The good things

So I've become a little bit obsessed with the new series of Doctor Who.  I won't go into why it is amazing, I'll just say that you should watch it and point you in that direction.  (It's also airing on BBC America and available on iTunes, but note that though the British-run website has the entire season, the last few episodes haven't aired over here yet.)

The menace that persists over the arc of this season's narrative is a series of cracks in the fabric of the universe.  The cracks are present in every era and locale, and anyone who goes through a crack (you can get sucked in if you go too close and yes I am going to ignore the Freudian implications, thank you) ceases to exist anymore in their rightful universe.  To those remaining, it's as if that person had never been born.  No memory of them remains, though the more sensitive characters experience an inexplicable grief.

Don't you think it would be fantastic if we could attribute all the losses in our lives to something as simple as cracks in the fabric of space and time?!

I mean, okay.  One of the reasons this show resonates for me is that I identify with the character who walks around with significant people missing from her life, trying to get on with whatever task or adventure is at hand, and intermittently finding that she's crying and doesn't know why.

After loss, after time passes, that's what it's like, right?  When you think you're over it.  When you've found a way to conceive of your universe without the one you've lost?  And then one morning you wake from a dream you can't quite remember and find yourself adrift on a wave of grief?

When those waves come for me, I don't feel what I feel because of the loss alone.  I also rail against the reasons for the loss:

Heroin addiction and depression fueled by childhood abuse and terrors, which led to suicide.

Complex and dishonest circumstances that made secrecy the condition of friendship, which inevitably destroyed it.

Ancient insecurities and missing skills from dysfunctional upbringings that eroded trust, without which even an unconditional love could not function.

Distance and misunderstandings exacerbated by jealous, insecure or controlling partners.

Unwillingness or inability to meet the demands of an exceptionally rare kindredness.

Alcoholism.

See? Wouldn't cracks in the universe be awesome?  Wouldn't it be tremendous if being human were so easy, so simple, that the worst thing that could happen to us came from something utterly beyond ourselves?  Something wholly beyond our individual or collective control?  (With the exception of the Doctor, of course.)

We are so frail.  So twisted up in fear.  Missing from my universe are extraordinary relationships with extraordinary human beings.  These are among the best people I have known and I feel that's saying something because I have always sought friends and lovers with humongous hearts, ravenous curiosity,  boundless capacity to experience beauty and joy, true compassion, creative fire, and more than a light dusting of magic.

The best of humanity.  And look at us.

So how?  How can I walk through my universe with all these magnificent, significant people missing, sucked through cracks of our own tragic terrible design, and still claim "this blue heaven?"  How can I in good faith put on bright colors and sing about light in the darkness?

The way I see it, every life is a pile of good things and bad things.  The good things don't always soften the bad things; but vice-versa the bad things don't necessarily spoil the good things and make them unimportant.*

We have to work to add to the pile of good things.  That's it.  We have to work to see them, to let them have our full attention even for a moment.  We have to fight for that because our frailty is so great and our power to destroy so very compelling.  I don't deny the darkness.  It is because I am aware of it, because I know how easily and inevitably the pile of bad things grows, that I insist on writing and singing about light.

Pain is easy to portray, but to use your passion and pain to portray the ecstasy and joy and magnificence of our world... that is -- until we evolve to the point that the worst threat we face is a bunch of pesky cracks in the universe -- the very best we can do.*  So we must.  I must.  That's it.

*Quotations from Vincent and the Doctor

Emerging: Thoughts of Persephone

Well friends, I have to apologize that my keynote Kentucky poet has been delayed!  Hence the crickets and stillness 'round here since that Friday.  Also, I got a crappish cold that took me away from all kinds of fun things.  So it goes.  We're limited, bodily creatures.  Anyway, the good news is that one day when you least expect it, a formidable Kentucky poet WILL be gracing this blog in beauty & provocation.

In the meantime, April is here!  my Starbucks drought is over (joy of joys, they've made me up a whole new kind of iced mocha!) and in celebration of spring, this week I would like to devote my little electronic corner of the webworld to the theme of emerging.

Today I'm thinking about Persephone emerging from the underworld.

Many times, in winter,

I approached Zeus. Tell me, I would ask him,

how can I endure the earth?

And he would say,

in a short time you will be here again.

And in the time between

you will forget everything:

those fields of ice will be

the meadows of Elysium.

Excerpted from "Persephone the Wanderer" (the second one) from Louise Gluck's amazing book, Averno.

Warmth has returned to New England.  Ice has melted and green and petaled things are pushing up and outward. I am rubbing my eyes to see in the glare of new light.  I've had cleaning frenzies to banish the dust.  And I'm trying to make out who I am now after that cold journey inward.  I'm trying to see what this revived earth means.

This morning I passed the towering line of seven trees that I call The Sisters in the secrecy of my own head.  They finally have green things springing from their branches.  I smiled up to welcome them back (a man I passed looked at me strangely).  I was struck by their indifference in return (go ahead, you can laugh, too).  The trees had endured the winter, but not in the way that we do - with a sense of relief when spring finally, finally returns.  More like maybe they are simply, stoically willing to forgo attachments in exchange for renewal each year, in exchange for the ability to cheat death, perhaps indefinitely.

Gluck's poems insist that nature lies to us; the dead stay dead.  Maybe unlike trees, our lot in this short life is attachment - to lovers and mothers, as with Persephone.  Maybe that's why these seasons take such a toll on us, forcing us to grieve and revise and wisen.

I had a long elaborate dream this winter, in which a young woman who had been banished to the bottom of the sea was called to re-emerge.  She was dressed in blue and green and purple batiks, as were her attendants, who formed receiving lines on either side of her and took her hands to steady her climb up out of the sea.  She had been banished by a white-haired villain; in the end, she had to fight him.  She was joined by everyone who had ever been pulled under by some darkness or other, which turned out to be everyone in the (dream)world.

Yesterday I clambered over some warm rocks on the North Shore and sat and listened to the rhythm of the ocean.  So like breath.  Such an enormous sign of our tiny spot in the universe's ballroom, our spinny dance between sun and moon that curves our psyches and our stories to its tune.

Speaking of which, did you see the new Alice in Wonderland yet?  In this one, Alice climbs back up out of the rabbit hole, pulling herself out with dirty elbows.  She has defeated Fear, her hair is wild and her muchness is restored.  And then she (quite anachronistically) refuses a stinky marriage proposal and trots off to become a trailblazing, world-traveling businesswoman.

I wonder what year it'll be when the story changes and the maiden emerges to choose a life and a lover, both of which encourage and enrich her deepest self?

I raise my iced dark cherry mocha to that day.

First blossoms

did we lose faith under all that snow?

death:  the unseen.

spring:  the unveiling of shapes that were forming all along.

winter:  a factory of renewal.

are you looking for heaven?

are you letting your heart melt, too?

(will you be at Church of Boston tonight at 8pm to celebrate with us?)

March is on

Well, my mother was worried about me, so I'm back with the good news.

Spring has come!  It's light when I leave the office, birds (other than my neighbor's roosters) are singing me awake, allergies have kicked in, and new plans are in the works.

It seems the upshot of giving up your optimism is that you can clearly see the problem areas and begin to own them.  The upshot of giving up your forbearance is that urgency and yes-saying give you the motivation to do what must be done to make changes.  (What "this blue heaven" is all about, really - in spite of "optimistic" as a too-common descriptor of our music.)

Seasonal cycles, like so many other natural cycles, give us that:  growth, decline, death and renewal.  I'm beginning to trust that each is necessary, each has its own offering, and each will always make way for the next.  February's gift is to wipe clean your slate (even if it feels like you're being knocked off your feet).  March's gift is a clean slate to start drawing up new plans!

And so I am.

And you'll see the results, I have no doubt.

Wheels of life and death

My first writing class was taught by the truly wonderful Gurney Norman.  Someone in the class eventually asked where his name came from and he told the story of asking his (mentally ill) mother that same question.  Her answer:  Wheels of life and death.  Yes, as in, a hospital gurney.

A time to love

Nearly to work, walking in the shade and wind between MIT buildings. My cheeks and knees numb, the numbness creeping up my legs, across my temples. Cheerful orange berries on the vine starting to go black. Thoughts about winter, its wisdom: a time to die. When? And when to persevere? Another winter lesson. I must learn. What light can be found inside? Ahead, two kids standing a foot or two apart, talking. Not touching. Nodding, turning - she away, he in my direction. His chin tucked into his scarf, his grin unmistakable. Even from a distance. Did not see the ice raised from the sidewalk like fresh scars. Did not feel the cold. Grinned and grinned, eyes fixed blindly on his path, teeth to the cold wind as I passed by.

A Christmas List

1. My new favorite Christmas memory this year so far: singing the 12 Days of Christmas with the Bass Player to warm up as we walked to the Middle East show last Saturday night. "Eleven... uhhhh...." All told, he had a harder time counting backwards than remembering the pipers piping, etc.

On Making Something From Nothing Or How Nothing Is Always Already Something: Sleep Deprived Ramblings For People Who Like To Laugh At Whiplash

I have half a mind to post a blank page here today.

Half a mind to ask you to contemplate the awesomeness 

of emptiness, the way it sparks with potential.

No one has found a way for beginnings to come without 

endings, that's the bad news.

The good news is that every end means a new beginning, 

which means the time is ripe to create.

And that's just what we're doing 

in This Blue Heaven right now. 

It's a germination period.

An underground growth period.

The ground only looks barren.

The page only looks blank.

It's about to bust out some rhymes,  yo.

Cuz that's how we ro'.  

I'm writing lyrics.

I'm learning to write lyrics 

that might could torpedo 

a heart or two.

I didn't make that line up.

A number of years ago someone said that to me 

about music -- it was like a torpedo to her heart -- 

and it changed the way I thought about 

a lot of things, forever.

I hope these songs will torpedo a heart.  

Or two.  

I stole a line from someone's great-grandmother 

and used it in a chorus.

But man was it a good line.  

I could have said it.

I even might have said it if given enough time.  

GP and KP are writing music for these lyrics.

Music with thrust.  

Torpedos are no good sitting inert in a warehouse.

They need someone to sit down with them.

Some people need to sit down with things.

I hope there aren't so many metaphors mixing and

bumping into each other in the new lyrics 

as in this blog entry.

I'll have to check.

Blank pages have no mistakes in them yet.

So there's that, too.

But we must weigh the risk, however 

high, against how hard we may rock.

Okay I stole that line, too.

I love everyone I ever really loved 

when I sit down to write.

I love you is always a quotation.

You did not say it first and neither did I.

That line is rightfully Jeanette Winterson's.

But man is it a good line.

There is nothing new under the sun.

Case in point.

But the juxtapositions, the juxtapositions can be new!

And so can the moon if we give it a little shade.

A little chance to go underground.

Leave the sky to the sly, mysterious stars.

Poe's phrase, man, doesn't it turn good?

I heard it first last night.

Night ends where dawn begins.

Or is it the other way around?

It's all the same f*cking day, man.

Janis Joplin.

It's all good news.

Let the metaphors be bumper cars.

Just buckle up and let 'em.

In defense of darkness

To be courageous, you must experience fear.

To be optimistic, you must see the obstacles.  

Otherwise, you're just in denial.