player piano

Music in all venues and modes expresses best a soul’s longing to love and be loved. Yet pictures came second in my appreciation the depredations of men to men indiscriminate. Variously my dreams are dominated by both. But now remembering best the discovery of images, illicit and impermissible otherwise, the carnage of Nazi Germany. I was quite young and curious, the photographs, were stored in a chicken coop; I’ve never been the same since.

“The same” as what? Before my witness I had held, exclusively, a sense of being unwanted singular. Then a race chosen for the final solution. But then, at the age of ten or so, I knew nothing of race, creed, gender persecution. In prayer I pray that I will find the answer before I die: why do we do what we do?

More importantly why do we ignore the issues before us when in truth what can happen to another can happen to you or me individually or collectively. The Golden Rule’s dark sibling: “What goes around comes around.”

In profile he seemed crushed as an abandoned automobile recycled into its smallest possible remainder. Around him was the sound of a player piano accelerated to gibberish, the roll torn through him a song in mute silence hysterical. I knew the dream was important. But was confused with free associations herein attempted the distillation of. Sometimes I sense the suicide of the world as its going to hell in a grocery cart bumping down hill towards the precipice of extinction. With age came a sense of integration: the spirit of what I heard and saw in both dream and ordinary of my days. All my ambitions to analogize this have failed and that applies to even this: writing. My greatest joy is discovering the genius of others who have no sense their gifts. Apparently to them improbable since they lack the education or franchise of being intellectual or capable of anything greater than being a cog in the wheel of industry.

In point of fact I would not be alive were it not for the kindness of random strangers who by acknowledgment or affirmation lent me a sense that I should seek life instead of death. Even now I sense I own nothing, being tenant and steward of something I have yet to inhabit fully. Possibly a self difficult to fully incarnate?

At the moment I can look across the recent dialogs and events: sense, seeing, intuiting then knowing the source of what I am writing at the moment. I feel at home here. At the same time I feel at home in my mind. Reopening all the myths and metaphors I used to hold as fixed and immutable objects to which I became subject.

If nothing else my thoughts tend more directly towards not being factory farmed for the amusement, pleasure and profit of anyone or thing institutional.

Of course I remember Kurt Vonnegut’s “Player Piano” and reviewing the summary on line remember better the spirit of the author than the narrative. Which is true of all my reading, the spirit in which it was written and what was sought, at least my sense of it.

We know ourselves simply absent all the arcana and esoteric language of academia. Follow the feelings when things go bump in the night and you will find them more benign that you expect. In retrospect I think all the rest is smoke and mirrors, bells and smells, magical thinking that serves no one really well . . . a sorta kinda I/Thou, not I/Them.

Real change is possible if you stick with changing your perceptions via stone cold sober mindfulness of what makes you heart sing and what does not.

130606 EDT 02:47 player piano

© 2013 by Jack Spratt—All Rights Reserved