Here I am in my favorite chair. The weather is 72 and sunny (no relief in sight). Bach and Brubeck sounds are alternating their good vibes. I just ate a bowl of granola with frozen blueberries. Images of flowering succulents from the Getty Garden mingle with Van Gogh’s irises in my head. Nothing hurts. This is my opium for all it leaves out.
The same narcotic Coleridge might have imbibed when he set
out to write the Kubla Kahn and his stately mansion so decreed. To each his
Xanadu where blossomed many incense-bearing trees.
As Peggy Lee sang:
Show me the way to get out of
this world ‘cause that’s where everything is.
If everything is going, I
don’t want to stay here
Who wants to stick around and
watch the world disappear?
With the French revolution gone amok, heads rolling and
Napoleon about to plunder the old order, Coleridge found his way out, in 1797,
sailing down sacred rivers through caverns measureless to man. He was
plucked from his revelry by the now famous person from Porlock who came on
business matters. There’s always a man from Porlock, from the macro, to intrude
on our personal, micro. We are privileged only by an accident of geography to
be here rather than there.
Back in my easy chair I could swear I was on the verge of
uncovering the meaning of life when suddenly reality burst through the door.
Porlock lives! No need to recite the litany of dread leading to despair. The
interface between reality and the imagination was the underlying subject of
Wallace Stevens’ entire oeuvre. He regarded reality as the necessary angel
as he toiled all day at Hartford Indemnity Insurance Co. Yet he walked one mile
to and from work with his head in a foreign country called Imagination. As did
Kafka. As did Dr. Williams and Dr. Chekhov. As did mailman Bukowski.
Which brings me back to the poem we are all writing , not
necessarily on paper, to buoy us up and away from the muck and slime, but
enough about Trump. In these dark times, we each have to strategize how to get
through the day to say nothing of the night. I think it has always been thus. The
man from Porlock has turned into a metaphor. Could it be he was a harbinger for
the beginning of end of Romanticism, decades ahead of time, a reminder that the
toast is burning, the dog needs to be walked, to change the paper toweling,
pick up the mail and tend your garden? There is poetry in all these places and
where there is poetry there are political acts.
Even Coleridge noted a ceaseless turmoil seething / as if
the earth in fast thick pants were breathing. The specter of global neglect
and political calamity loom so large they engender cynicism and paralysis. These
have become their own abyss, formulas for disengagement.
The best we can do is to live consciously. Assert our being,
our sanctity. Extend ourselves to help others. Buy local. Spare livestock. Take
the bus. (I am scolding myself here) Write a check for the good candidates. Spread
and model whatever enlightenment we possess. Small behaviors move the needle as
an aggregate. As the cliché goes, we need to become the universe we wish for.
"The best we can do is to live consciously." Amen, and again, amen. Thank you for this reminder, on this day. (And of course, for your always inspiring meditations. I think I'm ready for some granola and frozen blueberries now...)
ReplyDeleteI think the operative word may be simplicity. I toast you, David, with my almond milk turned blue from the berries.
ReplyDeleteThank you Norm, much to chew on as usual. I didn't seem to be able to reply to your posts for a while, and then I finally realized I had to "enable third party cookies". I'll let you chew on that one for a while.
ReplyDeleteKindest regards,
David