I'M STILL HERE, EVEN NOW

Over the past several months, I have been in several hospitals fighting off attacks on the integrity of my Being. Such attacks undermine my energy and demand a spiritual resolution. It is difficult to understand the source of this spiritual energy, but I feel it rushing to my rescue even as I am dazed and confused.

Now I am home in the sanctuary of my office overlooking the fir trees on the side of Blue Mountain beside the Hudson River in Peekskill, New York.We have had record breaking snow storms this winter. The spring rain is washing away the remnants of the storms and clearing a path for Spring.

I must say a word about the magnificent doctors and staff at NYUI Langone in the heart of the city on First Avenue.They restored and revitalized me. But it is the steadfastness and positive support of my son, John Russell and his wife Nancy that have sustained my recovery, especially with the introduction of an exceptionally wise cat known as Lady. Lady talks to me with great sincerity and depth of feeling. She is constantly checking on me. 

I know it might seem strange, but Lady and I communicate in depth, and she comes to check on me at bedtime, and in the morning to make sure everything is all right. She is quite interested in the shower and goes in to explore and sit, She watches me while I shower.

Lady is a special Being. Each day brings new challenges and insights. Russell and Nancy said that she actually chose them when they were looking to find a kitten for me. She was persistent and persuaded them to bring her home to me.

So I am still here, but the energy of my home is different, alive and dynamic. It is an entirely new adventure as Spring unfolds with the promise of an abundant summer.

 

A FAMILY SAGA

When I was fifteen, I came across a box of photograph scrapbooks and daitries in my father’s  office. It turns out that these were records and documents for the Gilbert clan that were part of the lost tribes of Israel. The Gilbert clan was persecuted and driven out of Ireland. They fled to Germany for several generations. But they fled hostility and attacks, seeking refuge in America  specifically North Carolina. 

In 1889, my Grandfather lined up on the Oklahoma border and participated in the Land Rush. He managed to stake a claim in the Oklahoma Panhandle. His name was John Gilbert. He was a tall, strong man who created a farm and improvised on an old organ in the house. 

On Saturdays he would go into town and collect men who were passed out from drinking. He would bring them to his farm and feed them, and nurse them back to health. Many stayed on with him to work the farm and others went on their way, sober and grateful.

When I was about eight years old, my father came and took me out of school. We drove to Oklahoma to see my grandfather who was on his deathbed. When we arrived, he opened his eyes and saw me. He managed to raise himself up and stood. He hugged me tightly and kissed me on the top of my head. He passed away a few hours later.

Across the years I still feel his presence, and know that my own inclination to improvisation came to me through his passion for for making music in the midnight hours on that Oklahoma homestead. My father was the youngest and he was always given the job of shelling corn. For my father, shelling corn was his term for wasting time...so when people would ask my Father, "where's Johnny?" He would reply about my improvising at the piano as "He's inside shelling corn."

SEPTEMBER’S SONG

September slipped in, unannounced. I wrote several poems today, and updated FACEBOOK. Today I tap this entry in from my iPhone, which for me is a single digit process. This establishes my iPhone as a surrogate laptop.

The first days of September always serve to mask my presence in the world. Labor Day slips in as a lazy day. My birthday hides in the smoky haze of September. But I remember one year when the Shankmans caught onto it, throwing a surprise party and presenting me with a digital camera for use on the Internet. This led to the formation of a Trio composed of Julie Song and Sunmin Kim that led to our mutual adventures on each other’s birthdays.

The Birthday Trio has long disappeared and I am no longer close to Julie or Sunmin. I was honored to see Sunmin through to her PhD, and she promptly disappeared from my life. She had served as producer of a recording project exploring Julie Song’s remarkable voice. All recording episodes explored new repertoire recorded under the sensitive guidance of sound engineer Tom Beyer. I composed some new songs for the project, all created in my wonderful Greene Street studio at NYU,

Julie  has gone on to distinguish herself as a music educator. The estrangement of our relationship came during the final days of our IMPACT workshop. I am happy to see how her career has developed. I remember forming a reading group that included Sunmin Kim and Julie Song to focus on the scholarly literature of music education.

Those days disappear into the fabric of the past. This process was buffered by a relationship with a remarkable personality who lived on the Korean Island of Jeju. In all, I wonder at the attraction of of Korea which influenced my life and professional career. Such was Sofia, the love of my life, who saved my life and we lived a fairytale in Little Italy on Mulberry Street. Sofia took me to Jeju Island, an enchanted paradise off the coast of South Korea.

I lived in the shadows of SangbanSang (Mountain from Mountain) with Mount Halla always in view. Mount Halla is the volcano that created Jeju Island fifty thousand years ago.  

I'M STILL HERE

Several years ago, I saw an Italian film by Paolo Sorrentino entitled The Great Beauty. It is the story of a writer at the end of his career, who showed great promise, but never lived up to his potential. At the time I was retiring from New York University where I spend 50 years developing a multifaceted, technology-based performing arts department in what became the Steinhardt School (having started as a School of Education). For a while I thought The Great Beauty was my story. But now I know it's not. My story is still unfolding, and while music remains central to my identity, I have emerged as a poet and writer. But maybe that was always me.

In truth I am merely a poet. Poems began to flow from me when I was eight years old, and perhaps earlier when I  published neighborhood newspapers at the age of seven. I began writing lyrics to "safety"operas in grade school, and lyrics to songs by the sixth grade. Parallel to those efforts, I started a book of poems, hoping to emulate Whitman, a book I continue to write in even today.

I think because I was somewhat autistic I found the piano allowed me to create the musical language of my immediate experience. I didn't read music, but I could improvise and create new works which were retained in my memory and became my musical works. When I was twelve I started to learn music notation, but all the while I edited and published newspapers in Junior high school and ultimately Amarillo High School where I won the Columbia University Award for editorial writing.

Now I write books, mostly poetry, but also a phenomenological inquiry on music composition MAKING MUSIC. Still to come are some short short stories about New York City as a kind of homage to O Henry's stories of NewYorkers entitled THE FOUR MILLION.

Recently I gravitated back to the keyboard and found that I still have songs to sing and maybe more. The music flows, and it grows, and I find these musical moments are spontaneous shapings of new ideas... fleeting and ephemeral...but maybe they will take hold and become realities.

 

GROWING Old

As I look around my current terrain, I am intensely aware that I seem increasingly alien to my current status of being in the world. I didn't expect to be around, especially writing this Blog at this time and in this place. I remember when I was about nine years old, I expected to live intensely and depart this life in my early thirties. 

But at this stage of Being Here, I have lived several life times encapsulated into this time frame of 88 years. All this time, I have constantly written in blank books, recording moments as though they were tiny treasures of Time that deserved to be noticed. I have an awareness of observing myself as though from a distance, and the stirring of an inner, ongoing process of the brain connected to some sort of infinite supply. You may have heard of the expression "thinking outside the box"...but in this case, thinking outside the brain.

I have noticed how the brain prepares for aging, and I have an awareness of how my brain is mellowing. It has emphasized the process of growing as an expansion of an inner dimension as vast as the universe we observe as exterior to ourselves. I perceive the brain as an organ for Mind, and as my current carcass ages, I sense an emphasis on Growing and I discern I have been fulfilling a promise made to myself when I was nine years old. I was autistic before it had been recognized as a learning disability. I couldn't recognize spaces between words. But I heard my sister practicing at the piano, and as I listened, the language of sound and music inhabited and defined my world. I started improvising when I found myself alone in the house.

Suddenly I am almost nine decades, but I still feel like I am nine-years old, trying to figure things out. OLD was always a distant state of Being, but as I approach its outer limits, I realize it is only the smiling face of Time.

LOST IN PROCESS

A lot has been lost in the past few days. It is hard for me to comprehend the nature of this loss, and yet I am plagued by the notion of something missing. Part of this can be attributed to age, but mostly it is the familiar attributes of Time's decay. It is so difficult to keep Now in an ongoing presence as it is always slipping into the future or dallying with the past. I know it is related to creative process and the ways that imagination has been deflected through neglect and negative energy.

I am not the first to encounter creative blocks, and having lived almost nine decades, I often have been overwhelmed by negative creative inertia. I try to comfort myself that spiritual forces within me are continually flowing in and out. Eventually, I tell myself, this creative block will dissolve, and I will go about my business of creating new work. 

But there is a deeper Truth to this moment. I know there is part of me that continues to create, even during intervals when I appear stagnated and ineffectual. So I linger on the edge of new work... I am somewhat astonished that I have been able to continue writing and exploring this experience of life. Phaedrus beckons and we have our confrontations. I am almost overwhelmed at the abundance of ideas that flow through the present moment and how many perish for lack of nourishment.

Sometimes I feel like I detract from my writing by keeping this Blog. But actually the opposite seems to be true. There are many ideas that perish from lack of attention. There are so many ideas erupting every moment that many die from lack of irrigation. So I understand how these are lost in the process. Yet these flowing of ideas gather into ponds, lakes, and maybe even oceans. Hopefully I will find myself lingering by these reservoirs and discover beauty about to bloom.

AUTHOR'S DILEMMA

 The New Year brings new projects and the closing of old projects. I was composing a new poem every day for 2024, an experiment that began almost tentatively. But now, a year later, I find that I want to continue some sort of writing activity. I had a reader of my poems who indicated she was thinking of starting a writing project. I encouraged her to write, if not Facebook, maybe a blog. But then I thought, maybe this is my new project. I have a Blog, Wyzard Ways, which I started in 2005. My entries of late have been sporadic, so now I think I may entertain the notion of maintaining the Blog with new entries, almost daily. I will link the entries to Facebook, so I can continue the semblance of a project. Writing is about wordsmithing, about capturing some essence of Time and making a linguistic fossil that may get lost from day to day, but shows up in someone's future search.

The question for me is whether I should link to the Blog from Facebook, or repost. Maybe I will link, and provide comments from time to time. I am still in a state of flux, as I have had some negative energy confronting publishing my books.

To date, I have published the following books as John Vance Gilbert:

TILTING TIME
REMNANTS OF BEING
MULBERRY DAYS
FACEBOOK POEMS 2024 (January-June)

THE SANTA OF JEJU ISLAND (Published under name Jonathan Vance)
ALIENS (Published under name Jonathan Vance)

More books on the way:

MAKING MUSIC
NEW YORK STORIES
FACEBOOK POEMS 2024 (July-December)

There are some other titles I am working on, including an adventure novel. But the most pressing is New York Stories. I still have to complete two stories, or decide not to do them. 

The dilemma that arose was to consider the best path forward for my creative process. I'm not sure how best to proceed, but at this point maybe resuming the Blog WYZARD WAYS is the answer.

 

NOVEMBER TIME

These posts are a way of noting Time and its passage. I have been pursuing the passing of Time on Facebook, where I write a new poem each day throughout 2024. I am currently proofreading FACE BOOK POEMS, a book that includes poems written during the first half of the year.

This Facebook project has taken away from my posts hereon Wizard Ways, and I regret that I have allowed that distraction to deter posting on this site, since this Blog represents a large segment of my life and activity. On the other hand, I have only one reader of this Blog, and Google has discouraged comments by its rigorous sign-in procedure. My main regret is that I used Google for blogging. At the time, I had no idea how sinister and manipulative Google would turn out to be.I am sure they regularly scan these blogs and develop profiles on each contributor.

But here we are in November, and the greatest development for me has been to become immersive in sonority and musical sound. I'm not sure where this will lead, but as always, music becomes structure that can lead to discovery.  

Improvisation is a way of traveling through Time, and it is productive when I become obsessive in exploring musical ideas at the keyboard.  My mantra has been "fingers on the keys"... sometimes I come upon an idea that takes me down a musical path. I'm surprised, because I thought that time was over. 

I'm in the midst of revisiting past songs. Thanks to a colleague, Dr. Ulrich Hartung, a number of my songs have been salvaged, but  there's still so many that are gone. All of the songs I wrote for the album Prayer are lost from the several computer crashes I have experienced over the years. 

But November has somehow brought a new resonance to my creative process, and in the midst of all that is going on, I relish a journey through the contours of musical thinking. I like to listen to fading sonorities where I sometimes detect a musical gesture that becomes a song.

THE CLEARING

I have been away for some time. But I have been on a voyage of discovery, a time of recovery, and now I am pausing in a clearing where everything is new. 

I look around at the terrain. I am always cognizant of my terrain as it defines the journey. This terrain is jagged, with giant mountains, deep valleys, and treacherous trails. I struggle to travel a few years, and I must rest. Hidden in these mountains are ancient monasteries with inhabitants who have lived for ages articulating and demonstrating the Truth of Being. 

My existence is so temporal, caught in the web of confusion, of the Maya, of the illusion that diverts us from tending to the reality of ourselves. It is a trap that most of us struggle against, a reality that is oppressive and pessimistic. We are pushed to extremes to the point that we can only focus on trivial minutiae. I have to admit I have been diverted by the illusion, despite my understanding of the Maya as a trap. 

But why? Somewhere in the vast conscious awareness, we are the reality of Here and Now. It is right here, seemingly within (although inner and outer are just binary constructs). 

But here in The Clearing I have discovered that Silence is an infinite domain of discovery. Everything comes from the Silence, in the quietness of our Being Time itself is being created filled with infinite imaginings that will never end.

The Clearing is a node of Infinity where in a infinite pause, becoming is a perpetual delight.

BEING HERE

I have been so delinquent from this site, even though I have been writing in multiple media. I have been writing a new poem everyday for Facebook, and have committed to complete this year with an original work each day. The first six months of Facebook poems have been collected into a volume that should be published in the next few weeks. 

I am committed to finishing my manuscripts of New York short-short stories by September, even though the last two stories have been extremely challenging. Mulberry Days is a work based on an experience of living on Mulberry Street in the context of rich history of that famous street. I am happy to say that book should be available in the next few weeks.

My long awaited phenomenological experiment Making Music has been set and should be available sometime this Fall. A project which is still in a speculation stage is a souvenir book for IMPACT with pictures and text on the experimental workshop in collaboration conducted at New York University for ten years.

This is a challenging time for me. For some reason, ideas have been streaking through my mind like comets, representing the culmination of years of exploration and research. I have been fortunate to have an excellent book designer, Oksana Tykha, who has piloted my two poetry manuscripts, Tilting Time and Remnants of Being, into books available on Amazon.

In the meantime, I have been listening deeply to the music makers of the American Song, especially Neil Diamond and Carly Simon. This has awakened my musical wandering, and I have no idea where this may take me.

My first tendency has been to focus on "Being There" as a mode of of awareness. But I can see how a shift to "Being Here" provokes a new dimension of exploration. This shift promises a new artistic energy that may uncover new works and new directions.

BEING THERE

So much time has passed and I am feeling a bit overwhelmed to still be here at this post. Actually, I have been away for some time, so returning is a bittersweet moment as I know that time away might have been posted here as the experiences of my journey. That time is past. But maybe I am here at last.

This could be among the last transmissions of my journey. Time has been flying by at a seemingly increasing pace. In recent days, I have been writing and posting new poems to Facebook every day. These Facebook Poems have collected as a daily publication since the end of December.  

So this is about friends this year, and how the project of writing a poem each day on Facebook has deepened my sense of the friends that share my life and my limited awareness of the wide range of activities going on with my friends. I have come to realize how much we take for granted in friendships, and how fragile they really are. Facebook can seduce you into believing your friendships are active, even intense. But it really is a substitute for actually BEING THERE. 

Time splashes through our fingers like water, intensely present but flowing past us. In an instant the moment is gone, lingering as the mere shadow of itself slowly decaying. Opportunities abound as an infinite array of possibilities, but only "Being There" shapes the reality of the moment, and we may never fully understand how rare true friendships really are. 

For me, those intense friendships are fading as the reality of now pushes our intimate contact with each other further away. I regret we cannot be fully present in the moment with each other, and that somehow, the intensity dwindles with the passage of Time.

But I am grateful for the combustion of our encounters and how they have created who I appear to be. I wonder if in the distant future that we imagine exists, we will meet again. Maybe this leg of the journey is to learn the meaning of BEING THERE. There was a film with Peter Sellers devoted to such an adventure and the superiority of experience over identity. But I think even that great film missed the mark in deepening our understanding of being in the moment.

 

The Twelve Songs of Christmas

Christmas is coming…I would like to celebrate it in the sensibility that has been my secret and secluded habitat… it has always been a time of reflection and renewal… I have always had two Renaissances: September and Winter Solstice.. a spiritual awareness and consciousness invades my Being…a Beingness becomes me and for a moment I am connected to the Entanglement…and I am everywhere and always for a slight sliver of Infinity…of foreverness…

Over the years, I have written Christmas/Solstice Songs to send to friends during the holidays. We found 12 of these songs that now have been arranged and collected into a Christmas Album: THE TWELVE SONGS OF CHRISTMAS.

A New Christmas

This Is A Season To Remember

Happy Yuletide, Lovers

Sing We Now

Maybe It Is Christmas

The Kind Of Christmas

The Season Of Our Dreams

Will You Be Home For Christmas

Solstice Song

Christmas Time

Merry Christmas To You

Another Year

As I indicated earlier, every winter solstice has always served as an artistic renaissance for me. Sparking this renaissance this year has been the genius of creative arranger and producer Rainer Raisch, his marvelous studio, his Dreamland Orchestra and Singers, and the warmth and presence of the soloist Marie Luise Lutz. Raisch manages to uncover musical motifs specific to each song and expand them, so they unfold as a tapestry of musical expression.

Enabling this process has been my friend and colleague, Dr. Ulrich Hartung, who has encouraged and supported my work for many years, and was responsible for connecting me with Rainer Raisch.

We will soon release the songs on streaming services, for each of the twelve days of Christmas, and then as an Album.

DIMENSIONS OF DIMINISHMENT

Time to take a moment to reflect on aspects of mortality that I haven't considered before. I am already exceeding the lifespan of male members of my family going back a century or so. For the past few years I have found myself focused on the moment, and have found energy to extend these moments by noticing and creating objects of awareness that vivify Being in Time. This somehow seems remotely connected to Martin Heiddeger's opus magnum, Being and Time and a later final lecture, Time and Being.

But my reflection encounters a different arena, one that counters an expanding universe with its opposite process, a diminishing content that tugs at at the heartstrings of a universe seemingly out of control and plunging recklessly into an infinite abyss.

My perception might be that of peering through a glass darkly at infinite regression, a diminishment, if you will. Well, a diminishment, even if you won't. It is perhaps a little like the "incredible shrinking man," but has more to do with the mass of intelligence, which seemed immeasurable when I last thought about it. But as I looked at the implications of the entanglement overcoming infinity, I began to understand that it is all quantifiable to an infinite degree, and the nature of infinity is that it is complete+...complete-.

So I seem to be on the brink of Diminishment... which has the look of disappearing, until you realize Diminishment is Infinite, and I only appear to be disappearing. We are the infinite reflections of the jewel of diminishment... cultures have expressed these jewels as mandala. Maybe I'm becoming a Mandala, a singing of myself as a jewel spinning like a comet across the night sky.

Making Time

Time always remembers
Important moments…
Some glowing embers,
Or feelings so intense…
We are suddenly changed—-
Discovering we feel
Our destiny rearranged.
We discover we are real
And made of Dreams
And Love and Joy…
Entangled so it seems,
And nothing can destroy
Our connected awareness
Expanding forever
As universal fairness…
And isn’t it clever
That actually we are Time?
We are the ticking of the Toc
The makers of the rhyme,
The rhythm of the clock.
We are the stuff that make
Moments to remember,
And the dreams that take
Us past September.
October withers us away…
December slithers into night…
I still have songs to play
Before my final flight.

WINTER ME A SOLSTICE SONG

As I was growing up, I discovered the beauty of Christmas was its connection to winter solstice and the triumph of light over darkness. 

As the years passed, I wrote poetry in blank books as I walked through cities and visited coffee houses and bars. My most prolific times were autumn days as they passed into winter.

I was composing songs as part of my process…often for some distant, unattainable love… this was part of my psyche, and in recent years I discovered that this distant longing is a condition known as “limerance.”

My obsessions changed slightly as I chose to enter higher education to pursue how music could be a force for change. As the years passed, so many students and colleagues and students went into the world.
Christmas became a time to reconnect with all those who impacted my life as students and colleagues. 

I began writing Christmas/Soltice Songs when my mother came to visit me the Christmas after my father died. The first song was written for her, “A New Christmas.” I sent the song as a Christmas greeting to friends and colleagues. I continued to write a solstice song each year and sent to friends and colleagues. 

We managed to find twelve of the songs. There were a few more, but they disappeared into the vaults of forgotten past improvisations. In my adolescence, I was known as an endless improviser… and improvisations became compositions.

These Winter Solstice Christmas songs focus on the beauty and suspense of winter solstice… for me the essence of Christmas are a continuation of the ancient the Stonehenge vigils that began more than five thousand years ago, waiting for the sun to appear after the longest night… assuring us that life is renewed in a new cycle. 

Unfortunately, I haven't found all the Christmas Songs, as I had several computer crashes where I lost data I was not able to recover.

Here is a list of the songs recovered. The dates are speculative. I know "A New Christmas" was 1989. My son, Russell, was nine, and he was born in 1980. 

Here is a list of recovered songs. The dates are speculative.

A New Christmas 1989
Happy Yuletide, Lovers 1990
Merry Christmas to You 1991
Sing We Now 2011
Maybe It’s Christmas 2012
The Kind of Christmas 2013
Just Another Year (2014?)
This Is the Season to Remember 2015
Solstice Song 2016
Christmastime 2017
Will You Be Home for Christmas 2022

Tradition  passes the power of life to generations…and a time for remembering our friends and loves became a source for continuing to celebrate the beauty of who we are to each other. These songs exist because I have been blessed by the friendship of so many around the world. 

Winter Solstice has always been a source for celebrating the renewal of life…at least that has been my reality, and I thank so many brilliant and talented friends and artists who are helping to share these songs with a wider audience.  

Somehow a phrase came to mind that might be a song in itself. The phrase is "Winter me...Winter me a solstice song..."