Thursday, January 7, 2016

After the workweek, sore, the maestro lay on his side in bed with the shades drawn, in a meditation pose, allowing the thoughts to form, like watching loose translucent blob-like strings of DNA form and pass in his mind, vertically, like thematic streams of Beethoven's music.  Notes by themselves at first.  Then, discerning, coalescing, here a part, here a voice, here an instrument stating something, then picked up in another way, changed slightly, then many of those gathering, changing, reforming on their own as greater groups.  The actual music was hard to hear at this point, coming out like little blips, smaller sawings on a stringed instrument, much like the beginning of the Ninth.  One had no way to know if he was talking in nonsense or in scientific or psychological postulations of any accuracy or not.  A certain peace can be found in such writing attempts if not in the world in the same fashion.  One must rest in peace of some form to be able to see and hear.

Peace.  Yes, there are the diplomatic arenas of the courtship ritual.  So the notes in his mind were telling him, and he judged them not.  But there seemed some vague fact, hard to attain and develop, that certain people might act as, to use a loose term, depressives, and that to treat them with the usual roughness to be expected in such matters as courtship and friendship has a deeper effect, a magnifying effect.  Really they are just sensitive people, natural people.

But who knows if this is true, or reasonable to say, or even worth mentioning?  Barely a lump, a roughly formed thought, sitting just so in the mind of a person who'd gotten through the physicality of a work week of night shifts, who was awake but craved more rest.   A personal thought, coming from some personal experience long turned over in the mind, a delineation point between the world as it is and the questions of how to attain peace in the mind, through understanding.  Maybe if peace was found in one mind it could be passed to another, and so on.

The over-reaction, yes.  His own.  His own tendency to not react in the appropriate calm self-confident way, but to allow in the more negative narrative of a scene.  "Well, after all that I call her up and she practically hangs up on me, so therefore she doesn't like me..."   Carrying that in to the next day, when she appears before you, but you cannot break out in time of the bad thoughts, the sense of hurt, what-have-you, not worth going into.  Then distraction, then loss of opportunity, quickly and as easily as that, and your own sins coming into play.

The stress, that's what it is, you allow in the stress.  And the stress controls the thoughts and the way the adrenaline fires.  Be positive, easier said than done.   And stress is bad for the brain.  It leads to coping mechanisms that cause damage.  Ultimately, depressions of the sort that lead to things like dementia.  An overworked mind.

Which is again why people write, or, like Beethoven, craft strains of music into symphonies, as a way with coping with the depressions, the depressions that grow upon depressions.  Because you hear things, basic things, like somewhere, in the midst of cacophony, an Ode to Joy.

Or maybe quite well not even depressions.  Just an innate need, the organic need to take all those rushing loose strains of thought's pieces that run through the mind as we each must know it on our own, and put them down.  Ed Sheeran said as much on Charlie Rose last year.  It builds up.  When the chance comes out the songs come.

Somewhere a thought in the midst of the week.  Hamlet.  He slips so easily and fully into the antic disposition.  We want to tell him, stop, my friend, stop; it's Ophelia you're speaking to, forget the dramatic intent beyond that...  Shakespeare's observation is of people slipping into their modes, choosing them, how complete, overrunning they become, even when one is aware of what he's doing.

But it is hard enough to get through a workweek.  The new busboy.  The co-worker who shows up just before the door opens, not a single effort to help set-up, arrange the furniture for jazz night full to the brim.  One wishes to come from another culture, less Germanic about time.  Calm, easy-going, diplomatic, friendly, not so worried about how things might actually come together, eh, shrug, they will happen.  Not part of that tribe who has to go home, sleep, then upon waking try to spin the yarn of thought out of the coarse wool of the week.

Kindness, the depressive thinks, doesn't it finally come down to the kindness with which one treats, regardless of external fact, another human being, a kindness that is ultimately good for the health of that person, the deprivations of which of said kindness are not good for the health of that person.

And who would ever know where the less than full implementation of kindness came in to the dialog?  Can you blame anyone in particular?  Can you point to any thing that was just a little bit too harsh?   Diplomatic histories are made of such errors, like Obama and Netanyahu, one saw in PBS winding down, maybe that's why he is thinking of such things, diplomacy.

He wrote, he had his green tea, he had a cup of hot water with lemon, a dash of cayenne, a drop of pure maple syrup, and his glasses, oversized, progressive bifocals were awkward to look through as he leaned over the coffee table.

Okay, and what were other thoughts from the week that I have not been able to get to?

Depart from me;  for I am a sinful man, O Lord.  From the Gospel of Luke.  5:8

Peter's talent.  His sensitivity.  Self-understanding.  His great human humanity.  His shyness.  The great admission, the greatest of all admission, simple, stinging, full, a sense of the lack of self-control, scary.  Yet, we sense in him, he wants to do something creative, something good, something to wipe the pessimism and the negativity away, to be clean again.  Not caught in reaction.

The bar gets overrun.  No one from downstairs comes up to help, and so I hustle.

Master, we have toiled all night, and have taken nothing.  The futility of a job.  He's tired.

Then what does the Master say?  And then, somehow, it's easy to come along.

Peter will have his own moments of creativity.  He is the flashpoint for all the Gospel writers.  "Who do they say I am," and Peter answers.

A faith in kindness, some form of kindness, chaste as it may be, kindness given by and to a fisherman who's toiled all night and taken nothing, just trying to do his work.

And for him, there is better work.  A fisher of 'men.'  Temperate, Peter will have a better chance at working for the good, less allowing of evil...

There is barely any meaning left in words.  How they are delivered, yes.  But the words themselves, some are just foolish enough in a youthful time to believe in them, take them as fixed.  That's the beauty of poetry, the attempt to make words fixed points of a truth about something.

Really they are far more like music than we might think.  Musical notes, phrases, signifiers for things there are no rational terms for, emotional truths of how people feel.  Meditations, little more.  If you can pluck something out of them, it is a thought out of a field, one in keeping with the whole field, a whole spectrum, into which one supposes a particular instance of life might be dropped into to see it in greater context, for all outcomes.


Thereby, the maestro felt a certain comfort.  There was never any intention to write a novel, like, say, For Whom The Bell Tolls, something to be made into a movie with Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman.  There were just mysterious connections to be mulled over in the words one was able to write down, something that went along with but perhaps beyond thought.  Thinking of a sort that could be placed in the context of a whole lifetime of a thinking creature, from wordless babe, through childhood and youth, through those years that are supposed to be somehow adult, and on into those of old age.  Thinking that is simply there, somehow, constant, a thing itself worth pondering about, conscious, present, aware somehow, as if from a higher perspective of our own thoughts, tolerant of them as we are tolerant of weather conditions, there being some spiritual point, some understanding to be gained, lest we get lost and think of ourselves only as the hapless fisherman of one night's fruitless toil.

Employ the wordy part of the mind, and let it go its own way, reaching down to thoughts of a deeper consciousness, for which one has, of course, no control over, but to sit down and listen.  An idiot full of sound and fury but signifying nothing?  One hopes not.

Somehow the blank thoughts, the exercise of words, soothed the maestro's mind after all the talk of the week and the people in different states coming through the bar and the tables.  Quiet enough now to let them come out, and then, maybe weeks or months later, find record of them, to then see if they might yield any jewel of meaning...

"Eat your dinner," they had told him, the kind people at the end of the night.  "He's too shy," a woman said.

Might some form of a parable emerge, just born, nascent, more human than divine.

It was the last diners that had pushed him over the edge, fellow staff disappearing as they conceived of their own real duties, abandoning him, wiping the glassware clean, the last cheese plates to be wrangled out of the kitchen at the end of a long one, a requested alteration of the night's fish special, the complication of being turned into a live music venue.   But he had recovered.  Just the next day, tired, rather tired.

What did it all mean?  It must have some Christian form of meaning, somehow.

Now when he had left speaking, he said unto Simon, Launch out into the deep, and let down your nets for a draught.

A literary operation, the room where people meet.  Salt of the earth.

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