"I Don't Know": The Genius of Kim Myung Sook

I Do Not Know
Poem by Han Yong-un performed by Youngju Kang


I have commented on this beautiful poem in an earlier blog, "I Do Not Know." Now I will describe a work of art that has subsequently emerged from this poem, the creation of Kim Myung Sook, an inspired dance that relies on the poem as a point of departure and celebrates the Korean experience, identity, and the fabric of life as humans existing as elemental earth. Recently the Korean government gave a special award to Dr. Kim for the outstanding contrbution of this work to Korean culture.

This remarkable artist has painted a masterpiece of dance where movement unfolds like brushstrokes and choreographic calligraphy... her dance group is Nuhui, a dance troup that has served as the canvas for Kim's explorations of movement, color, space, and structure. Kim has fashioned a cultural icon in her realization of the poem, extracting profound elements of Zen Buddhism to explore the essence of the poem and the spirituality of the Korean Psyche.

Kim has always had a sensitive eye, designing her own graphics and controlling every nuance of color and costume much as the great film director Antonioni. Her choreography frequently takes on the vocabulary of cinema, and Kim often creates video versions of the dances that employ cinematic effects such as cross dissolve and superimposed images.

This new work is closely related to the narrative structure of Han Yong-un's poem. As we listen to the performance of the poem, we can hear the textures and rhythms that find their way into movement and sound. Youngju Kang's eloquent rendering of Han's poem creates a sense of wonder and awe, and the sheer beauty of the language permeates our sensibiity in a profound awareness of mystery and revelation.

Here is a synopsis of the dance structure:
Prologue.
Dancers : Kim Yul Hee, Pak Koung Eun, Kim Whal Ran, Bea Jin Yl, Lee Jung Min, Lee Eun Jung, Lee Yoon Kyoung, O Ji Young, Kim Yuen Hee, Yoon Ji Yang. Musician : Son Bum Ju playing a reed instrument (sort of traditional pipe)
Act I. [Sae Oul] - green fountain from east / sound of water and rainfall...
Dancers : Yoon Jueng Min, Kim Yul Hee, Pak Koung Eun, Kim Whal Ran, Bea Jin Yl, Lee Jung Min, Lee Eun Jung
Act II. [Mu Ji Gae Sal] - over the rainbow / Gayageum
Act III. [Nat Dal] - moon rising in the afternoon / Voice
Act IV. [Mu Geoung Ji Hea] - everlasting being / Korean traditional fiddle (violin)

Prologue -- Kim draws upon an austere palette for sound, the sounds of an ancient windpipe, as though summoning the spirit of Korea to attend a celebration. Sun Bum Ju produces an inspired melody that penetrates and envelops the emptiness. The dancers awaken to discover themselves in the midst of antiquity merging with the present..not only awaken but seem to be created out of the mists and textures of the infinite moment. The sounds of the windpipe are evocative, as though Silence itself had discovered its own true voice. The music fades into darkness dissolved by a steady, refreshing rain.

Act I -- The rain brings new images of dancers around fountains flowing from some infinite wellspring... the dancers are vertical with an outstretched arms extending their reach as though gathering the rain. The way they surround the fountains evokes the image of a temple, the guardians of the flowing force of life...Sounds of distant thunder welcome the ritual, the quiet celebration of an undefined presence... the rain yields to the sound of water flowing...


Act II -- a cascade of sounds, the ancient harplike sounds of the Kayageum spill through the space while a lone traditional flute soars through the texture like a rainbow. Flowing water in fountains sustain us, the ebb and flow of life reach to the source of our identity in a cold and alien universe. The water welcomes us, nourishes us, delights in our delight. A swirl of sound encasing the flute...dancers swirling...lingering...in final gestures of celebration...a final touch of the fountain... withdrawing and fading into the clouds concealing a revelation...

Act III -- Wind and the sound of the surf rip through the terrain, the dancers run forward like the wind sweeping the ocean... and in the wind we hear the voice of I Don't Know, the text now transformed into a profound prayer in a most expressive and sustained performance, beautifully drawn out in a flowing musical line sustained by the wind and waves in lingering counterpoint.The dancers attend the poem in awe as worshippers of the source of wonder... reaching a sense of supreme ecstacy... above, butteflies hover in evocation of an endless sky...

Act IV -- A harbor bell sounds in the night... we see the ocean in the distance and the waves upon the beach, accompanied by the incessant sounds of the surf... almost imperceptibly we see the dawn slowly glowing and dancers emerging from the ocean like life itself...the dancers are part of the ocean... a Korean fiddle creates a soliloquy with the surf, a comment on the mystery and awe of the night, the endless ocean, and the slowly emerging enlightenment of the dawn... a light in the center of the stage flickers through the shadows and movements of the dancers and we sense this to be the source of ourselves, forever enclosed within our wonder and embrace... and yet, in the enveloping darkness our wonder continues and echoes... I Do Not Know... I Do Not Know... I Do Not Know...

The sculpture work of You, Young-kyo is inspired, the stone pools and butterflies add to the spiritual presence of the work. The composer and music director Hwang, Byoung-ki helps set the musical texture that melds with the layers of visual richness and structured movement.

Yuoul, the Kayageum ensemble, adds color and antiquity to the over all impression of sound. The sound design by Kim, Tae-gun establishes an ambience that envelops in the dance in the resonance of rain, wind, thunder, and silence. The baritone Sin Kyoung-ok provided one of the most remarkable performances in his singing of the poem, an inspired and inspiring performance. The poem was set to music by Hwang, Byoung-ki(he put the rhythm on the poem as lylic song). Jeung, Soo-nyun's Korean fiddle cuts through the surf and wind of the final movement like a spontaneous prayer. These artists and the dancers provided an extraordinary immediacy that transformed the many parts into an integral whole.

Kim Myung Sook has created a tour de force of movement, sound, and shape that provides a framework of introspection and revelation. The dancers combine with the musicians, the sculptor, the sound and light designers to weave an inspired tapestry of a work that fuses the past and present, the unique with the universal. The grace, agility, and sheer virtuosity of the dancers is tempered by the deep respect bestowed upon the work by these performing artists. Each dancer establishes a distinct individual quality while contributing to the whole.

Kim does not attempt to answer the questions of the poem. She goes beneath the answers to the essence of the questions themselves and provides insights into the fundamental resonance of ourselves within the world that is our dwelling place.

159 Years of Liederkranz

Liederkranz of the City of New York presented its 159th annual concert and gala evening on Saturday, May 20th. This is a venerable cultural club of the kind that began to emerge in the United States during the middle and late 19th century. Liederkranz was founded in 1847 as a male choral society. Now it has spanned the 19th and 20th centuries, and emerges in the 21st century as a full society of men and women with male and female choruses that also combine as a mixed choir. The purpose continues to celebrate German culture, but also promotes musical talent through competitions, scholarships, recitals, and concerts involving musicians from around the world.

The concert featured the combined chorus and the men's and women's groups, along with the New York Concert Opera Chamber Orchestra, led by their talented and resourceful music director, Dr. Ulrich Hartung. Not only did he direct the chorus, but he was also responsible for a number of the orchestral settings and choral arrangements.

The chorus has approximately fifty members, and Dr. Hartung was masterful in leading them through an ambitious and delightful program. Although the chorus is no longer the dominant choral organization in the city, the performances were sensitive and musical. One highlight of the evening was the winner of the Liederkranz vocal competition, Mari Moriya, who is joining the MET in several roles including Queen of the Night in Die Zauberflöte. Her performance of Der Hölle Rache was simply stunning for its clarity, range, and power. The chamber orchestra led by Hartung provided a spirited performance of Die Zauberflöte's overture.

This was a mix of works such as Beethoven's Die Ehre Gottes in der Natur, Mendelssohn's Auf Flügeln des Gesanges to a medley of Broadway hits, and a finale of works from Strauss's Zigeunerbaron that brought the guest artists together with the chorus and orchestra for a memorable and rousing close. The baritone Laszlo Fogel and soprano Mari Moriya added to the rich Strauss texture and the gypsy spirit as they performed excerpts with the chorus in an inspired abbreviated version of the work as selected by Maestro Hartung.

Liederkranz has played an important role in the musical life of New York and the nation through its close association with the Metropolitan Opera. The chorus once was so select that it performed with the New York Philharmonic, and performed with the Metropolitan Opera in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. The organization has hosted guest artists such as Jenny Lind, Frederuccio Busoni, Victor Herbert, Lilli Lehmann, and Helen Traubel, to name a few.

Liederkranz has had an impressive and illustrious history, and one hopes this cultural society has the imagination and energy to endure another 150 years. The Liederkranz building is a treasure, but it looks as though it is in need of an overhaul and a creative touch to align its facilities with its expanded cultural role. Formerly the organization was located in a much larger building on 58th street that included a full stage. The society moved to its current quarters on 87th street in 1948. Up until about that time, the organization continued to be a male chorus, but around 1949 women joined Liederkranz as was the practice of many cultural clubs throughout the country.

The challenge for the organization is whether its greatest days are in the past or whether it can rise to the demands of modern musical practice and establish a new dynasty in a multicultural world. There is clearly a need for cultural societies such as Liederkranz to maintain ties with a rich past and an important cultural tradition while forging new standards through imaginative concerts, recitals, and staged performances. Currently, it is but an echo of its past, but Liederkranz could be poised for a new era of excellence. Certainly the musical guidance of Ulrich Hartung inspires a new level of achievement, but serious recruitment from the younger generation of music lovers is greatly needed. Whether the organization has the will and dedication to renew itself remains an open question.

One notable feature of the concert was the elaborate printed program which served as a souvenir for the occasion. The person to be credited for this expanded version is Trudy Sczesny, and the quality of this brochure-like program added to ambiance of this gala event.

Many Happy Returns

Thanks to all my friends who have commented on my absence from the cyber world. It was a sobering experience to face the prospect of not being able to work in this medium that I have come to love.

Even though there appears to be an physical explanation of the difficulties I have faced, I can't help but note that my difficulty occurred in the context of learning of Wyatt's death. The loss of such a good friend underscored my own mortality and whispered of the tentative and tenuous existence that frames each passing day. In these days I have discovered how the presence of all those I know defines my experience and illuminates who I am. The context of my life has been essentially one of aloneness, and I haved counted being "alone" as a virtue of being "all one."

Yet, now I see that all those who define my space and time constitute my awareness of being, and my aloneness includes the interpenetration of each of you. The reality of what we are to one another continues to unfold in this mysterious medium of Time. I have always regarded the notion of Time and Being as redundant, as Being is the expression of Time. My electronic presence extends my reach and reflects my growing awareness. Yet, I am involved with your journey which is continually defining my own. The intervention of this new medium has created new opportunities of discovery, and somehow we are all moving to a new place in which the boundaries that have served to define us are yielding to new horizons that invoke the emerging reality of our continual and constant becoming.

To this sensibility I now return in the climate of new awareness and commitment.

Wyatt Back Deep in the Heart

My copy of Wyatt's Deep in The Heart contains an inscription by the author:

for Elizabeth---
who will surely go to Texas before long. It's terrible and beautiful -- as I hope this book shows. I also hope you enjoy the people here, who, troubled as they are, are close to me.

Wyatt Wyatt
20 March 1981

I had been thrilled to learn that he had written a second novel, and was struck by the title because it seemed to indicate that he was at last returning to a part of himself he had disowned when he went to New York and became enthralled with Perle and the romance of becoming an author.

The setting is the town that Wyatt and I grew up in, during an intense drought in summer:

It was the beginning of the dog days. Amarillo was bone dry. In the throat of the afternoon the temperature stuck at a hundred and eleven degrees Fahrenheit -- in the shade --if you could find shade. Between noon and six, you couldn't touch the door handle of your car without a glove or a handkerchief, and the ground had slowly cooked into a friable crust that flaked off and rose in the wind and tinted it. People said there was blood in the sky. On restless days -- nearly every day -- the wind beat at the town with the hack hack of a great rusty blade, flinging out a spray of dust that settled like a dry red mist down over everything whether it was alive or still.

This review can be found on Amazon.com:

Wyatt Wyatt (author of "Catching Fire") scores big in his second novel "Deep in the Heart"--- a well-crafted tale of sex, love, and violence in the heart of the Texas Panhandle, Amarillo. His prose is rich and imaginative and deserves a wider audience. Boone Randolf is the central character who struggles with his emotions and his friends in a personal quest for sanity in the midst of irrational and tormented characters. His people ring true, and yet, loom larger than life: Grady Hornsby, a legend of fiery wildness, a volcano always on the verge of eruption; Rowena, Grady's love, a sultry goddess tormented by a desire to control, Sue Pam, a 19-year-old sexual feast eager to live life fully; Dennis, Sue Pam's husband, protected and sheltered by wealth; and Lloyd Hollister, a cynic corrupted by power. Full of surprises, Wyatt Wyatt mixes these ingredients with abandon and shrewd observations that will stay with you long after you finish the book. But the real star is Texas itself, and Wyatt spins us through a devastating summer drought and welcomed respite of September rain. His descriptions weave an unforgettable texture of torrid temperatures and temperaments.

Wyatt Wyatt was a Texan who ran from his heritage most of his life and returned to himself in this wonderful tribute to a vanishing frontier of the freedom to be wild. Reading this book makes you wish for more, but sadly Wyatt Wyatt passed away in 2002, which makes this book all the more poignant and precious.

It really is a wonderful second novel, full of promise for a third, which was not to be. If there are flaws, they might be traceable to a tendency to be too driven by the plot, keeping the characters encased in the narrative. As though he was aware of this trap, Wyatt wrote "Already, I've been tempted to explain more than is necessary, to justify or ameliorate." He always ties up the loose ends, and life is never quite that orderly.

Wyatt writes of an Amarillo of the 1970s, and it is a city full of contradictions and wild living. The people are struggling to find an identity in a Texas that cannot come to grips with its heroic past and estrangement from modern life. It is a Texas that yearns to be the wild west, but is caught in the throes of a betrayal of itself. This treachery is manifest in Boone's deception of his best friend Grady, and through this deceit the extraordinary becomes merely ordinary. "The wild, reckless, best part of him had dried up, it had split off and blown tumbling across the plains in the wind until it vanished."

United 93 and American 11

The recent showing of the film United 93 has brought back the morning of 9/11 with startling clarity.

September 11, 2001 was a beautiful Tuesday morning, possessing a splendor and elegance that only September can distill as an idyllic memory --- the kind of day that poems are made of.

On that morning, I walked out of the market on La Guardia Place across from my apartment and looked up to see an airplane flying south so low that I could see it was an American Airlines commercial flight. The plane was flying full-throttle, and the engines sounded loud and laboring, an eerie, sinister whine that knifed through the September stillness with alarming swiftness and in a matter of seconds disappeared into the north tower of the World Trade Center some 30 blocks away in a flash of smoke and flames. The world changed in that instant, and I was stunned by the smoke pouring out of the north tower and the solemnity that cloaked the collision's aftermath in the semblance of silence. I was too far away to hear the screams of death and horror.

Minutes later, the world watched in terror as a second commercial airline approached from the southwest and erupted through the southern tower in a cataclysmic explosion magnified by telephoto lenses and television coverage. Throughout the day there would be repeated airings of this brutal attack, and when the towers collapsed, frequent relentless showings indelibly etched this catastrophe on our collective consciousness, including the ghastly images of people leaping to their deaths to avoid being burned alive. We also were intensely aware that when the planes struck the towers, countless numbers of people were instantly incinerated, including those ill-fated inhabitants aboard the hi-jacked airliners. Yet, minutes later, another commercial jet crashed into the Pentagon, and to my amazement, the media still seemed to be wondering if these events were related.

As these events were unfolding, passengers of United 93 discovered through their cell phones that they were destined to die as the others in the three flights that had been commandeered as volatile missiles by terrorists. This knowledge empowered them to act, in an attempt to take the plane from control of the terrorists, but their awareness of their situation had materialized too late for them to do anything but cause a premature crash, diverting the plane from its likely target in Washington D.C.: The White House. It crashed in an "empty" field in Pennsylvania.

An excellent writer of The American Digest, Vanderleun, places United 93 in context (Of a Fire in a Field). Fires continued to burn for many days in the subterannean aftermath of the collapse of the towers:

Inside the wire under the hole in the sky was, in time, a growing hole in the ground as the rubble was cleared away and, after many months, the last fire was put out. Often at first, but with slowly diminishing frequency, all the work to clear out the rubble and the wreckage would come to a halt... Far away on that day, far from the pillar of flame and plume of ash at the foot of the island, there was another fire in a field in Pennsylvania. Those nearby felt the shudder in the earth and saw the smoke, but it would be some days before we understood what it was, and longer still until we began to know what it meant.

...The film I saw by myself tonight expands that meaning and brings a human face to the acts by the passengers of United 93 that endure only in that rare atmosphere that heroes inhabit. What I know in my heart, but what always escapes my understanding until something like this film renews it, is that heroism is a virtue that most often appears among us not descending from some mythic pantheon, but rising up out of the ordinary earth and ordinary hearts when the moment calls for actions extraordinary.

In the days that followed the collapse of the twin towers, those of us who lived below 14th street, found ourselves in a war zone. Hordes of people wandered about this war zone. They collected in parks and along streets, stunned by the sudden and swift calamity that had befallen the nation. Strangers met and talked, and support groups and vigils met in parks and other public areas. Along walls and fences, pictures of people were posted in a desperate attempt to account for those missing who were thought to be in the vicinity of the attack. As time passed, these were transformed into walls of rememberance for those who were believed to have persihed, and were strewn with flowers and candles. As these postings were ripped from the walls by wind or passersby, the authors would repost and add to the text and images (including laminating them), a ritual that clung to the hope that some miracle might restore everything.

In the meantime, the war zone had been clearly mapped. The air still retained the smell of death, and the dust of pulverized remains were still sifting, drifting, and settling on the terrain. Residents had to be identified before they could enter the area, and shipments of goods such as groceries, magazines, and newspapers were curtailed. I had to go above 14th street to get a newspaper. There were shortages of bread and milk. None were permitted into this downtown zone unless they could demonstrate that they had legitimate business and had acceptable ID. Vehicular travel was limited to emergency vehicles, and troops were stationed throughout the area with deployment of heavy armament on strategic streets such as Houston, Broadway, and the entire downtown Wall street area.

As the time of this vicious attack has grown more distant, many seem oblivious to opposing worlds on the verge of collision and collapse. We have insulated ourselves from the impending violence and danger. Yet, we know that in the blink of an eye, at any moment, our fragile world may disappear in an act of hatred and devastation, as it did on that idyllic September morn of 2001.

Etude

Morning...
quickening sounds...
fleeting glimpses...
A breeze slips
through fresh-leaved trees...

Spring dances
to a counterpoint
of birds bickering,
laughter leaping,
and conversations cavorting
in the early shadows of May.

Filtering the Past

I received Wyatt's Deep in the Heart today. He wrote an inscription in the book, and somehow I feel his presence. This book marks a return for Wyatt, back to the matters of the heart in the land that he once fled with a vengeance.

We filter the past in many ways, and Wyatt turned his back on his past for a time, and now returns to reconstruct a world, to give it a new birth and dedication. I am happy to travel along with him.

Although for a while we were cohorts in that Texas terrain, I come to his story telling as a stranger who has travelled similar paths, but now follow them through his eyes and ears. It is all strangely familiar as though I have been there before, but also wildly strange since there is a new luster, a patina that masks the moment in a new awareness.

The journey for him is so different from the ones I have been pursuing in this blog. I often am writing of the same place, but of quite different times, a kind of pre-Wyatt and sans-Wyatt sensibility. However, this filtering of the past also recounts the special nature of our friendship. We maintained separate spheres even though we were the closest of friends. Our connection was fundamental and intense, but our worlds were also separate and remote.

The Eyes Have It---Not

You never know just how precious something is until it is taken away. Suddenly I am unable to read at the computer, and have started keeping drafts on paper to enter later. The main problem seems to be multiple images and flickering. It is really quite disturbing. I am writing this to post later, and for the moment I seem somewhat blind to the cyberworld. The flickering makes it difficult to look at any screen, although the effect seems less pronounced with a television set.

I am scheduled for an exam, and then perhaps I will find the cause and hopefully, a solution. In the world of computers I am eyeless for the moment. I wish I could say that such blindness leads to wisdom, but instead, I find myself powerless and inept. Writing now calls for a new rhythm. Paper and pen, old media, but now unfamiliar terrain. My efforts falter, and these few sentences are all I can muster for now, as though the affliction of one medium is somehow transferred to another.

Celebration

Having gone through deep encounters with the past, I find myself looking to the celebration of who we are in the streaming presence of Now. This is a compelling and urgent activity, one that reminds us that we are the leading edge of creative momentum, making meaning as we become the newness of ourselves in each successive moment. If you can imagine that you are space or time itself, and that you carve reality from the brink of nothingness, you will understand that your being is the essence of the universe. Your very existence is creation, and creation is the act of moments unfolding.

I often refer to this process as becoming, and that is an apt metaphor. We have only metaphors to penetrate this simple reality, which is beyond words. Language cannot penetrate the nothingness. The words, the letters, the sounds dissolve in the blackhole of negative space and time. Language is mute and ineloquent. Part of the dilemma is that language must have something to represent nothing, and thus we miss the phenomenal essence of something that simply is not there.

Yet, we are here at the boundary of that not-thereness which is yet another dimension, and we perpetually enter that dimension in our becoming. All becoming is from the zero-point, the repose of energy in its unarticulated state. The future is in the zero. Existence is in the zero. Our isness is the reality of infinite disclosure. Our infinite becoming is cause for celebration!

Wyatt Wyatt

For some reason Wyatt has sprung to life in my memory. Once he was Lawrence Wyatt, who became my closest friend around the fifth grade when he entered Lee Bivens School and was assigned to my class. We instantly bonded as friends walking home from school.

This bond continued throughout school with our admiration for each other deepening and continuing even after we went to different colleges and pursued very different paths. Larry was a literature major at the University of Texas, and when he graduated he headed for New York to pursue an M.A. at Columbia University, arriving there slightly ahead of me.

Even though we were often separated for long intervals, we would resume conversations as though it were the next day. Wyatt became an ardent pursuer and writer of fiction. The catalyst intensifying his passion was Perle, the wife of a psychoanalyst who fancied himself the reincarnation of Freud, and who , of course, understood Perle's obsession with Larry. She had a deep knowledge of literature, was sexy as hell, and gave Larry his real education in writing and sexual intensity. Their affair was stormy and passionate, and was fully condoned by her husband. We often dined out together or went to Perle's place for drinks. It was all very urban and civilized.

Abruptly Larry left for Paris, as all good American writers should. This was an extension of a process that had begun with Perle, which could be best understood as abandoning his Texas past as being irrelevant. If nothing else, he was tracing the pathways of American writers, and he wore a beret (which he actually began wearing while in New York). In addition to a real commitment and passion for writing, he was also caught up in the drama and theatrics of his adventure.

He returned to New York and resumed a turbulent relationship with Perle. He urged her to flee with him to Alaska. He bought a motorcycle so they could experience traveling the countryside through a visceral immersion in the windblown senses. Perle took off with Larry, the epitome of an impetuous impulse to live like true romantics in the passion of the moment. However, after several days of travel, Perle returned to New York, and Larry continued alone to Alaska where he taught creative writing at the University of Alaska.

While in Alaska he fell into a relationship with a student who deeply admired Larry and always addressed him in third person. She was from Seattle, and immediately latched onto Larry who was ready for something different than a tempestuous relationship. There was an element of hero worship which fanned Larry's ego as she continued to call him Wyatt even in intimate moments. Thus Larry dropped his first name and became officially and legally Wyatt Wyatt, hoping somehow that this name would bring him fame as a writer. They went to Spain and to the tiny island of Ibiza, which at the time was relatively undiscovered, and they could live on pennies a day. This was an intense time of reading and writing. When they returned, Wyatt was appointed to run a program in creative writing in Florida. Eventually the student left Wyatt, and he was finally faced with the reality of himself and his writing.

Under that name, which was now his only name, Wyatt Wyatt brought forth Catching Fire and Deep in the Heart. Wyatt and I were in touch during the time he published Catching Fire with Random House in 1977. He spoke of selling rights for a film version, but apparently that never materialized. He gave me a copy of the book when he paid an impromptu visit to New York. There was something about that visit that altered the orbits of our universe. On his arrival, we resumed our intimate connection and conversation as before, but by the time he left New York, we were somehow strangers. I never heard from him again.

I found this lone review of Catching Fire on Amazon.com. It had been posted on my birthday, in 1999.

As southern as grits and beer for breakfast, this entertaining book is filled with odd-ball characters that grab and hold you. Very well written. Wyatt Wyatt uses humor and pathos to explore the human condition and he uses it well. If you can find this book, check it out.

I never had a copy of Deep in the Heart. It came out in 1980, and since our paths had swung in different directions, I never knew anything about the book or that it existed. There is no Amazon.com review. I feel compelled to search it out, because maybe Wyatt decided to write about a past that he had abandoned when he became involved with Perle and felt the need to be more urban, more cosmopolitan. There is no doubt that his New York experience with Perle was so momentous and potent that he must have felt that his real existence virtually began in the ethos of that time.

I am not sure what has brought Wyatt back into my memory after 25 years. Perhaps, somehow, my links with this particular past are active once more. I don't know if Wyatt is still alive as web searches only yield minor references to him as author of these two volumes composed at the zenith of his journey more than 25 years ago. In this same period, Perle published work on the Kabbalah and Malcolm Lowry, but was even more prolific publishing under her maiden name. Perle's husband was also a highly productive author, publishing many books, including a book about healing through visual imagery and establishing a foundation and website devoted to healing yourself through visual imagery. I hadn't thought much about Wyatt until today, when suddenly he seemed to be in the room, an old friend intimately bridging the abyss of time.
* * * * * * * * *
Addendum: After writing the above, I did a rigorous search and finally tracked down the following obituary:

Wyatt Wyatt was born in Shawnee, Oklahoma and has lived in Oklahoma, Texas, New York, Paris, Alaska, Spain, the Yukon Territory, and Florida. Wyatt has held jobs as a bag-worm picker, popcorn popper, tractor driver, window washer, library janitor, traffic counter, street sweeper, cat skinner, goldminer, woodcutter, teacher, and writer. Wyatt previously taught literature at the University of Central Florida before his early retirement in 1998. Including two novels, Wyatt has published short stories, drama, poetry, television scripts, book reviews, criticism, articles, and political speeches. Wyatt passed away August 8th, 2002, after a lengthy battle with cancer.

So Wyatt is gone... irretrievably, sadly, and so final that I feel a great radiance has flickered and failed... This sudden knowledge penetrates to the core of my being ... painfully... permanently...

Yet, today he has been vividly present.

Perhaps he has been looking over my shoulder, nudging me to remember. Now I realize the impediment that his memory has breached was far greater than I knew. From other sources I discovered that he had brain cancer in 1988, but he fought it off and returned to teach a course on death and dying. From the above notice, he continued to teach until 1998 when he took "early retirement." Wyatt confronted his ultimate demons. While in high school, his stepfather underwent a tortuous, fatal siege of cancer that was very painful for Wyatt. Wyatt also harbored deep forboding that he would one day face his own battle. Yet, his best trait was to summon courage to confront his deepest fears and carry on with dignity and resolute resolve.

Writing of his adventures today brought me such pleasure, and I remember his great affection and sense of humor. I know he must have had a hand in his own obituary...as nothing to him was ever trivial.

My deep regret is that we lost touch in those final years. I still have a date with Deep in the Heart, as I realize that Wyatt has returned to a place deep in my heart... in fact, he never left.

The Little House

For his livelihood, my father served as one of the early efficiency experts emerging in 1930s, for a large multistate electrical power company, and in fact, saved the company from bankruptcy by reorganizing different practices and structures so that the company was able to cut costs dramatically.

But for his well-being, Dad pursued carpentry and philosophy. Having grown up on a farm, he had learned that we are empowered to improve our physical world by using our minds and hands to effect change. Consequently, when I was entering my teens, he decided to redesign and reconstruct the house and the garage.

Before this extravagant undertaking, he had built a small house in the backyard that served as a laundry room, a workbench for woodworking, a printshop for my newspaper ventures, and a small library of books on history, science, and philosophy, which my Dad avidly pursued. To put this in perspective, this was during the Korean War, and my news source was the Associated Press via the old radio we kept in "The Little House." As an aside, that radio gave me the shock of my life (and one of my first lessons in physics when I grabbed the metal stump of the tuner [the wooden knob had fallen off] while in my bare feet on a wet floor).

For Dad, The Little House. was a retreat for his pursuit of history and philosophy (he would include science as a part of philosophy). He would buy books from estates for his library in the Little House, and began to amass a distinctive collection. He had never gone to college, but had completed studies by correspondence school in accounting, history, and philosophy from LaSalle, a prominent pioneer in distance education.

Now, as I was in middle school, he began his significant project of expanding our dwellings, enlisting my help as an extra hand where I learned how to build things. Briefly, he completely changed the front entrance of the house, combined the dining and living rooms into an enormous room for formal entertaining with a prominent place for the Knabe Piano, remodeled the kitchen to include a counter for eating and food preparation, and constructed a large dining/recreation room as a multipurpose space, including a new invention that was becoming popular: television.

Rather than attach the garage to this new home, he built a creative open port that could be used as a garage or a rehearsal and dance space with a side that could open to the backyard where an audience could gather. At the back of this space he build a new "Little House" which could double as a guest room, with its own bathroom. and library-like shelving to house his growing collection of books. Even after he tore down the original "Little House" we referred to this new room as The Little House, which in the spirit of Darwin's theory had evolved to a new species. On many an evening and well into the night, my Father would disappear to this sanctuary in pursuit of knowledge, but ultimately, I believe, he found wisdom.

Of course, it wasn't until later years when I read Hemingway's "A Clean Well-Lighted Place" that I fully understood my Father's urgent need for this clean, well-lighted room. Like Hemingway and all of us, he felt confronted by the looming nothingness.

What did he fear? It was not a fear or dread, It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was a nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order. Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada.

In history, science, and philosophy, Dad was seeking an answer to the void, to nada. Somehow, in the quietness of The Little House, he found brief glimpses of answers, moments of conscious awareness that gleam in the darkness like distant galaxies.

Washington Square Park

Washington Square Park has been the heart of Greenwich Village for more than a century. It sits at the south end of Fifth Avenue, a timeless jewel in the bosom of the city. It is still a gathering place for people with causes and people who are interested only in people watching. It is a place for musicians to bring out their instruments for a trial run, for joggers who trace paths around the perimeter (always counter clockwise), for politicians and birthday parties, for chess players and kibitzers, for dogs and dog lovers, for strollers and sun bathers, for entertainers and outdoor concerts, for hotdog stands and water fountains, for onlookers content to watch the world go by. The list could go on and on.

It is a Damon-Runyon/O'Henry paradise, where stories abound in volumes not yet written. Surprises happen every day, every moment. At the turn of the 19th into the 20th century, O' Henry started romancing New York through his imaginative short stories with surprise endings. A little later, Damon Runyon made his way to New York City to work for Hearst as a reporter. His favorite hangout was Broadway, and his story "The Idylls of Miss Sarah Brown" appeared in his 1932 book Guys and Dolls, written in the Broadway slang of the time, which caught the ear and imagination of Abe Burrows and Frank Loesser who transformed it into one of the all-time great classic Broadway musicals.

Henry James (1843-1916) wrote Washington Square, a novel depicting the 1840s when the brownstones across from the park were a fashionable haven for the wealthy. Henry James was born in Washington Square. James strips the glamour from Washington Square in his story of disappointment and unfulfillment. He wrote the novel from a distance, while in London and later, Paris. It has been made into an opera and a film. Composed by Thomas Pasatieri, the opera Washington Square premiered in Detroit in 1976. The opera was revised. In 1977, the New York Lyric Opera, in residence at New York University, gave the new premiere of Pasatieri's opera in what is now Loewe Theatre on West 4th, about 50 yards from Washington Square Park.

While Henry James wrote of a fading aristocratic class in Washington Square in the 19th Century, O.Henry and Damon Runyon were the chroniclers of New York's coming of age in the 20th century, of the colorful characters that made up the city with their millions of stories erupting every minute.

Washington Square Park is a miniature, a mircrocosm of the great engine that is New York City. It has gone through many transformations. There were once luxury hotels that lined several sides of the park. I have roamed through the underground catacombs of these old hotels that the university had commandeered to use as offices and classrooms. There was a labyrinth of tunnels connecting the buildings, and I came upon the underground quarters of the valets and maids. I found kitchens and ironing boards, and the remnants of laundries. Entering these quarters was like descending into the past. These rooms had not been touched for more than half a century. There were clothes left on the floor, and old bottles and glasses on counters. I felt as though any moment someone might walk through the door from this past, this lost civilization of a vanishing aristocracy and its servant class. I wondered how these rooms had come to be abandoned. Why were they left in such disarray?

Sadly, I think we have lost our taste for short stories, for those prose portraits of vibrant people in the throes of life. The 20th century was an age of innocence, a coming of age. 9/11 2001 ushered in a new era, tough, impervious, and so brittle we appear always on the verge of shattering into incoherent fragments.

Mercer Street Bookstore

No matter how great the technological incursion into our lives, one prediction that has not proven true for me has been that books, as such, would begin to disappear and become obsolete as electronic text became universally available for all such "books." It has also been suggested that electronic media would become so pervasive that ultimately less and less paper would be needed. We would eventually emerge as a paperless society.

Well, not for me.

While I admit that most of my research and inquiry utilizes acquiring and reading text on the internet, and benefiting from the recent advances in instant translation of documents in foreign languages, I had almost forgotten the romance of the printed word and books as a physical presence. Then I wandered into the Mercer Street Bookstore, a place for second-hand books and old vinyl LP recordings.

There is a certain majesty in the variety of paper and bindings you encounter with books. There is a special smell of paper, and the tactile experience of leafing through pages of volumes of books you never knew even existed can be intoxicating. And the textures of paper are so rich and varied! I am always drawn to the poetry section of such stores. Poetry passes into the "second-hand" status more rapidly than most books. Calling them "used" books is often misleading, because most of the books have been rarely touched, although there are notable exceptions.

My imagination is ignited by such encounters. Titles are leaping out at me with such explosiveness. "Incredible," I think, "Why didn't I think of that!" There are authors I have never heard of, and books have such variety of sizes and styles! I think of my experience with electronic print media and suddenly realize that text is reduced to a certain monotonous sameness, with occasional deviation of fonts and backgrounds. And there is no equivalent tactile sense of how books feel as I sort randomly through a volume.

After poetry, I head for philosophy, then to arts and humanities, then to fiction, then history, and science. I replace Internet Explorer and Firefox with myself as browser with a certain built-in intelligence (I hope) as I search, although what actually alerts me is some sensibility not immediately understood, an awareness that grows as I leaf through pages... words and phrases grab me and awaken some dark mysterious recess of myself that was waiting for some such signal.

Mercer Street Bookstore... Not a bookstore at all but a place where ideas occupy three dimensional space, slumbering on shelves until some intelligence stumbles upon them and discovers new constellations, new galaxies of thoughts formed and flung to the wilderness waiting to be deciphered and filtered through the mind.

Walking into the bookstore I enter a universe that is dazzling, an underlying order that structures knowledge. Bookshelves line the walls to the ceiling around the perimeter, with smaller shelves and bins in the front. It is a cozy, comfortable space, with an open central area that contains recent arrivals, LPs, odd-sized art books, books of poetry, with little anarchic pockets here and there inviting scrutiny. At the back of this open space, the room narrows to the right and continues back, a literary gravity pulling you to the furthermost wall. There is just enough chaos, scattered blackholes that connect to the vortex of my imagination and drag me irresistibly into the increasing density of inspiration and human achievement.

Time is suspended. Books beckon me with silent and persuasive seductiveness as I discover that this realm of mental activity emerges as a kingdom, a landscape where I can wander among the volumes like an adventurer from another planet... exploring alien terrain with such abundant awareness that I abandon my routine digital domain for an idle Saturday afternoon among the ancient tomes and printed manuscripts of Mercer Street.

What Do You Mean By That?

Maybe you have noticed the same rhetorical device that I experience on a somewhat regular basis: "What do you mean by that?" It is a clever device when critiquing written materials since you can pretend to have read something and you put the pressure on the person to find other words to somehow clarify something that already may be perfectly obvious. It is also useful in face to face exchanges in diverting the discussion away from your own arguments and creating new territory for exchange.

A corollary phrase is "I don't know what you mean by this." This is, of course, much more aggressive, since it implies an accusation that someone has not made things crystal clear. This is, in modern circles, a grievous error, except when you are writing poetry or philosophy.

The reality may be that as marvelous as language is, we may never fully know what is in the minds of others who are speaking and writing. This is part of the human dilemma. We never know ourselves fully, and whatever we disclose in a particular moment is enclosed and relevant to that moment. How it relates to past and future is a process of discovery, and is never fully revealed.

In fact, isn't that the miracle of language and words? Words in combination are a way of making meaning through extending ordinary meaning into extraordinary combinations that become new knowledge in the world. This is true of poetry and of creative writing where words are tools of extension that produce original ideas. In the act of uttering, we are in the dynamic disclosure of creating meaning from moment to moment...

...and yes, I am not sure what I mean by that...

A Class Act: Anything Goes!

A group of music education majors from New York University under the leadership of Candace Parr formed a student production group called A Class Act and on April 7-9th demonstrated they rated that designation and more. They transformed a space at Thompson Center into a Broadway Theatre, complete with their own improvised orchestra pit and proceeded to perform an inspired production of Cole Porter's Anything Goes, even exceeding to some degree the professional training programs in musical theatre at New York University. What they lacked in financial and institutional support, they made up for with imagination and inventiveness.

Producer Danielle Lazarowitz, who may be our next David Merrick, helped Candace maneuver through all of the obstacles of producing a musical with absolutely no financial support from the unversity as well as no support in providing space. But the driving force was the vision of Candace Parr and the talents of everyone involved.

The scene was set by the pianist/accompanist Kyle Henry who was playing at the "piano bar" as the audience arrived. He has a genuine connection with the audience, and is one of the few left-foot pedal pushers you will find, which gives the impression that he is always poised and ready to leap off the bench to take care of some musical problem.

Sitting in the audience and inspired by these young song and dance actors, I thought back on the early efforts of those who went on to fame, and saw that same potential in all the talent on stage. I couldn't help seeing analogies of actors who have gone from their initial efforts to full careers.

Michael Holder playing Billy Crocker combines the looks of Sam Shepard and Richard Gere, but brings his own distinctive style to the role, with a wonderful voice and deft character. There were also elements of Fred Astaire as he shaped an utterly convincing portrait of a schemer and dreamer who has fallen in love with Hope Harcourt.

Joe Piccirillo as Moonface Martin could be the double of a young Robert De Niro who brings sleight of hand, humor, and perhaps the best performance of "Be Like the Bluebird" that is on record. His performance and his character were classic. He has an instinctive comedic flair, but also has the natural tools of an actor. I doubt that he studied the moves of De Niro in The King Of Comedy, but he has them in his vocabulary.

The Ethel Merman role, Reno Sweeney, played by Jaclyn Altieri, at times must carry the show with numbers like "I Get a Kick Out of You," "You're The Top," "Anything Goes," and "Blow, Gabriel, Blow," to name a few. Not only does she manage this feat, but she has a presence that reminds me of a mix of Mitzi Gaynor and Debbie Reynolds.

A vivacious Heather Wilson playing Bonnie Le Tour could be how Laura Dern must have looked in her early acting days... fresh, energetic and enthusiastic... she brightened the stage with a dazzling incandescence. And Christina Kompar played mother Harcourt with all of the comic panache of Peggy Cass as Agnes Gooch in Mame. And while we are at it, Jim Kuerschner reminds me of how Eric Roberts looked in his first days as a professional, projecting a kind of lyrical devil-may-care cynicism. His portrayal of Elisha J. Whitney was superb.

Darrell Dumas as Sir Evelyn Oakleigh turned in a performance that was as masterful as anything David Hyde Pierce has done, bringing a great deal of detail to the role with a distinctive flair. Everything he does has a sense of connection and secure control, as was always apparent in "Let's Misbehave." His work gives us a sense of immediacy and spontaneity. He has a comic imagination that seems inexhaustible, tempered with the craft of an actor.

Jeanne Cascio's Hope Harcourt, reminiscent of Leslie Caron or Anne Baxter, captures the essence of the ingenue lead. winning the day along with Michael Holder in "DeLovely" and "All Through the Night."

Proving it is true that "there are no small roles" were the likes of Sutton Stewart (Captain), Louis Winsberg (Purser), Meghan Phadke (Stewardess), Richard Vagnigno (Bishop), Natalie Nachimson (Soloist), Jennie Chiaramonte (Reporter/Ling), Megan Himel (Cameraperson /Ching), and Lianna Purjes, Julia Rosenfeld (Sailors). The performance was marked by the synchronicity of a total ensemble effort.

Certainly Cole Porter's lyrics and music of this 1936 musical astound us with how well they wear, even when they are topical. The ever lyrical "All Through the Night" as a duet of separated lovers heightens their separation through its spiraling downward flow, but we are lifted up by Reno's Angels (Laura Chzaszcz, Courtney Marello, Amy Rosenfield, Marissa Ur) in a show stopper "Take Me Back to Manhattan." Cole Porter would be proud.

Anything Goes goes because of Candace Parr who masterfully directs the production with a sense of fun, pace, and style. Candace is a budding Hal Prince, with that rare combination of production sense, performance savvy, and a conceptual approach to staging and direction. Anything Goes goes because of the talented students on stage, and the talents of student instrumentalists supporting them in the pit. Conductor Tammy Edwards is poised and keeps the orchestra cohesive and balanced, and even makes a cameo appearance in the second act. The rich choreographic touch of Jeanne Cascio finds just the right moves for the actors and ensemble.

By now, you may have forgotten that this started as a project of music education students who are A Class Act, and who from my perspective are "the top... the Coliseum... The Louvre Museum... the top!" If the future of music education is in the hands of these resourceful, musical, enterprising students, music education is in for a renaissance such as we have never seen before. Look out world...cause here they come! They're the top!

Coffee Times

My mother loved coffee. Mostly it was the idea of coffee. Sipping coffee as she watched the weather and the world go by.

She was a passionate watcher. She loved whatever was unexpected. Coffee was the great mediator of the unexpected. The first time she visited me in the Village after my Father died, we celebrated New York over coffee. Although we went to all the coffee houses in Village (before Starbucks), we also sat on the terrace, which overlooked a garden and included a view of the Empire State Building some thirty blocks away. With our coffee we would watch the clouds marking time, and the glow of sunset over the Hudson, with the shores and cliffs of New Jersey accenting the dwindling light.

Once, a sudden thunderstorm swept through the skyline. It was one of those August electrical displays with lightning crackling all around and thunderclaps exploding in cataclysmic eruptions and rumbling across the sky in fading fierceness. Inevitably, shafts of lightning bolts attacked the top of the Empire State Building. My mother insisted in sitting on the terrace, delighting in the display, despite the driving rain which was soaking the terrace, including us. For her this was a thrilling light show. This was all the more remarkable because I remembered her being afraid of the lightning since as a child she had seen her father struck by lightning while standing in the screendoor during such a thunderburst. Somehow she had overcome that fear. She always was seeking the unusual, such as abruptly driving to Colorado in late August in hopes of finding an early snow among the mountain peaks. She usually found them, and was always exhilerated by such impromptu discoveries.

Just before she visited that August, I had watched a local entrepreneur put together a new coffee place around the corner from our building. It was in a garden-like spot, and the businessman was something of a craftsman as he completely constructed the space over the course of about a month, finishing with a wonderful outdoor terrace in front, a perfect place to watch the Village pass by. I thought of my mother, and wrote to her about the new space which was then called "Coffee Cuisine."

When she arrived, Coffee Cuisine had just opened and proved to be our favorite place aside from the apartment terrace. The weather was idyllic and we sat for hours with our lattes and capuccinos remembering past times and absorbing the spirit of the Village. In fact, if I went out on some business and returned, I would usually finding her sitting outside at Coffee Cuisine. This visit was to be the last time I would see her, and so these times and that place take on a special luster in my memory.

Coffee Cuisine went through several transitions after that, becoming Internet Cafe, and then briefly Leo's Place. Now it is empty, for rent. But as I pass by, I see her sitting there with her coffee, watching the weather and the world go by, and probably wishing for a thunderstorm with snow.

Silence

For me, eloquence is born out of silence.

Everything emanates from the point of nothingness, a dot of infinity, an infinite void... out of which time and being emerge in continuous streaming. We have created a metaphor of this streaming with our electronic media flowing across cyberspace, light and shadow flickering on screens around the world, performing their magic as fast as our connectedness can download successive moments.

For many today, inspiration comes out of the multisensory overload, a kind of Ivesian collage of competing, even conflicting elements vying for dominance among the senses. Out of this pandemonium some grab handfuls of meaning, reshaping experience by remixing the sources. This is the age of remixing. Art has become the sampling of moments. Our process now culminates in the layering of images and sounds, often thick and dense, with a compelling driving rhythm that melds the diversity into a cohesive whole. Rhythm has become a visceral link to a fundamental essence.

Yet, I still listen for the silence.

I have often wondered about the idea of creation being the suddenness of light. Perhaps before the darkness, there was silence, and out of the infinite emptiness came the sounds of beingness, sounds so profound that they shaped order from chaos, modulating the debris of constellations into patterns of delight.

Rain

The rain falls like a mist over everything, an April rain, artful and deceiving.

I walk through the mist of April and look at people hurrying by, shielding themselves from the rain with whatever is handy. Some have umbrellas.

Night is coming with the rain, and the lights of the Village blend and blur with the lights of cars going by. The lamppost through the rain seems almost as though it has been sketched by someone. The wind blows, and gusts shake the trees and street lamps. The trees are leafless, but tiny buds are starting to open. Here and there are cherry and dogwood trees with a certain splendor against a grey and dimming night.

I dreamed of such rainswept nights long ago and far away, when the city gleamed in my consciousness like a distant dream about to happen. I dreamed of the rain. The rain was always the beginning, setting the stage. A story would unfold, slipping from the mystery of the rain like a phantom. The rain is like a curtain opening, and we can see the characters dimly. There they are, waiting for some destiny to tap them on the shoulder.

Now I dream of other cities. The world beckons and I know there are other cities waiting for me in the rain, perhaps in other lifetimes.

Being Wildered

Maybe it is just the approach of Daylight Savings Time, which is always more traumatic for me than any of the solstices. Maybe it is the intrusion of the light of dawn and the light of dusk into the thick of night. Maybe it's the rush of things that always accompany the beginning of spring, when there seems to be so much to do, but your instincts are quietly urging you to celebrate life in ways that depart from your daily routine.

Whatever it is, I find I am bewildered. I wonder what this means, actually. In some way it must mean that I have become wildered. And what is it to be wildered, because wildered is certainly what I am. Answer.com suggests that I am "baffled, befuddled, bemused, confounded, confused, lost, mazed, mixed-up, and at sea." Elsewhere, I discovered it is archaic and wilder once meant to lead astray, and elsewhere bewilder means "to confuse or befuddle, especially with numerous conflicting situations." No wonder this archaic word has persisted into the modern day. Nothing could fit more appropriately with our accelerated times.

Yes, I know the song Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered brought the word back into modern parlance. Yet no one has really parsed the meaning of bewildered in terms of our times and mindset. I have heard the party discussions that suggest that the word means to be "wild," which means to be "out of control." Maybe there is an element of wild in being wildered, but certainly not to the extent of "a walk on the wild side" ---which might be an excursion into the darker side of our being.

Whatever it means, I recognize when I am wildered, and I don't need the dictionary to know that I seem to be wildering more and more as time goes by. My theory is that the older we become, the harder it is to be fully in sync with Now, because the past becomes such heavy baggage that is harder and harder to pull into the present. In sync with Now allows us to filter the barrage of the present, while an enlarged domain that encompasses the past with Now interferes with those filters, since experience brings a deeper set of values to the same incident. We just keep getting wilder and wildered the deeper we go into the infinity of ourselves.

A Wash of Light

i visited what I think of as my singapore muse and found this provocative entry by ismene:

i don't want to be cool.
i want to be a wash of light.

we wrap and unwrap ourselves many times over.

her images are breathtaking... and i find myself in the midst of this wash of light from the east... like a brushstroke of early morning wakening me to the newness of another day unfolding... imagine a shaft of light diffusing and bathing the world in the substance of dawn... imagine the fresh scent of morning bursting into consciousness like a delicious aroma of some exotic condiment of beauty...

if the earth didn't spin creating the cycles of day and night, we would have to invent the night and morning, for we require the renaissance of recurring days... we must "wrap and unwrap ourselves" in a festival of renewal... a wash of light that cleanses the soul and renews the spirit....

Magnificent Sound

The first moment he heard her sing, he was astonished.

Her singing filled the space so completely that there was no sense of location, no voice coming from the direction of a person...just the full, mystifying presence of singing sounding in the fullness of the room. In fact the area was actually a sanctuary, and although it was spacious, the deep contralto voice filling the space seemed to resonate beyond the walls and spill outward.

He had never heard such richness of tone, or smoothness of texture. He thought at first he must be bewitched. He was certain that he must be under some spell, such perfection could only be a magical manifestation.

It was his nature to idolize her because of her singing. He developed his obsession through all the newness that her presence brought to his life. He researched everything he could regarding repertoire for contraltos, great recordings of contraltos, and used these findings to add to her aura.

She had one other irresistible feature that fired his imagination and obsession: she was unattainable---or at least unavailable.

So he began to compose music for her, songs, solos, and cycles. Some of his best work came from that time when he was under the spell of her remarkable voice. They would go through many difficulties, and they were destined to enter forbidden territory. But through all of the turmoil, and hanging on the outskirts of Time itself, the integrity of his discovery remained untouched.

Her musical pervasiveness that had captured his imagination, totally invaded his very existence at a time when he was most vulernable. Ultimately their mutual fragility would doom them. But in the meantime, they would endure and survive in the essence of her magnificent sound, which somehow inextricably bound them in a shared journey of discovery.

Spring is Here

Why doesn't my heart go dancing?

Spring arrived masquerading as winter.

But in my heart, I hear grass greening, see trees leafing, smell shimmering spring showers, taste tanging strawberry tarts , and feel the sunning of the sun. Spring is like the contagion of hope, infecting us with delight and expectation. But winter betrays our trust, and spring delayed paralyzes our reawakening to life renewed, rendering us immobile, ineloquent, and impatient.

But I still remember the countless solstices of spring restoring the cycle of being alive, urging me to explore life and love with greater passion and commitment. I still remember the music spilling from the soul in a festival of song. I still remember the feast of fantasies that fueled my imagination with the celebration of spring.

Spring might be a little late this year.

I Do Not Know

Whose footprint is that paulonia leaf
That drops softly, rousing ripples in the windless air?

whose face is that blue sky
Glimpsed between the threatening, dark clouds
Blown by the west wind after a long rain?

Whose breath is that fragrance in the sky
Over the flowerless tree, over the old tower?

Whose song is that bickering stream
That quietly flows, starting from nowhere
And making the stones weep?

Whose poem is that evening glow
That adorns the fading day,
Its lotus feet standing on the endless sea,
And its jade hands patting the sky?

Burnt ashes become fuel again.
My endlessly burning heart,
Whose night does this
Flickering lamp illumine?

...Yong-Woon Han (1879-1944)
(translated by Chi-Hwan Yu)

Two additional translations of I Don't Know can be found at Pilgrim Priest, an attractive blog about the journey of life.

This poem was the catalyst for a major dance work by Kim Myung-sook which premiered in Seoul, October 2005, and has been officially recognized for its contribution to Korean cultural life. Kim's dance company, Nulhui, has explored Korean cultural values and aesthetic ideas with stunning success in the past and has projected its work through performances incorporating ancient practices and modern technology. Kim's new work will be described in a later blog, but for now, the poem speaks from its time to ours. Han was a Korean Zen Buddhist whose poetry provides a legacy in the context of the resistance to Japan's occupation of Korea.

The poem's shifting images raise questions of identity, ownership, and belonging. At first we might think we are being led into meditation that awakes us to the source of Being. But there are disturbing images "threatening, dark clouds...the flowerless tree...the old tower...the stones weep...burnt ashes..." This is much more than meditation. There is a confrontation that emerges from the stillness. The past is recycled and renewed, and a core of being burns endlessly, while a flickering lamp illumines the night, but just whose night is this? This emergence of the underlying Korean spirit denying the subjugation of foreign occupation is an eloquent image. Inside is the "endlessly burning heart," the passion and identity of the Korean psyche, while outwardly the lamp may illumine, but its light is flickering... perhaps ebbing ... perhaps yielding to the spiritual intensity within.

The poem celebrates the timeless Korean environment: the "paulonia leaf...the blue sky...the dark clouds...the west wind...the long rain...the stream...the stones...the evening glow...the lotus...the endless sea...the night..." the quiet and awesome wonder anticipated by the title, I Do Not Know.

Who owns this night? Whose footprint...whose face...whose breath...whose song...whose poem...whose night...? these images silently tear the soul...

Underneath the text, the poet seems to be asking Have we forgotten who we are? The underlying answer to each question is that these all belong to and emanate from the Korean Spirit.

No Accidents

There are many that argue that the universe is a chaotic chance generator, that the creation of life itself was simply an accident, and that accidents drive the sequence of events despite all the "best laid plans."

They may be confusing the element of surprise with accidents. Surprise can be part of the joy of living, when the unexpected erupts into the moment catching us unawares. The present may be the leading edge of existence, and yet, my sense of accidents is that they "happen" for a reason, and if that is true, they are not accidents at all.

People come into our lives seemingly by chance, simply sharing proximity, or mistaken identity, or colliding physically or mentally, and as time unfolds, we make meaning from such aleatoric encounters, often suddenly understanding that our lives have been immensely transformed in ways that are meaningful and decisive. Chance was the catalyst for change.

Was this predetermined? Pre-ordained? Events in motion, like filaments in an infinite tapestry shape the present in extraodinary ways. However, this is much different than cosmic events in which comets may collide with planets whether or not we are witness to the event. The difference of accidents within the domain of human experience is the conscious awareness of humanity experiencing and interpreting Time as emerging reality, a reality that is necessarily ambigious. The ambiguity provides a point of departure, so that our knowledge of the moment and truth is personal.

In one sense it is simultaneously "accident/no accident" and our experience and consciousness shapes this balanced yin and yang into some interpretation of the moment according to our predisposition. Since accident always includes its opposite, the debate of a universe governed by chance or structure is an inexhaustible discourse whose rhetoric may influence us in vacillating directions over time--never reaching a final resolution.

Yakitori Taisho & St. Marks Place

Walking in NYC's Greenwich Village from west to east on 8th street, you pass into the east village as you cross Broadway. You enter a kind of no-man's land called Astor Place with Cooper Union, street vendors and musicians and a curious cube near the subway. As you continue east you enter the twilight zone, a stretch of 8th street so bizaare that it is given a different name: St. Marks Place (named for St. Marks-in-the-Bowery, two blocks north).

The moment you enter St. Marks Place you sense a different vibe. It has been that way for decades, even though the vibes have changed as times have changed. There is enormous energy that infuses you, a heightened awareness as though you somehow were on some substance that once and always flows freely everywhere. But you don't have to be high to experience high. You are sped along a vivid sensitivity just by the surge of people who have keen perception and a zest for living in the moment.

Yakitori Taisho is not exactly a restaurant...it is more like a happening that is spilling over into available crevices and spaces along St. Marks Place. Inside, the chefs are spirited and appear to be having the time of their life. Yakitori seems to be like tempura exploded inside out with every conceivable way of preparing a vast array of vegetables, meat, and creatures from the sea on skewars, in pancakes, and free form assemblages that exist like new edible art forms.

But while the food is the excuse for going to this establishment...the real attraction is the people. People start to arrive early, waiting outside for an available table, sometimes for hours, despite the expansion of Taisho into several spaces. And why not? You could be in the middle of a scene from a new novel...a new F. Scott Fitzgerald or a John Updike capturing a new time and a new culture, or a new movie from Tarantino, who might have already invented such a place in a script written and forgotten long ago. Overnight these blocks have quickly adopted a brash Japanese style, and the absorption of the west by the east is now re-introduced like a cultural isotope slowly dwindling in half-life stages as it morphs into yet something else new and different. The catalyst is the people, the individuals whose energies and dispositions clash in a fusion of hiphop, rock, jazz, heavy metal, and folk genres.

Wildly cataclysmic...

An American in Topeka

As I moved into middle school, my interests seemed to shift more toward journalism. I had abandoned my musical development and composition, stopping my improvisation activities for about three years. I had always had a romance with the fifth estate, starting a neighborhood paper when I was about nine, and then a newspaper for my scout troop, and then a homeroom newspaper in junior high school known as the 205 Home Rumor. This newspaper created such a scandal that the school was disrupted by students at homeroom period massing around room 205 trying to get the latest copy. This reached crisis proportions in that the homeroom paper was in greater demand than the official newpaper of the school.

The faculty sponsor threatened to resign unless I agreed to stop publishing the Home Rumor and serve as editor of school paper. This added to my background as a journalist, which I continued to develop through high school. It was quite an education. We would collect and write the news, type and edit the copy, and deliver the edition to a town about twenty minutes away where a printer specialized in school papers.

There was to be a journalism convention in Topeka Kansas, and my faculty sponsor made arrangements for us to attend over the Thanksgiving weekend, leaving Friday by train and returning Monday. At the last minute, a family emergency made it impossible for the faculty spnsor to attend, and so I struck out for Topeka alone.

The train ride was magical. The rhythm of the wheels against the tracks was intoxicating, and as a fifteen year old journalist, I was living a Gershwin fantasy in real life. Fascinating rhythm!

The conference was terrific, and I was dazzled by the lights of the "big city." On Sunday I went to a film that had opened that weekend called An American in Paris, and suddenly my life was changed. I drifted out of the movie house in a haze, dazzled by the flim and the lights of Topeka. Returning to the hotel, I strolled to the elevator, and once in, I impulsively pushed the button for the Penthouse.

The elevator door opened on a darkened deserted ballroom. Across the floor was an opened grand piano silhouetted against the lights of the city. I hadn't touched a piano for more than three years, but I took my place at the keyboard and began to play. I improvised throughout the night, recreating the music of the film and then delving into new ideas and new regions of sounds I had never known before. I played for hours, fueled by Gershwin, the film, Gene Kelly, Oscar Levant, the city lights and my fantasies.

Although I continued to pursue journalism, music resumed as the major driving force in my life, and I felt as though I had discovered my true identity...at last in touch with a part of me that had been in denial... an American in Topeka launched on a new trajectory...

Chasing Reflections in the Window

He sat at a counter in a coffee shop. He was in a hurry, and focused on trying to cool the liquid in the cup so he could drink it. He sipped slowly at the surface of the coffee and as he did he noticed an image in the shimmer of the coffee reflected from the plate glass window next to his seat. He turned to look at the reflection in the window...

She was ravishingly beautiful with long, black, flowing hair framing a pale, expressive face, finely shaped eyebrows arching over dark blue eyes...a wistful look, almost on the verge of a smile. He could take in this detail without embarrassment because these facets were captured by the image reflected in the window...

As long as he focused on the reflection he could see her every expression in rich detail, and he marvelled that the mind could separate the layers of visual stimulation so successfully. If he relaxed his focus, her image fused with the surroundings outside the window, people walking by, cars parked a long the curb, and traffic pulsing along the street. It was like two totally different dimensions, two worlds alien to each other existing side by side.

Actually three worlds. He turned to steal a direct glance at her beauty. He could catch the edge of her profile. He could see her better in the reflection. She had ordered coffee and was waiting for it to cool as she added some milk. She started to turn toward him.

He quickly averted his gaze and focused on sipping his coffee. The coffee shop was crowded, and though you could hear the buzz of conversations, it seemed strangely quiet. He glanced at her reflection and marvelled at her presence. She had a regal essence that seemed sharply etched in the glass. He savored the charisma of her aura in the window.

Too soon, she arose to go, and when he finally turned to see her for a final glimpse, she was gone.

He paid his bill and ran out of the shop. The street was crowded and busy. He looked up and down the street, and suddenly found her flowing black hair and black coat in a large mirror outside a barbershop. He ran toward her reflection, but she had vanished.

He walked through the streets seeking some echo of her, hopeful and inspired. He felt certain she might appear if he kept searching,

the identities of jack, jerome and oscar

even before there was the possibity of assuming different identities on the internet, i recognized the freedom released if we might be more than one person...

what makes identity? are we what we do?

once i met a very insightful woman who was entering her fifth decade. somehow in her twenties she had made up her mind to change her profession every ten years. at the time, i was mystified by her courage and determination. it also seemed a remarkable way to think of one's self... not anchored by some decision early in life, but free to pursue new treasures through new pathways. at the time i met her, she was launching a new career as a film director, having been a teacher in the previous decade, and a writer before that. i think career choices touch on issues of identity, but i have always thought that identity was something more than what we do.

the woman was engaged in a linear transformation every decade, a new journey following an earlier engagement. and somehow i sensed that she did not regard these adventures as new identities but rather a deepening of the spirit through a wide range of exploration and achievement.

i am somehow refreshed by the thought that our lives can be more flexible and spontaneous by allowing ourselves to be more than what we may choose for a career... to understand that we can carry on many pursuits without surrendering the integrity of our humanity or betraying some notion of a value system that comfortably tucks us away in the pigeon holes we dig for ourselves.

not too long ago, i knew someone who was not only himself as jack, but also existed as jerome and oscar. the individuals in this trio had distinctive personalities, unique handwriting, and differing perspectives on life. they each loved the same girl and competed for her affection through letters and poems. she was very flattered by the attention, and wondered why she never had the chance to meet these suitors who seemed to know so much about her and celebrated her virtues through daily letters and notes left for her in curious places. far from being schizoidal, this was a playful vignette that unfolded as daily adventures and intrigue.

that was at a time when the world was more naive and innocent. now we live in a world full of menace and peril... many individuals are in the business of stealing identities... and fraud lurks as a lingering possibility in almost every encounter...

yet each of us may have multiple layers of existence stretching back to the beginning of the cosmos, many identities reflecting the infinity of being... expressed in the moment of becoming whoever we are or really may be in the next instant...

Gregory Haimovsky's Dream

Anyone who has heard Gregory Haimovsky in piano performamce knows that he is a brilliant colorist who extracts an infinite array of dynamic nuances and tone colors. He is a poet at the piano, an exactimg artist and original interpreter intent on exploring new regions of expression. His performances inspire wonder, delight, and a passionate commitment to the poetry of musical expression.

He has not had an easy life. Once a respected music critic in Moscow and on the verge of being awarded a doctorate in music, as well as enjoying an outstanding career as a performing artist, Haimovsky was inexplicably and suddenly a victim of political exile in Siberia. His career was interrupted for 16 years, and yet in spite of this travesty, he has managed to transcend this adversity emerging with a new career as a performer and mentor of young artists. During his exile, he continued to nurture the artistic sensibility that flourished in an inner world of vision and determination.

Haimovsky has now translated this artistry to literature with the publication of his book of prose poetry White Buffalo, the title inspired by Irving Stone's The Passionate Journey. The white buffalo appeared between two warring tribes and was accidentally killed by the arrows meant for the warriors. Stunned by the miracle of his appearance, both tribes lay down their arms and shared in a ceremony of sacrifice that united the tribes as one. At daylight, his white skin disappeared in the mist of morning: the white buffalo existed only as a DREAM.

Haimovsky sent this book to me some time ago, but I set it aside, sensing that there would be an appropriate time to enter this special world. There is an "Afterward" by Marissa Silverman, once mentored by Haimovsky, who charts a course through the Dream and the fantasies that fuel the energy of White Buffalo. She brings the perspective of a participant who is inextricably involved and thus able to share personal insights into the fantasies while maintaining a degree of scholarly distance.

It is a distinctive volume, slim, but intense and richly packed with the essence that underlies beauty and greatness in art: the Dream. Dream is the driving force that inspires the tales and fables that are written as musical structures, words forming the tones, the harmonies, the rhythms and structures that inhabit the pages. Music is always sounding on every page, and the creators and appreciators are celebrated as an ongoing presence and manifestation of the Dream force.

Haimovsky takes us through a journey powered by the Dream and achieves a different kind of work of endless invention and variation. He continues to be a master of nuance.

Songs, either screaming at night seeing love or fighting for their lives, whether breaking into bloom or drooping down in the season's flowers and grasses; whether leaves springing up on the branches of trees to later pave the soil: all this, apart from our will, intrude into us, affects us, and reverberates inside us sending back reflections. Our bond with every living thing in this world is totally mysterious. It waits intently for us, every moment spotting us, following each emergence and exodus.

We encounter a new performance of the Dream populated by greatness from the past and creatures of a rich fantasia where the anatomy of genius and excellence is explored with genuine affection, imagination, and inspiration.

Dear John: "Goodbye to All That"

A couple of years ago in Bucharest, I heard an extraordinary premiere of an orchestral work that included prepared piano, and voice. The work was performed by the symphony orchestra of the Bucharest University of music, a stellar conservatory with outstanding performers.

The work was entitled Dear John by New York composer Tom Beyer, and it was a poignant letter of love and farewell to the composer John Cage whose musical experiments stretched our perceptions of music for at least four decades. His pieces for prepared piano were among the classics of 20th century repertoire and opened our ears to extract the extraordinary from those practices in music that had become more or less routine. John Cage challenged our assmptions about music and provided a strong alternative voice to the twelve tone serialists that dominated academia.

I remember the first time I heard John Cage was at a concert in the late 1950s in Texas where he performed with David Tudor, pianist and composer, playing music involving indeterminancy and aleatory. The audience was made up of somewhat conservative students and faculty who had piled into the auditorium to see this cuiosity who had already become something of a legend.

As the music began to unfold, the audience was clearly not sympathetic, a number left in noisy disgust, and the trumpet instructor ran back to the music studios and returned with his trumpet to play Irving Berlin's Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better, in the midst of Cage's masterwork. The theory/composition instructor was more open, and after the concert she went on stage to look at the scores, remarking that "either this is very profound, or we've all been had."

Such was the impact of Cage, who was more deeply appreciated and revered in Europe than in his own country. However, his later association with Merce Cunningham brought a new aura of respectability and credibility to Cage, and eventually he had become an institution around the world.

The piece premiered in Bucharest, Dear John, incorporated two important features used by Cage in the past: prepared piano, and vocalise sung into the piano soundboard and strings which would create resonance on selected notes according to specific depressed keys on the keyboard or while holding down the sustain pedal. The composer of the piece, Tom Beyer, prepared the piano and performed at the keyboard, while Christine Ghezzo, the ethnic singer, perfomed improvised vocals into the piano.

Dear John was a haunting work that had the air of an elegy, having for me a similar expressive effect as Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings. The prepared piano, couched in the string sonorities, had an almost archaic quality, sounds breaking apart and falling into the past in shattered fragments. The voice followed a melancholy path, a beautiful utterance, lyrical, sustained, and faintly echoed in the strings and soundboard of the piano. There was a deep yearning and sense of remembrance that gave special meaning to the moment. It seemed to say to John Cage "John, we loved you deeply. We thank you for opening us up to new sensibilities and possibilities. But now that time is past. It's time to say 'goodbye to all that.'" The double meaning of Dear John became apparent as the work sounded in time, coming to a joyful, regretful and reluctant, quiet closing.

An Aborted Adventure Fulfilled

Slipping back into that ubiquitous past, I see this booming oil town in the 1930s with cars and horses, and wild eyed buckeroos who came to this tiny burgh in north Texas looking for a stake to a fortune. The town was snuggled in among the breaks of the caprock that characterized this panhandle area. This caprock is a vast elevated landscape that once may have been part of the rocky mountains until a glacier of a distant ice age sliced off the mountains and left a vast flat area of plains stretching north to the Canadian border and ending just south of Amarillo, Texas.

Somehow I was born in that town where the sky was filled with smoke from freshly drilled burning wells not yet flamed out, with black geysers popping off many times during the day. We were at the beginning of our romance with oil, an affair that now has become somewhat jaded and perverse. But then oil was king. Oil was liquid gold, and people rushed to it for the promise that anyone with the right divination might become a millionaire overnight. Striking oil was a kind of cataclysmic orgasm, hot, turgid, and explosive, an event to be celebrated... bubbly, overflowing, black champagne.

My first years were full and eventful, and I still remember vividly lying on my father's lap and looking up into his blue eyes. I also began to crawl and walk somewhat precociously, and thus was a constant problem fo my parents, particularly for my mother and my sister. My sister was almost ten years older than I, and I had invaded her space. Months passed and soon I was upright and ready for adventure.

My space existed as a backyard of a building where we rented an apartment. By the side of the building was a gate, and beyond the gate lay the world which seemed to call to me as seductively as any of the sirens in Homer's Odyssey. On one hot summer day, as I played alone in the yard, I discovered the gate was open, and in an instant I was off to see the world.

The story my father tells is that he learned of my adventure from the state highway troopers. My sister and mother never have spoken of this episode as far as I know, although they have heard my father's version many times.

According to him, the troopers, after some considerable trouble and inquiry, finally determined that I belonged to my father who worked at the local electric power and light company.

On that summer afternoon near the end of the workday, two troopers brought me into my Dad's office.

"You better keep an eye on your son..." they warned.

"Where on earth did you find him?" my father asked increduously. He hadn't known until that moment that I had been missing. My mother and sister had been scouring the neighborhood looking for me and hadn't yet reported it to the police.

"He was walking east along the highway outside of town in his barefeet."

"Yeah," said the other trooper, "and we asked him where he was headed..."

"...and...?" my father looked at me and the troopers.

"Well, he said he was going to New York City! Like I said, you better keep this tyke on a tight leash..."

So it is on record that at the age of three I was determined to get to New York. Now in those days of no television, no access to movies, and little interest in radio (for me), how did I ever get the notion of New York City in my head? My Dad insisted that no one in the family ever mentioned New York, but it was clear at that time that I knew that was where I wanted to be. That energy and vision persisted throughout my youth in Texas, and when I finally made it to New York, I felt like I had returned to a familiar place, a home I had always inhabited in my heart and mind.