebrities and a Chase Bank app for mobile deposits. Talky words chase out rare thoughts; show hosts twitch their mega-switches at our helpless minds.

The other occupant of the room has his nose in a paperback as I turn off the babbling box. New arrivals consist of a little girl reading the funnies and a mom with her morning coffee. The receptionist ventures from her desk to readjust the strangely quiet noise scene but agrees to leave it be when I lobby for the peace. A small man of carved cheeks sits down across from me, two tired eyed women at his arm. They discuss the prospects of the morning in Chinese. Now we hear the little girl’s sneakers pad the carpeted hallway through a squeaky door between her mama and the warm tones of a cotton clad nurse. The stillness sounds like freedom.

Dylan’s early Village expertise juxtaposed him to folk shows, poet rants and boozy giggle fits. He spun records and read volumes filled with worlds of sound. He fed the syllables erupting in his mind with morsels of observation, void of TV gibber jabber.

Do mad potions flood the streets of New York while our parochial hinterlands stand desolate and dire? What if Dylan had stayed in Hibbing or got as far as Cleveland and retired? The ten cent rule applies. For every dime’s worth of real time humanity, you can either savor it gladly or choke on the smoke screen of easy distraction.

It doesn’t take a madman-jester to make that call.

Original photo Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license, adapted by Susan Weber

Coop's entourage

In times past, members of the masses, those with very little clout to start with, were neatly packed in God and Country. These two cellophanes remain, reminding us to be humble, idealistic and resigned. We work, we pray, we soldier on.

Then came the mad men who injected commercials into the matrix of mass consumption. Brash celebrities took their extra money for the important job of convincing the rest of us we wanted to be just like them. Nice mansions. Nice cigarettes. Nice cars.

Glitter and glitz took our eyes off the prize which, if you’ll pardon the melodrama, comprised our very souls. By which I mean our own individual personalities that give character and dimension to our lives.

The Coops, the Kates, the Cary Grants were bigger than life, grander than anyone the movie fan could really be. Hollywood worked hard behind the scenes to serve up impossible dreams.

Now we hear there’s another revolution afoot. The masses stand to gain new clout. Madison Avenue can’t have our hearts and minds anymore. The net has set us free! Free to consume vacuous glitz, from Hollywood smooth to Youtube lewd, we are facebook twittizens curating our hipness in snippets of savoir faire. Consumer fools consumed by tools of coolness. Just try and pry my iPhone from my cold, connected hands and... well... watch me blog!

At the end of the high pitched day, what is the distinction here? Then, we watched a few famous people tell us how to behave. Now, we watch each other amateur our ways across the ethosphere as emptiness nips at our insides and the admen scheme to monetize our gape.

What are we to do about the state of our souls? It’s trafficky out there. If an artist has something to say to this loud, littered planet, good luck with finding an ear without an earbud set to stun.

Have you heard about the hermit artists? Of course not. They are hermits. They don’t publish, record or put on airs. They don’t compete with the happening acts or weigh in with the media.

What might they do? you ask. Why would they tell you that? They’re hermits, reclaiming their individuality. Choosing deep over wide. Supposing that the well is not dry, it is merely clogged with quivering mothlings, badly singed.

Photo of film stars Gary Cooper, Phyllis Brooks and Una Merkel

Free Therapy

This never made it to the blog this summer. Life intervened. But here it is.

You might say it doesn’t take much to make me flee the pungent porch on a late summer night for the sanctuary of bright lights, notebook and lanolin. But here I am, resigned to write, and itch and wish I were sleeping.

Lately I’ve felt too shy to pick up the pen. With an author like Laurie R. King churning out wondrous mysteries, why use up time I could use to read her words, trying to formulate my own?

There is already a writer in the room.

How does she do it, thrust me into the role of participant in the chase? Quite a role, too. Trolling British-occupied Palestine disguised as a male bedouin, absorbing the culture, disposing of villains. Or perhaps I’d best let the author speak:

'We picked our way over mile after mile of loose, jagged rock, and although Ali kept reassuring us that Mar Sabas was just ahead, I no longer held much hope that I should see the place in this lifetime. One of my boots was sprung, I had twisted my ankle taking an incautious step, my tongue was swollen with thirst, my woolen garments and the snug binding I wore around my chest chafed and itched abominably, and the patches of raw skin, irritated by the salt water, now stung fiercely when the sweat trickled into them. I had long since entered that timeless state of mere endurance, placing one foot in front of another until strength failed or I ran out of ground.'
Laurie R. King, O Jerusalem: A Novel of Suspense Featuring Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russell

I often wonder what compels a writer to give her days to the creation of a novel? Is she touched by a force outside herself, some creative unconscious? Has she made herself worthy of that touch with preparation and hard work? How does she know writing is what she wants to spend her life doing? What is the wellspring of her sustained, intricate form of creativity?

A screenwriter once compared seeing a good film to seeing a good therapist. Both leave you more whole, your ID less fragile. Similar things happen to me when I'm reading a good book.

As the next Mary Russell novel wends its way through CleveNet to my mind, I don’t really care whether my writer questions are answered. Dr. King’s receptionist calls me in. The good doctor will see me now. All I have to do is read.

Photo Nikswieweg, Bedscha

Shredification

Certain sons and daughters asked to stow their overflow with us so they might follow their dream to far off places. Since I’d begun to clear out the glacial accumulation of stuff from our attic and basement awhile back, inspired by the dismantling of my dad’s place, I was less than aligned to the prospect of yet more stuff. But family can hardly be denied when room can be made.

I proceeded to throw out, donate, recycle and shred a heap of my belongings prior to the influx of storage boxes. Halfway through the journals, our paper shredder let out a prolonged squeal under the onslaught of words, and abruptly died.

I might consider this a sign to halt the decimation of beauty, in light of Goethe’s lines on letters (and what is a journal if not letters to one’s self?).

“We lay aside letters never to read them again, and at last destroy them out of discretion, and so disappears the most beautiful, the most immediate breath of life, irrecoverably for ourselves and others.”
Goethe

Surely this genius from another time has the knack for inflicting guilt on pack rat journalistas everywhere. But really, would hypothetical future readers gain much if they even found time to probe my delving mind?

My theory - and I grant you, I am no expert on humanity - is that we’re each born into a mind that wants to cross boundaries. Mom and Dad and village can only provide so much point of view. Our brain needs wider fields in which to romp. Which we find, say, writing. Or climbing trees. Or staging plays.

We find playgrounds when we consume art too, which coincidentally gives us less time and gold for loading up on unnecessary stuff.

If making or partaking of art satisfies the mind’s will to fly, and if sinking into a cluttered life clogs the urge to think new thoughts, it behooves the human creature to take down the tent and clean out the cage (thank you, Tommy Smothers) with bold regularity.

As for generations to come, deprived of our burgeoning thoughts? Dear Goethe, let them dance with their own élan.

Painting by Cornelis Norbertus Gysbrechts

Mostly mushrooms

In Folly, protagonist Rae Newborn works her way out of debilitating depression by building a house. Artisan of wood in her former life, she pieces together her redemption on a solitary island in the Pacific northwest.

Rae is not only the scarred creation of her writer. She is the writer’s scars, revealed as socially useful things.

Another contemporary novelist, Jonathan Franzen, sees reading as antidote to our myriad techno distractions.

‘Reading, in its quietness and sustained concentration, is the opposite of busyness. “We are so distracted by and engulfed by the technologies we’ve created, and by the constant barrage of so-called information that comes our way, that more than ever to immerse yourself in an involving book seems socially useful,” Franzen says. “The place of stillness that you have to go to to write, but also to read seriously, is the point where you can actually make responsible decisions, where you can actually engage productively with an otherwise scary and unmanageable world.”’
Lev Grossman, Jonathan Franzen, Time Magazine August 23, 2010

Folly’s creator, Laurie R. King, draws us safely into insanity and grief. She gives us permission to explore the imperfections that tell our past and shape the rest of our lives.

Shapes and textures of physical scars break the skin like the surprising eruption of mushrooms that populate the forest floor in mid August. If you’re like me, your scars tend to linger in bold relief, so it’s easy to remember the little girl who jumped on the bed and gashed her lip, the young woman who collapsed her lung in a bike accident, ending up with a chest tube, the grown daughter burning her leg on a bare bulb while painting woodwork in her fathers’ empty condo with one low set lamp to see by. I’m growing a new one now on the hand too hastily thrust into a glass made to drink from but quite capable of slicing into the organ we call skin.

Mushrooms and scars might seem ugly. Neither elicits immediate awe the way flowers do, or newborn babes. Maybe we respect the mushroom’s unapologetic overnight bloom, the scarred skin’s unique approach to healing, but is either thing beautiful?

It all depends, I think, on engaging with reality with sustained attention. Sustainable thought? Imagine that, reading, the oldest of green technologies.

Photo Susan Weber, from Flickr set

Game theory

'I understand your trepidation; you have been let down before, but getting your feelings hurt is part of the game.
'
Corey Barnes, The Cleveland Plain Dealer

Barnes is talking to Browns fans about football. But the point could be made about anything you care about, and some things you don’t.

Today my friend’s daughter is getting married in Detroit. I’m not invited, and I understand why. I was demoted from the guest list years back when irreconcilable differences derailed our friendship. Because we have some fabulous friends in common, we’ve patched things up on the surface. Being ‘let down before’ applies to us both, time and again, as we fail to make space for each other in the interstices of our lives.

But football wisdom aside, there’s a difference between something you play (or watch) for sport and something you get one shot at: life. Maybe this is why sports metaphors tossed around by pundits and preachers strike me as shallow. The interstices of our lives are not games; they come with complex, often inscrutable emotions.

Which is probably why a wedding I’d just as soon avoid is still capable of touching my need. To be loved, to be remembered.

Maybe the sports-philosopher gets it right after all. What better life experience than game to teach us this: perspective heals. There’s more to life than any one instance or feeling. There’s more to sport than any one game. And serious as we may think our team or life standing may be, in the long view we’re all running around with ridiculous armor and war paint, heaving our weight in the path of need.

You can tell I’m no football fan. So tell me why the quote at the top pulled me in to the place of heart, this fragile arena of life.

Painting by John Anster Fitzgerald, The Marriage of Oberon and Titania

True Story

Mama hadn’t been gone too long when my Dad ended up in rehab. I was in rehab too at the time, where an equanimity of spirit and growing roundness to my form could only mean on thing: I was pregnant.

It happens sometimes, you know, when life’s unredeemed losses pull you down into paths of least resistance? Humans cope by the means available. So there I was, impregnated by a familiar friend I’d relied on in many a tough situation, but never to this degree.

I’d bring my attentive companion to Manorcare when I visited my dear old dad, recuperating from a cracked hip. At Dad’s age, this entails a lot of difficult maneuvering around damp sheets and bedside commodes, which, one learns rather quickly as daughter-devotee, is not the number one priority of understaffed rehab establishments.

I hope I didn’t give the impression earlier that I myself went to rehab for some kind of socially suspect addiction or another, autobiographically interesting as that might be. To be clear, I was merely the significant other to my sweet, bereaved father in an institution that failed him time and again.

Nights were the worst, when staffing was even lighter than by day and I had to leave. My stalwart helpmeet and I bade Dad adieu and the night traumas began. His room was at the end of a long hall, his only means of calling for help a string by his bed that activated a light over the doorway to the hallway.

Hearing his horror stories about lying for hours in soiled sheets, I lunged to the nurse’s station, which was empty. I tracked down an employee, who received my complaints with a practiced stare before turning to her mop. Several staffers later, as my righteous indignation fizzled into politely desperate pleas, somebody came up with an answer. The light for 32B was burned out! Ah, no wonder no one checked on an 87 year old man on diuretics who couldn’t get out of bed to save his life. Electricity! Technology! Humanity had nothing to do with it.

I’d like to report that everything improved once the bulb was switched. But it only got worse. He developed a chest infection which put the kibosh on physical therapy for a few days. Did you know that if you’re not ‘progressing’ in physical therapy for a few days, your insurance company stops paying for rehab?

The ongoing struggle to have underwriters and care providers speak a common language (i.e. common sense), along with hiring a private night nurse to sit by my father and pull his string to call for help to meet his needs (she had a bad back) and all the other injustices and indignities he and his various roommates had in common would have been unbearable to me, his anguished daughter, had it not been for my dark, sensual, delicious Mr. Hershey, ever at my elbow, always in the know about the trouble I’d seen.

Boredom is a huge obstacle to revival, so the three of us, Dad, Hershey and I, made do. We played cards, watched movies, wheeled around the premises, got out to bingo, dined in to reality shows on two jumbotrons' competing plot twists, both loud enough for senior roomies to enjoy. The whole while, Hershey reached out to me, reassuring, available. ‘I’m here for you, dear. Let me comfort you.’

Oh, did I give the impression earlier that I’d actually gotten pregnant with a living, breathing compulsion of a man, intriguing as that may sound? Hershey was indeed a hunk, and a sweetheart in his way (bittersweet, truth be told, as these trysts tend to be), but technically speaking, we were celibate, my pregnancy symbolic and therefore somehow pure, don’t you think? We consummated our mutual admiration in the midst of adversity and, unlike the mundane scenarios of childbirth, diapers, tetanus shots and roseola, our pregnancy could go on and on with only our fathomless desire to satiate again and again.

I’d like to tell you this theory holds but, alas, poetry and real life have no lasting concourse, only the highs and lows of outrageous fortune. Dad, now healed - hallelujah - abides in the sweetest (that word again) assisted living home your bright mind might imagine. Hershey and I are working things out with, shall we say, a little less rhyme, a bit more reason? I reach for him daily but not as before, when his alluring goodness robbed me of my sensible, honest self.

As for the rounded belly, well, that’s been subsiding too, month by month. And my mother, whom I might blame for the saga just unfolded, blankets a slope not far from my dad’s new home, her ashes feeding the trillium blossoms every spring. I’ve finally come to mourn her, my pregnancy notwithstanding, my germinative ocean refined and encapsulated in the complicity of years. The ones left to me, unbounded.

Austrian Lithograph, The First Birth

Look

Asleep in the trees, I feel my fingers itch from palm to tip, but dream swelled eyes resist the open air. I hold the netherworlds and blindly smile and scratch, until I stop: the itch remains.

Sleep undone, I spring the lids and there she is, madonna moon, a silver shimmering sheen. Hanging baskets join the boughs to rock this pearl, this tiny apparition.

I the witness scan my expectations, troll for means to hold Antigone’s desire before she flees. But now my pride is vanquished by a smile. I the pawn of fate. Here the sojourn ends. There my insignificance is told. A transient beauty noticed by the gods I am the moon and she in me.

Linger in the madness of the place before the goddess hides her face beyond the clouds. With silent, steady hand release her now.

Release her now.

Painting Edouard Manet, White Peonies

Bzzzzzzzzt

Summertime in Cleveland has me sprawled on the back porch like a flayed goose, awaiting the nightly visitation.

Mini-gangsters breach the imperfections of my nylon mesh. Careening buzz saws trumpet their arrival, merciless high frequency their taunt.

I am the oversized sixth grader on a playground of bullies. Or, is this a single Lilliputian who dives at my sweat sodden skin from here to eternity in the heat of the midwest night?

Though I might escape to the drone-free inferno of the great indoors, I stay and study my supporting roles as life of the party and warm buffet in a multi-legged wedding bash my mini-mob is staging.

Ancient salves of lanolin give scant relief nor sane belief there is a balm in Gilead. Alone with my itchy discontent, the self control of planet earth could not contain the madness.

I punch the pillow one more time, my brave resolve ignored by all creation.

Public Domain photo James Gathany

Artist Shaman

The shaman has been revered by purveyors of culture who link our storied past with a starker spiritual present.

Shamans of tribal lore dreamed in technicolor so that humbler sorts might have a taste of raw wonder. Are the artists of today our shamans then?

Surely not all artists. Some sell out. Some mistake celebrity for art or feast on tawdry expectations.

What separates the shaman from the shameless, in a word, is dream. The shaman artist slips into madness for awhile to gather up insanity for a world gone sane. Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne ‘shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers... while Suzanne holds the mirror.’

Why do we need what the shaman offers? Ah - because we are so dangerously civilized. Take it from the jungle lad, who sees these things.

 ‘The city people are very careless and very dirty. Unlike animals, they have no sense of personal cleanliness. They do not eliminate odor and sounds as do animals in the jungle. They could not go half an inch in a jungle without being killed by somebody.’
Dhan Gopal Mukerji, Jari, The Jungle Lad (The following Mukerji quotes are also from this book)

Shamans deal with life and death, it seems. The further we roam from our astute animal instincts, the less protected we are. Devoid of nature’s teaching, people crowd together, calling it sane to hoard the wealth.

‘It looked to me as if people were always saving money in order to be robbed.’
Mukerji

The artist shaman brings us close to nature, a drama of the here and now.

‘This is what I call drama, this theatre of nature, where no one hoards for someone else to steal.’
Mukerji

So here is the secret of nature; it happens now. We may champion the profit motive, but profit forces us into the future. What value do we find in the work inspired by profit and how does the chasing of gold poison our character?

Humans, with our vast intellect, have been caged and humiliated by our noisy swagger, prey to the very fools we emulate.

‘Being noisy and thick-skinned has made a fool of the rhinoceros. I have known people who have killed him from the grass by driving a poisoned spear into his belly.’
Mukerji

There is a shaman musician, deaf only in the worldly sense out of which she steps in the giving of her art. She would have us overflow with now-ness in the otherworldly principle of sound.



Photo Nick Farnhill, White Rhino in the waterburg Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0

Swoop

If there’s one place on earth where joy eclipses toil and grief, it’s music.

But there’s an endangered tribe running through the bliss fields, prone to miss the magic. You guessed it - musicians.

Recently I heard Judy Collins describe her struggle with depression, alcohol and drugs from early on. If a singing angel yearns for joy in the midst of plenty, what’s to become of the rest of us?

Many people tell me they love music. Some of them are musicians. Most of them are connoisseurs, curators of their music collections, fans of bands and troubadours. At least that’s how it seems to me, but of course I’m biased because I’m a musician endangered by the making of music.

Music can be a buffer against the cares of the world. A friend of mine had a tough childhood. Hank Williams on the radio at night was his refuge and salvation.

But it’s hard to find joy in a craft you love that also says ‘get out there for the world to hear.’ Getting it out there is more than hooking up some mics and amps and letting ‘er rip. It’s a rowdy expertise we call ‘marketing’ which has a tendency to leak frustration, doubt and a certain crass materialism into the pure realm of music euphoria.

Imagine a winged creature at home on the wind, suddenly forced to truck around bird ads on her skinny legs and spritely feathers. You think we’d expect her to sing too?

I haven’t figured out how to avoid the derangement of the market place. Yes, I do love music. But I’m hopelessly inept at sales. ‘Swoop with me into the wild blue yawn?’ I might as well tell you to get religion (my religion), which won’t be happening anytime soon.

See what I mean? Hopeless.

Painting Margret Hofheinz-Döring, Meeting of Birds Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0

Why do music?

My sister Mariah’s got a phenomenal cache of recipes. A large bunch of fresh dill from a Chicago farmer’s market needed one.

‘Do you have Mrs. Waltz’s dill bread recipe?’ I asked her. She clicked back immediately, ‘It’s in Mom's recipe booklet I gave you, Montana Dilly Casserole Loaf - and I love the attached potato salad recipe - it's the first thing I thought if when I heard fresh dill.'

Mariah’s our family recipe caretaker. Our mother used to say, ‘I’m not a good cook. I just have good recipes.’ Because of Mariah, Mom feeds us still. Caretakers abound where humans love.

2 Men and a Campfire shared songs they love at the Beck Cafe Thursday night. Cat Stevens, Paul Simon, Lennon-McCartney songs with spot on harmonies and well hewn guitar grooves had us humming down nostalgia lane. Dale and Ryan care for the good songs when they perform them and emulate them in their own compositions.

An original Lennon lyric sheet just went for $1.2 million at Sotheby’s. I’ll take the live rendition any day. Recipes are made for cooking/eating, songs for singing/hearing.

And what to make of the 45-year-old carpenter who retrieved his high school class ring from a quarry he’d lost it in as a boy, swimming with friends? Care taking is a communal story. Somebody’s got to drain the quarry and somebody’s got to want what’s down there.

Recently I strapped on my guitar to begin again to sing the songs I left behind some years ago. It can seem pointless, in the glut of digital music distribution, to be caretaker of songs I write. The communal piece appears lacking - no Beatlemaniacs or Dylanatics revere my tunes, hankering for more. Scarcely friend nor kin has asked about the golden ring ‘on a ledge that would have been 35 feet under the water line.’ I guess it’s up to me to drain the quarry and tote the ring, both.

A recent TED talker describes his 'why' discovery this way: ‘People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.’ He says rational explanations about how a product is so necessary and desirable miss the point entirely. Buying decisions are made in the intuitive, feeling part of our brain. The ‘why’ of our exertions draws others to things we revere and offer up creatively.

It’s not the zeitgeist's job to track down my songs for posterity. I’m the caretaker, quarry drainer, ring bearer - chief cook and bottle washer. I do it because I love making music. I do it for community. I do it for love.

Next to godliness

I like cleanliness.

When our boys were young, their two little hot wheel runaround pals named Ian and Evan moved away.

A few months later, we visited their upstairs apartment in a large brick house painted gray. Wading through the rooms knee deep in randomness, I wondered if I dare leave my boys to play and possibly be swallowed whole by swamps of stuff.

As I recall, I made a flimsy excuse and darted for the door, my sons in tow.

The generation of our children is one I know more closely than most. Now young adults, my children and their friends buoy me with selflessness and candor. They would save the world, or at the very least proclaim it worth their efforts.

Most of them are graduates of rented student houses rife with late night schmoozery. I've never been in one of those communal digs where bathrooms or kitchens got a once over more often than maybe once every rent cycle, which could be months or years depending on the student migration timeline.

I remember my own collegiate avalanche of under-managed personal debris, the dredge of deadlines daunting me from term to term. Then in nursing school I shared a small flat with Grace, a contralto at the institute of music who was rather disciplined as I recall. I think we did the dishes and I can't remember bathroom chores becoming points of tension.

Gradually I think I just ran out of slovenly excuses, cleaned up my act and proceeded on to quasi-ordered adulthood.  Messy, at times. Dirty, not so much.

Those people of the upstairs rental I mentioned earlier? I remember the parents. They were from Montana or Idaho or some such windswept scape. She was soft spoken, evanescent, kind. He was a thinker. He told me once he couldn't imagine why a soul would ask him if he believed in God or wanted to accept Jesus as his savior. (Not that I had, or would. It was just a subject that came up.) I'd never met anyone so sure of the intimacy of that question and the sanctity of inner space.

No matter how well our long abandoned Ian and Evan learn to breach the creep of stuff, the bilge of pesky matter, I'm confident these sons will be alright. And so will mine and all their fond companions.

Unfazed by tidy elders, let them brave this unkempt world.

Lithograph by Ehrgott, Forbriger & Co., President Lincoln writing the Proclamation of Freedom

All the world is somewhere else

'All the world is somewhere else... I am the mask. I am the bird. I am the animal. I am the spirit... I transcend with the being of the mask.'
Chief Robert Joseph, Kwakwaki'wakw (Kwakiutl), recalling his youthful experience as a ceremonial dancer, 1998

'There are three things that maintain a culture - language, religion and art. You lose these three and you lose the culture completely.'
Jackie Paisho, Pikuni (Blackfoot) bead artist, 2005

'You say prayers when you start a basket and you let it know that it is going to be started, to be created and when you are finished, you end with prayers to let it know that its birth is complete.'
Frank Turtle, Yubi-Wailaki, painter and basket maker, 1999

'Art comes from a deeper source somewhere - it's part of the act of just living; you know, let's put on the beans and get the clay out.'
Rina Swentzell, Tewa-Santa Clara Pueblo artist, author and schollar, 1994

For Rina Swentzell, clay can be 'a gritty reminder of the land, a way to hold the places of her ancestors between her fingers.' I tried my hand at gritty reunions last week with a lunge at gardening. Soft and green at the work, my blistered palms sent me to the sidelines to let the weeds have their ancestral way.

The same hands scribbled quotes, shards of artist truth scattered through Art of the American Indians: The Thaw Collection last month. At the time, I felt the author-artists pushing me out of my complacency, where everyday tasks outweigh the urgency of grappling with my far, forgotten roots. Then of course those same tasks led me down the road of practical oblivion, my bits of penciled wisdom moldering in the dust.

My people were Swiss and English, poor orphaned clans. My clay - my songs, my words - forget or deny their sacred worth. Ironic, and perhaps deserving, that the peoples who appropriated this land often sacrifice the very ties to Europe that might redeem their streak of stubborn independence. Stark individualism relegates our heritage to a wan relic of a lush communal presense just beyond our consciousness.

Prayerful art, say the land's native prophets, might yet be our salvation.

Photo Edward S. Curtis, Blackfoot Bear Bull