Thursday, January 17, 2013

"How's your book?"
"Uh.  I don't think Sergei liked it.  He didn't mention it last time he played here."
"No, your new book."
"Oh, yeah, huh.  I guess I haven't started it writing it.  I don't know what to write about.  We have too many hangups here in the U.S.  I'm stultified."
"Confessions of a Bartender."
"Well, that's a thought."

Confessions of a Bartender.  Actually, not a bad idea.  Bring forth all the strangeness of it, the life you lead.

I'm sitting in the chair at the dentist's, for my routine cleaning.  The nice young lady has scraped, and polished, and scraped some more, and then the dentist, a bright eyed fellow younger than me, comes in.  "How are things?  How's your guitar?  How's your writing?  I guess you didn't bike here today." (He is an accomplished musician and a cyclist, now a busy family man.)
"Well, I guess if Lance is confessing, I should, too.  So that's my next book.  'Confessions of a Bartender.'"  The three of us share a chuckle.
"That would be interesting."  (In contrast to my last effort.)
"Really, nothing happens.  I live the life of a monk," I say, shrugging, lifting my hands up.  It's true.  And anyway, religious orders have long been drinking wine, so that part fits too.

Relieved, my gag reflex having been carefully bypassed, I exit the dentist's office.  Later I end up taking a walk on the university campus not far away.  I walk across the main quadrangle of American University.  There's a hint of snow coming.  Young people, dressed as students, brightly walking back and forth between classes.  I pause before the Center for Spiritual Life, a round building at the far end of the quad, observing the light through stained glass windows in the inner darkness, a chapel.  A banner hanging on the outer door lists the congregations of different faiths present here.  But there is anyway something inherently spiritual to the life of a campus;  consciously or not, something spiritual is happening, though this is no longer regarded as the main reality, but swept off to the edges.

I walk on, downhill, away from the traffic circle, the new art center on the other side of the avenue, not far to the low brick campus of Wesley Theological Seminary.  Christ raises his left hand out in front.  I walk around, finding myself looking in through the big glass windows at the neat lit library at one end of a small square quadrangle.  I stand in front of a drained fountain and read the plaque at the base of the bell tower.

Later, as I walk back, heading home, past the Kay Spiritual Life Center, I am brave enough to enter for a peek inside.  I take a brochure "35 Years of Worship and Service," enter the chapel for a moment to breath its silence.  As I come out I find a small litter of tea light votive candles left on the steps, most with wax still in their little rings below the blackened wicks.  "The recent tragedy," one says to himself, the school shooting, a stain on modern life that can now never be wiped away, haunting each of us as we go about our days interacting, wondering if the person around the corner might be the nut.  Looking at the roof lines of a campus, I ponder the assassination of President Kennedy (my father's memory of the bell tower at UC Berkeley ringing comes in to the mind) in terms of Hindu Buddhist thought of there being an almost infinite number of other worlds comprising creation.  If you added all worlds, all the individuals, you might gather that though it's not a matter of such a thing as horrible of that ever happening again, the odds are that indeed such a thing would happen once in our world within its long history.  Is it Brahma observing to Vishnu, that the ants marching in ordered unison up the steps of a great palace were all themselves, each and everyone, once a powerful monarch building a great castle in honor of themselves?  It's all in the scale of things.

And so I imagine my own what-I've-done-with-my-life, as people do in dentist's offices, or on the eves of their birthdays, in some terms, ones that put me once in that great spiritual world of campus life, learning, dreaming, and then later outside of it.  Certainly I carry that life of learning within, but it feels quite evident that now as I walk across a campus I am no longer a part of that, and I am unhappy to see myself having fallen out of it.  My own sins, drinking too much, laziness, self-absorption, narcissism, bring a measure of shame, even if I was completely well-intentioned as an English major, actually trying to be very serious about it.  Being exiled from that spiritual world, not finding a way back, one easily gets lost, maybe very lost.  And so I am a bartender.  Lost in the wilds, able to remember the temple.

The spirituality of a campus--yes.  That's what it's all about.  And it makes you see, and makes you see the broader truth of it all.  Life is all about spirituality.  What else are we here for?  How else could we even exist?  We cannot acknowledge another person as being real and alive without acknowledging our spirituality.  But yet, what do we do with that spirituality?  We ourselves are not perfect.  Do we join a socially accepted congregation that holds on to its own seemingly distinct way of being?  Does or would that close us off, having so joined, from another perhaps broader spiritual practice or recognition?  If I spend my time amongst Methodists, do I not have less time to spend practicing Tantric Yoga?  Does one way look sort of foolish from the perspective of the other?

Fittingly, it seems, it costs money to go back to school.  Debt.  Then again, it costs you not to go back to school, big time.

Years are frittered away thinking of these things.  You show up to work, do your job, go home at the end of the day, eat something.   All the years bar tending, it's not like I was totally practicing evil, but I am not proud of them.  And so I confess.  There were lots of sins around the edges, lots of not standing up for anything, but rather swept along by different personalities, when all the while, school is a far better influence.  You just hope, hold on to the hope, that there is at the bottom of it all something not unspiritual about it, as if performed with something in the mind along the lines of Christ's admonition to us to not seat ourselves by the head of the table, but at the lowest.

Picking up the brochure, I remember a familiar suspicion.  Is a university chaplain, a person of some denomination, inherently more spiritual, more spiritually informed, more qualified by spiritual acts than the rest of us?  Professional, of course, spent the time studying, practicing, has done the reading, and I am sure, quite helpful.  Yes, committed.  And yes, a lot of experience in dealing with certain issues.  Whereas I, the barman, whose shoulder has perhaps been subtly cried upon in silence often enough, am left standing outside, not sure what to believe in when it all is made particular, having not been raised as a church goer (but by no means ignorant of spiritual lesson.)  Can you be both Buddhist and Christian at the same time?  You could respect the Catholic faith but balk at becoming a priest for obvious reasons.

Being a writer can be spiritual, even finely so.  But it falls outside the usual organizations. Less foot traffic, less support, less organization, less respect.  You'll quite possibly end up bar tending.




I know:  I am in need of an editor.  I write too often without thinking.  I know it to be therapeutic.  It helps the thoughts.  The big banks have screwed us all, all who aren't part of their game of setting prices then making it look like the market arrived there through trading, the big banks who love huge government debts so as to make huge profits over tiny marginal changes.  They haven't left much for the rest of us, and we all know that big corporate oligarchy is so intent on fascist changes to our governing system as they and the big banks seem to enable each other into the same sort of power.  And the only way out against this trap of greed is a real hard long look at spiritual reality, and not only that but an acknowledgment of that which is spiritually good in life, spiritually good outside of all moralizing and entrenched belief systems.  We are good at this.  We can do this.  On the eve of Doctor King's Day, we can.  We can strive on for what he saw as a way forward, a moral way, quite apart from the world of corporate profit.  Spirituality.  The recognition of our 'brotherhood.'


When you are a barman, you go home.  You stay up too late.  You open a bottle of wine at 2 AM, and it relaxes you.  It lets you watch PBS specials about the lives of salmon with great appreciation, and you don't feel particularly lonely.  ("The unique smell of their birth place is imprinted in their brains," Jeremy Irons tells us.  That's pretty cool, after these fish have travelled thousands of miles.  The camera work by Bertrand Loyer--very cool.  "The Surprise Salmon" episode of Life on Fire.) Yes, you have your foibles, your puerile interest in Anthony Bourdain visiting Paris and Philadelphia, your love of Irish music on YouTube, Russian literature, some of it dirty, in order to relax the corpus after the blitzkriegs of the restaurant's dull week.  You like to play guitar at 5 AM.  You think of doing laundry, without doing it.

And it all leaves you with an ability to open a book at random, like a Dostoevsky, or The Gospel of Luke, and find a brilliant passage that suits the mind like a cross-pollenation.  From House of the Dead, an explanation of how the noblemen were treated in a Siberian labor prison.  Something that just fits into your head, because it's free.

You can't live in the past.  As my wise friend Ron, who works for an importer of wine we all rely on, told me just days ago, 'today is the first day of the rest of your life.'  Cheers, and thank you for the quite excellent Chamisal Vineyards Edna Vallen 2010 Pinot Noir, a Christmas gift my boss has suggested his company provide the salesman of the Frenchy Bistrot of Upper Georgetown.  (I've pushed my share of Kermit Lynch wines, curatively, on our customership.)  Ahh, Pinot Noir indeed is quite distinctive.  No one ever blends it.

As a parting word, Ron kids me about finding a kind older woman like the nice lady who is a good conversationalist.  That, or teach prep school.  (At a boys school, not a girls school--too vicious--in his opinion.)  I guess it's a running joke between us, what someone like me should now do with his life as a second act.  He knows my love of Shakespeare, as earlier I've tried to mumble a few lines, shyly, to this actor, who will always be an actor.  "No judgment," he says to me with his spot on smile.  And I say, yes, we don't judge here.  Rattled a bit, by several different things going on, I fail to deliver on my recent viewing of a film portraying Frost and Nixon.  "No, Ron," in Nixon gravelly sentimental basso profundo, "we don't judge here.  And we don't mention Watergate, either."

Later on, I will convert this all into iambic pentameter in my head.  That helps you control the language, find the right word, the right sound.  I wouldn't mind it if all the people on CNN delivering opinions about Lance Armstrong would stop, take a moment, and put it into iambic pentameter before the words gushed out of their breathless intent mouths.  Some people are able to use words, words with thought.  And actually, I have the distinct impression that Lance Armstrong is one of them.  To me, he came across as a thinking person, intelligent, and that's not nothing.

No comments: