Happy Birthday, Margaret

Today is my Mother's birthday. I honor this day along with my Father's birthday, December 18th. Of course, one honors one's parents, but in our case we were like fellow travelers in life, intent to discover and make meaning of our lives. They were always introducing me to new things, long after I had left home, and I was also sharing books, films, poems, and ideas.

I have blogged about my Mother's visit to New York. It was the last time that I spent significant time with her.

She grew up in the wilds of Missouri and Oklahoma. Her father was struck by lightning when she was about two. It was a large family, as her mother continued to have children with her second husband. I don't really know how many children were in the family, but there were at least ten, maybe more than a dozen. There were so many children that my mother would forage for food and sleep under the stars. There simply was no room and no resources in the home. As it turned out, she was raised mostly by neighbors who lived several doors down from the family.

Growing up she lived somewhat wild and untamed . Schools at that time put all ages in one room, but Mother could not be corralled and confined. Instead she would climb on top of the school house and stomp on the roof. When they searched for her, she would spend the night in a cistern in water up to her neck.

She often wondered how she ever survived that time. Living with my Father, she had a volatile temper, but he knew how to calm her. But she and I had many violent clashes. However, after I left home, she mellowed, and traveled a lot with my Father. They built a get away home in the Ozark Mountains which became my destination every summer. With his influence she read philosophy and books expressing religious ideas. Her thinking had always revealed a deep curiosity and wonder of life. Now this part of her matured and deepened. I still have a few books of hers where she wrote comments and questions in the margins.

Somehow she had been able to emerge into the fullness of herself...into a thinker and reader who celebrated life, I remember her commenting one time shortly after my Father had passed away, "It took me a lifetime to grow up..."

So I celebrate this day... knowing that somehow she is continuing her journey of growing into the fullness of her being.

Fluxus1 Releases Alternate

I have mentioned Fluxus1 as a Blogger with imagination and talent.

Now on Summer Solstice, Fluxus1 has released a stunning podcast entitled Alternate, a fusion of styles that you will find exciting, inspiring, and entertaining.

The following podcast entitled ALTERNATE is presented as a first step in unifying my interest in ambient sound and popular song. As on the LONGTIME CD, my method was recording technology. The works on this album were created in a variety of formats: 4-track cassette, 8-track analog, 16-track ADAT, 16-track analog, 24-track analog, and digital multi-track. Many of the tracks were then augmented using Logic, Audacity, and Garageband.

Thom MacFarlane

This is an outstanding effort that holds together from the first to last selection. Go to the website to print out the names of the pieces and credits. You will be glad you downloaded this podcast. The style fuses the best of past practices with new ideas. After an Entrée, Free Danny moves things along, and pieces like Mr. Memory will blow you away with its sadly nostalgic narrative blindly dancing on. There is a cameo-like appearance of A Child in A Chocolate Shop, "the victim of a cosmic joke" complete with the laughter of innocence. Little Girl is fresh and evokes such delight that you can imagine building a movie around the song. State of Mind is catchy and beautifully rendered, followed by Melt Into Your Arms, a kind of quiet confrontation, building to Gone So Long, a fatalistic remembrance of times past, rising to Dysfunctional Town, another movie-like composition fraught with climactic extremes, eventually collapsing to Pretty Little Fingers, as nice an exit as anyone can imagine. Throughout there is a significant social comment underlying the musc and lyrics. Each element of the music contributes to the commentary, couching the lyrics in an ambiguous context, and throughout there is often a sense of regret and irony.

After listening to this album, I was struck by the coherence of the album as a whole. I vaguely felt I had just heard the sound track of a new Charlie Kaufman film, and thinking "How did I miss that?"

Great work guys! Kudos, Thom!

Summer Solstice and the Passage of Naomi

Solstice means "sun stands still," defining a moment of change, and so summer solstice celebrates the moment of entering the fullness of summer, a pause in our passage to a new era, which despite our names and sense of cycles has never been and will not be again. Such passage is unique.

Through the portal of my awareness, Naomi was always present as a distant recognition of a time gone by when she was just beginning to recognize the journey she would take to remote and unexpected adventures. The images of her youth and energy that echo in my memory of times in the past were restored relatively recently as somehow we reconnected through the fabric of cyberspace. I picked up the threads of her journey as she became aware that there were new regions of experience awaiting her, a deeper fulfillment of an expedition begun long ago. Our messages began and continue in a natural and unforced exchange, as though we are on the crest of a dynamic expansive wave cycle whose frequencies are measured in decades rather than seconds. After decades of absence, our worlds coincided once again, revived by these new communal powers of the Internet.

On this day of summer solstice, our orbits brought us face to face. We met in the lobby of the building that had served as a mutual enclave, where our pursuit of wisdom was tempered by the ravages of the 70s. We also shared in a distant way a musical odyssey, which would serve as the crazy glue binding the parallel paths that were separate and highly divergent.

Her musical sensibility would continue to inform her future, even when she pursued a world of advising and coaching leaders of business. She understood the performance values of her own work and the performance needs of her clients.

Hers has been a search for clarity, enduring the brambles and pitfalls that obscure our vision, fighting through to the clearing just ahead. I am reminded of Robert Frost's In the Clearing, his last volume of poems with a metaphor of discovery just up ahead, in the clearing. For me, the metaphor extends to the solstice as the "sun stands still" in a moment of clarity before moving on.

Naomi has reached a clearing, the passage to her renaissance. She has founded her own company, Practice Clarity, which reveals her passion for guiding others through the brambles and thickets to their own clear places where they are empowered to understand and act in the fullness of all they can become.

But perhaps the crowning centerpiece of Naomi's passage is that she is in the final stages of completing her Ph.D. As she pauses in this clearing and looks back over the rugged terrain she has had to endure, she appears to look in wonder and amazement as she enters this final phase of academia while launching an entirely new season of creativeness.

The Agony of Love

We sometimes develop relationships that define us to ourselves. Who knows the intricate mechanisms of obsessions, but I have found myself driven and inspired by distant and not so distant passions. These painful rejections (real or imagined) once resulted in some of my most inspired work. But I know it is out of character for our time.

Yet this has been the convention of the world. Unrequited love often results in masterpieces of art. The agony of love creates a vacuum, a void that must be filled. Agony once was not merely intense pain or suffering. It comes from the Greek agonia "a (mental) struggle for victory," originally "a struggle for victory in the games," from agon "assembly for a contest," from agein "to lead".

Agony is not only deep suffering, but a vying for victory, a conquest over the rejected love, not physically, but through the triumph of what emerges spiritually and artistically. Thus Beethoven in his agony and despair over the unreturned love of his distant beloved creates the first song cycle, An Die Ferne Geliebte, transcending the moment and living on in perpetuity.

Looking back, I am deeply indebted to all those stunning creatures who spurned me, rejected me, and treated me like dirt (knowingly or inadvertently). They triggered my most creative and original outbursts. Without them my life would have been mundane and colorless. It has been a joy to undergo such agony. To those who gave their love, I regret that my interior map was charted to agonize my way through relationships. The journey has been painful, but not without its moments. There is nothing like pain to let you know you are alive.

There really is no room for such agony in modern times.

The Substance of Time

Time and the experience of Time continue to elude me. Somehow, I understand Time to be the basis of all experience that stands outside of the senses and yet contains us within some illusionary cube without walls.

Space and Time appear to be the same reality experienced by the senses as two different modalities. But when we look through powerful telescopes into the far reaches of space, we look into the past, and the theory is that with a powerful enough looking glass we will actually be able to look back to the big bang. We peer into Time itself.

The clock of Time is light which ticks at the rate of 186,000 miles per second. Mathematics has given us glimpses of reality. We know that the dimensions perceived by senses imprison us within primitive strictures. The deception of the senses that space and time are separate domains is a convenience for human coherence.

Space expanding is Time Being. The main limitation of human physics is that it cannot truly accommodate Infinity. Infinity is the zero state. The substance of Time is the universe with all its spinning parts. In the final analysis Time and Space are the same energy, and All is infinite energy. This is in direct contradiction to Newton's laws since his reality never included consciousness but was stated as though reality could be described independent of consciousness.

Consilience

Consilience, the sudden "jumping together of everything " as Edward O. Wilson describes it in his book is a work of extraordinary insight and vision. Wilson is on a quest for the new golden grail, the unity of all knowledge, which has been the dream and inspiration of scientists, artists, and philosophers for ages. Einstein yearned for a theory of everything, and String Theory of the physicists metamorphed into M Theory as an explanation of all things cosmic and microscopic.

But Wilson sees the 21st century as an opportunity for the true unification of all knowledge, in which our understanding of genetic codes evolve into epigenetic rules that explain evolution, human nature, society, and culture, providing an undergirding of the physical sciences to support the social sciences, the arts, and humanities.

In the 21st Century there will be two ways to know the world absolutely: Science and the Arts. This is the culmination of the age of enlightenment begun in the 16th Century, but betrayed by those who stole the Enlightenment for the sake of seizing power.

Coevolution is an ongoing process and becomes a way of describing from a scientific perspective the interaction of genes with the environment to create the mind, and ultimately culture itself.

Wilson's work is compelling and elegant. It is a book about everything. but posited on a scientific structural foundation. Consilience is the recognition and understanding that everything is profoundly connected and can be perceived and described from any point in the spectrum of our knowledge and understanding.

Moonlight

In the moonlight, mystery awaits like a mystical messenger.

Moonlight is more like sound than light, sound we hear with our eyes, delicate decibels echoing across the terrain in the fragile shadows of the new moon, and the clarion call of the full moon that floods the earth with the gigantic resonance of a celestial organ...

The moon casts an eloquent spell over the earth, over those who watch the cycles of the moon work their magic on the tides and those of us tuned to its inspiring tones... the nuances shaping the night and those who watch in the shadow of the moon. Without the night and moonlight there would be no mystery.

There in the shadows is the birth of mystery and wonder, and the awesome presence of the moon adds incalculable intimacy and lustre to the worlding of ourselves...

Discovering a Poet

One of my favorite adventures is to raid the poem bin in a used-books bookstore. Small volumes of poems abound in these bins, and most of them have never been opened. Books of poems are always the first to be discarded, and usually the least regarded inventory with little attention paid to the upkeep of the books.

Yet waiting there are such wonderful explorations where words create new dimensions of experience, new insights, and explore deeper awareness of an elusive reality. One thing you know about these books. They come into being because someone loves words and the insights that poetic vision yields. My rule for choosing one book over another is that something must instantly grab my interest... a book title...a metaphor...a line....

...books like Glyn Maxwell's The Nerve with lines that tug at the imagination such as

Nothing that's been does anything but dance.
Nothing that blinked did anything but stare,
now being over, though the merest sense
of over is strange there.

The Structures of What Was

Or lines like:

The corners of our eyes,
cold and alert to missing them, report
a flash, and in the breeze
we turn our heads
to where the stars are quiet.

The Leonids

Leonids are meteor showers that appear to emanate from the constellation Leo.

Poets take us to new dimensions of ourselves and create new worlds from words colliding in new connections with each other. Maxwell sees the world differently, and his vision expands my world and my awareness. His is a world rich in structure, rhythm, flow, and metaphoric vision. There is economy of expression which always seems to find the perfect combination to generate new structures of meaning.

Coming upon Maxwell's poems in the piles and piles of discarded volumes was like discovering a parallel universe buried beneath crumbling constellations of words and letters. Here was a new sensibility, and my newly found windfall would take me many places where I could savor the work of an explorer of a universe that did not exist until Glyn Maxwell crafted and shared this miracle of his own making.

In his simplicity is such elegance that the lines continue to resonate long after the book is closed:

THE SNOW VILLAGE

In the age of pen and paper,
when the page was a snow village,
when days the light was leafing through
descended without message,

the nib that struck from heaven
was the sight of a cottage window
lit by the only certain
sign of life, a candle,

glimpsed by a stranger walking
at a loss through the snow village.
All that can flow can follow
that sighting, though no image,

no face appear -- not even
the hand that draws across it --
though the curtains close the vision,
though the stranger end his visit,

though the snow erase all traces
of his passage through the village,
though his step become unknowable
and the whiteness knowledge.

Glyn Maxwell

Kicking the Can

In the evenings in summer as we were growing up, we loved strategy games such as Kick the Can and Capture the Flag. These were the wargames of our youth.

These games were played usually in the late afternoons, when the heat of the day was beginning to yield to the approaching night. Choosing who was IT or captains and teams was always a ritual that had the trappings of spontaneity, but were usually just variations of the same theme. Kick the Can was like Hide and Seek with the taking of "prisoners." Everyone would hide while the person who was IT counted to a hundred. If IT spied any one and called their name, they became prisoners. Prisoners could get released if one of the hiders could reach the can and kick it before being seen by IT. If you beat IT to the can and kicked it, he must start counting again while everyone hides, but if IT reached the can first, the person trying to kick the can became the new IT.

Capture the Flag was a more elaborate game. You needed a minimum of six players (three to a side), but it was much more fun if you had many players. Each side would hide its flag, and the opposition would send forays into enemy territory to find the flag. Touching the enemy while they were in your territory made them prisoners. Finding the flag and bringing it to your territory constituted a victory. This was a game that was especially fun at night. I remember countless nights beneath the bright Texas sky with moonlight flooding the terrain where we vied against each other.

This was what we did in the days before television. We made our own entertainment and found ways to engage with each other. Such times led to many side excursions, stumbling upon adventures and dangerous liaisons. As we grew older, we played these games with much more at stake. Our movements were in automobiles, and the city was the playground. These were dangerous times, since nearly everyone carried guns. Now real enemies emerged and often, lives literally hung in the balance. The innocence of youth dissolved into the bravado of many who had become so bored with life that the only excitement to be had was seeing how close you could come to death and still survive. Now it would take much more than Kicking the Can to escape to freedom.

Forever Young

Greenwich Village is ageless, forever young. No one has really deciphered the secret of its perpetual youth. The Village holds onto this vigor, despite the meddling of outsiders and many challenges to the integrity of its existence.

Currently Greenwich Village is in the stranglehold of newstyle yuppies, and corporate America (including that wild and greedy private corporation, New York University), determined to choke the life out of the dynamism of this area that has always existed as a country within a country. At the moment, these challengers to the creative milieu of the Village appear to be winning on all fronts. In addition to the expanding tentacles of NYU, CVS and Duane Reade have replaced jazz and theatre landmarks on Bleecker street. An apartment building replaces the innovative presence of Theatre in the Square (which had been chased away from Washington Square by NYU) on Bleecker, a condominium appears to be replacing the tiny theatre on Sullivan Street that gave birth to The Fantasticks. NYU managed to drive the Bottom Line out of business so that great Village Landmark could be replaced by classrooms and a lecture hall. Even the Provincetown Playhouse is now under the aegis of NYU. The city, distressed by the lack of symmetry in Washington Square Park, is spending millions of dollars in public funds to move the central fountain a few feet in order to align it with the Arch and Fifth Avenue.

The Village has been the birthplace of many ideas that have challenged America and created a new culture. In the 1630s Dutch settlers cleared the land and named their settlement Noortwyck. To the north, the Village Grin'wich (1713) was once a rural hamlet, separate from New York City. When it was incorporated into the city, it retained the layout of streets, which was angular and antithetical to the logical square grid layout of the rest of the city. This lack of conformity geographically to the rest of the city reflects the divergent stance of the residents and artists who found the Village as a resonator for their progressive ideas.

The Village has been the Bohemia of the country, the home for the avant-gard and alternative culture with the small presses, art galleries, and experimental theatre and music. Every generation has found an important oulet there until now. Greats such as Maxwell Bodenheim, Eugene O'Neill, Jack Kerouac, Marcel Duchamp, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Bob Dylan flourished in the Village because the open spirit invited change.

Youth, more than anything is characterized by change. The Village has been the homeplace of our young thinkers and artists, and even now they flock to this historical birthplace of their predecessors. They have been forced underground by the establishment, and perhaps they are surfacing in newer progressive communities elsewhere.

But the beat goes on. Walk down any street in the Village and you will sense the underlying energy. Its eternal youth is vibrating all around you. In a matter of time, something wonderful will erupt once more, spawned in some movement on some tiny side street in the Village on the fringe of the corporate shadows that currently obscure the rich tradition of a continually changing and vibrant culture.

Tan Dun: A Shaman of Music Making

Tan Dun, who is known throughout the world for his film music (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) has been commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera to compose The First Emperor. The opera will premiere December 21 with Placido Domingo in the title role. It will be conducted by Tan Dun, who also wrote the libretto along with the noted novelist Ha Jin, whose first full-length novel, Waiting is the winner of the 1999 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2000 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. The opera will be directed by the celebrated film director Zhang Yimou, confirming Tan Dun's vision that cinema is the opera of our time.

Tan Dun has always approached his projects with fanatic energy and inspiration that fashions new forms and structures challenging the premises and fabric of the past. His "out of town try-out" took place about a month ago in Shanghai, and it was clear from the outset that Tan Dun had brought a new voice to the Metropolitan Opera:

The run-through began with pulsating drums. Singing in the style of Beijing opera, an ‘official geomancer’ introduced the story of Qin Shi Huangdi, the visionary and brutal warlord who unified China in 221 B.C …the music rose from the orchestra, alternately heroic, lyrical and haunting. Voices wove through the gongs, the bass flute and the plucked strings of ancient instruments as well as the orchestra’s standard violins and cellos, woodwinds and brasses.

--Sunday New York Times, May 14, 2006

Tan Dun is a shaman of music, where sound, text, visual art, video, and movement merge as a single entity, a magical and mystical expression that transforms time and space. Opera is the most extreme form of artistic collaboration --- the essence of art comes from opera, and such opera is the crystallization of life itself. Tan Dun delves into the spiritual realm of creation, penetrating and connecting many seemingly disparate realities into a new holistic and inspiring vision. He has a way of defining, connecting, and mapping the world that suggests a new paradigm for the 21st Century.

The Grand Opera of the 19th Century dominated the 20th Century, and premieres of contemporary works at the Met were often pale replicas of the past. Tan Dun is proposing a new direction, one in which the content of antiquity fuses with the dynamics of contemporary cross-cultural life. What may emerge anticipates the longing of our time for an authentic voice that assembles the unfolding worlds of East, West, North, and South, in cataclysmic collisions that tear off and shape chunks of past remote worlds into new spheres of influence and expression, much as the moon was created from the earth in a catastrophic episode with a rogue planet.

Tan Dun, as the rogue shaman who has infiltrated the establishment, may have the magic touch of an alchemist, transforming the wornout relics of the past into pure gold.

3 Zins Later

Once an inhabitant of Des Moines, 3 Zins Later (VJM) found herself plopped down in Fort Smith, Arkansas (You're not in Kansas anymore!) The spirit of her Blog, 3 Zins Later: "Etta James sings in the background, I love you circles the friendship, and Wine Night continues..." is an intriguing premise, born of the spirit of Des Moines, but now growing in the remote fields of a different place and sensibility.

Adjusting to suddenly being transplanted into a different place is usually not an easy transition for anyone, and VJM confronts these issues head on, but many remain unresolved. There is no question the stories are there, waiting to be discovered, uncovered from memory and imagination. But her Blog reveals that there are also new stories bubbling over in the context of personal crises. VJM is a story teller, and all we need are the 3 Zinfandels and candles burning, and the stories will rise like smoke from the candles filling the air with scents and textures of the past. I sense a reticence to embrace the level of intimacy that 3 Zins Later's banner suggests, almost in a whisper...

We are invited to lean forward. Stretch out our hands, and maybe she will read our story from the Tarot cards that are part of her personal treasure. These are more than cards. Through the Tarot she connects with a deep awareness of spiritual forces linking us to one another and to destiny itself.

She has slowly expanded her presence in her blog. Her style is starting to shine through. She is easing into the space, observations spilling out in increments. Reality intrudes as a tyrannical diversion, and her energy is directed at day-to-day survival. Even so, we long for the chance to turn down the lights and discover the quiet revelations of her world still in the act of becoming.