Along the Way P. Crockett
When you long for blessings that you may not name, and when you grieve knowing not the cause, then indeed you are growing with all things that grow, and rising toward your greater self.
– Kahlil Gibran
“DAMN IT!! Either EVERYTHING is the blood and body of Christ, or nothing is!”
– Robert Johnson (epiphany, spoken aloud)
Faith is nothing like I thought it was, at all. It is not a matter of closing your eyes and making some sort of “leap” and deciding to believe in something that you cannot see. It is a question of opening up your eyes, and your mind, and your heart.
– Ray Bradbury
WHEN was the last time you heard the expression, “normal life?” Not so very long ago, the phrase did not seem such an oxymoron.
The Intrepid Porky Pig Touches down in Wackyland. A surreal classic: http://video.tiscali.it/canali/truveo/1525716697.html
I’VE just been thinking: the world around us has most certainly grown more strange a place, and seems likely to become only more so. Yet already, we feel ourselves strangers within it.
It can be a sickening feeling, to sense the very ground beneath our feet shifting in ways we do not understand, for reasons we cannot know. Science has taught us that the Earth is constantly in motion, that entire continents will suddenly groan and then shift and collide before finally straining into some geographical accommodation.
And though we might grasp the concept intellectually, in the same sense that we "get" the one-time rise and fall of the Dinosaur kingdom (engaging and wondrous, to be sure, but not now!), it remains on the far away and distant side of some comfortable (and hopefully uncrossable) margin. Shifts on such a grand, cosmic scale are supposed to transpire over the course of millenia, where they can comfortably remain both undeniable, and fully abstract.
We are not supposed to feel it, any more than we might expect to glance out our bedroom window only to see the huge, beady eye of a Tyrannosaurus Rex staring right back at us, sizing us up with cold reptilian intelligence as its next hot meal.
“Evolution is only a theory,” she said. “Well, MyGarsh!! I’ve got theories of my own!”
There is very little that feels comfortable about any of it. We very much depend upon the stability of the Earth beneath our feet much more than we realize: for a place to make our stand, to call our own, to fundamentally ground us. A firm footing tends to keep us from falling. We hate that feeling.
Also, we seem to have this need to have the magnetic poles on a compass line up in exactly the same directions, every single time. It is almost as if we like for the things that we rely upon for meaning and direction to mean something.
We are funny that way.
I always loved the idea of Hunter S. Thompson at least as much as (or more than) the man himself. The legendary “gonzo journalist” once famously observed…
That quote and its spirit of prophetic whimsy somehow seems to me good news, having always seen myself as something of a weird person. Longer than I can remember, I have been living in a world for which there was absolutely no real reckoning. For reasons I cannot fully explain, even to myself, I have always felt the world, or perhaps all that we knew, as somehow weird at its core. And I mean on a level even beneath the (considerable) madness that was so apparent.
(It occurs to me that I always felt it as strongly magical, as well, and it might not be possible to have one without the other. There is no magic in opening one’s bedroom door only to find the dining room that’s always there, instead of stepping into the ominous panorama of a hostile tribal village in Africa. Or turning back around on the bus only to encounter another living person seated behind you.)
It wasn’t just my family, like most-unfortunate Sibyl. The Crockett family can claim its full measure of grand wonder and general insanity, but only its full measure. They are great. I came into this world loved and wanted, and have not been returned yet.
There were times when my little hands held my Mother’s, and Grandmother’s, tightly, with large gratitude.
"Cowboy Paul" (much more typically garbed as an Indian, in those days) with Whit and Lisa.
The little tyke you see above, just to look at him, can’t have that much experience under his belt. Yet he knows much more than he can see, and feels more than he can understand. He knows that he is different. (Not in a “special” or egotistical way, quite to the contrary. He sees quite clearly that everyone else is, too, but that solitary observation provides small comfort.) His dreams are too layered and vivid, the horrific nightmares each and every night a relentless assault much too huge and dark for his little self to process. Even ordinary life, that great tableau always unfolding all around, feels a bit too magical.
One day when the boy is no longer so little, he observes (unconnected with any event he can remember) that his experience had become less magical, more solid. It feels good, much like that moment of simple joy accompanying the recognition that “it was only a dream,” as that wave of relief breaks gently over you. ("Oh, good!")
The man that child has now become, sitting here at his keyboard, remembers exactly where he was sitting in that moment, even the angle of the golden sunlight easing through the jalousie windows.
“What's strange, is the things that we remember,” said a woman (I believe) whose name I have forgotten.
Some sort of trade-off had been made, and whatever exactly it was, it had been chosen by him alone. It had to have been, no one else knew.
And he was very glad.
King Of The Road Drawn from Imagination 6th Grade 1972
Even still: at times the “surface” offered comfort, and other times seemed, (exactly as in an episode of Twilight Zone) all the more surreal and vaguely sinister for its appropriation of “the real.”
I knew better. I did not want to, wished devoutly that I could not, or never had. But I did.
Let me start here, because the point is important: Yes, you are weird, but you are not alone.
There. Feels better, doesn’t it?
Interesting, this post. From my perspective, I mean. I have no idea exactly where it is going, really. Only rarely have I felt led to strike out so boldly into the Great Unknown and sit down to write, even committing to myself to share with my readers, with such little idea of how I might hope to arrive there.
Coral Way Hammock P. Crockett
Yet something tells me, nothing else would do, right now. We’ve already derived all possible nutrition from available scripts. And yet we still hunger and thirst, for that which we cannot name.
By now, however, we have at the least learned some things that it is not.
Saturday Afternoon, Bayside P. Crockett
THERE is a certain special quality offered by paintings, as I suppose with all that is art, (almost by definition) and it might be called a quickening. A given work, in whatever medium, might at times reflect or inspire a sense of serenity or agitation, evoke a spirit of stillness, rage, or delight. We might often lack any clue why.
But to the extent it is really art, the expression remains always somehow in motion, and it is this quality that shines out and through the work like light. We recognize it in the language of our hearts, and are touched in the part of us that is always in motion. When the chemistry is there and the moment allows, the glow alights upon us gentle as a moonbeam, reminding us of the magic we’d forgotten.
From Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Oh, Vincent.
WHAT is color, in fact, but kinetic resonance—light vibrating at varying frequencies? No color is another’s opposite, really, and neither are any better, more important, or of greater or lesser value than any others. All are different, completely essential, and exist primarily in relationship.
As a whole, joined together, each is dazzling in effect. None then require any justification of any sort, or even a reason.
They just are. Thank God.
Prospect Park (Brooklyn) P. Crockett
Paintings speak directly to the heart, complete in their own language more immediate and ancient, fresh and pure than any made of words alone: that of color.
Moonlight Symphony (Miami Summer) P. Crockett
Illustrated another way, we might (every one of us) be understood as singular and indispensable notes in one Great Symphony of Heaven and Earth, with its attendant soaring harmonies and inevitable jarring clashes of discord. The function of each note is to give its all to the whole, for there can be no more. To resonate with full or measured passion for its designated hour, and finally retreat once more into the silence that is its source.
Perhaps it is never given the hard-working note to hear the composition, as a whole. Or even imagine it.
Yet without even the smallest note, the symphony could not be.
Key West Nightfall P. Crockett
So: it seems a fair question. Why is all of that so much easier to grasp and comprehend with hues and musical tones than with people? Is it not abundantly clear that we, as well, are all woven into and part of one grand tapestry?
Ancient Tides P. Crockett
All right, I can imagine a reader thinking, but what difference does any of this make? An important and powerful question, especially in these days when the Earth itself seems on fire, deserving a serious answer.
And I would say, only the most huge and critical difference, because we have forgotten that we stand in relation to anything, or to one another.
And so we suffer.
Love Never Dies P. Crockett
Consider for a moment the question posed in the title to this posting. If we are all swept up in the pure power of such a churning stream of transition that we can no longer recognize our coordinates, how are we to find our footing, much less make our stand? How are we to have any idea where to go, from here?
Why not start with the only critical questions that we can answer: 1) What is the one thing we can know for sure?
and 2) What might be the only thing that any (or all) of us now have to rely upon, and look out for?
Answers:
1) That we are all in this together, though it might not seem that way.
2) One another.
So, what does that mean? Where does it leave us?
Biscayne Day! P. Crockett
It leaves us very much right here and now. What it might mean is very much up to us. Each one of us, and all of us.
More later. Thanks for tuning in.
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