Easter

The day spread itself in sunflower tones, in the jangly guitar chords of The Sundays, in the warbled buzzer of blackbirds resting in open-mouthed heat on still yellow-budded limbs. On cracked concrete steps, they sat with guitars and banjos while cats wriggled like epileptic serpents on the bright, white stone. Here and there, bikinis lowered and flirted with sunlight, strollers caterpillar-tapped plastic wheels, the barista raised her face and tilted back her chin and smiled squint-eyed and freckled.

There are grebes in the surfway bobbing in the jet ski wake, and bumble-bees testing the old fire station’s stucco with pipe-cleaner legs. My root spreads, that naked blue wolf rattles, and my dreams are of tornados and gorillas. She sails by me in a wooden kayak as a robin calls happily from the rock crevice as is answered, met and mated.

It is hard to find anything wrong with the world at this moment, hard to listen to internal voices or heed fears, hard to be anything but present and complete. Today is Easter and this is my church, my connection to reverence spelled out among the mud worms, the pews are blackberry bushes swollen and ripe, the altar is a lemon dandelion circle, communion is bare feet on a soft-grass meadow. The ghost mountain is painted on a translucent layer of cloud canvass, like some Melville-era bearded divinity. Resurrection is the whale-barnacled moon breaching, the golden trout sun spawning, and the old elephant bark mother tree curling around squirrel tails. And it happens not only every day, but every minute.

I am struck finally by the truth of the wholeness of all things, all stimulus the same, all expression the same. Distinction, like borders is imaginary. One inhalation. One exhalation. Only up-close are the dots various colors and only to the up-close eye does that matter.

This earth, this wind, this water is what we are made of and to this we will return. It used to be what we encountered daily, what we contended with, what we had to understand and be understood by, how we lived. Our bodies, our pulse rates, our blood pressure, our stress levels are reduced, slowed, brought into balance by a return to connection, whether by gardening, sunbathing, boating, or allowing for the guilty pleasure of goofing off by water or by wood. But we often need the excuse, the object, the activity to make it right, to make it seemingly worth the time spent. Or if we cannot make the journey, we find the easement, the silence in mediation or yoga, or art or writing, or sex.

What more for us defines any broad sense of divinity and source than this? What other explanation for those moments of carefree, shoes-off, breeze in the hair, smell of grass moments can there be, what other answer when what the soul echoes is so pure, so right, so whole and complete than that this is our home?

But there is no lesson like this in the day. No, there is the eventual aubergine wine stain that soaks into the horizon. There is the way that birdsong mutes and the hiss hiss of traffic on far distant roads slides into a background white noise, the wind chimes hang loosely asleep. That old, stray cat curls up on an abandon deck chair and watches the mosquitoes blearily gather in an early congregation around the shrine of sepia lamplight. The heat softens and falls to the asphalt. Everywhere, the smell of cooking, the clink of silverware and dishes, the wavering smear of porch bulbs.

Twilight spreads itself in cool blue breathes against our eyelashes and crows wheel in one final circle before dipping into shadow. Tomorrow approaches like a resurrection, and every moment lingers, a kiss on sleeping lips, a psalmed sigh and a leisurely scuffle of shoe down the long alleyway homeward. We have holes in our jeans and dirty noses. We are happy. We have lived.

Spalding Gray

I’m again at the root of a willow tree aslant a lake, the sort of power spot I look for and favor in whatever city I happen to be living. This willow and this lake are particularly good examples of both, and yet it’s only lately that I’ve put the luxury of mobility together with this spot to equal freedom from the cave of my apartment. As the weather turns and the boughs swell with blossoms, as the great Goddess glows in coitus, I’m finding more and more that there is a particular problem at the center of my being, one that I’ve touched upon or alluded to or spoken directly about several times. This is going to be another of those postings, and it might end up being the last of that ilk.

I was listening to an interview with Spalding Gray, the well-known monologist and actor who after a tragic frontal lobe brain injury, spiraled downward in depression and took his own life earlier this year. I only knew the man through his performances, and then only bits and pieces of those, but I’ve always somewhat identified with him. I’ve been writing what could be called literary monologues for almost seven years, long before blogs were in vogue, right as online journaling hit the scene. These days, it’s somewhat commonplace to wrench open your heart and share the intimate, stark details of your fears, desires, neurosis and shadow. Back then, however, it wasn’t widespread. So naturally, I cast around for like-minded people, mentors and community and happened upon Spalding.

I don’t pretend to have known Spalding Gray or the state of his psychology and I don’t presume at all to explain him or his life through me and mine, but listening to him discuss his work eerily impacted me. Here was a man talking about observation, that kind of detached, super-focused observation of your own life that makes of you a vulture of creativity. As you that vulture experiences something, only one piece of you actually experiences it while a much larger piece is busy processing the experience in terms of how you plan to write or speak about it later. What kind of story should I use to illustrate this adventure, you think as the spear plunges into your foot. Is this an interesting metaphor about the general state of living or loving or death? Can I somehow work the yellow mailbox into the general thread?

In his interviews, Spalding described looking for a moment of living life rather than living it and observing the living of it for inclusion in some future monologue. He never found it. Instead there was a freak car accident abroad that left him with a frontal lobe injury, which intensified his churn and the depth of his observation and enhanced and magnified his neuroses and psychoses. In his last days, according to one of his friends (also interviewed) he discussed how he was no longer sleeping, how he couldn’t shut off the internal monologue, how all of it had become an excruciating, maddening hell. He took his life on the Staten Island ferry, stepped off the deck sometime at night. His body washed ashore a few months later.

I don’t even begin to have this level of neurosis or psychological turmoil, nor was I or have I ever been as medicated or therapy-involved as he was, nor certainly do I have that horrible injury. But we have two things in common. The first is that I empathize with his search for a moment that exists outside of the observation of it. The second is that when I have been suicidal in the past, my favorite phant’sied methods have been drowning (usually from a ferry) or falling (jumping) from a great height.

In my loneliness moments, trying to struggle through an understanding of life or trying to come to terms with creation, I honestly feel like I’m going mad from the sheer level of thinking going on or from the need to establish some structure with it all. Neil Young was asked lately whether he maintained a routine of writing every day. His response was, paraphrased, “That’s no way to do it. You write when you feel like writing and you don’t write when you don’t. It’s not up to you anyway. It comes from somewhere else. You just have to always be ready for it.”

I think in my life I’ve been looking for easy-to-follow, structured solutions to any number of problems. But I think now that’s the real problem. Opening the gateway to creativity, spirituality, etc at 3pm every day assumes you are in control and that you can say to the world, it’s 3pm, what do you have for me? Saying today I am going to write and tomorrow I am not going to write, or that I’m going to shamanically journey next Wednesday evening or that I’m going to work on music Saturday from 2:30 to 4:30 is the same thing. And maybe that works for some people, but what I’m finding is not that it can’t work for me, but that I cannot go about it that way and remain healthy.

The reason is Spalding’s described observational life. As I reflect on his path, his words (which ring now as cautionary tale and advice), and his art, I must in necessity seek out the things that make me different from him, or rather the things about me that would prevent this kind of suffering. At night, alone sometimes, I feel the pressure of the internal monologue and minute dissection, which churns up all manner of validity issues, guilt issues, abandonment issues, and fear. Without that internal monologue, those specific issues are met, sat with, understood and given their place. It’s only when the observational mind goes into high function and the great eye of Sauron falls upon me that the catalyst is sparked.

Coming from the fairy-infused trip to Ventura, and after some of the most recent postings, what initially rings out to me as a saving grace is my spiritually, or rather my Belief. In my best moments, I sit happily and silently in a stream of synchronicity, trying to read it, ride it, immerse myself in it, walk with it. I hold strongly to the kami, the spirits that exist in all living beings. And I have some experience with certain older, hidden, secret things as well. What that all speaks to me of is intuition, flow, magick. Applying structure, schedule, routine to that which gives me such joy when they are flowing is, therefore, cross-purposed. It’s negating the possibility of spontaneity by scheduling windows of spontaneity and timelines to things that don’t care much for the passing of time, or have their own ideas of what time is all about. It’s also encouraging that part of me that likes to make lists and check them again, that likes to project manage my progress and output to continue doing so.

Sure, the Wild Mind exists in those openings, but they are shepherded by the task-maker and the time-keeper, who even if told to sit back and not disrupt, are still sitting back by agreement. It’s like telling a child to play and not to notice the fact that they are being watched. You can’t not know that somebody else is in the room, even if they are quiet and non-involved in what you are doing. Even if somebody leaves the room and says they’ll be back to pick you up in a hour, you still know there is a beginning and an end, and you know that this is your only chance to be alone, regardless of whether you want to be or not, or whether you’d rather be later.

Where is this all going? The Shiftless Seattlite tour is in-between stops right now, and Spalding Gray was ironically killed by the same thing that drove him onward. That’s not going to happen to me. Instead, I think now is the time for those two disparate parts of me to stop being married and living together, and instead to become best friends and have their own apartments. It’s time to completely shut down the partnership and invest instead in the individual fulfillment of each half. Throw away the writing session schedule, tear up the checklists, erase the chalk-height measurements on the wall. Stop being the parent. Stop being the child. You do when you do and you don’t when you don’t, and that’s all there needs to be, every day. That’s all now that there can be for me.

Farewell, Spalding. Thank You for the gift of your life.

Shiftless Seattlite Tour : Ventura (Stop 1)

Since January, I’ve been working to make the money to afford the most extensive travel season of my life to date, which will stretch from Austin to Kona, from Red Rocks to Canada and points beyond and between. As I expunged myself of inner landscape chaos over the last few months, pounded out the churn methodically through the machine-gun tapped key and the blinking vertical bar, I thought about these journeys, knowing exactly what I hoped to achieve. For this was a pilgrimage of the mystic to the meeting place, a walkabout of a different kind, one in which I planned not only to find God, but to bring him, her, them and it back with me.

The scene is Ventura, California, seventy miles north of Los Angeles proper, along the Pacific Coast Highway. This is stop one of the Shiftless Seattlite tour, 2004.



I collapsed in the bed, sank down into the luxury of the well-loved mattress as the night sounds pressed upon the black window glass, promising a tomorrow of sun and heat and the secret hearts of palm trees. Around me, all manner of fairy, statues and matchbooks, booklets and drawings, lingered in corners and on shelves. Above me, the gold-flair of 1970’s starlight rose from the angled, square fixture, the same fixture I had in my bedroom as a child.

There was a significance about this that deeply affected me, and since mine and my hosts’ sleep and wake schedules were slightly at odds, I was afforded many hours of time alone in that room to reflect on it. The days were spent lounging in the fragrant garden, slathering on sun-screen and walking the shores, strolling the neighborhoods with dog in tow and watching for butterflies. But the nights were spent among the Host, nestled down under layers of covers, feeling that faraway thing inside of me wriggle and shake awake as tiny eyes observed and tiny wings gave merely a hint of flutter in the shadows.

This was my wellspring growing up, my sense of how things were as I walked with a staff down the riverbank and talked to sparrows, too young to know anything was different or strange about it. There was a feeling of wildness in me, a hearing of things on the fringe of sound, a respect, a belief that was beyond books and ritualized learning. As I grew, I systematically ignored, then repulsed and finally accepted, but the order that an adult gathers as age grows locked itself around these memories and this source, categorizing, dogmatizing and eventually taking for granted.

At the end of the days of talk and laughter in Ventura, of complete utter displacement among the hot, hot winds and under the spreading palms, there was this wonderful world of fairies, light fixture, and the past.

But the daylight hours were far from normal either.

As Seattle is the sleepy exhalation of magick that spreads slowly and collects in corners in strange but relatively harmless combinations, as San Francisco is the type of lush, well-ordered chaos of old magick that rises vortexes and sweeps along girders and stone paths, Ventura is something else entirely. Ventura is like the gassy mess of the early formation of a universe, the sort of lax, yet frenetic testing ground of creatures and realities that in Hollywood terms would be a marriage of David Lynch and the Cohen Brothers in a screenplay written by Hunter S. Thompson edited and aired by ABC Family.

I walked those streets where new-school punks met dropout beachcombers at the Busy Bee diner, where the blue-blood windowshopped at boutiques with extraneously-accented-lettered names while men in ridiculously oversized self-woven hats trolled at thrift stores. This was a place where Acupuncturists worked at the Carpeteria and Mormons tried to sell religion to Rainbow Family off-the-gridders. It had the scent of the beginnings of things, that baby-flesh scent of morphing bones and hesitant manifestations, the pure smell of realities trying hard to mesh together in too many places at the same time. This was a rag-doll-body outline, a jagged edge that somehow remained fluid, set upon a thousand various directives colliding randomly and violently in an excited, catalyst-fed reaction.

This was a place where coffee-shops had gift merchandising and hidden, Narnia-through-the-wardrobe-type wine bars way in the back. This was a place where soybeans, beekeeping and sunlight formed a crackpot’s theory of stem-cell replacement while pitching a rob-the-Indian-casino petition to Trader Joe shoppers. This was a place where old frontier men in coonskin caps drank at the end of piers and took turns on high-powered motor scooters or simply cursed at brown-feathered seagulls.

I couldn’t have imagined a stranger universe. I certainly cannot describe it well enough to give it credit. Still, what could be a better start for my journey than the reminder of things that lie beneath, of that sort of roiling, primal magick that feeds the mind of belief and the heart of creation? And what better way to begin this exploration than with the wings and fingers of the dark, mossy veil around me as I dreamt?

The words lapped at the shoreline, around rock-towers and between pier posts, falling in great sheets of pollen, playing out in the eyes and lips of the spice-sand affected. We are here. We are here. We are here. Remember.

When I returned, nothing was the same. That kind of oddness jumped into my suitcase and made the long flight back up the coast, where I returned to find that my garbage can had inexplicably been stolen. So to close, and to glorify the weird of the Wyrd, a short, open letter to the garbage thief:

Dear Garbage Thief,

I knew #1 for two years and we had been through many a time together. How his brothers, #2-#5 will miss him. Were you attracted to his black, plastic, droid-type body, or were you drawn to the large #1 on his side, hoping that through him YOU could be #1 as well? He certainly was beautiful, the way that the old trash sludge slid around inside him and the dents on his frame in the right light looked rugged and heroic.

What sort of ninja activity did you engage in to spirit him away? Had you been stalking him for weeks? Did you rearrange the other cans, filling in the gap left by his abduction in the hopes that I’d think that I never actually had a garbage can?

I’m hoping for, but not expecting, any of a number of excuses, that perhaps you and he eloped together and I was too blind to see it coming, that maybe you took him to save a nun from drowning in the mud puddle or to give the orphans a toy for their games of basketball. Perhaps you could not afford the money to make a phone call to the city to get a free sanitation-provided garbage can like I did today.

Whatever the case, I hope you are taking good care of #1, and I’m also hoping you are enjoying the overfull bag of very used kitty litter you have found inside.

Yours truly,
Canless in Seattle