What better medium than collage to express the accumulation of memories?
ROMARE BEARDEN, creator of A Black Odyssey series of paintings
Tag: Inspiration
JUST A ROLLING STONE
Lately, thanks in part to a great yard-sale find, I’ve been revisiting a lot of Bob Dylan and realizing how many phrases that pass through my head originate in his lyrics. Or at least the ones that also have a musical line. I came to him in late ’62 or early ’63 and was a loyal fan until he went electrified and left the activist and folk scenes. Count me among the contingent that felt betrayed.
OK, I’ve come to recognize and even admire a lot of significant material he wrote in the years since. The man could turn a phrase, for certain, even when he was drawing heavily from others.
The line, “Like a Rolling Stone,” had me wondering about its relationship to the naming of the band and the rock magazine, all three products of the ’60s. Did the song prompt the other two?
Turns out the band was formed in ’62; the song, ’65; and the magazine, then a tabloid newspaper, November 9, ’67. But, in another twist, the band took its name from Muddy Waters’ 1950 “Rollin’ Stone.”
As for the popular phrase, “A rolling stone gathers no moss,” the line points to John Heywood’s 1546 translation of the Roman-era Pubilius Syrus. So it’s been rolling around for some time.
~*~
Also from the ’60s was my discovery of the common Pennsylvania road sign, “Beware of Rolling Rock,” along with the brew. I suppose looking at the connection between those two would be like asking which came first, the chicken or the egg. Or even why the chicken crossed the road before or after.
PUBLIC MAGAZINE SWAP
One of the most popular services at our local library is a small cart in the hallway where patrons leave magazines they subscribe to. The periodicals become free for the taking.
Considering the cutbacks in the library’s own subscriptions (accompanying the cuts in the hours the building’s staffed and open), it’s a major service.
We feel good leaving our now-read copies, and feel grateful when we pick up others for perusal.
It’s quite an impressive array still coming in the mail. Hip, hip, hooray!
CORNFLOWER EYE
The sky of America’s interior West is a dry eternity – an intense blue I see reflected in the cornflower bloom, or certain other blossoms, such as flax.
Curiously, the flower itself has no direct relationship to the cornstalk or ear. Its naming presents a mystery, to the modern ear, at least.
Now that I dwell under the commonly milky skies of New Hampshire, I find the blooming cornflower celebrates that vibrant blueness in my memory, and locales suddenly overlap in my mind, making me grateful to once again acknowledge that fullness and contrast. By extension, the cornflower blue sky extends to open spaces reaching westward from the Great Plains, with another set of experiences within me.
Gaze, then, into such deep color, undiluted, and its inexplicable essence.
CHANGING STYLE, CHANGING TASTE, CHANGING DIRECTION
Driving any of my back routes to the beach, I pass impressive houses that have views of the water. Often, they’re old estates reflecting established money. Some are infused with history. Some are large, with four or more chimneys. Others are cozy cottages with four-season porches.
For much of my life, I would have dreamed of owning such a place.
Lately, though, there’s been a sea-change in my perspective. Part of it is no doubt my arrival at a point in life called retirement, although for me it’s been more a matter of culminating focus on the Real Work, as the poet Gary Snyder calls it. Another part of it has to do with stripping away all of the competing visions of where I thought my life might have been heading. The two dovetail, actually.
When I was starting out, I held often contradictory goals. As one date once admitted, she couldn’t decide whether I’d been in a corner office in a Manhattan tower or in an artist’s garret 10 years hence, and she wasn’t far off the mark, even before the ashram intervened.
Of course, the corner office and the house overlooking the water both assume a sizable income, and that was never in the offing for a journalist unless I somehow became publisher at a young age. Unlikely from the outset, but all the more so once the hippie movement kicked in.
Even so, as a writer, there was always the dream of the blockbuster novel that became a hot movie, but my work kept veering more and more toward the experimental while the publishing industry kept constricting. You get the picture.
You could add to that the possibility of a wealthy girlfriend or the talented one whose career took off big time, but both of those went up in smoke. Or whatever.
Come to think of it, the dream wasn’t just about houses. You could figure in the shiny cars, too, or a sailboat or global travel.
The vision, as it turned out, included an entire lifestyle. An exteneded family with a handful of my own kids, at the least, running around. Many friends and business acquaintances, along with political connections, all coming to stay in the guestroom or guesthouse. A fully stocked library with an impressive collection. An art collection, too.
What it didn’t include was the life I’ve wound up living. Much smaller scale. As a writer, what I really require is blocks of uninterrupted time and solitude. Let’s be honest. A studio can be not much larger than a closet, for that matter.
As for the big place? It would need household staff, for one thing. And a long list of handymen.
What I have instead is an old house and its barn in a small city, along with a common car with 250k on the speedometer. It’s more than enough to handle, even before adding the family.
On top of it all, I also have a shelf of books with my name as author.
CLASSICS MADE IN THE USA
If classical music’s to find a fuller audience in America, the works of our own composers need to be presented. Especially those I call the Illuminists, after the great painters who finally have found widespread appreciation.
I love the orchestral works of John Knowles Paine, George Whitefield Chadwick, Amy Beach, Arthur Foote, MacDowell, Griffes … and no other composer spanned so much change within two decades as Charles Ives.
We know only the surface. Listen closely, and you’ll find none of them sounds truly German, despite the accusations. Even were it true, we need to remember (a) German was the standard for classical music, so much so that even Dvorak suffered, and (b) German was a central component of American culture at the time, anyway – it was even a required language in many major city high schools.
Acknowledging this puts Aaron Copland within a longer tradition, and all of those who follow.
Now, if our major orchestras would only live up to the challenge. Is it really to much to ask that they play a fourth of their repertoire from their home base?
WITHOUT A DOMINANT LEADER
As I wrote at the time:
My spiritual work from my Yakima years on has always been within a collegial circle, rather than with a dominant leader. In this, much of my reading/study of Scripture has been along the lines of Arthur Waskow’s book, Godwrestling, a Jewish communal tradition of arguing with the text, asking if the writers had it right, if there were alternate outcomes, and so on. This is quite different from the legalistic approach taken by fundamentalists of all stripes or even much of the mainstream.
Quaker Theology has published my piece, “The Quaker Enterprise of Metaphor,” laying out an alternative way of thinking, one based on personal experience more than speculation or splitting hairs. Your mention of Kaballah reminds me of a volume I got as a present, The Jew in the Lotus, about an individual who discovered the mystical and varied sides of his heritage while traveling in a small delegation to the Dalai Lama, who was curious not just about angels being everywhere but also about keeping a faith alive in Diaspora.
Over the past few years, I’ve been connecting the dots of an alternative Christianity, one that apparently flourished before the Nicene Council in 325 C.E. and resurfaced in the early Quaker movement, which had to couch its articulation because the Blasphemy Act still included capital punishment. This line of reasoning remains controversial, and I hesitate to say too much too early in my writing. Essentially, “Christ” is something other than the historic person known as Jesus – more along the lines of the Judaic Sophia and the Greek Logos concepts or principles. (So I had to laugh when you reminded me, regarding the spelling of Chanukah, of Jesus’ last name! No, it’s not Christ! It would have been Joshua bar Joseph!) This version also points away from the conventional teaching of Trinity, or of Jesus as God incarnate, and toward a different framework. Just don’t try this on your more conventional neighbors, even with chapter and verse from the New Testament. They’d be really baffled by the short version: Christ is bigger than Jesus.
In all of this, I recognize that something happens in the meditative silence, or “waiting worship,” no matter how we try to define it. In sitting, especially among others, I’m somehow reconnected to intuition and deep emotions, as well as to the other people in our circle. And without it, I really can’t write poetry. (Prose is another matter.)
Still, as my wife asks, how does this make me a better person? I hate to think what the replacement would be!
LOOKING FOR AN UNCOMMON GROUND
If you’re part of a faith community, you can ask this about your own circle: What do we have in common? That is, if we were required to write a “confession of faith” (in my case, for our Quaker meeting), what would we profess? What I’m envisioning is not a listing of what we do together, which our annual State of Society Report too easily becomes, but rather what lies under and behind our actions. I know that some Mennonite congregations from time to time draft what they call a “constitution,” although a corporate “mission statement” may also do here. The idea is to sharpen the focus of what a group already possesses and where it would like to go into the future. It’s a way of acknowledging and enlarging on the strengths and dreams of its members. Think of one retailer’s slogan, “Let’s build something together,” with its unvoiced understanding that they’re talking about people’s homes, rather than their investment portfolios, and maybe you get the picture.
I would hope that what we have in common is something other than similar tastes, income, educational attainment, lifestyles, party affiliation, or the like. Perhaps, in asking the question, we can even come to a clearer understanding of what diversity we, in fact, possess, and the potential it offers us.
Answering the question would, I suspect, be far more difficult than we might originally anticipate. On one hand, answering candidly might actually prove divisive. We’ve seen this as we responded to New England Yearly Meeting’s attempt to revise Faith and Practice for the next generation. On the other, delving into the question might also lead us into a clearer understanding of the core energies at the heart of our worshiping community. I recall Caroline Stephen’s amazement Friends can do anything, considering that Quakers are essentially a body of mystics. We’ve heard others compare trying to get us moving together like “trying to herd cats” or go somewhere with “a wheelbarrow full of frogs.”
What I do know is the difficulty of maintaining a witness – even plainness – apart from a community of faith. Community, with its definition of common unity. In the end, it requires far more than strength in numbers. It’s a matter, I’d say, of strength from our hearts.
* * *
Now, for my stab at the statement:
Dover Friends Meeting (Quaker) is a body of individuals and families who together encourage and pursue the New Testament goals of simplicity, equality, honesty, integrity, nonviolence and pacifism, and divine love in daily life. At its organizational core are the weekly hour of open, waiting worship in the presence of the Holy Spirit and the monthly meeting for business, both conducted in accord with the longstanding manner of the Society of Friends.
NOW FOR THE BEANS
PEAS, PLEASE
Jnana's Red Barn 