PEGGY LEE AND LOUISE GLUCK

peggy lee

 

Peggy Lee has been singing in my head the last couple days, all day. Is that all there is? If that's all there is, my friend, then let's keep dancing, let's drink some booze and have a ball. It's been something of a mantra in my head. The way Peggy Lee sings it in her Peggy Lee style made the song hers for all time. I saw her on YouTube out of curiosity because this song had come to mind and I wanted to hear her sing it again. It had been a long time. She's as cool as a jazz singer as Miles Davis is cool blowing his horn. Peggy Lee was best known on the Ed Sullivan show associated with big bands and the Forties. This song, Is That All There Is?, recorded I think in 1969, was played on the radio for awhile. Not many people knew that in the jazz world Peggy Lee was held the highest among jazz singers, up there with Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday.

I just now took a digression, went to amazon and ordered a CD of Peggy Lee At Basin Street East Live, 1961. I have it on 33, the same as not having it. It was an impulse purchase, but hearing Peggy Lee in my head for two full days convinces me I want more, and that's the album I want to hear. The song, Is That All There Is?, has been something of a mantra in my head. I hear her sing it and think about it in agreement that the best way to get through this life is to keep on dancing, drink some booze and have a ball. Why the hell not? It's saying live free of the imaginary restraints of other people's unspoken expectations, keep a light-hearted spirit about everything, don't worry, be happy. The material dimension, itself, is a disappointment. A multi-billionaire looks in the bathroom mirror after a night of too much to drink and says, Is that all there is? No matter our status, our assets, our fame, our reputation, our religion, no matter, we are well acquainted with the disappointment in the earth experience, the realm of the physical where seldom we feel full satisfaction for more than a few seconds.

A spirit with  physical body and mind sometimes feels trapped and separated from the world of spirit my spirit longs for. Home it's called in hymns. Existence in the physical world is hard work for the spirit. There is no certainty in anything. We pretend certainty by mapping the night sky and misinterpreting scriptures. This afternoon I sat down with Louise Gluck's Collected Poems, opened it, selected a page randomly, p191, Hawk's Shadow. I found it online easily just now googling Louise Gluck Hawk's Shadow. Went straight to it. It is a good example of how concisely  she tells a story you can see visually, physically, then it goes into shadow. Seeing a hawk hovering with its kill and flying away, watching the shadow of predator and prey in one shadow. Remembering her partner, maybe husband, embracing her spontaneously, the shadow of him holding her, followed by the shadow of the hawk and its kill. It reverberates.

louise gluck

This poem is a good illustration of why I like poetry. She weds spirit and matter. She brings out the spirit from matter, like the way she went from hawk to its shadow to nothing. I like her concise language, I watched them veering toward West Hill, casting / their one shadow in the dirt, the all-inclusive / shape of the predator--Then they disappeared. I sat staring out the window, stunned by awe, by how she made this shadow of a flying bird an image of her deepest feeling around her relationship with partner, the predator consuming her. She has a way of arriving at the end with a reverberation that goes on and on like circles in a pond. She finds her deepest feelings and addresses them in a physical form with words that bring them to life in such a way the reader shares the feeling. She makes reading an art form.

louise gluck

national book award 2014

 

 

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MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH POETRY

jan van munster

Two years of reading difficult writing for an average high school graduate was my preparation for college. Out of the Navy, into school, I liked the English class the best, introducing poetry that was awfully interesting to a kid with no experience in poetry but Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Turns out, I'd recommend them for introductions. They speak in our language. I found a paperback of Robinson Jeffers' Selected Poems in the first week of school. Back in my one-room attic apartment, after homework, I thought I'd read a few of the poems before sleep. No sleep happened. I could not stop reading, read them all and read them all again and again. All night long I lay in the bed, head propped on pillow, reading his poems. They spoke to me. I was in awe of what he was doing with the form. My knowledge of poetry was negligible beyond a few of the Beats. Jeffers was like the next step. I have beside me a small Modern Library, 1935 edition, of The Roan Stallion, Tamar And Other Poems, by Jeffers. Probably found it someplace for fifty cents. Just now read one of his poems selected randomly, Pelicans. Reading just one of his poems after not reading him in a very long time, I see the original attraction to his writing. I like the connections he makes and what he sees in what he's looking at. Thus began a lifetime affection for poetry. 

jan van munster

Several years of reading Twentieth Century American poetry, and poetry from Europe and Asia, I came to a place that when I want to read a poem or a few, I go to an anthology of Chinese poetry, Sunflower Splendor, from beginning to 1975, the date of publication, several translators.  This is my desert island book. Chinese poetry satisfies me like no other. My favorites were written over a millennium ago. Tu Fu lived from 712-770. Han Yu lived from 768 to 824. Han Yu wrote a long poem I've read many times, Southern Mountains. These are the mountains of southern China, semi-tropical. I'd like to show you the whole poem, though will pick a few lines:

          Winter comes with somber silence,

           Ice and snow sculpting in white jade.

           A new sun lights the summits

           Stretching heights and breadths millions of feet.

I've loved this anthology so much, I bought the hardback edition first, then the paperback edition, to save the hardback for later years and wear out the paperback along the way. 

jan van munster

Sunflower Splendor is such a treasure, I needed a shelf copy and a copy for use. I have four copies of the Stephen Mitchell translation of the Tao Te Ching, different editions. Favorite is the one illustrated with ancient Chinese paintings. And there is John Berryman's book of poems, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, 1968, I keep near at hand. Sometimes I want to read a Berryman poem, pick it up, read one, savor it and go on. And from that same time, I recall devouring Robert Lowell's book of poems, Notebook 1967-68. It was in the same time as Norman Mailer's Armies Of The Night and Robert Bly's long poem, The Teeth-Mother Naked At Last, a poem of the American war in Vietnam. I'd heard Bly read it in person, bought a cassette tape of him reading it. Have read it again recently in his new and selected poems, Stealing Sugar From The Castle, released last year. Bly is another of the poets I pick up and read one or two and put it down. I read Bly an awful lot in the late Sixties, early Seventies. Haven't read him much at all since around 1980. Found his selected poems published, and like his later poems quite a lot better than the earlier poems. Not throwing off on the early ones, like Light Around The Body, not at all, but saying he's gone beyond in his maturity. 

jan van munster

I've picked up Louise Gluck's book of collected poems, Poems 1962-2012. Gluck I've followed since her first book of poems, Firstborn. I was glad to see her poems together in one volume. It's so thick, it's kind of intimidating, so much to pick from. I don't like to read poetry books front to back, unless it would be Lowell's, Notebook 67-68. I wanted to touch Louise Gluck's book to pick it up and open it. I let it fall open randomly and read the poem it opened to, Lullaby, p 299, from her book, The Wild Iris, a poem called Lullaby. I want to share three of the lines with you:

Twilight, then early evening. Fireflies

in the room, flickering here and there, here and there,

and summer's deep sweetness filling the open window. 

Reading the entire poem took my breath away. Her poems frequently take hold of me in such a way I inhale and exhale when it is finished, thinking, Where did that come from? It is the same feeling when I stand in front of Robert Motherwell's Elegy To The Spanish Republic, or Monet's water lilies. The kind of thing that makes me say to self, This is the real deal, this is art. I'm recalling a show I saw of Jaap Mooy's drawings by felt-tip black marker, every one of them an astonishment, black squiggles on white. Couldn't stop staring them, had to buy a copy of the paperback book of the show in the gift shop. Gluck's poems do for me what Jaap Mooy's simple drawings did, each one awe inspiring. 

jan van munster himself

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READING THE POEMS OF LOUISE GLUCK

robert motherwell

Today I gave myself a rare treat, one I did not know was necessary until it happened. It's been so relentlessly cold the last few days and nights, I needed to be warm, relaxed and warm. My neighbors who are away right now have a house across the road. I needed some time to sit back with a book in a warm house and I wanted a hot bath. Put clothes in the washing machine and ran the bath water as hot as I could take it, filled the tub as high as it would go without overflowing when I sat down, remembering I displace more water now than in the past. I'd pre-heated the house, making it comfortable. The floor was warm enough to walk barefoot. It would not do to take a hot bath in a cold room with a cold floor. Today I was taking a time-out from the cold. I sat down in the tub and the water rose appreciably. Feet were glowing warm in a short time, blood circulation. Warm feet was the greatest blessing of all. It felt like sitting in a sauna, the heat even all over. Almost nodded off a few times. I wanted to stay in the water on and on, but it started cooling down after a good while. I was surprised at how well the tub held the water's heat. I started getting restless. Dried off, dressed and went to the living room, sat on a warm sofa and picked up the book I'd brought to spend some time in the warm with, Louise Gluck's, Poems 1962-2012. Gluck requires close attention, focus, from word to word. She's a tight, compact poet who uses every word deliberately. Maybe I read a dozen poems, each of them half a dozen times, reading them over and over until I felt the flow of the language and followed the progression freely. From one of several poems titled Matins:

 

                          are you like the hawthorn tree,

          always the same thing in the same place,

          or are you more the foxglove, inconsistent, first springing up

          a pink spike on the slope behind the daisies,

          and the next year, purple in the rose garden?

 

louise gluck

 

I lay back on the sofa reading, bare feet up enjoying the warm air, mind enjoying the verse of Louise Gluck. I bought her first book in the late 1960s, Firstborn. She was not what you'd call a Sixties poet. Pop culture was not her ambition. She received quite a lot of positive attention, a Young American Poet of the moment. I liked her concise style with language. A quarter century later I found another of her books, Ararat, which I loved. In one of the poems I read today she wrote of standing before a window speaking to her other self reflected in the glass. The poem was one part of self talking to the other part of self. Her poems are often addressed to the other known as you. Sometimes you is another person, loosely identified, and sometimes you is another part of herself, like the mirror image self. Bob Dylan uses the device of you for another person and another part of self. I've thought several Bob Dylan songs conversations with himself. Sometimes with Dylan and with Gluck, you is both other and self at once. Her poems have a presence for me, such that each one is like a painting. Each one is uniquely itself like abstractions by Robert Motherwell. The poems are intimately personal, subjective, without being confessional. I read the poems over and over, went from last line to first and through it again, each time feeling the relationship of the words with each other, seeing it new each time, sometimes slightly new and sometimes radically new. From first reading to last I am in search of the poem Louise Gluck wrote. In some ways, I'd say she'd be a very difficult poet to translate into another language. The clarity of her word usage would be sublime for a translator, but then you get into the subtle nuances and it kinda gets past word meanings.

 

robert motherwell

 

I spent two hours with maybe a dozen poems. I wasn't explicating them or trying to figure them out. I was reading them looking for their feeling, images, what she was saying. The academic way I learned to read poetry was a good education, but I don't read like that anymore. I like to read a poem as a work of art to be taken on sight like a painting on a wall in a show. I like to read it for the story it is. I like to read a poem with the same eye that I watch a movie. Gluck's stories are not ones with beginning, middle and end, nor are they dramas. They are quiet observation. Each poem is a smooth ride through her thinking process. I like the quiet her poems ease into my mind. The lines pull me through the poems not by drama, but by the progression in the poem, riding its rhythm. I feel like she has a fine feeling for rhythm. Her rhythm is walking rhythm. I even feel like her poems are brief Pinter plays. I'll put here a full poem to give an idea of how she writes a complete poem. This is not to say all her poems are shaped like this one. Some have long lines and short stanzas. The poem itself determines it's physical expression on the page.

 

          SCILLA, by Louise Gluck

 

          Not I, you idiot, not self, but we, we---waves

          of sky blue like

          a critique of heaven: why

          do you treasure your voice

          when to be one thing

          is to be next to nothing?

          Why do you look up? To hear

          an echo like the voice

          of god? You are all the same to us,

          solitary, standing above us, planning

          your silly lives: you go

          where you are sent, like all things,

          where the wind plants you,

          one or another of you forever

          looking down and seeing some image

          of water, and hearing what? Waves,

          and over waves, birds singing.

 

robert motherwell

 

The buzzer on the dryer was my signal to wrap it up, fold the laundry and return home. It felt like I had just begun with Louise Gluck's poems. I could have sat with her hours more. And will. It's my book. I brought it home. Hers are internal journeys. I follow the lead of the words to see where they go, a winding trail that is never predictable. It's like driving Glade Valley Road; surprise turns left or right, the steering wheel always in motion. Attempting to drive the road too fast it becomes a struggle. Settling into it at 30 and 35 mph, it's a smooth flow going with the hills and curves. Louise Gluck's poems are a struggle to keep up with in a hurry, but slow down to the rate of flow in the poem and it becomes an easy, lilting flow something like following the dog, walking a deer trail through the woods. I come out of a round with her poems with my head feeling as clear as during a walk among the trees. It was a good cleansing today, body, mind and soul.  

 

robert motherwell

 

 

 

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BOB DYLAN: NEVER ENDING TOUR DIARIES THE MOVIE

bob dylan

Assuming anything with Bob Dylan is a big mistake.
---Winston Watson, drummer

Bob Dylan stays with me. His album Tempest stirred up a renewed interest in Dylan and renewed interest in poetry. Over the last several weeks I've been picking up books of Chinese poetry, TS Eliot, wanting to read the Four Quartets again, Wendy Salinger, Lu Yu, Han Shan, Tao te Ching. Recently bought a copy of Louise Gluck's collected poems, which I love as much as Dylan songs. It would sound cool to say I love her poems more than Dylan songs, but it's not so. The same. I found a video made of home-movie footage, interviews, concert footage, featuring Dylan's drummer in the early 90s, Winston Watson. It's called, Bob Dylan: Never Ending Tour Diaries. The content is Watson talking about experiences in relation to Dylan and playing drums with the band. I liked Watson's spirit. He seemed to have a spirit similar to Bobby McFerrin, a round-faced, self-sustaining attitude toward life. I liked best seeing and hearing about being a musician with Bob Dylan, what it's like on the inside. It appears to be the same on the inside as the outside. Dylan doesn't talk much with the people in the band. He doesn't give them instruction on how they're to play, unless they're way off. Watson said he is especially demanding on the guitar players, because Dylan plays guitar too.


I saw Dylan in Atlanta in the summer of 1974 or 1975 at the Omni. It was his first tour. Two shows there, both sold out. From where I sat he looked like an ant standing on its back legs. The Band was with him. I took off the shelf my Dylan album LIVE 1975. It's with the Rolling Thunder Revue. I'm not a Dylanologist, so I don't know about the sudden change, same year. It must have been 74 I saw him. He didn't have white paint on his face. I didn't know Rolling Thunder Revue was the next thing. I can see it, however, looking back on Dylan behavior. The concert tour I saw was evidently the end of a certain way of seeing/hearing his music, time to change it, wrapping up a cycle. Winston Watson told of a time Dylan's song Like A Rolling Stone was on the set list. Watson was looking forward to playing it, because he loved it. When Dylan played it, he made it entirely different from the way Watson knew it. At the concert I saw, he sang his standards in a new way, inhibiting sing-alongs. A sing-along Bob Dylan concert would be offal. It would be too much like I imagine singing in a multi-thousand seat mega-church must be. I personally prefer church singing with less than fifty. And at music shows, I prefer an audience of less than fifty. I'd far rather hear Skeeter and the Skidmarks with an audience of twenty than Dylan with an audience of twenty thousand. So that's what I do.


An artist as satisfying as Bob Dylan makes me want to know about his life, and at the same time, not know about it. I'm not interested in connecting a particular album with a divorce or a motorcycle wreck, or anything like that. They may be pertinent to an academic examination of the songs, but has no bearing for me. I prefer to like a work of art for itself, not necessarily its context, unless the context is a part of it. If a work of art inspired by a given moment or event in somebody's life cannot be understood without the explanation of biography or critical pontification, it's not art. I like it when I read, say, a poem by Louise Gluck, AVERNO, and then read a brief note telling context, it being an Italian island with a volcano known to be the place where souls enter and leave the earth. That set off a ping in my head that was enlightening. Sometimes translators of Chinese poets will preface a poem with a short note of place, time and circumstance. I can read Gluck's poem with the same thrill I get hearing Dylan sing Mr Tambourine Man. A lot of people liked to think that a drug song, because it has the word trip in it. That was in the first years of white people discovering marijuana, etc., and attributing all forms of creativity to drugs. It was a cool time for fashion, also another quantum leap in American anti-intellectualism. The equal of the Reagan Revolution in that regard.


The Sixties in retrospect as seen on tv was all about peace and wow and free-style dancing, following the Dead, tie-dye tshirts, long hair, thrift store clothes, Janis, Jimi, Led Zeppelin. It was a renascence in rock. At first, the cool people rocked. The cool ones being the drop-outs, the ones that hung out all the time throwing frisbees, scoring, speaking a new dictionary of slang to be learned, like groovy and wow. The verb to score acquired multiple meanings in that time. Hippies were prejudiced too. People without long hair didn't even figure. If you were a hippie and cut your hair you were no longer a hippie. Reading was confined to Hesse, Tolkein, Brautigan, Vonnegut. Richard Brautigan was a hip Rod McKuen as a poet. Rod McKuen on recreational drugs. Jim Morrison of the Doors published a book of poems that became holy script. In my personal estimation it more aptly rhymed with script. It was a time when knowledge lost its vigor and its appeal. Yet in rock, some of the lyrics coming on were good poetry. Dylan's songs, Mick Jagger's, Lou Reed's, Lennon and McCartney's were good poetry. In music there was Santana, the band that suddenly became known in the film of Woodstock. Their Soul Sacrifice was unforgettable. Joplin singing Big Mama Thornton. And all the time Bob Dylan is out there by himself, the one who changed rock & roll to rock, and wrote songs nobody else could come near. Heir to Woody Guthrie. He was like what Chilean poets of the time said of Pablo Neruda, always out there ahead of the other poets.


I sometimes wonder how college might have retarded Bob Dylan. I'm so glad he focused his mind to writing songs and performing them instead of joining the corporate climb. Had he majored in accounting, he'd be a good CEO by now. And probably making less than he is making as somebody with thirty-some best-selling albums behind him, all of them still paying royalties. When it comes to wealth, he has it. The wealth does not own him, except he's the CEO of his own wealth. In my adult lifetime I have seen the career of a young bad-boy American Rimbaud folksinger under Pete Seeger's umbrella, who left the folk scene at the end of that cycle, start up a new sound called Rock and transferred his stardom from Greenwich Village to the entire earth. Not many people go to the top of their career possibilities early and stay there all the way along. Harold Pinter did. Bertolt Brecht did. Can't overlook Frank Sinatra. Like Winston Watson said, everybody in the world wants to see Bob Dylan. I've thought of Dylan as America's Pablo Neruda in that light, that he stayed out ahead of his peers. Watson described being in a room with several people, Dylan among them. He said everybody is sucking up to Dylan. Bob Dylan seems to me an Elvis who went his own way and the world went with him.

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BOB DYLAN AMERICAN POET

Tis the day before Christmas and all through the house the buzz of the refrigerator motor and the ticking of the battery-run clock on the wall blend with the rain dripping from the edge of the roof into small puddles in the stone pathway. Now the kerosene heater's fan joined the trio to make a quartet of the sounds of my silence. In my head is Bob Dylan singing Soon After Midnight, "A gal named Honey / took my money." This new Dylan stays with me like in the early years his album The Times They Are A Changin. At his beginning was Mr Tambourine Man, Blowin In The Wind, even making Man Of Constant Sorrow his own on his first album, and Like A Rolling Stone. I can't think of any song that could top Like A Rolling Stone as a song beautifully conceived, composed, written and performed. I have a Rolling Stones album with Like A Rolling Stone on it; Jagger made it his own, blues style. In youtube parlance, he owned it. All the way along, Bob Dylan has been a Star to me. But since his last five albums he has gone beyond to the place where I hold an artist like Harold Pinter, Constantin Brancusi, Larry Rivers, Marcel Duchamp, Patrick White, William Faulkner, John Berryman, Mona van Duyn. Dylan is in that level of my respect for artists. Others I read and see with appreciation and sometimes awe, but with these people I am in the presence of something so great, great in immense vastness, that I am in full appreciation of everything by these artists and several others, too many to list, Chinese writer Gao Xingjian among them.

I find when I hear Dylan now, after listening to him all my adult life, I am hearing the poet, who to my way of seeing is a great poet and songwriter in one, the great American poet, the Whitman of his time. Sometimes at the end of the day when I'm done chasing the moon, I'll click the remote to start the Dylan album. It has stayed in the cd player since the day it arrived in the house. I'll sit back, turn out the light and hear every word of the whole album like watching an audio movie. I hesitate to call him the great American poet, because it sounds like nonsense, like The Best, Number One, a Ten, unless it really is the case. Calling Whitman the great American poet sounds right to my ear. I try to think of another for that position and can't do it, unless it might be John Berryman, but that doesn't fit somehow, yet. It may in the future. But it fits Dylan at least as much as it fits Whitman. A new Bob Dylan album is the same, to my mind and ear, as a new book of poetry by Robert Lowell, great poetry. Lowell's book of poems, Notebook 1967-1968, is one I must sit down with again in near future. My first time through it, I read it front to back like a book of prose. It scorched the tips of my hair almost as much as the first reading of Robinson Jeffers' Selected Poems. Yes, Jeffers. Jeffers blows my mind with poetry the same way Bob Dylan does. We have a lot of great American poetry.

 

I have loved about Dylan from the beginning that he is writing poetry in the song form of the day, rock, which Dylan kicked off. Before Dylan went electric it was called rock n roll. From Dylan on, it was rock. His poems are contemporary concerns, everyday life observations, stories both nonfiction and fiction. I imagine a future where the collected Dylan songbook is firmly in the American tradition like the Carter Family songbook for traditional musicians of the mountains. Dylan will go through time with a name up there with Shakespeare, Mozart and Tolstoy. Dylan's integrity has been a model for my own, like Gore Vidal has been in another vein, politically. At the same time I make these lofty exclamations about the artist still known as Bob Dylan, it's totally without concern about his private life, people he's shit along the way, women who divorced him, his junkie son, or even his spiritual life. I don't think if we met there would be any more to it than a handshake and a how-ya-do. That'd be it. What can I say? Yer really cool, man. I'm a nutcase living out in the mountain; he's a multi-millionaire businessman in charge of a tremendous staff of musicians, roadies, managers, recording studio, accountants, gofers, hangers-on and probably in his mind an infinite list of responsibilities and obligations when all he wanted to do was make music. With all that, and it compounded by the major trials that go with tremendous wealth and international fame, he continues to write songs that get better in a stairstep climb, much like Harold Pinter's plays in that way.

It doesn't seem far-fetched at all that Dylan needs the Nobel Prize in poetry, not for his personal sake, but for balance in the universe. Even better is to be with Tolstoy and James Joyce, distinguished for not winning the Nobel. How many poets have people wearing tshirts with their pictures and names on them? How many poets can fill a huge auditorium for a reading? How many poets sell millions of copies of every new book? You say he's a songwriter, not a poet? I say nearly every, if not every, living American poet is influenced by Dylan's writing in varying degrees per individual under 70. He took poetry back to music where it came from. Chinese poetry through the centuries was written to traditional tunes. The French poet Apollinaire wrote his poems to what we call classical music. Read his poem Zone slowly in the flow of Pachelbel's Canon while listening to it. Dylan gave his poetry to a world of people who don't read poetry anymore, except a few here and there, like a few people here and there like to listen to old-time fiddle and banjo music. That's how it is with art forms. Art goes unnoticed in pop culture but by a few unafraid of being regarded retarded by the tube-gawkers. A poet I would call Dylan's equal as poet is Louise Gluck, though she is speaking only to some of the people who read contemporary poetry. I believe I could read different poems of hers as frequently as I listen to Dylan songs. Her poem Averno I could read happily as many times as I've heard Like A Rolling Stone.

walt whitman

 





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EAST AND WEST

 

brice marden, couplet IV



When the white page appeared to be written upon, these lines came to me from Louise Gluck's poem, THE WINGED HORSE,

     Here is my horse Abstraction,
     silver-white, color of the page,
     of the unwritten.


Yes, I'm getting on the horse Abstraction and heading into the unknown, going with the horse to see where we go. The flow. I like starting on the white page with nothing in mind. In my early years in the mountains I knew a Regular Baptist preacher well enough that over a period of several years he told me his life, one of my great experiences in the mountains. He told me that in his way of preaching, he approaches the pulpit with nothing in mind. He doesn't study for a given topic to preach on, nothing. It's all about being a vessel for the spirit, keeping mind out of it. It's a gift to be able to speak from the heart without interference from the mind. They say it is the Holy Spirit speaking through them. I watched it for years trying to figure out where the "in the spirit" talk came from. Everything I thought about was not it, until I finally saw that it was exactly as they say, from the Holy Spirit. In the case of Millard Pruitt, his only subject in the pulpit was love. Outside the pulpit it was a word he seldom used; it was a four-letter word, making love. Old country beliefs. But outside his mind, love was all that came through. It was ok when the Spirit talked about love, because then it is only one kind of love the Spirit means. Out here in the world, things are carnal. It's different.

I use that principle when I jump on the horse Abstraction, not because I believe the Holy Spirit will speak through me, because I don't. I won't even go so far as to say my Higher Self comes through, because I don't believe it does. Yet, sometimes I have seen it peep through, though not with my intent. I'm not channeling. I'm having fun. Writing these almost daily entries is the ongoing project I started when I wanted to find a way to stimulate me to write something every day that might be worth reading. The ones I feel like are the best are the ones where one sentence comes at a time and I don't know where it's going, what it's about, the why of it, and when it comes to its end I click the orange publish rectangle and am done with it. It was like walking through squishy mud. A couple weeks later I go back and look at it and it is one of the more interesting ones. To my way of seeing. All this is about my way of seeing because I believe the only reality is subjective. There is no real objective that we live with. Objective needs a lab with set conditions that can be repeated and give the same results. We don't live like that. We live as a self swimming in a sea of other selves, each one the center of the universe. The trick is learning how to live with each other.

In the West, Europe and the 2 American continents, we are born bad and learn to become good. In Asia we're born good and learn to become bad. In the West, self is first, all others last. In Asia, others are first and self is last. The difference between Buddhism and Christendom. In myself, in my adult life I have consciously sought how to become in myself a blend of East and West. First, I have the Western way as my own, because it's the world I was born into and have all my experience in. I wanted to ease that off a bit. When I fell in with Meher Baba and began to be able to understand scriptures of the East, Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim, I came to see that Jesus was Eastern too. He didn't ever talk about me-first-everybody-else-last. I'm not a Paulist, but one thing he said I like, Run the race with patience. Hurry slowly. I see Paul pulling the teachings of Jesus back into codes of restrictions and privilege. Anyway, I wanted to become a blend of East and West. My only access to the East was through reading, also my only access to the West. I spent several years reading discourses of Masters from India, Buddhist writings, Buddhist poetry, scriptures, until I felt I had a fair enough understanding that it was familiar as the Western vision.

First reading Meher Baba's discourses and writings about him I discovered he was saying the same things Jesus said. In fact, when I found myself checking Meher Baba's sayings with the sayings of Jesus, I found them the same. Jesus spoke in parables and Shakespearean English, Meher Baba spoke(or signed) in prose. I like about Meher Baba's prose that he explains what certain spiritual principles mean in practical everyday life ways. The part that brought me out of my slumber was when I saw I was reading Baba in relation to Jesus in my mind when I believed I didn't believe Jesus was the God Man. I saw then I had successfully discarded all the unnecessary belief systems built around the words of Jesus by centuries of theologians thinking up as much nonsense as can be thought up, and kept the words of Jesus. Soon afterward, a year later, when I came to the mountains, my nearest neighbor Tom Pruitt turned out to be a Regular Baptist who had left the church several years before. His Bible was a New Testament and he only read the red letters. That was the only part of interest to him. The red letters are also the content of the Thomas Jefferson Bible, which he reduced to the red letter words. I thought it very interesting I had fallen in with someone who saw it as I saw it, each in our own ways, which were very different, though the same. Jesus was every bit as Eastern as Krishna and the Buddha. They all say the same things, just in different words, languages and images for different cultures.

A Jesus who looks like James Brown is no more inconceivable to me than a Jesus who looks like Willem Dafoe. My guessing of how Jesus looked was a dark Middle-Eastern or North African look. The Hebrew slaves in Egypt in Pharoah times came from South of Egypt. Nubia is South of Egypt. Ethiopia is South of Egypt. Isaac Hayes was right: Moses was black. Five thousand years ago, there weren't many white people in that part of Africa. I feel like Andre Gregory's portrayal of John the Baptist in The Last Temptation of Christ was a good portrayal of a fair likelihood. That part of the world in Bible times was very different from portrayed in Bible movies. The parties in King David's time after a battle, I don't even know if they've been attempted on film. Three thousand years ago everything was so different from us conceptually we can't even imagine what those people were like in the part of the world that is now Iraq and around there, and North Africa. They weren't like Americans is all I can start with. Though my guess is to sit in a coffee shop in Cairo today would not be a great deal different from three millennia ago. Conversation would be the same; names would be different. They still use donkeys in parts of the city.

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