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.