Hope Come Over Me

A few months ago I purchased Moby's most recent CD called "Destroyed" in a very cool CD and Vinyl store in Brussels, which has a surprisingly large number of these types of shops interspersed throughout the more touristy sections of the old center of town. Yet, that is what is curious about Brussels, one minute "huh?" the next minute "wow," and so it goes. Ad nauseum.

To put it bluntly, the first time that I listened to "Destroyed," I was less than impressed, in fact, rather disappointed. However, I let is sit idle for a couple of months, intrigued by the story behind the CD, but not yet ready to give it another chance. In the liner notes, Moby says that the majority of the songs were written in or about cities after hours, when he felt like he was the only one up, or even alive. Apparently he has bouts of insomnia while on tour, and these songs were the voices of those cavernous cities at night. As I said, intrigued, but hard to get the bitter out of my mouth.

When I returned recently from the US, however, I began listening to the CD with a different attention, not one that was attached to what I knew about Moby, but rather one that was just simply listening. In the past week, it would not be an exaggeration to say that I have now listened to "Destroyed" well over a dozen times in its entirety and I have learned to appreciate the nuances that I skimmed over the first time. Sometimes, we just need to put the CD or book down, or as Robert Pirsig wrote in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, whatever it is that has us stuck. I was stuck on not liking "Destroyed."

While listening to it yet again this morning as I was contemplating the Huxley articles I have been reading, I decided to do a bit of digging on Moby. I knew that he had picked his nickname from the supposed kinship to Herman Melville, the august American autodidactic author of Moby-Dick, and that he was an extreme vegan and ardent animal rights activist as well as a believer of Christ's divinity, though is in direct opposition, much like Kierkegaard was, with the majority of those calling themselves Christian, though who like charity and mercy. This much I knew. I also have several of Moby's CD's including some obscure tracks cut well before he was the emperor of sampling.

And then, something rather odd happened. I was looking up information about "Play," his 1999/2000 CD which I bought about that time as well, and that jettisoned him into Stardom with 10 million copies sold after relative obscurity for a decade. And, on the track that I remember hearing for the first time on the radio in Austin, "South Side," I saw that Gwen Stefani of No Doubt was the back-up vocalist. Huh? Wow. I have listened to that song perhaps well over a hundred times and never realized that it was her on back-up. Well, had I ever seen the self-parodying, campy video, which I have posted below, this would not have been a question. It is kind of hard to miss that it is GWEN and MOBY in flashing lights, literally.

Now, this is no revelation worth calling upon the heavens for in epiphanic bliss, but it just goes to show how little attention we can pay sometimes to something that is right in front of us. The genius (and I don't use that word lightly, nor did he) of Huxley is that he takes the minutiae of life, that which is right in front of us, and brings it to our attention, and it is hard not to feel the one-handed clap of realization smack our forehead, wondering if indeed, "wow, I've could have had that V-8" after all. The Devil is in the Details it is said, and so is a whole other Universe of discovery, usually right in our own backyard, so to speak, if we have our eyes wide open.

Amazing Grace

About six years ago, I had the sweet pleasure of having lunch with perhaps one of the most remarkable people I may ever meet in my life, Judy Collins.

For most, Judy Collins is the voice of the ballad, Amazing Grace, and her version has become the standard against which all others are measured. She is the gold standard of Grace. Often, as has been the case with other “famous” people I have met, that standard is merely fools’ gold, or at best a veneer of gold-plated appearance. However, if you ever have the blessed opportunity to meet her, you will see that there is no pretense, nor filter in place.

This song has become a staple for many occasions and will be heard across most Anglo-speaking countries tomorrow under the auspices of St. Patrick’s Day when mostly Americans will flock to Irish-styled Pubs with English names, and listen to Scottish Pipes and Drums play “Amazing Grace.”

Yet, the song itself was written by John Newton, a former slave trader, who was making amends for the atrocities of the profession that he had helped flourish. The agenbite of inwit, or re-morse of conscience, again has lead to one of the greatest hymns in the history of the English language. From what can be considered one of the worst desecrations of humanity, slavery, comes something so incredibly beautiful and moving, that it almost shocking to think of the hand that penned it.

That is the mystical power of Time though, that what may at one point be the seemingly absolute worst moment in the history of either our lives, or the history of humankind, as a direct result, over Time, something great may come of it. The Greeks did not ask if one was “happy” at any given Time, because one cannot measure true happiness, or eu-daimonia (literally, good spirited), by a single moment, but by the sum total of our lives, which, unfortunately, if you do the math, means after our deaths. In other words, the Pursuit of Happiness, is futility in praxis, for the results, we will not know in this lifetime, for a pursuit is ongoing, unto Death.

My sister worked with the acclaimed film Director Terrence Malick for his award-winning movie, The Tree of Life, which pits the world of Grace and the Mother against the world of Nature and the Father within the heart of the Son, who is a combination of the two. Leibniz, an 18th Mathematician and Logician, as well as co-inventor of the Calculus and who was a Philosopher and Ethical Thinker (in the days when dallying in a variety of things won you praise, not scorn and derision as in today’s hyper-specialized world), was greatly interested in the concept of Theodicy, or the presence of Evil in a world created at the hands of a Perfect God. How is it possible? Leibniz believed that we live in the “best of all possible worlds”  and the key element is Love, and Love over Time. For, Leibniz wrote about the world of Grace and the world of Nature and the struggle, which was played out between them, through Love.

Our world is full of Grace in every day life, in the small, simple pleasures, but, it is also full of the brute force of Nature, in Death and in tragedy. It is how we combine the two, and how we will find the elegance of Grace in the awesome power of Nature’s indifference that will determine us, it will make us who we are. And, it is a process. From being blind, one can see.

I could not find this on Youtube, but here is an Amazing a capella rendition with lyrics. Thank you, Ms. Collins

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/1465794/amazing_grace_judy_collins_and_the_choir/ 

I Touch Roses

Who wrote the Book of Love?

Going through some old CD's, I came across Book of Love recently. I remember listening to this as a cassette tape while living in The Woodlands in the summer of 1987 when I was down there training for swimming, trying to decide if I would in fact pursue a swimming career in college. We would swim for about 3 hours each morning, then again for 2-3 more in the murky Houston humidity. In between, I would go back to the home that I was staying at and put on my Walkman II (yes, a real one) and listen to a few cassettes that I had including this, Depeche Mode's Black Celebration, Kiss Alive II, Rush, Led Zepplin, and various random mixes that I had made, as if that was not random enough.

I never had the 45 of this song, but when I stumbled across the CD, then looked it up, thinking about my cassette, it was a natural progression to the 45 I guess.

That summer changed a lot for me, and is the subject of a novel I am currently revising. 25 years later, much has transpired, but the Book of Love still makes me smile. Like bands such as the Art of Noise and the Eurythmics, there is just something so patently 80s in all its quirkiness that does make one wonder that we ever made it through them.

Come Sail Awolnation with Me

Having spent the better half of the past week or so in New Mexico, with limited Internet access and distractions of the so-called "modern" world, it was only fitting that the subject of UFO's came up in one of the many conversations I had while in the Land of Enchantment.

So, I was thinking of songs that have to do with Alien abductions, and there are quite a few, in many shapes and sizes. Cat Stevens was wont to write about such experiences in songs like "Longer Boats" and "House of Freezin' Steel." Who can forget the Classic Rock anthem of Billy Thorpe's "Children of the Sun" (the movie, Children of the Corn was another topic, but that's for another post...), or the all-time favorite, Dennis De Young belting out Styx's "Come Sail Away"? No classic radio station in the range of 93.3 to 96.5 in the US nation would be worth it salt without that one.

But, I was thinking of the more recent homage to the the stygian hair band's opus magnum, that being Awolnation's "Sail."

I first heard this in 2010 when I was visiting the States and it became a staple for me on youtube for quite some time. Last year when driving across New Mexico and Texas with my young daughter, it came on several times and she remarked that it was about angry angels at one point. Cue up the Twilight Zone music now...

Looking out at the New Mexican sky, it is not hard to lose oneself in its vastness of stars, planets, and galaxies. Who knows what, or who is out there...I wonder...

Once in A Lifetime

I remember first knowing about the Talking Heads because of a guy on our swim team in Amarillo, Kris Perry. Kris was an interesting guy in many ways as I think back on it now, but I do remember this song as something that I learned as a result of knowing him.

This was a time of the early to mid-80s, when MTV was just beginning and it was pretty much guaranteed that you would see T-Rex, Mott the Hoople, Wall of Vodoo, The Buggles, and/or Haircut 100 on any given day. Or, somewhat more exciting, the Talking Heads.

The experience (for it was neither merely an LP nor a concert video), "Stop Making Sense," for those of you too young to remember, redefined "live music" because it was the first mainstream video recording of a concert that was consciously trying to also be an extended music video for mass consumption on MTV. David Byrne's "big suit" redefined stage appearance and presence as much as any glamour trend has in the past 40 years.

Why Kris Perry though? Kris was an actor, naturally, and he eventually went to school in California to pursue it professionally, though I don't know the fate of that. However, all that he did had a dramatic flair to it, and one of the things that he did which later spread to most of the members on the team was to do the chop suey motion from "Once in A Lifetime" in which David Byrne does a series of chopping motions down his arm while singing/talking the lines "and you may tell yourself, this is not your beautiful house/and you may tell yourself, this is not your beautiful wife" followed by the refrain of  "same as it ever was...same as it ever was..." as well as the in/famous full-body jerking that was to become a temporary dance fad at the time. It became legion upon the team to do these two motions: the chopping and the hurky-jerky dance.

Listening to this song now, as opposed to then, it is interesting to see the differences and vicissitudes that life does bring to us, and we to it, and to observe how one has changed over the years, but perhaps equally importantly, how one has not changed. There are things in my life, and my life's philosophy, that have not changed, that are indeed "same as it ever was." But, like the song, one day, I looked around at what had happened in my life, and I could also say, "this is not my beautiful house, this is not my beautiful wife..." as those things had changed, though I was still sliding/swimming/gliding down the slipstream of life, merrily, merrily...wondering if life is but a dream, or so the song also somewhat goes.

When the material elements are gone: the beautiful house, the large automobile, the wife, and so forth--what happens? What happens, when we find ourselves "in another part of the world "? 

Who am I then? "Well, How did I get Here?"

And, more importantly, you may say to yourself  "My God! What have I done?"

I have in the meantime learned to live that each day, in each moment, with each breath, is indeed Once in A Lifetime, and that within those days, those moments, those breaths, either we learn to appreciate them, or we merely float along, biding our time, though not abiding, same as it ever was, same as it ever was, without the awareness and without the realization of what it took for us to get to where we are on this day, in this moment, with this breath. It takes a Lifetime.

Knowing the difference between what I cannot change and what I can within this lifetime, however, has been the greatest gift of all. Like a diamond bullet, straight through my forehead, and for that, I am eternally grateful. Perhaps that is the jolting motion that Mr. Byrne is experiencing...it has been for me.

Perhaps one of my all-time favorite songs/videos. Somethings do come around, once in a Lifetime.

There Is A Mountain

When I was a young professor some years ago, I was teaching a course called "The Pursuit of Happiness" for a Freshman Humanities course to a group of extremely bright, young men and women.

Although the title of the course garnered much derision (this was before someone made a similar course the most popular class at Harvard), what myself and the students quickly learned was the question of "What is Happiness?" is one of the most difficult and long-standing questions ever asked.

Indeed, what then does make one "Happy?"

The origin of the word in the western world is eu-daimonia, which means "good spirit," and you can readily see the stem of the word daimon, which later takes a sinister turn in the 16th Century or so, becoming demon. The "eu," unlike the unhappiness caused by those two letters in Europe currently, means "good" then.

Is Happiness, however, a state? a journey? a destination? a fiction of our imagination? 

My own tendency is that like the story of Croesus, we cannot know at any given Time in our lives if we are "Happy," but rather, what is the sum total of our lives, unfortunately, only to be counted after our deaths. In other words, the darkest part of one's life is merely a portion of that person's life, but in order to concede that, one must then be willing to go with the fact that the best moment of Life is also just that, fleeting and ephemeral. A part of the larger whole.

In the tradition (or lack thereof) of Zen, there is the concept of contemplating a mountain. In deep contemplation, one first sees a mountain, then not a mountain, then a mountain again. What happens in that middle stage, when the observer has dis-entangled himself from the object, is the Quality of our inner be-ing. Who are you, when there is no mountain? Who are You when there is neither happiness, nor pain? When it is just You, without sensation, without the judgment of others bearing down on your shoulders, where do You go?

I don't really have much truck with the concept of "Happiness" and I usually try to avoid saying whether  I am "Happy" for the most part.

Rather, I have learned to focus on that Quality of what is within, what makes me "Me" and not "You"? Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, when we die, we'll become part of that mountain again. But, during the interim, when you learn to live true to yourself, Happiness becomes a thing of the past, as do all other temporary sensations, and then, you begin to Live.

One of my students from that class, who suffered from some serious personal struggles in life, introduced me to this song when we were discussing Zen in that course. In that course, I chose the philosophical tenets that I knew that I wanted to live my life by, but it has only been in the past couple of years that I can say that I now truly live them. Sometimes, that mountain is not a mountain for a very, very long Time.

Thank you, Josh, for introducing me to this song.

Death By Water

Martin Heidegger, a controversial figure in the history of Philosophy spoke of the darkening of the Earth as it became consumed by impersonal technology, becoming a man-made World. When the Technology dictates our very lives and consumes our every communication, we will drown in it, and the Earth will be forgotten, hidden.

The Earth is Drowning.

With the advent of a New Year, 2012, there are doomsday mythologies including that the planet will be consumed by a flood, or some other major catastrophe.

There is a more immediate dilemma. The Earth is desiccated, starved for spiritual rain. Mass protests and political sanctions will not bring relief.

Kieslowski's movie, Blue, includes this adaptation of I Corinthians 13 as the closing piece.

May it be a Message for 2012.