Sunday, August 01, 2010

Thoughtfully, Beautifully

The problem is the music putting ideas into their heads, words not their own running in lines like trains along tracks, tracks all forged in the simple melodies of these songs. All of my thoughts have been cooked out of my head, my senses dulled by the sun blazing on and on. The people made in the music and baked in the sun lay around wondering vaguely how they came to be at the bottom of the valley. Dressing their dogs up and wearing the least possible amount of clothing themselves, these Southern Californians run on iced coffee and sex. These are the two lures that get them to race through the course like lanky long faced gray hounds after the rabbit. Is there a story in there somewhere? Or is it only a poem? A verse in the song that makes us, an incoherent stream of experience, one line of code, pure data in the form of color and sound. The sweet bitter taste of coffee and cinnamon, the scent of vanilla body wash rising from heated skin bronzing under the solar disc rolling overhead, Apollo driving his chariot over water and earth without compromise.
Why don’t we all sit together and make our own song? After all, we’ll all soon be bones or ash and it won’t matter where the broom was or who opened the window while the air conditioner was running. Such resentment because life hasn’t been made thoughtfully, beautifully, but has rather happened to us when we should have happened to it. A sword slicing through a piece of blue sky like a knife through lemon meringue pie, purposeful, unrelenting like the tap, tap, of a wood peckers bill into the trunk of a tree. Bit by bit, measure by measure, taken in careful steps laden with the intent to savor and cherish. That was the way to do it, but we schlepped through it, clinging to vague ideas, promises regarding tomorrow and other distant futures that could never arrive because the first steps would never be taken and someone else would be blamed for the inaction.
What is missing is not a something that can be held in sweaty hands. All we will ever need, the most glorious thing we could ever obtain is already here and we are closed to it, blind to the wealth that is real and irrevocable; this liberty that is mind, this river that is love and never ceases to flow.
The problem is the music putting ideas into their heads, words not their own, words that tell us what should be, what could be, but never what is. Where is the rejoicing? The explosion of self that is being all that I am in this moment with lungs and heart and brain pouring pure poetry and hands that can do. It is our hands that give us some unusual potential as makers. But what good are makers that take no action, that never make?
Creators that do not create are something else, listening to the lyric that someone else wrote as if it were absolute, this reality the only reality. These are consumers, the walking dead, with tiny dogs in purses and the urge to create subverted so that all they really need to get by is a jar of Vaseline and a stack of pornographic magazines, and ideally some one to stick it into or to take it from, words not their own running in lines like trains along tracks, senses dulled by the sun blazing on and on.
Whatever happened to the darkness, the womb where things are allowed to gestate and come to fruition? There is no room for creation in the endless prying light. All things skim by on the surface, racing towards the future on the tracks forged in the simple melodies of this popular song. When will we all meet in the darkness, within the depths below? Shall we really wait until there is nothing left of us but bone or ash? Is it then not too late to last and love? To persist and adore? Is it then not too late to sing our own song, to use our hands for something more challenging than instant gratification?
That song, the resentment in that voice, the sad helplessness of flesh trapped within the life unlived, sagging with age, the bitter threat to run away once again. Time runs out. All songs happen through time, all songs begin and end. It is the little flourishes in between that count the most.
Did we make it ours? Live up to our deepest nature as makers? Or did we let it rush by on those rails that were supplied by the manufacturer, let it rush by only to make bone and ash, bitter sweet taste of coffee and cinnamon, blue sky un-sliced?
It should have been made thoughtfully, beautifully, and without compromise. It should have been made in the dark. It should have been our own.

Labels: , , , , , , , , , ,

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home