An American in Seoul

Coming into Seoul from Anseong, I felt the energy of a city tuned to the present but steeped in the rich heritage and tradition of a past that stretches into the remote past and included regions that extended out as far as Manchuria.

As we approached City Hall, we could see the building decorated in anticipation of the upcoming national holiday on Tuesday, August 15th of Kwangbok-jol, Korean Liberation and the establishment of the first Korean government in 1948. The building was completely covered with materials replicating the Korean flag Tae-kuk with intense red, white, and blue with the black characters framing the central red and blue yin and yang symbol. Workers were busily constructing a stage to the side of the building.

Fortunately my hotel room looks out over this scene from the 20th floor where I look northward to the mountains that surround Seoul. As I look on the grounds before me, I see the great lawn in front of the City Hall Building. In the states, this area would be sealed off with a "Keep Off the Grass" sign, but here in Seoul families are enjoying the lawn, strolling and sitting, with children running and playing.

To my left as I look at the circular grounds below is a square with about 64 water fountains that shoot out various patterns as children run into the square to be doused with water. They are having such fun. What a great idea!

The stage has been comleted and chairs set for musicians. In front of the soundstage is a circular stage, which will likely be for speakers, performers, dancers, and whatever will comprise the official celebration.

From the intense activity, I wonder if there will be some event today, Sunday, in anticipation of the Tuesday holiday. I have just finished breakfast and will be going out in the city with some adventure ahead. Last night I went to the Korean Traditional Theatre with a friend. We had been led to believe that the top performer of Pansori, An Sook Sun, would perform that night, but as it turned out, it was her students, who were fine, but still growing. We watched the Pansori for about an hour. It is an epic work that is deeply ingrained in the Korean Psyche. The entire performance is usually about four hours.

JFK-KAL-KOREA

I am sitting here, half a world away from my destination: Seoul, Korea. I am in the Korean Airlines Lounge looking across to the waterway that skirts the runway at JFK. In Korea it is half past midnight, August 5th. Here is it is not yet noon, August 4th, Eastern Daylight Time. I will go through an enormous afternoon in which Friday will morph into Saturday and I will step off the plane around 5 p.m. Saturday, fully convinced that I have taken a long summer's day into evening.

This is the miracle of travel, a phenomenon that makes us aware of the relativity of Time. Even on our little blue marble planet we experience time warping through space, the delay of Time filtered through the array of Space, slipping into dimensions of consciousness not fully comprehended, too easily dismissed as "jet lag."

My taxi to JFK was through a different time warp. The driver was pure Indian, with full Indian regalia, and he was intent on avoiding the bottleneck where the LIE joins the Cross Island Expressway. This took him on a journey past LaGuardia Airport, and I thought for a moment that I must have muttered the wrong airport as I recovered from the trauma of lifting and loading my extremely heavy bag into the trunk. Given the high humdity, there was a mess of fluids dripping from me and hitting the cold air conditioning of the cab like a miniature weatherfront.

"Are we going to JFK?" I managed, but the driver was silent, and in my weakened immune state, I began to imagine I was being abducted. Such moments are heady fantasies since it requires an audacious leap of faith that you are someone worthy of abduction... a boost to the old self-esteem...

I looked at all of the familiar ramp exits of LaGuardia and was thoroughly convinced I would never make it to Korea.

"Are you going to JFK?" I repeated, with somewhat more authority than before.

The driver glanced back at me and nodded.

There was surprisingly little traffic as we literally flew along the Van Wyck, usually the nemesis of every driver attempting to reach JFK by automobile.

And now, here I sit, listening to the distant roar of jets coming in and out of JFK, sipping some coffee courtesy of KAL and beginning the first Blog of my journey to the East, which amazingly takes me to the north and west to a world of serene mountains, robust people, beautiful lakes, and a city that never stops, but literally stretches out to the mountains all around in a pose of foreverness.

My friends in Korea are mostly asleep by now. I won't sleep for a whole day, because I can never sleep when I travel, but my psyche will pretend that it is just one long, beautiful day stretched out in the twilight of summer, and we can blame my drowsiness on the heat and the humidity.

Pershing Square

Walking along 42nd street, looking for some place to land around Grand Central Station. Discouraged by the cold store fronts of fast food chains designed to force you through their calorie-ridden food fare at a break-neck pace. Tired. Feeling the sultry air of a city summer morning. Sunday. Lazy and lax.

There under the viaduct of Park Avenue, tucked away like a pre-war mirage, Pershing Square beckoned, calling me like a black and white movie, full of intrigue and mystery.

I crossed the street, somewhat wary. Pershing Square seemed both out-of-place and strangely familiar. I had the eerie feeling that if I walked through the door, I would enter the world of Bogart and Bergman. I half expected that Peter Lorre would greet me with his fiendish smile and hand me a menu as he escorts me to an out of the way table surrounded by characters from Casablanca. Lorre leans over to me, shielding his face with the menu, and whispers that he can get me out of here to a safe place, for a price.

I push through the fantasy and enter Pershing Square. It is a large space, the front inhabited by cane-backed chairs and tables set for a continental-style breakfast. Looking past this vesitbule, I find a huge restaurant with a sumptious bar to the right. Somehow I have tumbled into a wonderland of the forties. It is quiet, as though waiting for something, for someone. For me, maybe. Mostly empty. A few people give me the once over as I am taken to a prominent table across from the bar.

Almost mysteriously, coffee is poured and water placed to the side, setting the stage for the waiter, an Eastern European from Hungary or Romania, looking like a young Peter Lorre. He regards me suspiciously, asking me if I am ready to order. I order eggs over easy with sausage. He takes the menu from me and asks "you mean instead of bacon?" I nod. "That's right, sausages." He gives a look of approval as though I had successfully said the right code word and disappears.

I pour the cream into the coffee and slowly stir as I look around the dining room. It has a confortable feeling, in spite of its size, and although there about twenty-five people, the restaurant seems strikingly empty. There is a man at the bar, watching some soccer game, some world "football" fare, while the bartender moves about his business. Both men appear to glance over at me, noting my presence while pretending to ignore me.

More quickly than I had expected, the food arrives, the waiter whisking the plate from behind me to the table in an almost frantic gesture while he half whispers urgently, "...careful...the plate is very hot!" He gives a glance and disappears.

I try to understand the meaning of this and begin to carve up the sausages. The plate IS very hot, and I figure this is a common practice of the restaurant to ensure that the food arrives at the table piping hot. The breakfast is excellent, laid out as extravagant fare, a separate dish of strawberry jam and a slab of butter, and an endless supply of coffee.

Suddenly I am struck by the intense silence of the room, punctuated by murmurs and laughter from several tables. No background music!

I look around. I am disappointed that there is no piano near the bar. It is too quiet. Pershing Square is the epitome of another time, a time gone by, and I want to lean over and whisper to the piano player, "Play it again, Sam, for old time's sake, play it again."

Marking Time

Music has always meant so much to me because of its immediacy, a felt connection with Time that vividly etches a streaming existence --- a metaphor of melody unfolding from the silence in a declaration of being. Music is Being.

I suspect it is this quality of immediacy that gives music its special niche in contemporary life. Music made in the moment makes us feel our authentic selves. Even recorded music provides a window of connection with our primal beat, our pulse shaped as the musical evocation of Now. Music is Now.

Music and dance are inseparable. Moving to music has become the social norm, mutual connection to the beat is a form of greeting and acceptance. The essence of musical movement is shaped moment to moment, and correctness is the hipness of Now. Ringtones are the new musical mantras, and dance is the tribal gesture of life. Music is Dance. Music is Life.

In the frightening zero state of ourselves, we are compelled to make music to cover the silence of non-existence. Music marks Time, reminding us that we Are. Music is Time.

The Troubador

Sitting there in Silver Spurs with steaming coffee, a trunk and guitar to the right, the Troubador took a sip and looked straight at me. I recognized the songster surrounded by everything defining a musical identity. In a five-foot square of space, all of the Troubador's belongings sat neatly tucked away alongside the small square black table. A wardrobe trunk, a guitar case and satchel, all black, carved out a space in the diner like a moveable office or studio, the top of the trunk holding the business of the day. On the table with the coffee, lay a gleaming white laptop. and on the laptop lay a mobil phone, silent but poised for action.

The Troubador smiled and moved to the music playing in the background, grooving with the mood, the tempo, and zeitgeist of the moment, perfectly content and comfortable as though this space was a permanent haven. Thoughts surfaced like music rippling through the diner in counterpoint to the countless conversations of customers at nearby tables.

The phone rang and the Troubador flipped open the phone and quietly streamed a phrase, the patterns connecting with sounds defining the perimeter, music flowing in and out of the moment. It was though everything the Troubador touched turned to music. A stranded song maker, caught in the routine of a Monday morning, shaping time with the rhythm of ideas bursting from the imagination.

The food came...eggs over easy with sausage, homefries, and toast. Without missing a beat, the Troubador incorporated the breakfast into the routine, even this was a musical texture weaving a web around the space, a place for music as presence, as sounding silently in the immediacy of awareness, torso dancing in place to the tune of a different drummer.

Putting down the phone, the Troubador connected with the music in the background, arms waving to the beat. I looked at the Troubador and saw a child of the future bursting through all impediments to become a singing poet of a new age. I looked at her, a youngling barely eighteen, long black flowing hair, intense dark eyes, music pulsing through her like sonic circulation.

She looked at me, and for an instant, we recognized each other, troubadors passing through time to different refrains and distant destinations.

Morphing into There

There is nothing new under the sun" was a mantra that my mother often used, usually an assurance that comforted her that there was nothing really to worry about. Like many truisms, the surface glistens with the self evident "truth", but underneath are the shadows of reality looming ever larger. Actually, there is nothing old under the sun. Time and Space are dimensions of change, and we are in the midst of such transformations. Even growing older is a newness of sorts.

So I come to realize that age itself is an agent of Time just as our body is an agent of Space. My perception is an awareness of morphing, for as Time and Space move through us, we are changing into some newness that we do not yet recognize. I don't mean this in the biblical sense of "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face:", but rather in a more cosmic sense, fashioned from the debris of the space/time eruption sometimes called the "big bang" ---just another foolish notion from our limited understanding that something must have started things.

I experience this in a phenomenon akin to phasing in sound. My phase cycle is changing, expanding. I am becoming more and more out of phase with what one might perceive as the present (actually it is just a sense of the present that specific people inhabit). There is a subtle likeness between phases of being and orbits of spheres. In my expansion, my phase, my orbit is elongating into unknown regions, eliciting entirely new awareness, briefly, but soon, more and more. Mostly I am here, but I am gradually morphing into there.

I like to think of the "mansion with many rooms" as actually the universe with many dimensions, which may exist as intersecting and parallel universes. But maybe this kind of thought is just another manifestation of morphing into the thereness of myself.

Kill Memory

I just finished reading Kill Memory, a novel by William Herrick. The title attracted me because the problem of reality and memory has always been a theme in the context of my own thinking, which was why Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind has been one of my favorite films. The title is from a Russian poet:

. . . Kill Memory . . .'' (the title comes from the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova - ''So much to do today: / kill memory, kill pain, / turn heart into a stone'')

The novel deals with Elizabeth, in her 70s, and not growing old gracefully. She is tormented by her memories. The novel begins with "Elizabeth was not crazy, she was old." Thus we enter her world where her memories range from her lovers, and perhaps one true love she betrayed for the war, to the atrocities she performed in the name of a cause that was the revolution of the masses, that was itself betrayed.

The book is taut, economical, and well written. We glide effortlessly between her meaningless rituals of the present and her memories of the past that ultimately become too much to bear. It is a stream of consciousness narrative that is treated effectively by an experienced and accomplished author, who has been described by some as an American Orwell.

Even though we intimately share Elizabeth's thoughts, it is difficult to become emotionally involved with her plight. Herrick has been careful to provide an objective distance so that we can consider her life intelligently and understand the issues from an intellectual perspective.

Often I am attracted to a title such as Kill Memory as I project what I might create in the context of such a provocative depiction. Might memories be so full of rich experiences and emotions that they torment us as we grow old because they are becoming more and more distant and are ultimately facing extinction? Or might the killing of memory be an involuntary act in which the past crumbles in the onslaught of time and human frailty? Or maybe we have a character who battles the ravages of Time on a quest to Save Memory, to resurrect moments that continue to exist even as constellations still radiate their light from the remote and vivid past of the big bang.

Think Coffee

Just when I thought there was a conspiracy to rid the Village of its best coffee retreats (Space Untitled became a polyglot, music blaring, product showcase, and Coffee Cuisine surrendered to Leo's Place which then went out of business), Think Coffee quietly appears, almost like an afterthought, an "oh, by-the-way" place that makes its predecessors seem childish and awkward.

I'm not talking about a Starbucks kind of place which has become such a formula that you can almost measure the smiles and hospitality, or the first genuine coffee houses in the Village like Caffe Reggio and Cafe Figaro. I'm talking about the new-style, Internet-savvy hangout where coffee, conversation, and connectivity are all part of the same process.

Perhaps there is nothing suspicious about Think Coffee inconspicuously appearing across the street from the Courant Institute of Mathematics where physicists and mathematicians have been working on String Theory as it has evolved to M Theory with the discovery and validation of the 11th Dimension. Perhaps... and yet...

My own discovery of the place was through a colleague who was openly hostile to the thought of Starbucks. We were meeting for coffee and conversation. It was raining, and we were about to settle for Starbucks a half a block away, when she remarked that there was a new coffee shop "over there" and waved her arm in a south easterly direction. I followed her hand and surmised the street she meant. I remarked "I think you must be hallucinating because I know that street very well and there's nothing there but a Gristedes and a few closed storefronts. She insisted, "Well it's there. It's narrow in the front, but then opens into a huge space in the back."

So we struck out in the rain, and as we reached the corner of the next block and looked south, there was the simple, unassuming marquee proclaiming "Think Coffee." We made a run for it, using the marvelous trees in front of Courant as umbrellas (I am from Texas and she is from Colorado, so neither of us have any respect for carrying umbrellas---but that's another blog).

Inside, it was just as she described except that everywhere I looked I saw people sitting with their laptops and coffee, and others engaged in deep conversation. Suddenly I knew I was home. In fact, I am writing this blog from Think Coffee and enjoying my iced coffee at a table tucked away in the back. Tonight there is a free showing of a film and animation, so it looks like I've found the reason I was headed for New York City so many years ago...

Yet, I am somewhat certain that this Think Coffee is actually a portal to the eleventh dimension that the folks from Courant use as a front for their comings and goings as they journey through that fantastical new universe. You can see someone peering from behind a laptop, and then surreptitiously slip away for a while, disappearing unceremoniously, and returning later with a look of mysterious satisfaction. That is, of course, how they are coming up with such exciting visuals for those specials on the Science Channel.

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...