Make way for the butterflies

The children sleep in separate beds, one bed at Mommy's, one at Daddy's. Separate bedrooms. Separate dreams, save one -- the dream of reconciliation.

These children are like any of us, caught in struggles we don't understand. One such struggle -- the estrangement of our body from our spirit -- finds our body irked by the spirit's piousness, the spirit scandalized by the body's joy.

So the children, you, me, our gentle selves, pack our pajamas, wishing. If only Mommy could bend, just a little bit, to see what Daddy's talking about. If only Daddy could listen and try something Mommy's way. If only they could get along. If only.

Mom and pop turn to us in the midst of another royal ballyhoo. Some absurd look about us makes them drop their scorecards, ink smudging their rude cheeks. Oh. The children. We almost forgot.

Let me tell you a story about my spirit body split. Like you, perhaps, I want to know how I feel about the boy who shot the innocents last week. Do I hate him? Is it pity? Disgust? Rage? Sorrow?

I feel an ancient sorrow for the people he killed. But when I try to take the pulse of my response to the killer, I feel...

Some have compared the shooter to a suicide bomber. Both are ideologues for whom human life has no value. Both chill me to the bone, but there is no bone. No marrow. No sinew. No blood. In the face of their murderous certainty, I feel only ice white fear.

Spiritual purists and worshipers of the senses are doomed to everlasting strife. Both define themselves by their martyrdom. The body politic finds the effort of self-discipline unconscionably harsh. The extremist extinguishes the sloppiness of hedonistic culture with a bullet or a bomb.

We, abandoned children, make no sense of our emotions, benumbed by tummies so damn full, no butterflies alight there. Traumatized by spirits that have lost the urge to play.

Largesse

Victory is what happens when ten thousand hours of training meet one moment of opportunity.
Coach Jason Hill, Beachwood High School

A certain student earned his 'exemplary young man' moniker yet again over the past year and a half as he transformed himself from a rather likable teddy bear to an affably self-assured lean mean competing machine. Last weekend he completed his first ever Olympic-length triathlon in two hours and twenty six minutes, exceeding his own, his teammates' and coach's expectations. Hearing him exude pleasure while consuming post-race calories momentarily washed me clean of the grim tragedy of Virginia Tech.

A swim workout can sometimes cleanse my wounds in this world gone mad. Lately, though, with images of 32 precious students and teachers etched on my retinas, I can barely make out the Coach Hill quote that hangs over the pool deck.

Last night I saw Miss Potter, a film about an artist spurned by mother and world. When Beatrix loses the love of her life, she withdraws to her painting space to drench her sorrow in creation. Her images of bunnies grow dark as crows peck at Peter's blue coat and bloated guppies swallow up the sweet green frog. 'I must leave this house,' she tells her savior, Milly. Beatrix escapes to the countryside where her grieving mind and hands embark on endless hours of training. In time, with earnings from the most widely published children's books of all time, Miss Potter rescues 4,000 acres of rolling farmlands from developers, preserving them for the British people.

The question of this mournful day of innocents downed is ever, 'why?' The shooting, the disregard for life, the horror? The constancy of atrocity worldwide, pulled down around my senses, numbs my strumming hand. Ten thousand hours of training, coach -- why bother, when the shooter's aim can maim another child?

In a race between good and evil, firepower obliterates fairness. But it doesn't win. Your lily pad, your cabbage patch, your cotton tail, your puddle duck, your fifty yards in fifteen seconds flat -- your hope within the madness.

Victory. Another name for love.

Mrs. Monet

Our minds are familial search engines. They know our clan, flash point quick. They feed us reliance, surround our doubt with possibility. Thoughts remand, remonstrate, remember. They play our questions like loquacious kin. Search ignites vast comfort within the complicated otherness of nature. She steps into the sea with brush and pallet, turns to her childhood coastline, carves her darks and brights into the work the waves can't have.


by Claude Monet Wikimedia Commons

Killing me softly

The soft drink industry gets rich delivering recipes like this to your blood: carbonated water, caramel color, natural & artificial flavors, phosphoric acid, aspartame, potassium benzoate, citric acid, potassium citrate, caffeine, acesulfame potassium, calcium disodium edta.

The American Heart Association tells us this about you:

The human heart is one powerful pump, propelling six quarts of blood through the 60,000 miles of blood vessels in your body -- twice the distance around the world.

How does Big Cola get you to contaminate your insides with its brew? Ask me. I just quit.

My addiction started when I worked night shift in the ER. Cola tasted better than the oil slick they called coffee. I took my first swig and never looked back.

For a few years now, my doctor's had this annoying habit of suggesting I lose the caffeine-aspertame dependence. Better for the bones, the brain, the heart, the kidneys -- there's no part of the body it's not better for, according to the doc. But my friendly neighborhood addiction told me otherwise. Denial ruled.

Until the first day of Spring. Finally, something clicked. I read about Fosamax, a drug you take if your bones begin to waste away. The side-effects of Fosamax broke through my denial. A split second of mental clarity said, if you take a powerful chemical with potentially gruesome side-effects to counteract other powerful chemicals that erode your bones, you are insane.

This reminds me of our national Big Oil fixation. We love our SUV! Of all the vices, how could this one kill us? Our survival instincts have been bullied by habits we picked up like a can of pop on the midnight special. We don't like the voice of rationality -- the eco nut with his wishbone shaped stethoscope -- asking us to breath deep.

Until this fine Spring day, a feeling in our bones, a shot of innocence, an inkling of self-determination.

Much obliged

It comes out of nowhere, and it feels like you've stepped out of yourself. Oh man! That's the best part about singing!
Mary J. Blige, Rolling Stone 1018

I probably think too much. I can be slow to act, relentless with perfection. I'm frivolous with smiles, though, and lavish with ink. I gravitate toward kindness and admire the humble soul. I'm patient with old people and charmed by certain felines. Integrity holds me in her trance; I value her suggestions.

Every now and then in song, like Mary Jane explains, 'I'm gone. I've lost myself.'

And found myself in every creature living.


photo by N Gallagher

Pricey habits

Luckily, I've always thought of myself as a musician more than a guitar player. Since I'm always changing as a person and my tastes are always changing, that is reflected in the ways I approach my instrument. I never feel like I'm running out of ideas, because it is clear to me -- music is infinite.
-- John Frusciante (The Red Hot Chili Peppers), Rolling Stone

If music is as infinite as the inventive mind, the same could be said of the lyric edge of song: poetry defies boundary.

When songwriters say they've hit a dry spell, there's an air of longing in their words. They miss the keen aphrodisiac, the fire, as they putter about the house, keeping up appearances. Originality feels so good on. Rehash tastes like dust.

I spoke with a former fan of mind expanding drugs, a holy father of the sixties, who reassured me it was OK I'd never done any. Never have I sought absolution for my cognitive extravagances: listening, waiting, watching, risking.

These indulgences cost nothing but time. And patience.

Their side effect is art.

Post dramatic breath

Spent from sheer elation, my essence stretched around the open air of careful minds expanding. There sits my audience a breath away from sentient cousins once removed. Its members know but dare not name a certain yen for meaning. Some of them ignore the pangs. They reach for comfort food, the confluence of friends and conversation. Heady stuff, this syrupy concoction brings them high without a whiff of expectation.

There are questions in the songs my band and I infuse into the smoke-free wonderland of sound. We are not gods and goddesses; we only whirl the orb within the dervishes' devotion. Few embrace the madness in the songs but these emerge eternities the wiser.

The nether realm entrusted to a troika such as our emancipates the neurons ever after, nature's soft impressions in the snow.

What -- again?

Yes, again. Happily. Because of the lovely encounters with good people this process brings me. Take this conversation with John, an elderly gentleman at the pool.

"Would you cast a vote for me, John?"

"Sure, I'll vote for you. You know that Mitchell's Icecream? They won an award for their store. I didn't think much of their icecream until they won the award. I went back and tried it and it was pretty good!"

Sanity bastion

Ninety nine percent of all live rock concerts are stupidly and dangerously loud... It seems the height of folly to have a musical concert be so loud one needs to wear earplugs to mute it and then hear it with the sound messed up.
Bob Ludwig, Recording 9.06

Music is not my quintessential sonic form. First comes silence. After that I'm fond of wind and water, birds and bugs do a nice soundscore and the human voice intrigues me. Music has a tendency to mess with my neurons. I never was a background music lover.

Music gets to me completely. I create it out of self defense. I have a useless mental filter. Bad music -- lacking soul and depth -- does not engender boredom in my psyche. It's more like sitting my brain cells in a waiting room with a TV set on soaps, no place to hide. Excruciating.

I want to enshrine Bob Ludwig in the sacred halls of musical integrity. No need -- with mastering credits including Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Velvet Underground, Sly and the Family Stone, Steely Dan, the Police, Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones, Dire Straits, Nirvana, the man is already there. I once assumed the point of pulsating rock concerts was to merge the listeners into a gelatinous mass of frayed ganglia, a kind of communal electro shock treatment. But if the music isn't good enough to transmogrify individuals into world class citizens, making it louder won't help.

Are we all ad-slingers on the lost highway, riding techno bare back? No. But the voices in the wilderness are few.

New Year Resolution USA

The average weights of American men (191) and women (164) have increased 25 pounds since 1960. And according to one study, in 2003, Americans' 223 million cars and light trucks burned an extra 39 million gallons of fuel for every additional pound of passenger weight. So Americans are using almost a billion gallons of gasoline more each year than they would if they were as (comparatively) svelte as they were in 1960.
-- George F. Will, The Washington Post

Storytime

I carry secrets in a baby basket. The day care kids appreciate the stuff I bring -- it seems to strike their fancy.

The cooking pot belonged to Tante Liny, who stood for hours, I imagine, stirring berries from her bushes. I can see her labels scrawled in foreign markings on the jelly jars she gave us. Gooseberry, current, raspberry sweetness from the sides scraped smooth. The lid is blue enamel, rusted in the dips and scratches. Am I not, a storygirl, enamored of this pot?

The knitting needles are my mom's. She once decided she would knit her man and children each a cardigan of wool from Nova Scotia. Deers and antlers come to mind, pine cones and snowflakes interwoven on the sleeves and backs and pockets of her intricate design. She labored and she loved and warmed us in the sheep's soft magic. Her patterns soothe me still.

The purple pouch of velvet is a gift from one dear friend and there's a wand of silvery ribbons from another, sisters who evolved with me through motherhood to worlds within the moment. Friendship permeates the tales I tell.

I cover up the basket with a loopy zigzag afghan made by Glenna. Projects, like the ones you do in day care, were this woman's middle name. How many newsprint Christmas trees did her Julie, my-best-friend, and I spray paint in Glenna's basement? Nowadays from Memphis Avenue to E 140th her easy kindness gleams at me from variegated faces.

You've only one known chance at love, a chance that lasts a lifetime. You're inclined to get it right when Aphrodite's angels travel with you.

Rules to live by

In life, nobody gets no trophies for winning. So what I've come up with is you live, and you love what you do, and you do it well, that's success. But at the same time, nobody wins life. You never see nobody jump out in the middle of Peachtree Street and say, 'Give me my trophy!' You don't win! You live and you learn, until it's over.
-- Young Jeezy, Rolling Stone

Jeezy looks good in his arm long tatoos and diamond wrist band, tucking his thumb in a low slung belt buckle. Atlanta rapper getting shot at by the Rolling Stone. Star studded famester standing tall.

One frigid Sunday my photographer takes me to the lakefront to reproduce a photo shot in August when the air was hot. The plan is simple -- he sets up the shot with his subject, moi, coated up for winter. At his sign I shed the layers, step bare feet and arms into his frame and plunge my brain into the fantasy of summer. Voila. Click click. Suit up, load out, drive home.

Sometimes life is funnier than fiction. The exact spot of the earlier shot has ceased to exist. A huge sign says DO NOT ENTER, but, doubting this, we peer beyond the boulders in our path. Nature rears its evidence -- one Erie storm too many wrecked this dock.

Cameraman and diva set up camp a little ways along the shore. Wind devours us like an ice belching dragon; our fingers freeze; our nostrils stream. The man behind the camera sets his sights. The woman leaps and dares her feckless muscles to respond to ancient memories of the sun. Exhausted by...

'Battery exhausted!' he's announcing as he clamors down the boulders to her bag. Together fearless artists -- I'm above them now, out of body picturing the pair -- prod the batteries from wee compartments. Numb fingered miracle accomplished, the bold ones soldier on.

Once again the perfect shot's a poofy breath away as gray waters crash against the pier. And once again, the battery's exhausted. Impossible! She charged it full this morning. But the camera never lies -- it is too cold to say the everready's ready. It lives too far from summer to comply.

We pack it in, load away, spin the wheels to home without a pixel to our names. I ask you brother Jeezy, are we happy? Did we win?

You lovin' what you do?

Sure.

You got your trophy, sister. Run it in.

Setting

When Kathy says, 'I like the settings of your songs,' she borrows from a theater world of furniture and lighting, chandeliers and sofas, creaking boards and thunder. She conjures atmosphere and texture, everything (besides the script of words and notes) that brings a song to fullness on a stage.

How wise, this knowing maven.

Musicians who deny we're 'acting' -- with a mild disdain for thespians, who trick us by pretending -- forget that acting is the purest form of being; it is song eluding silence, it is truth escaping numbness, it is life unmasking death.

Setting is organic to the fever of a song emerging skyward with a sinner in her arms.

Tepid skin

Despite all the controversy surrounding the veil, the woman behind it remains obscured. The debate has fixed our attention on her body or her face instead of herself, her freedom or her subjugation, her rights or their denial -- instead of who lives behind this portable wall and the moderating role she has often played in the Islamic world.

Farzaneh Melani, professor of Persian literature and women's studies at the University of Virginia

Troll the MySpace nation if you want to see the masses clothed in veils. Digital reality fixates our attention on selected features and ignores the rest. Avatars in busty-babe or handsome-hunk regalia never quite reveal what needs revealing. Why should they in this voyeuristic scape?

Walk the streets of Cleveland, Lakewood, Shaker Heights -- again you see the veil. America the beautiful is thickening the distance from the plexus to the epiderm. Our bowls of jelly jiggle when we laugh. What's more daunting to the human form, this roly-poly camouflage or yards of flowing burqa cloth?

Have you seen a live show lately? Tell me there is freedom in the land when audiences stoical and mute behold a panoply of artistry on stage, malaise ensconced in tepid praise for stunning feats of physical expression.

I'd love to see us slip outside our shadows. The concept of 'the veil' as something only worn by Muslim women blinds us to our formidable walls.

Wonder be

My brain homes in on words and music like the swarm of germinator bees returning to the hive. Sweet buzz of creation -- my lustful predilection for the muse. No two honeys taste the same. Unique as the composer's dream.

What is the role of music genres? Quell the chaos -- satisfy the need to know -- squelch the innuendo? Hard. But true.

Radio promoters, says a friend from California ("he should know") distill your style into a coded text the gurus scan to cull the honey hopeful sent by fools who drink the madness of the rose.

Entourage

Man, haunted by the world, acts. ...The works of the arist... must be interpreted as modifications of the world.
-- Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (Sartre's Saint Genet)

Sometime in my youth I read the Goethes and the Kants, played the Kabalevskys, trembled in the shadows of Monet -- and lost my nerve. Great Art had come to call and Cinderella's nasty sisters told the prince to try another hovel -- this one held no candle to his flame.

There is great art -- a world class museum here is spending millions to house it more comfortably -- and there is the endless tide of ornaments the experts' hall of genius has no use for. If you're no Rembrandt, if the muse who taps your sholder is a char maid and the art you make has all been done before -- why bother?

Because you are haunted, says Ms. Sontag, by a world that can't forget you. The incompleteness of existence asks you to make love the only way you can -- body, mind and soul. You may decline, treasures buried, will intert. Or, you can modify the world.

Who will rule your love life? The tastemaker? The genius meter? The millionaires who fund museums? Or you, the country bumpkin with your sleek bewhiskered coachmen driving Cindi to the ball?

Contingency plan

Nothing reveals man the way war does.
-- Oriana Fallaci, journalist (1929-2006)

Having never lived a war, I can't test the writer's theory: war, the ultimate revealer.

I have seen people die, in ERs, in hospital rooms, at home. Tragedy in peacetime -- mourners flee the scene into a grueling sameness fed by ghosts of plenty.

I hope Fallaci's theory is ultimately proved wrong, that war becomes a phantom in our nomenclature, that depictions of war's grit and grandeur fade from gray to black. That humans turn to art and thought and openness to paradox to crystalize their deepest doubts and dreams. That sorrow need not marry pointlessness to give its shadow to the shape of life.

I wonder this: once art and culture rise to their revealer role, do war and war's accomplices reluctantly stand down?

Heartland security

On the corner of Fairmount and Green there used to stand my heart. I didn't want to see the twisted branches laced into a heart against the winter sky -- cliché abandoned me when I became an artist, or so I claimed. But when I waited for the light to change a million times I failed to not look up and see, unerringly, that kindred shape against the gray.

With summertime I took my heart on faith. A flush of green obscured the tree's design but I drove by unworried.

One day, my heart, my faith, was whisked away. The tree was gone, a mound of dirt remaining. Great wells of nothing gaped at me like traffic lights that yammered in the wind.

What was the point, this massacre? Who had stolen virtue from the womb? From whence betrayal this obscene?

Time that followed brought its erie changes. Shiny stanchions black as oil erected overnight began their vadaresque intrusions. Metal beams shot out across the roadway. Lights were hung that dwarfed the feeble fixtures they replaced.

I find myself imagining a stuffy room of conscience bound officials taking stock of dangers on their turf, calling in the experts -- upgrades recommended, moneys allocated, papers signed and notarized, security assured. Civic leaders meet the starry night with conscience clean, virtue spent and not a thought for what they lay to waste.

I drive along from time to time beneath the deadly safety.

I mourn the photograph I didn't take.

Aboriginal enactment

Wake
take a pee
sleep
wishing day break speedy.

Walk the ancient hallways
European old New Orleans.
Kids in smudgy faces
wound with grins
politely let you pass.

You need the door
but doors are blocked or locked
or leading down to rail-less stairs
you ask the office workers
and the dean of hope
the pale clerk in rimmed glasses
people nudge you
one by one.

Women speak from beards and heavy braids.
Their skin is earth.
They parley Boston and New Amsterdam
the street is only motion
yeast arising
termites hatching
rubies boiling
workers oozing royal jelly
to their future queen.

You find your music store
pour it in glass bottles
which you leave behind.

Language in a vacuum.

Sontag

Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
-- Susan Sontag