the music of time

My connection with the Buddhist sangha is maintained now through continuing monthly automatic withdrawals from my bank account. Even if I'm not currently (formally) practicing these teachings, I do believe in supporting them. As a result, I still receive copies of The Dot, "the quarterly newspaper of Shambhala", whose tag-line is "Nothing happens and we report it."

The autumn 2007 issue arrived yesterday in the mail. As I flipped through it while lying in bed, I felt pierced by feelings of recollection and nostalgia, as well as dissatisfaction and impatience. But I felt a jolt of surprise and recollection when I flipped to page 24 and found this headline: "Warrior in the World: David Nichtern".

I knew the name David Nichtern from 33 years ago, on the album cover of a record by Maria Muldaur. He was a guitarist, one of her musicians, and in fact the writer of her hit song, "Midnight at the Oasis". How many David Nichterns are there? The black-and-white photo accompanying the article: could that gray-haired guy in horn-rimmed glasses be the same as the ginger-haired, bearded young man on the album cover? Ye-e-es, it could: look at that faint, knowing, impish smile--that's the same, isn't it?

Indeed it was. I quickly saw "Midnight at the Oasis" mentioned in the article, and the fact that Nichtern has a career in music, as well as now being director of Buddhist studies and practice at OM Yoga in New York.

My gosh. Who knew? In 1974, when I was 15, "Midnight at the Oasis" was my favorite song, and I had a teen passion for Maria Muldaur, an olive-skinned, gypsyish beauty with a lovely warbling voice, a bit reminiscent of the folk singer Melanie. I would listen to the record and scan its jacket to learn what I could about its makers.

I noted that "Midnight at the Oasis", the only hit song on the album, was also the only song written by one of the musicians; the others (as I recall) were all covers--tunes like "My Tennessee Mountain Home" written by Dolly Parton. Why was that? I wondered.

I was fascinated by the phenomenon of writing--excited by the idea of writing as a basic creative act, which could take different directions: novel-writing, scriptwriting, songwriting, even writing computer programs. I was excited that all these different activities used that same creative verb, to write, and I wanted to do them all (and indeed have done them all). I wanted to be a writer in this total way.

My love of that song caused me to remember its creators, and I formed a kind of loose connection with it and them.

In 1980 I saw that Maria Muldaur was playing in Vancouver at a place called the Bombay Bicycle Club. Warren and I decided to go (he was able to fill me in on more information about Maria Muldaur--in particular that she had formerly performed in the Jim Kweskin Jug Band in the 1960s). We sat at the bar of the little club and soaked up about three sets of Maria Muldaur at close range. To my astonishment and delight, between sets she made her way to the bar and sat right next to us. Indeed, she had to brush right by us, making Maria Muldaur the most famous person I've ever actually physically touched. She didn't look at us or communicate with us; she seemed very withdrawn, even depressed, and sat in her black outfit, flipping through a newspaper, head down. But on stage she radiated smiles, power, and excitement. And she sang "Midnight at the Oasis" twice.

Next, in the winter of 1983, I saw that guitarist Amos Garrett was playing at the Town Pump in Gastown. He too had played on Maria Muldaur's first solo album, and since I was then playing guitar in my own garage band, I decided to check him out. He put on an excellent, all-instrumental show with his band, introducing the numbers with fairly technical comments about their musical qualities and style, much to the delight of the other musicians in the house, of which I'm sure there were many. He would call out challenges to the audience such as, "can you name this riff?"--seeing whether anyone could identify a particular riff he was playing (someone could! It was B.B. King). Anyway, I was thrilled when he played an instrumental version of "Midnight at the Oasis", including his guitar solo which itself became famous, at least among guitarists. (I was intrigued that he played with finger-picks, not a flatpick, as most guitarists do--and felt particularly glad that I'd received finger-picking training from my first guitar teacher, Barry Hall.)

Later, when I had hooked up with Kimmie, I turned her on to the Maria Muldaur album, which she loved. She even thought that she would like to put one of its tracks ("Don't You Make Me High (Don't You Feel My Leg)") on her "stripper" tape--a slate of tracks she would like do strip-teases to: a life-long ambition of hers. More of that, perhaps, another time...

Then, of course, I got into my own Buddhist "career", and got away from music. And last night, seeing David Nichtern's name in that unexpected place, brought all these memories flooding back. There was a sense of connection, of intertwining, such as that suggested in the Anthony Powell novel-series, A Dance to the Music of Time.

There are some benefits to aging, and this is one: opportunities for this kind of threading-together of the strands of life. A dance indeed.

the sleeping wounded

A mite underslept this morning after awaking at 3:45 from this dream:

Dream of being shot--or rather of having been shot--with a diamond bullet. I'm with Kimmie and others, cleaning out a house or apartment, and I'm putting on a record to listen to: a 45 RPM disc of "Reelin' in the Years." For a lark we're going to see whether we can clean out a certain room in the time that the song plays. I'm expecting the song to last maybe four minutes, but I see on the label that it plays for only 2:59--even less than three minutes! I'm surprised; this won't leave us much time.

And now I notice that I've been shot: there's a bullet-hole in my chest or upper arm, a clean, dark-red hole. I know it's a diamond bullet, but to Kim (or Mom?) I say, "It's a carbon bullet." This is bad, because this kind of bullet does especial harm, maybe blowing up inside one after a certain time. I'm not in pain, but I realize that I may be about to die--a reality I find hard to grasp, and I wonder whether Kimmie and the others realize the urgency, or whether I'll be dead before the song's over.

I quickly typed those paragraphs into my journal when I got up so I wouldn't forget the dream. I can see in the images certain impressions from recent days: I was thinking yesterday or the day before of when we moved Robin into her new apartment down the hill in October; a few days ago something caused the old Steely Dan song "Reelin' in the Years" to surface in my mind--possibly when Kimmie and I were reminiscing about the song "Rock and Roll Hoochie Koo" by Rick Derringer, from the same year (1973), and I recalled an anecdote that Fagen and Becker of the Dan had exhausted Derringer in a recording session once by demanding endless repeats of a guitar solo; a couple of days ago I read an article in The Economist about the world diamond trade, and some of the effects of "blood diamonds" on that industry. (Curious side-note: Rick Derringer now appears to be a Christian rocker.)

I've also been reading and thinking about nanotechnology, which relies on carbon nanotubes and the minute carbon polyhedra called buckyballs. Maybe a week ago or so Kimmie asked me what a geodesic dome is (invented by Buckminster Fuller, after whom the nano-balls are named).

I recall too that "Reelin' in the Years" contains the lines "You wouldn't know a diamond/If you held it in your hand." Diamonds, of course, are also pure carbon. And I have toyed with the idea of setting a story in a globally warmed future, with the working title of Carbon. I've been reading about how the complexity of living forms is made possible by the special properties of carbon, its many different ways of making combinations with other atoms. In that sense it's the element of life. To be shot with a bullet made of it is therefore something of an irony.

These are just scraps of impressions and thoughts: the shreds from which the collage of the dream was made. But I haven't thought about what the dream might mean. I felt a sense of sadness and vague urgency in the dream rather than the dread I might really feel if death were so imminent. But it was striking, anyway--and I think a new kind of dream for me. Why that? Why now?

I never did return to sleep. The alarm went off, and it was time to lumber down here and start my day.

Happy Christmas

Kimmie is still off on vacation, beavering away at various crafts, becoming stressed. The big thing is preparation for the wedding of Robin's school-friend Jen on 29 December. Kimmie agreed to make the wedding cake and also to make a dress for Robin, who is maid of honor. Both the cake (a three-layer job with roses and carnations of gum-paste) and the dress (a damask-patterned satin with scallops that had to be specially cut and matched along the bottom of the bodice, causing Kim, a very expert and experienced sewer, great anguish) are proving more difficult than she had had thought.

Still, Kimmie has solved many of the problems and now is able to relax more (and is also undergoing chiropractic and massage therapy a couple of times a week to unspasm her tense body). She has spent most of today happily wrapping presents (artistic gift-wrapping as well--even using some ideas from a special Japanese book on giftwrapping that I brought home as a present from my meditation retreat at Karme Choling in 1993) and preparing to bake the actual wedding cakes.

Kimmie plays Christmas music while she works. She is intensely, almost fanatically, theme-oriented. On 1 December the Christmas lights go up and she starts decorating. Everyday objects, such as her coffee mugs, are sidelined and special Christmas ones subbed in (I condescend to drink from a Christmas mug on the day itself, otherwise I stick with the usual crockery).

A couple of nights ago Robin stopped by to give Kimmie a new Christmas CD as a "thank you" for making her maid of honor dress: Sarah McLachlan singing various Christmas songs. Kimmie was delighted, and has put the CD into heavy rotation on her sewing-room ghetto blaster.

This morning I heard part of it while delivering coffee to Kim: Sarah singing John Lennon's "Happy Christmas (War Is Over)". I found it a beautiful and haunting rendition, better even than Lennon's own (I've always thought this one of the best modern Christmas songs). (And incidentally, I like to think that my preference for versions other than the original artist's is homage to his work as a songwriter.)

Something about the song went deep into me, so that I found myself humming it. The music kept going through my head, and from time to time I would vocalize it softly as I went about my tasks. Somehow, today, I felt the longing in the song--for world peace. The opening question of the lyric--

"And so this is Christmas, and what have you done?"

--I found especially haunting. What have you done? The question seems to cut many different ways, especially in the context of the song. It's both reflective and accusing, suggests sins of both omission and commission. The special magic of songwriting is that the music lends a particular spin and weight to the lyric; gives it a special, unique emotional meaning. Of course, the fact that Lennon himself was martyred nine years later close by that very hotel lends the song extra poignancy. (He may have been a self-righteous prig, but he did sincerely deplore the violence that took his own life.)

I felt so strongly about the song that I had to work it out for myself, right away. I opened the case of my acoustic guitar, which I keep parked behind the leather sofa, and, holding the tune in my mind, found the key: D. I hummed the song softly, finding chords, until in a few minutes I had the song roughed in well enough to be able to play it to myself. As I did, tears came to my eyes.

My thanks to John Lennon, then, as a songwriter. He wrote this one with Yoko Ono in a New York hotel room in October 1971. Now, 35 years later, it still stands as a hopeful encouragement for a world that in some ways has gotten worse, and I find it is my theme song for today and, I think, for this Christmas.

Happy Christmas.

music and memory

More lying in the dark after waking from dreams just before 3:00 a.m. I dozed just before the alarm went off at 5:30, then lay in bed, feeling heavy and sleep-ready as Kimmie bustled to the bathroom, radio playing. I could hear the music faintly through my earplugs. I pulled out the plugs when I recognized a song as one I enjoyed, even though I couldn't identify it. With the orange foam plugs out I could tell right away: "Avalon" by Roxy Music.

I was launched back through time to 1982, after I had returned from my solo trip to Europe and Africa. I remember walking up 4th Avenue in the cool steely light of late afternoon in October, in search of a birthday present for my sister Mara. The street and sidewalks were busy as ever on the slope up from Burrard Street, with music floating into the gray air from boutiques and restaurants. I was enveloped in a sense of solitude in my home city, and Bryan Ferry's introspective voice in the evocative, shifting mist of the music expressed my mood.

Now the party's over
I'm so tired
Then I see you coming
Out of nowhere...

Up. Up from the wooden platform of bed and into the still-dark of morning and a new week.

Over the weekend I went on a book binge at two separate Indigo stores--North Vancouver on Saturday and the Robson store in Vancouver yesterday. The total haul of books:

• House of Bush, House of Saud by Craig Unger
• Our Posthuman Future by Francis Fukuyama
• Synaptic Self by Joseph LeDoux
• Rogue State by William Blum
• The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose
  

Yesterday, since Fukuyama mentioned Aldous Huxley's Brave New World in the opening part of his book, and Kimmie expressed an interest in it after I told her what it's about and why it's famous, we got a copy of that too.

Slow going today. Only a few notes: dry. Low in ideas.

sadness

Maybe a short post.

I have spent the past couple of hours catching up on the bookkeeping for my strata corporation (of which I am president and treasurer), and so am late to this blog. As you faithful readers know, I have been patchy lately in my posting: an artifact of my strange, questioning frame of mind.

Yesterday was another brilliant, crisp day. I went to the library to pick up a couple of DVDs, then down to London Drugs to pick up the replacement for the digital camera we bought last Saturday (a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ5--the LDC screen on the camera we took away from the store had a hairline crack). When I parked the Corolla in the store parking lot the radio was playing the Tracy Chapman song "Fast Car"--a song I recognized but had never listened to closely. Yesterday I did. I left the radio on after switching off the engine and listened, staring over my steering wheel and across 20th Street to the low-rise apartment buildings and their dark shadows in the intense, low sunlight.

I was deeply moved by the pathos of the song, the yearning of an impoverished young girl to have a life, to find happiness. Tears came to my eyes, and I could hardly bear to listen to the chorus repeat itself. I was filled with sadness for the world, for life.

That sadness stayed with me through the rest of the day. I found I couldn't read but just sat looking into the fire. It was almost unbearable at moments, but not unpleasant. It wasn't a bad sadness, more like the sadness, the raw heart, I was trained to cultivate in Shambhala Training: the genuine heart of sadness of the warrior. I remember that Trungpa Rinpoche said that the warrior's senses are open and exposed, so that the sound of raindrops hitting your coat seems very loud.

Sadness.

reelin' in the years

Awoke at 5:30 and lay in the dark, as ever feeling dissatisfied and not up to the task. Kimmie was awakened repeatedly in the night, she said, by the loud sound of raindrops dripping on a sheet of metal, and another set of drops on plastic. It's probably the strips aluminum soffit tucked under our back deck, which is no longer waterproof since it was resurfaced by a friend four years ago. Water drips through to what is below.

"I'll see what I can do about it," I said.

It has rained for 23 straight days in Vancouver, according to the radio. The song that came on as I sat up in bed was "Reelin' in the Years" from Steely Dan's original Can't Buy a Thrill album in 1972. The title means more to me now, but I always liked the song, and it took me back to a specific memory: early 1973, when I was 14, and had just finished delivering The Province newspapers one Saturday--and had collapsed on my bed just after sunrise. Sunlight streamed pinkly through the homemade red-corduroy curtain of my basement bedroom, and Elliott Randall's carefree guitar solo seemed to express perfectly the feeling of wellbeing and freedom of having finished humping an extra-heavy paper sack up and down the streets of Upper Lonsdale. This morning I dawdled as I put on my T-shirt and sweatpants and socks and glasses and wristwatch, listening.

Then: downstairs to make coffee, open up the PC, and get to work. My new strategy is to skip research notes first thing and get right to writing. The idea is to increase my productivity. It makes it harder to get out of bed, since the instinctive fear and resistance keep me stuck to the mattress longer (what I have sometimes called the Bed of Procrastes), but eventually I must get up, if only to make sure Kimmie gets a cup of coffee. It's actually a good way to start: a bit like jumping into the pool instead of creeping down the stairs, getting your skin wet one centimeter at a time. It's a shock--but you're swimming, and you feel alive.

I didn't hit my stride first thing, since I still was underpowered, knowledgewise. I found myself wanting to name which particular Judean fortress my characters would be using, which got me hunting for what and where the fortresses were at that time. I pulled the book Herod: King of the Jews and Friend of the Romans from my bottom shelf, checked the index, flipped to the pages describing the geography of Judea, recognized that I hadn't yet keyed that material into my research documents, so took a detour to see to that. It did list fortresses in Judea, but when I spun to my desk (behind me when I'm facing my computer, which sits on a decommissioned kitchen table), where Aharoni and Avi-Yonah's The Macmillan Bible Atlas rested open, I flipped a couple of pages and found a perfect map of the fortresses of that period. It was almost right in front of me! My first impulse was the best: Hyrcania, overlooking the desolate wilderness east of Jerusalem, just before the rocky hills drop 4,000 feet to the Dead Sea.

As I fussed with this and other details of my scene (how many legions were with Caesar when he left Egypt?), I bogged down and wound up producing only 2 pages (almost 3). For me, this is how it is.

dancing in the dark

An unusual evening post for me: I find myself down in my office, and Kimmie and Robin are out for the evening at Seymour's Pub with their niece/cousin Lisa. I've had my leftover beef stew and wine; and now I'm into my second juice-glass of scotch.

I have Bruce Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark" running through my head. It was the song playing on the radio when I switched it on this morning upon rising from my mattress in the predawn dark (I turned up the heat, shut the window, and turned on the heat in the ensuite bathroom--chores Kimmie usually sees to, scurrying to do them then plunging back into the warmth of the covers to regain lost body-heat). Like many songs, it took me back to a specific place and time: in this case, spring 1984 and my first solo living quarters in a the basement suite of a Greek family living on the West Side just off of King Edward Avenue. I would come home from my evening shifts as a clerk at ICBC, it would be midnight or so, pour myself a juice-glass of whisky much like the one I'm drinking right now, switch on my only entertainment device, a transistor radio, and read a book or write a letter. I listened to CKLG, then still a Top 40 AM station, while reading, for example, CIA Diary by Philip Agee--a research book for my writing, just as I do now.

One of the most-played songs when I first moved in to that dark little suite (the narrow living-room had no windows of its own; only a window in the entrance door a few steps below ground level) was "Dancing in the Dark". According to the Songfacts website, this was the last song Springsteen wrote for his Born in the USA album, and the song itself describes his frustration at trying to write a song that would please people--be a hit. Perhaps ironically, the song itself was a hit--the first of seven on the album--and won Springsteen his first Grammy.

I didn't know all that then. I knew that Springsteen was one of the hottest things in music, a huge star. I also knew that his path to stardom had been not straightforward, since I was around back in 1976 or so when Rolling Stone had proclaimed him to be the "future of rock and roll", after which he disappeared for eight years. In 1984, as I sat in my dim basement livingroom, drinking and reading, I enjoyed the song; and its strange mixture of upbeat tempo and haunting musical and lyrical ideas seemed to express the flavor of that time: a solitary, anxious time for me--but a time of promise as well.

Now, this morning, the song was there again. I felt again the solitude and promise of that time, moving through the dark of my bedroom, again wondering whether I myself will be able to create something that will please people.