Our Text This Morning Comes from Sting's Epistle to the Yrekans

A terrifying confession. Very few people have approached me and offered to explain life, and when they have I wasn't paying attention. More planning the next thing I was going to say. So my sources of wisdom may be a little haphazard.
But I remember reading an interview with Sting when I was a kid, maybe in Spin magazine or maybe it was Musician. Not Rolling Stone because there were lots of pictures. Anyways.

He said, in text that sort of Alice-in-Wonderlanded around these b&w photos of him cavorting in beret and hoodie on some Caribbean island that has since, ich scheiss dich nicht, been more or less alemonaded by hurricane, that Great Leafblower of Jehovah. He said that he, I think it was, "honed his musicianship" during the frequent periods when he was uncreative and more or less depressed. He said that learning was what made the pain of life bearable. And I thought, man, what a bleak vision of the world. Isn't there ice cream and stuff? Can't you always make something up and play it? And there you are with your upscale Wild Rumpus catered and you still can't be brave about the Darkness?

But I get it now, Sting, and I have come here to apologize. Or no, you're right that the tone is wrong for an apology. But I see now that you were being brave, not least because you were saying this to a rock journalist who I'm sure did all he could not to elicit this sort of thing. And that you seem not to be a (conventionally) nice or modest person is neither here nor there. The origins of our unhappiness may ultimately not matter a damn, though the moral high ground from which we view the unhappiness of others feel ever so firm and fecund underfoot. The Great Leafblower's extension cord is long, the workings of its Patient and Impersonal Bellows obscure, eventually the Toddler of Fate will find an outlet and figure out the plug. And though our cabana face placidly to Leewards, yet shall the wind march through like Sherman.
Not our fault; Nature of Things.

So let us hone our musicianship while we wait for inspiration, brethren and sistern. Let us not seek too far for pattern and cause in our rubble. And let us make of our profane jobs an holy work unto the Cosmos.
Amen.
[photo: Sting doggedly multi-tasks his way through an oppressive Mediterranean morning.]

Privacy?

So, Dude, would it be more conducive to the free exchange of ideas here if we shut this blog down to outside viewers? Your black butterfly poem should be in here, I think. It's important to me that this place be as free of impediments to thorough honesty as possible. I don't mind visitors, but maybe you do? Just checking.

Stuff I, V, Want to Do

1. Become 90% food self-sufficient. Growing fruit and vegetables, raising chickens, sheep, and pigs, hunting and fishing. The other 10% is for the wonderful exotics: seafood, chocolate, coffee, wine, that kind of thing.

2. Build my own house. I can't afford my mortgage, and I have a hunger to make stuff with my hands. I always have. I have almost everything I need to convert trees into lumber, and I certainly have the expertise. Now I just need the land and the time and the money for the stuff I can't make.

3. Move to Boulder. To my own land. This is a prerequisite for items 1 and 2.

4. Somehow overcome the dread, anxiety, and homicidal fury I feel when dealing with finances, especially taxes, which are killing me.

5. Figure out a way to have conversations with my family about what really matters to me. I have responded to being outnumbered by being silent, conciliatory, and neutral.

6. Finish my songs, orchestrate them for a small band of real musicians, and record us. I accept the possibility that I am delusional here, but I think some of my songs are really good, but definitely limited by my lack of proficiency on the guitar.

7. Learn how to write a narrative song.

8. Finish and publish my eccentric illustrated book about the sacralization of food, shelter, and love.

9. Either figure out how to act on what I've learned about my neuroses or quit therapy.

10. Figure out how to simplify my life, and really do it. I have too much going on, and I recoil from too much of it. One thing at a time.

11. Start painting again, specifically this idea I've been carrying around for years: a series of still-lifes and a series of portraits that get to that line between depiction and reportage. Y'know. THAT line.

12. Make some kind of indelible mark so that people will love, respect, and revere me. That's actually the motivation behind the music and book stuff, to be honest. So maybe here's a worthier goal: get to where I don't need the recognition and can just do creative work for its own sake, or maybe for ethical and aesthetic reasons. Be a self-starter.

Myles Murphy and the Build-Your-Own-America Kit

When I was in my early twenties a towering and ambiguous friend sent me a peculiar present. Three 90 minute cassette tapes recorded front and back, more than four hours of original music. Titles were recorded on the folded up paper inserts but outside that, partly visible from the outside of the case, there was also a large geometric pattern done in water colors and cut into three parts with 1/3 included in each case. And the most amazing part was the box. The cassettes were--entombed? enshrined? installed?--in a triangular cardboard box that sat upright like a pyramid, painted all over with trippy neo-Navajo designs in red and black and green.

And on the tapes were these brilliant meandering songs, mostly fragments of legends about odd characters. Dan the Pharmacist Fan, Elvis whom everybody loves, the Thunderbird. But also there was ambient sound, bird song, car engines, the sounds of things being found or knocked over or thrown together, rattlings and shudderings and quaverings of all kinds, the equivalent of thinking aloud. The vocals were not only sung but also moaned, whined, slurped bits of odd dialogue read in hysterical voices from all distances, from around corners, through improbable substances. Sent to me on my birthday. The whole thing was a token of grudging respect, or a capitulation to the need to be understood, much more than it had anything to do with affection. Or at least with personal affection. I was something of a second or third-string recipient but was finally deemed the most likely to understand the music.

I think maybe I do. But it took years for me to be able to listen to it as a whole thing. Partly because the sound quality is very bad but as much because of the heterogeneous, meandering quality of it. It kept needling me, more or less night and day, with its prickly brilliance, its oblique self-importance, its heedless facticity. Myles had made this music and given it physical form as well and now it irreducibly and essentially Was. It contained not only music but Facts of all sorts, pleasant and unpleasant. It is a shrine to omnivorous Americanness. And I now think I see why it was such an affront to me at the time. At a time when I was very self-protective and assembling my own fantasy version of the world, The Box accepted and held out to me everything: drugs, homelessness and insanity, bravado, self-destructiveness, restlessness. Cruelty as well as tenderness, tedium as well as wit, discord and melody, huge raw civic conscience and the anger that arises in those who have it, pettiness and charity.

So I played the first of these tapes as my daughter Emma and I drove down to the Smithsonian American Art Museum this morning to walk through another brilliant and heterogeneous version of America. I turned Dolby on and off, fiddled with bass and treble, gave her synopses, repeated good lines, trying to make it clear. I wheeled her chair past the faces of John Brown and Joseph Smith, the redwhite&blue collage with Obama's hopeful face, busts of Lincoln and Jackson, WPA cityscapes, weathervanes and walking sticks, statesmen and madmen and prophetesses and kept women, Sodomites, saints, suicides and dandies. All the parts have to be there. And arriving back home I see that my room is another version of the Build-Your-Own-America Kit, and my heart yet another.

Yoga Lessons

Here's what I've learned in three years of about twice-weekly, quite consistent yoga: When I face difficulty, as in an uncomfortable stretch or balance, my mind tends to recoil. It tries to get me to stop. Every time I choose to continue, which involves observing my mind's recoil as a more or less interesting fact while patiently explaining to myself that no harm will come of this, and some benefit will, I become better at choosing to continue. There is a sort of mental muscle that gets practiced, and the very same muscle is what is needed to be present, to 'lean into' difficult challenges of all kinds. Getting verbally assaulted used to occasionally bring me to physical violence and later gnawing anxiety and self-loathing. Now, when my insane neighbor barks something caustic at me, I am much more able to stand there and watch him yammer until he runs out of steam, and then go into the house and ignore him. Very effective, and easier on me. I am far more flexible than I was a few years ago, and stronger, and I have repaired some chronic misalignments that were gradually limiting my movement and enjoyment of life, but the most important thing I've learned from yoga is the difference between pain [what circumstances create] and suffering [what my mind makes out of pain], and how to manage my experience day to day with relative equanimity. I'll be damned if I don't sound just like all them yoga books. It works. It is strange at first, or was to me, but it is the most down-to-Earth pragmatic mind training, strange maybe because I was raised to believe that my feelings are the product of my circumstances, that my mental state is an unequal and opposite reaction to exterior conditions. I am relearning, and this has been a clear path to happiness. I also have a long way to go.

What's a Build Your Own America Kit?

How about a sorta divination matrix for a Build Your Own America Kit? Take the personal and cultural conditions that are most American and write them around the perimeter of one of those spin-the-arrow things they used to have for pre-digital games. Maybe: innovation opposite corporate slavishness, enthusiasm opposite victimhood, appetite opposite provincialism, faith opposite certitude, politically correct self righteous liberalism opposite know-nothing christian conservatism ... I'm being sloppy here, but sorta like that. In another concentric circle write the most American products: pop music, cars, guns, electronic gadgets, high journalism, comic books, junk food, talk radio, opinion, pornography, self-sufficiency mags, high-tech military stuff, etc... On a third concentric circle you write the things you are interested in producing: poems, essays, songs, foods, stuff like that. Then you spin the arrow once and get, say, provincialism. You spin it again and get, say, talk radio. Your third spin produces song. Then you write a song about someone listening to talk radio in a samll town. Or three other spins tell you to write poem about a self-righteous smartypants liberal finding Jesus. THis was more coherent before I started writing it. THe idea is that you basically make your own recombinant DNA for Home-Built Americans.

Or maybe a set of paper dolls and clothes that allow you to mix and match what is not mixable and matchable in America: a middle American guy with gun and an Obama T-shirt. High campiness possible here, too, which feels like maybe what America most is. I love how iconic things become ironic things when you change their context. The Marlboro man reframed is Brokeback. The Village People play straight, but the context makes them queer, doubly, for playing straight. Black conservatives are endlessly fascinating. I met a Navajo man in Boston, long black brain, silver and turquoise, boots, eariongs, all that, but turns out he was a manager at the Massachusetts MV. That was very American. I once saw a 6'8" very muscular man with long blond braids and ahuge yellow handlebar mustache wearing very wworn buckskins and fur walking down Newbury street. I figured he was either some kind of fetishist or an honest to Thor Viking. Where else?

FWIW.

V.

Stuff I Want To

1. Learn Spanish so I can travel easily and so I can read Roberto Bolaño properly.
2. Go on a walking tour of someplace in these United States. Unite them: they are for me mainly a series of disunited airports looking out over identical barrens. Walk the Pacific Crest Trail or walk through southern Utah until parts of my body start to naturally slough off.
3. Write. Keep writing.
4. Learn a lot more songs from my own Personal American Songbook. I love how you can whip out someone famous's beautiful obscure song and it sounds like you just found it under a rock in the parking lot but it opens up worlds. To me, anyway.
5. Make beautiful coffee carefully every day. This is sort of a cheater one to help keep up esprit de core in the chill shadow of some of the harder ones. But unshallow.
6. Be conciliatory less often or at least not out of cowardice or reserve. Sheesh.
7. Learn to fecken cook more than a scant dozen things out of my own damaged noggin.
8. Yogayogayoga.
9. Commit passages to memory that transport me when I read them. They're so useful once you've got them. They can keep teaching you.
10. Talk about what I want to talk about even when others find it a bit boring or bewildering. Not to be rude or opaque, but just enough that I don't feel inaudible and fall altogether silent.
11. Keep working on the Build-Your-Own-America Kit. Whatever that is. Figure out what that is.
12. Write a book. Maybe. (Refer to 5 for courage.)
13. Follow Gary Snyder's excellent advice to learn at least one form of traditional divination. I'll tell you why later. No, you tell me when I'm going to tell you. See there?
14. Learn the names and habits of more plants. Learn more about geomorphology. Stuff like that so that when I return to the dirt we'll be on speaking terms.
15. Walk an hour a day even when I don't feel like it. The rhythm of walking straightens out my other rhythms real nice.
16. Write songs. Write bad ones. Dare them to suck, suck, suck. Relish the good ones. Play them to my darkness.
17. Ride proud in the humble body.
18. Return often to good friends among books and music. What's with this preoccupation with always learning stuff I'm going to forget anyway?
19. And conversely, learn omnivorously. Not stuff necessarily, just learn. Follow the faint buzz, that kind of learning. Keep at whatever's forming. New synaptic connections are the cambium of the soul.
20. Love right.
21. Plan practical things competently.
22. And conversely, give up on the trying to control the future. I'm resisting aphorism here, because anything you say about this should sound like benevolent chaos.