Childhood's End

I have been puzzling this past weekend, which in large part explains the dearth of posts on my blogs of recent.

Puzzling is meditation for me and is a way for me to sift through the pieces of my allegorical life as well as my physical, literal one. It gives me a moment of solitude, which to the outside world appears trifled and mere play. Child’s play. Real men don’t do puzzles. They watch sports and burp and fart in public, because they are real men.

A puzzle for me, and when I speak of puzzles I am now speaking of jigsaw puzzles, though I love nearly all kinds, makes one stop and see the trees for the forest, for in our big, modern world, we are so worried about not be able to see the forest for the trees. A turn of phrase often yields a turn of the view.

We are so busy trying to see the forest, that it is even easier to lose sight of the trees than vice versa, the condition of so much angst for some. I saw a big forest of people and things in India, but it served me of no use if I lost sight of the trees. Losing sight o the individual leaves one calloused to empathy and compassion. It’s easy to fell a swath of trees with one stroke if you do not know which ones are affected.

One of my favorite books is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which comes as no surprise to those who know me, but it is one that sticks with you, and teaches you likewise to become unstuck.

Quality.

That words haunts the book and the mental well-being of the author/narrator Robert Pirsig. It was a life struggle parlayed into fiction that he nearly lost his mind contemplating the dilemma of Quality.

A tree has Quality, a forest, Quantity. A puzzle has a picture, but the pieces are unique.

One of the CDs that I was listening to while puzzling was Pink Floyd’s “Obscured by the Clouds,” which in essence was a soundtrack for the underground film “The Valley.” Pink Floyd’s album, “The Dark Side of The Moon” is considered one of the perennial best albums ever made and expected to ever be made by many. It was when Roger Waters firmly took the helm of the band, leaving a bewildered in his own fog of confusion Syd Barrett to fade into blackened obscurity and delusion.

Waters in his own right is a musical genius, make no mistake. However, listening to “Obscured by the Clouds” again after several years, it was rather interesting. I listened to it without thinking of Pink Floyd post-Dark Side, but rather as a stand-alone CD in its own right. It was pretty amazing. I had always enjoyed it, but like one enjoys a light comedy after a hard week of work, not as a “serious” piece of Floyd, mind you.

All of that changed this weekend when I was listening to the CD, not as a piece of Pink Floyd, but just on its own, a tree that makes up the forest. As a stand-alone piece of Quality, not lost in the mass-produced Quantity.

Though we may feel that it is overly important to view the forest, the sun itself can be obscured by the clouds, but for want of trees, there is no forest, and for want of clouds, no reason to notice the absence of the sun.

Mad, Mad World

OK, got Entanglement , Time, and dark humor on the brain.

Donnie Darko pretty much sums up all of those ideas for me in one of, in my opinion least, the most creative and poignant explorations in the question of "what if I could go back in Time and change..."

I remember watching this movie on my laptop while living in Castiglion Fiorentino where I was teaching a course called, "Portrait of the Student in Exile," and based on the conversations that we had in class, several of the students told me, this is Donnie Darko! I had not seen the movie yet, but one of the students had a copy and lent it to me.

I remember very well watching in with no expectations, and when it finished, with tears in my eyes , I immediately pressed play and watched it through again without a break.

Bells Toll.

Rush’s Signals is an oft-maligned piece, which left many people to either become new Rush fans, or for other to leave the fold. It was not without its diatribes of musical pundits bantering back and forth about what this meant for the future of Rush, much like Van Halen’s 1984, causing a similar rift amongst die-hards. Considering I ended up mainly listening to the older Rush, for me it was a bit of a harbinger of things to come. However, I also stopped listening to Dokken, Vandenberg, and Whitesnake around the same time, so that does not mean much as I still listen to Rush, but unless startled by VH1, none of the latter. Neither here, nor there, sort of.

Signals was the end of a Rush era, things did change.  This song haunted me throughout high school though. Being known as “the Swimmer,” I knew that there would be a day when I would “lose it,” and no longer be the fastest. It terrified me.

That day did happen, and it was hard, very hard.

This song did capture that feeling quite well. I recently thought of it though in a different light, actually in the opposite way. What happens if you do lose it, if you lose nearly everything that you thought was “you,” what happens then? How will you react? Those are the questions that temper the meddle that we are made of, the ones that determine how that sun will rise again tomorrow.

Losing It

The dancer slows her frantic pace

In pain and desperation,

Her aching limbs and downcast face

Aglow with perspiration

Stiff as wire, her lungs on fire,

With just the briefest pause

The flooding through her memory,

The echoes of old applause.

She limps across the floor

And closes her bedroom door...

The writer stares with glassy eyes

Defies the empty page

His beard is white, his face is lined

And streaked with tears of rage.

Thirty years ago, how the words would flow

With passion and precision,

But now his mind is dark and dulled

By sickness and indecision

And he stares out the kitchen door

Where the sun will rise no more...

Some are born to move the world

To live their fantasies

But most of us just dream about

The things we'd like to be

Sadder still to watch it die

Than never to have known it

For you, the blind who once could see

The bell tolls for thee...

lyrics by Neil Peart of Rush

The Funeral

This past Friday was Armistice Day, or Wapenstilstand here in Belgium. This day always makes me think of my father, and his father. Both were military, and both are dead.

My father had a very difficult relationship with his father, and I inherited that legacy, having a rather strained relationship with him. I maybe saw my grandfather a half a dozen times, at least that I remember, so I don’t know if I would have had such a relationship with him as well. It is a non question.

My father lived in a world of intense Fear, and he ultimately drank because of it. He was a surgeon in the Vietnam War, and most likely, he never got over it, nor was he able to fully deal with the fears that that period of time instilled in him.

Although an insanely gifted thoracic surgeon and professor of surgery, my father was plagued with insecurity as a result of his fears. He would never be good enough in his eyes, and he punished those around him, often unwittingly, as a result of that fear. It had paralyzed him at a certain point in his life and he was never able to get unstuck.

He had great periods of luminosity and brilliance. At his funeral, there were hundreds of people to pay respect to a man whom each of them knew differently. Some knew him because of his job as a surgeon, others knew him because of his passion as a Grand National racecar driver and mechanic, and still others knew him because of his drinking, for better or for worse. But, they all loved him. As did I. My final conversation, though nearly a year before he died, was in a dingy phone office in Castiglion Fiorentino I remember it well. Funny how sometimes we know that that will be the last time we talk to someone.

He was a tragic Faulkneresque man who carried on his back a heavy burden of guilt and self-loathing, something I inherited from him for a while as well, but have since thankfully shed over the years. He was god-plagued, booze-plagued, and fear-plagued...and, he was the American Dream.

This video has always reminded me of him. He did not die behind the wheel, though that in itself is a bit of a miracle, but this was a part of him that I remember all too well. He loved his dogs, and he loved his scotch, he could relate to them better than he could to people. It was not all that he was, by any means, he was a great many in many respects, but seldom do we know the full picture of anyone in our lives, no matter how close we are too them.

I hope that he is resting in Peace at last though, without Fear.

A Return to Self

Ludwig Van Beethoven was probably not much fun to be around. He was cantankerous and abusive, obsessive and possessive, but what would this world (at least mine, for that is all I can speak of) be without his music. For me, there would be a gaping hole, one that I would be aware of, without quite knowing what it was that was missing, but would feel it all the same.

Gary Oldman’s articulation of the troubled Maestro is nothing short of inspired in my eyes. Like Antony Quinn’s Zorba, I have a hard time imagining anyone else playing the role of Beethoven after watching this film several times over the years. For me, he nails it.

Beethoven lost the support and belief of nearly everyone in his life. Falling from quite great heights, he was pissing himself drunk in the gutter after the gargantuan successes of his earlier works. The Ninth Symphony was doomed for failure. A silly, simple little tune from a dawdling has-been drunk. The world was sure to get the last laugh on this belligerent fool. He did not play by the rules, and therefore he should pay.

However, that was not to be. Beethoven had one last work in him that he had to set free, it was a return to the Self. And, when an Artist returns to the Source, to the Self, the waves of indifference and mockery are of paltry effect. To conquer the inner turmoil and demons that one has can provide strength that leaves others wondering, “what happened?”

Beethoven was just such an example, and I am grateful that I can come back to my apartment and listen to the works of a true genius, one who beat the odds and who came back from the veritable grave, beyond expectation, and beyond the droning criticism of those who lack the ability to acknowledge, let alone accept, that down is not necessarily out.