A Week at Drew

     Sometimes life is mostly painful though there is no discernible reason why it ought to be.  I am not sure whether this state of mind that I often find myself in is a blessing or a curse.  I choose to believe it is the former. 
     Three years ago I spent a week at a writing conference at Drew University "Sentences 2,"  not knowing it was happening I missed "1."  It got me writing and thinking.  Listened to writers read their works and loved it (though I didn't care for the YA author).  Wrote in workshops and began a short story that may turn into something, we'll see.  One author popped for me: Mark Jacobs (Forty Wolves).  He drank Yerba Mate tea ritually having learned its powers while in the Peace Corps in Paraguay.  I drank Yerba Mate for a caffeine buzz when I was in San Francisco in the summer of 1970.  The difference was striking: he was enveloped by an ancient spiritual culture and I was getting hopped up to speed through life.  I'm thinking he had it more right than I did.
     Anyway, he seemed to me to be hung with a great sadness, like he had seen too much. 

     When I lived in the City (NYC) I liked to wander about, ride in the subway, blend into the machine of mass humanity that fluxed through the veins of grey concrete.  But somedays I was naked in the streets, shaken with empathy, and fearful that any moment I might suddenly burst into tears, overwhelmed by the pain that sweat from each passing being.  These days I tried to stay at home, I was seeing too much.

     Mark Jacobs had lived among people who are close to nature and poor so they had few resources at their disposal to defend themselves from nature and those who lived in plenty made sure it stayed that way.  He read to us, a mountain in tears pleading for humanity, our humanity we who live in the land of plenty, to do, something.  I thought he had caught his great sadness from his years in the Peace Corps and in the Foreign Service seeing how the other half lives.
     He said to me and Renee, "I am not the man I was" with such profound sadness that I longed to comfort him, but I didn't think that proper.  His confession had arisen from a discussion of the trials that had been visited on our children, his and ours.  (This would never have happened had Renee not been with me.  She shares the details of our life with anyone she thinks could commiserate, it helps her, and them.)  Yes, I too was not the man I was, having lived for a few years in the madness of grief, with only the occasional medicated relief, I was a ragged man.  Jacobs had not caught his sadness overseas he had bred it from his own loins and it flowed into him through a cord that can never be severed.
     But one sorrow informs another.  He had seen the struggles of the "less fortunate" which inspired empathy and he had seen the struggles of his children which gave it flesh.  Life hung heavy on him.
     The conference had given me a hunger for more and a sense that our private sorrows could be made to serve some public good.  I couldn't wait until the next year, Sentences 3.  But it was not to be for me.  I was working and could not take two consecutive weeks off (the family would go to Wildwood the week after.)   I spent that week of work engaged in matters of no matter, filled with a resentment that would not leave me until I was relieved from the job and joined Sentences 4 and learned what I must do to feed the hunger.
     

Growing Up, Letting Go and Knowing Where To

     A word about the evil empire and then back to it.  Being strong with the force and being strong with oblivion are more alike than it might seem at first blush.  Both conditions cede control of the conscious will over to another power.  The Star Wars power was an unnamed state of being wherein one lets go the consciousness of self and becomes in tune with a benevolent force that exists both within and without the individual.  It at once makes the self and the universe richer, more complete.  Something in us longs for union with it and something in us resists.  The former is a complete mystery to me and because I need to name it I call it God.  The latter is also a mystery but is more familiar, it is self-absorption, self-destruction, the hubritic need to control the forces of the universe with our tiny little minds.
     We (I imagine most of us) see how foolish this is and yet we persist.  We cling to our will, trying to force the mysteries of the universe into an order dictated by the boundaries of our own beings.  It is difficult for us to accept that the order is not a part of us but that we are a part of it whether we will it or no.  We can be dragged to it: a trantrumatic child in a futile fight, or we can give ourselves over to it and achieve the bliss we long for.  Of course it is not this simple, though I wonder if it is for angels and saints.  I have fought the universe armed with whiskey and the like and lost again and again, learning nothing from my failures but anger.  I have set this anger on the world without me and failing there too have given up the fight, I have gone blank.
     Pogo said, "I have met the enemy, and it is us."  The evil empire is within, oblivion helps us to forget this for some moments though the crash is hard.  Back to the topic.
     My sister recently returned from her annual trip to the Berkshires where she swims in art.  She told me of a revelation (though she did not call it such, it was one to me).  She talked about working to let things go, saying something like she had been trying to gather and hold on when she should have been trying to jettison.  There is so much that we cling to, that clings to us, it keeps us earthbound.  My mother used to say, "Let go and let God."  Yes, but easier said than done.
     Some things stick with you.  Forty years ago or so Jimmy Toomey, who had been a smoker and a grand stoner and likely a pretty hard drinker in his day too, though I have no evidence of this last, told me he had stopped all of it.  I was amazed and impressed and wanted to know how he had done it.  He said, "It just fell away."  I figured there was more to it, I knew he had done Transcendental Meditation or something with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and I figured there was some sort of secret understanding he could not impart to the unenlightened so I let it go.
     Well obviously I did not let it go because here I am thinking of it still trying to understand.  My mother had a theory that we are bound to keep reliving experiences until we learn from them what we are meant to learn.  Mostly this was a way of explaining why the same bad shit (my word, not hers) kept happening to us.  She also said that we had a choice to learn the hard way or the easy way.  It was her opinion that I had chosen the former, she was right.
     The point of all this is that I have let drop the shield of booze I used in my battle with the universe and am feeling some discomfort at times now but am learning that the universe which I thought sought to buffet me is really seeking embrace.  Could this be the path to sweet oblivion?
    

Forgetting, Remembering, Forgetting Again

     So I was adrift.  Waking in the morning, feeling good for an hour or two after coffee, washing, shaving, working, coming home and watching the clock, waiting for the time to come when I could return to the temporary oblivion of sleep.  Whiskey helps.
     There were times, often, when I weighed the options: do something, do nothing, don't choose.  I could not think of any reason for this ennui other than the usual reason for ennui: I stopped doing, then wanting, then being.  There were moments when I saw some hope, when I heard a song that took me away, when I was at church, when the morning and the coffee and the sky and the birds all sang in me but these were moments without substance, I could not see that they were the unasked for blessings that abound for those in tune.  Again, I don't know why I forget what I sometimes have known, why I forget entirely what it is that tunes me.
     While forgetting is the cause of my having gone astray it is not the first cause; it is a passive symptom of my own personal original sin: knowing what makes me happy and what makes me sad and choosing the latter.  (I am working on a theory of individualized original sin for those who believe in God and such things. A perfect God could have made perfect beings but decided not to.  If He/She has gone to this much trouble to make imperfection, perfection being the norm, then it seems reasonable to assume that He/She has made many different types of imperfection, hence a variety of original sins.  But I haven't really thought this out yet and besides this has gotten far too heady and off the topic for me.)
     Empirical evidence:  most mornings when  I woke up and for most of the day, often till the end of work when I was driving home I was resolved not to drink booze, then various discomforts psychic and physical convinced me that what I needed was a dose of medicine: Jameson 12 year old is very fine medicine indeed and whatever wrinkles remained could be smoothed out with a bottle or two of Guinness extra stout and for good measure, as well as to secure sleep, some red wine, then sleep, repeat.
     Looking at what I've written it is clear that even the most obtuse observer would be able to formulate a preliminary diagnosis for my ennui saying, "Well that's not a good way to live, maybe that's your problem." or such like.  And in truth, I often thought to say such myself but the allure of oblivion was strong in me which sounds like what was said of Luke Skywalker, the force being strong in him but my gift was unlikely to help me defeat the evil empire and besides I didn't have the energy.
     The evil empire:  Having grown up in the sixties, I was born in 49, I knew all about the evil empire that scooped up people my age, disproportionately black, and sent them to kill Asians in rice patties.  I took to the streets, to guerrilla theatre, to sit ins, to teach ins, to rage against the machine, which is now a band that won't let the Republicans play their music.  I had a cause and a purpose, we had a cause and a purpose but it went terribly wrong, ultimately sex, drugs, and rock and roll no matter how delightful were not enough.  We lost our way and those who believed that ass-kissing obeisance was the righteous rite of passage until they too rose to become the ass that was kissed eventually took over, i.e. Karl Rove et.al.
     So I knew what to fight but was too lazy to do the heavy lifting.  How this all came about and how I eventually returned to the fray will have to wait for another day as this is as long as I would like it to be today.
    
    

Begun Again, having learned a few things about myself.

     With the full understanding that I am likely just talking to myself I resume my blog.  My disappearance was the result of two, unrelated, causes.  The first is a syndrome that no doubt has a psych name but I don't know it.  This is what happened:
     The exploration of the "Locomotion"  began to grow in breadth and significance beyond my ability to keep up with it for various reasons which I have forgotten.  Somewhere between my conscious and my subconscious there was a deal made that I would not post anything new until I had completed that line of thought.  In the meantime other demands called to me: dissertation prospectus, a writing conference, the compilation of a book of poetry, sorting out my income tax, bills, family events, etc.  So I put it off and by doing so put time betwen my intent and its end.
     As is often with me and I imagine others when time is so put, the return to the pursuit of the end becomes more fearful as it begins to work on the imagination: was it all folly, did Google dump me for inactivity, does anybody care, why am I even bothering to write when I can spend the rest of my days peacefully awaiting death.  These sorts of thoughts.
     Earlier I said that the two causes were unrelated but I'm likely wrong about that as I see now some connection between the state of mind occasioned by delay and what subsequently enveloped me.  I had a mid-life crisis.  This being my second I recognize the symptoms and ultimate result.  The first occurred to me in my fortieth year.  My wife was pregnant, I felt keenly that I had not accomplished that which I ought to have accomplished by that point of my life (though I knew not what that was), a deadly sameness had swallowed me.  I had to change something.  I was unable to afford a hot red convertible or any convertible for that matter and in truth I didn't care much for cars, my wife was adamantly opposed to my growing a beard or shaving my head, I couldn't decide on a tattoo, and I thought I would look silly with an earring or any other decorative piercing, so I quit smoking.
     I had never gone a day in my life from the age of thirteen till then without a cigarette.  Smoking is a pattern of life I was very fond of and I knew this fondness would never leave me, I liked everything about it except the end: cancer and/or emphysema.  And while these realities were troublesome I felt the tradeoff was worth it.  But the psychic need to make some big change and the thought that when this latest child, our fourth, was twenty I would be sixty and having by then smoked for forty-seven years, having a history of weak lungs (my mother never gave me permission to smoke because of that), and having Irish heritage on both sides (they all seem to die of cancer), convinced me to stop.  Not quit, stop, with the intention of some time in the future resuming the romance with tobacco.  I have a cousin, Joanne, who also stopped with the intent to once again resume, I wonder how many others have done so just to keep the door open?
     But this is off the topic to wit: why I had been so long away from the blog and why I have now returned.
     Mid-life crisis II:  While the first crisis might have been aptly named, as twice forty is eighty, a reasonable life expectancy though beyond what any known male relative of mine has been able to achieve (seventy-eight is the record so far) the second crisis, coming at the age of sixty-three cannot rightly be called mid, unless I live to one-hundred-twenty-six, an unlikely prospect.  I am working on a theory of serial deaths and rebirths but until I have it a bit more solid in my head I'm going to go with a variation of the common phrase.
     This mid-life rebirth followed, as did the first one (I), a period of drifting.  Now I am one committed to drifting and under normal circumstances would be content to drift but there are different states of drifting and I was in one that would be more correctly called being adrift.  The distinction lies in the end of each state: the former has some intended end, the latter does not.  Let me explain, but first I will post this because it has grown as long as I would like for a single entry.  I will return much sooner than the five months previous pause.
    

The Locomotion, Part 2: Detroit

    Listening to the song while driving a slow road that ran beside a railroad track I had a vision of the streets of Detroit filled with people dancing, a Motown carnival celebrating life before death, like the carnival of Mardi Gras celebrating life before the death of Lent, the season of ashes.  But we are dancing on the ashes of a city that fueled the smoldering groin of America with song and with cars.  We shine, our sweat pouring from defiant flesh:, ash and sweat mingling, making the barren, rich: flush with life.
     It is this dream of resurrection that the song sings in me and I believe it had to have been written there, in Detroit.  And though I know there are facts which contradict this, that prove it wrong, I choose to believe in a truth without basis in fact.
     I used to know two bright and beautiful women from Detroit who told me that they used to like to get high and drive in rush hour traffic there.  I never knew quite how to catalog this information.  I could not understand the motivation.  I have been in rush hour traffic in New York and New Jersey and have found no joy in it and certainly no reason to intensify the experience chemically.  These women seemed otherwise quite sane, so I couldn't dismiss this report as lunacy but rather sought to find some key to understanding or at least appreciation.
     We carry mysteries with us all our lives, questions raised but not resolved.  They linger sometimes for many years before something occurs to make them make sense.  This was a forty year mystery made sensible, if not entirely comprehensible, by a song.
     Detroit's vitality, its being, is a throbbing engine, it's wheels on macadam.   Cars are the blood that courses through its veins, they are life.  To be a part of a car and that car a part of the rush of life is to become one with the soul of the city, an experience I never had but think it might be akin to walking the rush hour streets of Manhattan.  This I have known and I have lost myself in the flow of humanity that pulses with the energy breathing from the stone and steel of the millions of souls whose bodies built this great gray machine, becoming the thing itself.
     This is where the Locomotion brought me, to Detroit., in a crowd, dancing.
    
    
    

The Loco-Motion Part one: The revolution

     Of the three songs that have adhered to each other in my mind in this past while: Ooby Dooby, Hokey Pokey, and The Locomotion, the last evokes the greatest complexity of imagination.  I knew it in my youth and no doubt danced to it, summer night skies, loud speakers, macadam, girls, but when I heard it driving to work one morning it lifted me up in ways I could not have known when young. 
     I became one among many dancing in the streets of Detroit stirring up the ashes of dashed hopes, breathing them in, tasting the bitter joke of unkept promises, and laughing at it because the spirit of man cannot be crippled by misfortune or controlled by corporate exploitation.  They stuff our mouths with death, they use us and toss us aside, yet we dance.  Joyful and defiant we celebrate what we are, what they can never be: human.
     In a life grown complex, in an America where big is beautiful and small is fodder for the Corporopolitical machine the hungers of humanity are a nuisance that must be demonized by Religiocorporate puppets who have sold their conscience for cash.  Passion has become a dirty word.  But I forget myself and have fallen into a Marxist rant remembered, unbidden, from those days in the late sixties when I believed in movements.
     Experience quickly made it clear to me that institutions are inherently inhuman, that those gathered under a banner or a flag abandon reason, reflection, and compassion.  It matters little whether you call it "The Movement" as we did back then or you call it Evangelical Christianity the goals are the same: destroy all that does not agree with it.  It is that part of us that will give rise to a Hitler, a Stalin, a Pol Pot, a Pope Gregory IX.  It is the abrogation of our own humanity, replacing our personal passions with institutional imperatives, becoming a part of the beast of the machine.
     But the truth is none of these subsequent reflections were a part of the experience of The Locomotion in my car on the way to work.  No, there was no politics in it, there was only the longing to dance like a fool in the streets, to be with others celebrating life.

    

Back to the blog: The Ooby Dooby

     I cannot say for certain that I have ever seen the Ooby Dooby done but there was one night in east Texas outside of Tyler when I witnessed, if not the thing itself, then something much like it.  It was in a private club that had, as far as I could understand, only two requirements for membership: to be white and to bring your own bottle, I qualified.  The place itself was unadorned, more of a hangout for working stiffs in their 20's, a place to dance and drink.  I was enjoying the latter when the Ooby Dooby moment came.
     There were two young women on the dance floor wearing the smallest, whitest, tightest pants I had ever seen worn in public.  The effect of the white was enhanced by the blacklight that was ubiquitous in that era.  So I, moderately oiled with gin, sat rapt, mesmerized by the fulness of these twin orbs that leapt and shook to the music in the hazy light.  They called me.
     It has been my good fortune to have a keen perception of the inherent decorum of any of the drinking establishments I have visited.  I know what is and what is not acceptable and have been able to avoid confrontation.  So I knew that no matter how much it seemed to me that these lovely young women appeared to beckon, it would be a serious breach of etiquette to approach them.  In one scenario I would slip onto the dance floor ask to join one or the other and dance with her, and talk, and share a drink, and perhaps step outside to share a moment of privacy, whereupon the local boys would beat the shit out of me to preserve the honor of their ladyfolk and my membership would be suspended.  I kept my seat.
     I chose to content myself with an appreciation of the aesthetics and the sociological import of this most delightful display that had all the elements of the Ooby Dooby: "wiggling to the left, wiggling to the right, a wiggle and a shake like a big rattlesnake."  Yes, I am convinced that this was it: a rockabilly ritual whose meaning could only be truly perceived by those in the cultural milieu of its origin.  Oh, I could tease it out intellectually, put aside the lust it inspired in me to imagine what long term contract the viewer was invited to consider, what mixed joy and sadness lay before them in this country that was too big for comfort, that would always drive them to seek some small nest of joy to shield them from the immense, uncaring land.  I could think it but never feel it.
     And yet, when I stumble upon the Ooby Dooby again it makes me dance, even alone, as I imagine I am one of them, that my heart beats to that rhythm, that life comes struttin' across the dancefloor lifting me from the ordinary to the divine.