Into the Mystic

Tuesday evening I went to a lecture on Mysticism. Actually it was sort of a book tour by an author who'd written on the topic.  Guesting on the panel was a well-known scholar and Medievalist who was there to generate a kind of Socratic discussion because the author himself seemed a little quagmired.  The Medievalist was skilled as a teacher-- the way she spoke in clear language, the way she addressed the packed audience-- was masterful and charismatic.  I remembered why I loved school-- the classes, sitting at the feet of professors, receiving information and ideas, and perpetually turning my intellectual world upside down.

So for the first forty-five minutes I was in a kind of familiar heaven... recalling things I'd studied-- old texts, narratives... saints and martyrs.  This had been my post-college major; I'd travelled, kneeled in old churches throughout Europe in search of understanding. The medieval centuries were harsh, punctuated by passionate religious sentiment-- and also by wars, disease, cruelty and torture. Fathoming these times was a challenge... the mystics and visionaries were both celebrated and punished. I also remembered consulting St Gregory... how the Bible stories had four meanings-- the historical, the allegorical, the moral and then the mystical. It was part of study, interpretation.  It was assumed.

The celebrated author speaking was also a 'philosopher', a designation which makes me squirm. These people seem less necessary in the present; they often pontificate on about pop culture-- sports, fashion, football, human weakness and addiction. They manipulate facts and maneuver narratives-- kind of like psychotherapy.  I have a hard time with this.  The issue of feminism crept in, as it does... especially since the larger number of stigmatics were women.  There was a hint of sexualizing... it's trendy... and then this conclusion about the outcome of 17th-century Mysticism being music... Bach. The author began to reference classic rock... at this point I looked at the shelves behind me, tried to plot my escape. 

Maybe I misunderstood-- missed one of the leaps of faith and took a wrong turn.  Maybe after weeks of relentless political rhetoric I am hostile and defensive.  And I've been a musician most of my life-- a passionate devotee of everything from medieval chants to Prog rock. Composers often dream melodies and songs; I do... but is this mysticism? Music transforms one-- it opens us, makes us fall in love. What would cinema be without music? I read once Scorsese spent eighty percent of his Mean Streets budget securing rights to the songs he felt were essential to the film. It is the very soundtrack of our lives. But mysticism?  More like a kind of unique personal recipe, I imagine, where inspiration supplies the ingredients.

Anyway, as I begin my annual fall alumni interviews, I wonder if I would fare well at a university in these times-- when song lyrics are taught in poetry classes, when CBGB's and NYC street culture are the stuff of Master's theses. I just suddenly felt a little duped.  I came expecting some revelation and instead was led via a circuitous intellectual musical-chairs to some pop-culture home base.  Scanning the shelves nearest to my chair was comforting; I'd read many of these books-- they were old friends, some in new packaging, but familiars. My heart opened. 

Back in college I'd had one or two low-key mystical experiences... things coming together that had been broken... a bird one night in my little college room which was absolutely sealed and locked. I craved these things, some extra-terrestrial epiphany at a time when my sexuality was blossoming and my brain being primed.  In art history classes I was drawn to these depictions of martyrs who were torn and penetrated.  It was mesmerizing; at the same time I became acquainted with drug use and friends who experimented with physical challenges and extremes like cutting.  I suppose today we have the gym-obsessed body-builders; it's become all too common to distort one's living anatomy. 

On the way home from the event, I started to think about my neighbor who has grown svelte and fashionable since her daily injections of Ozembic.  I saw her with her dog in her Prada... she's begun to look positively malnourished... her cheeks are sallow and sunken.  Oh no, I want to tell her.. you've gone too far... but I don't mention that she looks perhaps self-stigmatized. Instead I compliment her on her shoes which cost more than an average month's rent in Manhattan. Maybe two months.  

At home I took a couple of books from the shelves, as I often do at night... like a promise for tomorrow... and somehow had this flashback of Van Morrison.. Into the Mystic... it must have been 1970... I was barely 17.... a senior boy came into my college dorm room-- he was so handsome, with his long golden hair and his steel-blue eyes.  I had just picked up my copy of Moondance... he heard it playing from the hallway.. and by the last track, he had coaxed me into a slow dance with him... one of those magical romantic moments when I had no idea who I was or what I was doing but the moment carried me off.  

Here I was, free-associating, contracting the huge spiritual concept of mysticism into a shortened and altered form of the word, and a pop song... so maybe the panel authors were not so wrong.. and maybe the whole  meaning has somehow merged with this vernacularized version of whatever 'transports' us. At the time I remember imagining a sea called Mystic... the future... everything I was about to know. 

Thank goodness for these privileged moments-- me now, more than fifty years on, looking back on one of those heart-piercing instants, along with its indelible soundtrack... a kind of personal spirituality. What a thing is memory-- which connects us to ourselves, to our wounds and our blisses, our love and our sickness, as though these things were painted, as though filmed.  The eternal which will end with us... no matter how many posts or photos there are... only we can reach back into ourself... to browse our own long journey-- without books or Google or the internet.. and so precisely recall and revive the ignitions.  Amen.

The World in a Glass Hat

The word holiday in some cultures means a day of rest-- a day with family, maybe religious services-- prayer, feast, fasting…. but once an 's' is added--- it brings a little angst-- the burdensome part of family-- shopping, clothes, parties you must give or attend, gifts you can't afford, gifts you don't want--people you can't face… the face you cannot fake.  So New Year's Day, in a sense, is a bit of relief.  Of course when I was young, it was a terrible reminder that school was about to begin again, that all the great Christmas anticipation was funneling into the dread of grey-white winter days and afternoon sunsets.  The only bright spot ahead was a snow day or two.

Because I am a musician, and my 'work' is often other people's partying, I have begun to crave solitude.  I love my work, but some nights I admit I fantasize about coming home.  These days, with kids grown, relationships settling into a flattish line, I find myself adjusting to 'the rest of my life' with a tranquility that surprises me.  My ongoing resolution is demanding more of myself and less of others.  I am trying hard to minimize my disappointment with others' failure to honor their own commitments.  But I will never fail to observe this failure, and I will sadly continue to communicate my distress in the interest of truth.

Today I went for a late-afternoon run around the reservoir at sunset.  I had spoken to no one since 5 AM; even my voicemail had a day 'off'.  The winter light at sunset, the incomparable silhouette of my city skyline across the water, like a great circle of architectural dreams, never fails to take my breath away, to remind me I am alive in this magical home of enormous challenges and inspiration.  I went up to Harlem to pick up my modest week's worth of groceries, absorbing the passing soundtrack-- Katy Perry blasting from the skating rink sounded almost symphonic, like the ice-dancers version of the Messiah-- and hockey pucks whacking out their own rhythm; a man leading a bike tour, yelling all kinds of misinformation as he pointed out the sights.  I resisted the temptation to knock him off.

Up in Harlem people chilling-- a girl punching her boyfriend, a couple shouting it out in front of the liquor store where the cashier is encased in a bulletproof booth, a huge man on his flip-phone yelling and gesturing madly 'you ain't LISTENING, bro-- that's your PREDICAMENT'… over and over, like a play.  In south Harlem I am still an outsider--- I am usually the only white person in the grocery store, but they no longer ask for ID when I check out my few items.  People in my neighborhood are impatient; the supermarkets are overcrowded and the shoppers are impatient and angry.  Everything is a delivery.  Up here, people buy less carefully; they wait patiently in line, and they walk slowly.  Occasionally women my age and older argue about pricing and sales, but for the most part, people don't question things.  Handicapped people are everywhere; medical issues mean disability; life with a cane or a wheelchair doesn't seem to frighten them.  Their ambitions have either been thwarted or flattened; they seem to accept what is.  They will never own a condo in the new 200 story monstrosity with a google-worthy view of Manhattan, but they will get foodstamps and a decent project apartment for life. Some of them even have park views… so who is the winner here?

On the way back, passing the monstrous dark loom of Mt. Sinai (the ugly Jewish hospital, according to the central park tour-guide), thinking about the patients inside who marked the New Year from a bed… the first city births, and the first city deaths… those that could not quite drag themselves across the timeline... it occurred to me… if everyone simply told the truth, most of our more complex problems would recede.   If the doctors told them.. you have something we can't cure--- we can give you some poison that will maybe make your tumor suffer just a tiny bit more than the rest of you, but we really haven't a clue…  maybe they would have a choice.   I mean, there are certain drugs that work--- like aspirin-- but the biotech culture will continue to roll us into the trillion dollar irony of health-care.

If people went into a store and realized they really don't need these shoes that are $400…in fact, they really only need the ones they have… and if they went to pay for something, and owned that they really don't have enough money, because isn't that what a credit card is saying?  If the cable television executives and the huge entertainment companies just came out and said.. well, all of this crap we're promoting… it's pretty terrible; you don't need to watch it, and we don't need to make it anymore…
If the Academy one year decided to abolish awards because they really don't have many actors of the standard for which these awards were intended.  In fact-- what is competition and awards?  We either have the drive to be the best we can, or we don't.

And Jay-Zee and Beyonce, the so-called NYC 'royalty'… they would be dethroned because really all they have is a shitload of money, and a smart team of 'branding' experts.  And what is branding?  It used to be the cruel mark cattle ranchers burned into animals who are then 'property' and can be marketed, bred, tortured, killed, eaten-- whatever, for profit.  We live in a branded world-- of copyrights and lawsuits and copycats because so little seems original in the way that Mozart and Bach were original-- or Caravaggio or Leonardo.  Branding simply enables the exponential financial growth of mediocrity n this world where so-called experts 'authenticate' a work of art which is not original in the first place.  And if there was no lying, we would not need any of these people.

In fact, this middle-aged couple sitting next to me in Starbucks who obviously met online-- she is an aging Russian beauty with now-dyed hair, and a touch too much make-up, she is looking into his eyes with this desperate glow, like the new LED Christmas decorations on Madison Ave. which look happy but really lack the soul and 'life' of the old ones.  And he is telling her about his child support payments, and she is trying so hard because she needs a husband, even though he is a bit old, and he is lying to her, it is quite obvious he is a fool and a fake, and she is lying to him, too, because she hasn't paid her rent for months, even though she has an expensive haircut and a shopping bag.

Downtown so-called poets are reading Bukowski in an annual festival.  People who imitate and celebrate Bukowski, as though by reading these words, they will become poets, even though Bukowski himself would have told them, this is not poetry, and what was good about him was that he simply tried to tell the truth.  Isn't that what art used to be and when artists made art about lying, well, were they not honest about that?  And somewhere we all know about truth-- children don't lie, at least not until they learn that this is a very useful tool for getting something that they need.  If we consume artificial food we become sick and die… our flesh and blood know this-- but we don't seem to 'get' that we are a bit starved for art and music, some of us-- and for love, real love-- not the invented kind, and maybe even for a sense of God, a real sense of our soul, and we overcompensate with this competitive greed-culture… we stuff and stuff ourselves with crap…. and here we are on the streets, beating people for their iPhones, and paying masters-of-lying surgeons money we do not have to make us look like people we think have better lives than we have.

In Shanghai people stampeded at a New Year's celebration; one theory was that this was triggered by a paper shower of fake $100 bills thrown from a balcony.  The irony of the story was so poignant, so revolting, and so tragically 'real'.  Here we are, the untrammeled of us-- we have the gift of life, and we grow up knowing we must clothe our naked bodies, this is 'civilization', maybe the first 'lie'… but it is also protection, and has a meaning.  Still, we have our eyes, and our ears, and our mouths, and we have invented learning and books, and we can create… we can learn, we can discover…we can look back at our old year and see where we have failed to see, where we have been misled and fooled.

The blessing of the New Year is the illusion that we are turning a page, that we can start clean, we can start over.  Of course, as any addict knows-- it is not this easy, but we believe-- -and for that midnight moment-- the one that walks across the global timeline, hour by hour, country by country… we are all given this chance, together-- this annual chance, or the illusion of it, because it of course belongs to all of us, at every moment.  And we are human, and we will continue to fail to understand this, because we are too busy toasting our own selves, our false happiness or our refusal to be sad or lonely or truthful, and acknowledge that our enormous success or our abysmal failure… there is really little difference, it is part of our process, our life, which tragically, like the Shanghai victims, where we reach for something which glitters and it is death… the truth may feel like failure, but if we are truly honest, we will never fail ourselves.  As Sylvia Plath said in a privileged moment of clarity, and I remember this poem so well from my girlhood… 'we have only come to look'.