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
