Stream of Consciousness

The Wind, Wild, and Harry Houdini

The weather has whipped itself into a frenzy again. Predicted in the newspaper, of course, but the reality is always so different from the threat and the promise. So here we are now with wild winds and craziness on an otherwise ordinary Wednesday night as I try to think about entering the mindset of an eccentric, either Harry Houdini, or Frank Gilmore (father of Gary) who had more than a few compelling reasons as to why he may have been Houdini's illegitimate son. Johnson Creek rises as I type. The Gilmore family lived there not that long ago in the cosmic scheme of things. Today at the P.O., in a glass case, a brown stuffed bear with "Harry Houdini" emblazoned across his chest. Maybe it is impossible to write anything authentic in the 21st century...

BobFest

Getting myself in the mood for I'm Not There, the movie kind of, sort of about the life and times and metamorphoses of Bob Dylan which opened in Portland today. I don't know how much Bob we have on the new iPod. I started with Blood on the Tracks first. Blonde on Blonde is next and, if necessary, we can go to the actual CD archives after that. I figure by the time we get to the movie—maybe Friday some time while everyone else is dropping because they shop—I can be thoroughly immersed in the eras of his oeuvre.

Ah, Blood on the Tracks. What can be said? I know the music so well it's almost like I don't even remember what the words are saying, they just come out of my singing mouth. It's a soundtrack most definitely of a time of change and questioning and discovery in my own life, freshman or sophomore year of college in Oberlin, Ohio. I'm not sure which of those years it came out but I do recall grooving to it, over and over and over again, with G. In fact, I'm thinking it may have been Blood on the Tracks that sent me back into the Dylan archives to maybe for the first time in my life, really listen to his music, really take it deep within. Because I was too young during his freewheeling and highway 66 days, still stuck in an adolescent groove of the Beatles and the Monkees with a dash of Motown sprinkled in. Only at college, with new musical tutors, and later over that summer I lived in Cambridge, did I range not only musically forward (Bowie, Lou Reed, Roxy Music, TRex) but back as well, mining what I'd once missed and coming up with pure, iconic gold, a song that got in with the white and red cells of my bloodstream and never left. Like If You See Her, Say Hello:

We had a falling out like lovers often will. And to think of how she left that night, it still brings me a chill. And though our separation, it pierced me to the heart, she still lives inside of me, we've never been apart.

Reading Chekhov...

I just finished "The Cherry Orchard" as we are seeing it next Saturday at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. I'd forgotten how much I enjoy reading his plays as well as short stories. And how reading him transports me out of my petty 21st century life, and somehow, in the universality of their wisdoms, calm me down. He records what he sees—the actions and emotions of human beings in all their foolishness and frailty, in all their grasping and aspirations and depths. There's an absence of that peculiarly American brand of striving—after success or money, to change oneself, to be somehow different (better?) than you are—and more acceptance of one's station in life, one's state of affairs, the unchangeability of human fate. And yet, the play resonates, carries a bigger message above and beyond the petty machinations of a wealthy Russian landowning family forced to sell the orchard on their faliing estate. For the, the future is necessarily different than the present and the past, and change is certainly something that feels to be a guarantee even when they remain foolish and petty and blindly unwilling to embrace it. His are tales for all of us—cautionary and yet consoling, honest and true to the fallible human lives he observes.

Saturday, Taking Stock

I wake up early again, do my morning writing (the usual nonsense, really, I wonder if they serve any purpose) and check e-mail where not one but two friends send me the thrilling news that Karl Rove may be indicted next week. A chink in the armor so that maybe there will be more speaking truth to power, something I wrote about this morning as personally needing a bit more of in this American life. These days when a performer from Comedy Central is channeling the zeitgeist of those of us who have to be in the majority, wingnuts and moonbats aside, when that's where truth, veiled behind jokes and laughter.

Highlights of my less-than-exciting week as I make my my way back to writing after the disruption travel always is for me:

--Back to work, to writing, with Balthazar the whip-cracking cat, ever eager to meow at me to get busy so he can sit on my lap while I type.

--Finding the lotus vine and the double-blossomed wave petunia at Shonnard's nursery and hanging them outside: sure sign spring has arrived. And the opulent fuchsia at Homegrown, so huge it's hard to find the dirt in the pot when it's time to water.

--Bruce Springsteen's new album, We Shall Overcome. Songs made famous by Pete Seeger, brought back to life and zip in this live recording with a backup band of fiddles, banjo, accordion, who knows what else, to make it all sound rollicking, thunderous, joy-filled, nostalgic and alive. I'd forgotten how much I like the old songs, even ones we learned back in Central Elementary School, Erie Canal and Shenandoah.

--Browsing through the pile of periodicals that accumulated in our absence. No Depression, the AAA magazine, Portland Monthly, The Sun, The Nation, Poets & Writers. Just letting myself sit in the sun on the deck and skim, not feeling like I have to even want to take every word in.

--Stopping by the Gathering Together farm store in Philomath for in-season organic produce—salad mix, oak leaf lettuce, golden chard, shallots, carrots and zucchini, a purple onion, a giant garlic bulb—to begin to re-fill our very empty, post-vacation refrigerator.

--Hauling the small purple table and the orange and green 1950s patio chairs—all spray painted in these new, lively colors by J. last year—from the winter-moldy garage to a spot in the sun on the deck.

More Rumi for New Orleans

This has been a battering week. Much we knew, suspected about the state of our union, the rift in the social fabric of this country, the gap between the haves and the have nots has been thrown up before our eyes and for all the world to see. The charade of government shown to be more horrible, corrupt and uncaring than I'd ever dreamed or dared imagine. Paralyzing bureaucrats waiting on paper work. Incompetent political appointees getting disaster news a day late, in a newspaper? Finger-pointing and blaming rather than taking responsibility. Obscene obsession with political capital leads to shameless, callous disregard for human life. Poll numbers over pulling people to safety from attics and roofs. Complete and utter dereliction of duty. The emperor with no clothes, no shred of decency and compassion, no human heart. And now displaced people, fractured families, disrupted lives, the ruin of a singular city.

The pain and anguish of what has been allowed to happen, so much preventable, will be with this country for a long, long time. Many wise words have spilled the banks of Lake Pontchartrain into the streets of New Orleans to try and make sense of it. I'm reading Rumi -- I think these poems honor the spirit of what is/was/is New Orleans:

Some nights stay up till dawn,
as the moon sometimes does for the sun.
Be a full bucket pulled up the dark way
of a well, then lifted out into light.

Dance, when you're broken open.
Dance, if you've torn the bandage off.
Dance in the middle of the fighting.
Dance in your blood.
Dance, when you're perfectly free.

From Rumi's Unfold Your Own Myth

These stanzas spoke to me this morning. Thanks to Coleman Barks for his wonderful translation as always:

"But don't be satisfied with stories, how things
have gone with others. Unfold
your own myth, without complicated explanation,
so everyone will understand the passage,
We have opened you.

Start walking toward Shams. Your legs will get heavy
and tired. Then comes a moment
of feeling the wings you've grown,
lifting."

Mary Oliver, The Buddha's Last Instruction

I just love this poem. Having just recently (finally) been traveling in Northern Thailand, where nearly every village has its own wat (temple) -- replete with a statue of the Buddha -- I can now picture the scene in Oliver's poem: big sky, wide clouds, a threatening storm, quiet, sage advice.

--NF

The Buddha’s Last Instruction

“Make of yourself a light,”
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal—a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.
An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.
And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire—
clearly I’m not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.
Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of the frightened crowd.

—Mary Oliver