My idea for a musical:

Shane MacGowan sings Pogues songs, both with band, and quietly by self.  Lives.  Talks about spiritual things, Zen code, Joyce, literary history, meaning of songs.

That's all it takes.

Showing up.  It's always a good thing in the restaurant business.  That's what you do. ( The subsidiary of that being, that's what a waiter is;  you wait.  you stand there.)  And you know, it's a marvelous exercise.  A good training ground.  Go up on a small stage, all at face level, while engaged in a carefully arrayed set of activities that must respond to a flow, and talk to people.  Entertain.  Advise.  Serve.  Listen.  Enjoy.

Wine, a custodian of our thoughts.

The laws of physics allow us to draw portraits.

'Who's Very Important?'  NY Times  Krugman nails it again.

The sickness of egotism, the self important in a frenzy to elect a tax cheat as President...  What says, 'I don't give a crap,' any better?  Ahh, but he was a winning smile.

Add to this "The Rush to Abandon the Poor," 17 July Editorial in the NY Times.  Ever since Reagan, politicians (hard core Republican) have decided not to help people, not do the right thing by them, hurt them when they are vulnerable.  Which has moved the other side, Democrats and whoever else on up the liberal spectrum into higher thought, into their own self-created black hole (where money is sucked out of the general normal honest work life and into the hands of the .01 percent), pulled away from their own basic idea of service to humanity at a good price through enlightened thinking and generosity and poetic thinking, so that they also have to deal with rich stuffed pro-deregulators, slowly losing their own high ground.  Ever since Reagan, Republicans have become obstructionist, not just in the race of the election campaign, but in everything they touch (except of course for one thing, though I can't say what that is exactly, as I am not as well tuned to the center of their dark atomic gravity.)  It has become their knee jerk reaction, and they like to be good at it.  NOTE:  There are good Republicans, who don't fall into this, I would imagine.




The ego was a later development long after humanity was up and running.  The results of this have been a bit mixed, taking everything into consideration.  Sure, it's done some good, somewhere, this invention of the implanted ego.

Earlier, there was awareness, there was consciousness.  And this helped people not get too worried about going out and hunting and food gathering.  (News, such as we know it, wasn't necessary.)  People generally found themselves far less confused and more in a natural state about how to go about living.  Relationships were egoless, but for a few instinctive basics.

Like any art form writing is an attempt at authenticity, to reach the awareness that is beyond and independent from the ego.  It is not an easy thing to do, until it becomes an easy thing to do.  There are many forms of ego encountered along the way.  The Universe has need of authenticity, just like we need plankton in the ocean here on Earth, and so it sprouts forth evolutionary attempts at it, with success on different scales, simple humble garden variety type efforts like yours and mine.

The authenticity comes to be more important than the art of the form.  Kundera might well be concerned about literature strangling itself off through its impossible proliferation, everyone a writer now, no longer any way to navigate in all the clutter.  But he might well applaud the efforts within to save humanity and the world from killing itself off through egotistical acts, to find the simple plain consciousness within.

The act of literature, to celebrate a place that still has a relationship with nature, let's say, or to portray a relationship that is real, not a convention of societal roles and psychological complexes. or even a simple moment of authenticity, is, as it always was, more important than, or rather the ultimate source of, its form and its inherent quality to thence be debated by people who must bother over the less important features of a manifestation.


As I go to my job, of course I too have danger of falling into inauthenticity and ego.  I can fall into a role, or feel its imagined consequences, putting on the role of a Chekhovian lackey, or being stuck in my role as 'wine guy,' or 'server,' or 'bartender.'  Perhaps inevitable, to some extent, less and less I hope.  And this is a battle we all face in all aspects of our lives, so I think it bears mentioning.  For the good of the world, I am beyond that, more than simply that, or at least striving to be.  I will defend a restaurant as being a place that allows some relationships that are real and authentic as much as those not.

Egos are defeated, short circuited, put aside, often by non-engagement, by simple noticing and awareness, more than direct confrontation, it seems.  If you don't engage your own, you stand a chance to diffuse the workings of another.

There is a large house, a mansion you might call it, toward the top of a hill where I go cycling not far away.  It was built within recent memory, an ostentatious castle of a structure, grandly landscaped, such that a neighbor once shared a speculation that something was buried beneath a certain mound toward its rear.  Its steep lines and broad turret tower over the last ramps of the hill I climb.  Its high walls are faced with stone.

During a recent storm a strong wind came through along with driving rains and thunder and lightning.  Great oaks were toppled, downing lines.  The master of the great house was electrocuted when he came out of his front door to put out the fire caused when power lines fell on his Maserati.  Two weeks afterward, the burnt Maserati is gone, but for some charred remains, a strip of burnt metal lies on the stone driveway before the front door of the house, a used fire extinguisher, its own bright red burnt off by fire, nearby, and not far away, the remnants of a street lamp, the cut off metal glass encased bulb end at the foot of a new stained pine timber utility pole freshly planted.

Further up the side street there are two freshly sawed smooth oak stumps of grand size still with the odor of sawdust.  I pulled aside one of them, the further one, leaned over from my bicycle and counted the growth rings from the center out to the thick bark.  Roughly seventy, upon a patient counting, very close to the years of the deceased owner of the castle-like mansion and the Maserati.

It takes me an hour, of sort of rummaging around, to think of writing anything these days.  And that might not seem terribly productive.  An hour, at least, of wasted time, it seems, making tea, feeding the cat, breaking down and eating something, sorting out some laundry, all the while wondering, why write anyway? what is there to write about it, and to what purpose, we all need a purpose.  I think of my father's generation of scientist, mentored by rich 19th Century minds, schooled on G.I. Bill benefit after WWII, maintaining standards of classical thought and educational philosophy, big minded, before the specialist, botany departments giving way to microbiology and the technical narrowness required by expertise, undergraduate education becoming a less an awakening to broad and deep encompassing thought than a focus on particular technological training.  A generation savvy to a treason of the cleric.

It's as if I was raised by fireside tales of Ancient Irish culture, something I will always deeply want, on all levels of consciousness, to preserve, uphold and defend, even as I fell out of the academy and somehow was never able to get back in, much to my chagrin.  Science has always been the calling.  No idea how I ended up as I have.  Laziness, bad influences, misplaced faith, stupidity, confusion, a touch of being manic and high strung enough to need constant self-regulation.  An inability to get it together, as they say.  (Or was there something I took exception to down in the marrow of bones?)

No wonder I would find the music of Shane MacGowan and the Pogues so friendly to my own way of thinking.  But, like MacGowan, I suppose you have to pay for wanting to preserve an old culture against the pervasive involvement in the self-expedient fascination with technological development.

I still want to go back to school, to listen to scientists, to ponder big ideas with them like things Higgs Boson.  I'm probably not alone.

And yet, what does a day bring but simple things, like the wisdom to be free from the troubles over material possessions and unhealthy entanglements.  You must take good care of yourself first before helping others.

It is the artist's science to study the potential of human fruition, to study the spiritual capacity inherent within.  What would this look like?  Of course the general reaction could be dismissive, skeptical, cautionary in the wake of 'the master race' and 'the kool aid.'  Would the work of the spiritual itself be regarded as childish, out of place, immature, ineffectual, misguided, attentions better spent on matters practical and retirement accounts?  Would the advancements and insights associated with such speculative experiments be noticed, welcomed, shunned, take life only the glass case of a Brothers Karamazov or an Anna Karenina, in an Eliot poem, studied but not taken as a vital part of truly being alive?

Meanwhile, the artist tinkers, finds related work (say, in the deeply spiritual and informed element of Shane MacGowan's understanding of the larger issues that then make their ways into songs like Old Main Drag or Sunny Side of the Street) to provide a bit of a tailwind to his sketches.  He sees it exists in paintings, in nature, even in his earthly work as a barman (heretically enough, or simply laughable from certain perspectives.)  We aren't allowed anything dramatic and resounding like forty days out in the desert or a father's palace to leave in this mundane life under the rubric of modern science and as an economic entity who must learn the ins and outs of marketing.  Our feet are earth-bound.  Nor are we political rebels or revolutionaries, but neither then was anyone else.

Study...  it's an odd and interesting term, with rich potential.  About such things, I am skeptical myself, but those matters seem inherently worth speculating about somehow, as if though we no longer write Constitutions of new and better forms of government we could still understand our own nature a good deal better, finding not a threatened and aggressive animal intent on taking what he can, but a humble generous kind patient enlightened being, an inherent teacher of better ways with an energy within, as beautiful as any act of nature.  And so, back to our work as Da Vinci types, diagraming the reach of our arms and the spread of our legs along with painting enigmatic Mona Lisa and a whole range of things bearing upon nature.




It makes sense that to redeem and bring back into play a spiritual life that goes beyond rote belief in the way that he did, applying it to the grit of London life, Shane MacGowan would pay a price.  His was a unique focus somehow, bold and contrary and meaningful, not for sissies, a gift he possesses.   Criticize him for a lot of things, but not for his empathy and his heart.  Listening allows for a certain awakening to things deeper than normally talked about in conversations or even covered well by mass popular culture's artistic efforts, basic raw stuff considering the human condition.   MacGowan's work is a tribute to the fact that first one must ask questions, that curiously asking them allows him to find a satisfying answer.  There is a lot of living in MacGowan, maybe not enough self-protection.  As he himself has said, they thought they could beat the system (referring to the music business) when you can't beat the system.  His retreat, portrayed as his own personal hell in the new book by Pogues accordionist James Fearnley, somehow makes sense, to me anyway.   In order to write at all, one needs less the time eaten up by an attempted social life, more time doing healthy and self-rewarding things as time spent exercising and getting the work done.

William Blake was correct in his estimation of the necessity of a real spiritual life to vibrate at the necessary frequency to open up to the making of observations that will be art.  That is a brave thing.  And MacGowan is brave on many counts for his embrace of spiritual life and sensibility, as one risks fucking himself up, physically and professionally, risks being thought ill of (being a musician one way to not look like a complete asshole), risks thinking badly of himself for the life he has created for himself, must ask himself if it was worth the cost.  Well, that's life for you.

Murakami is right.  You need exercise, for energy, for discipline, for clarity of mind.  Helps you keep tethered to the peace of thinking your own thoughts.

Einstein called himself early in his career an 'official ink-pisser,' a civil servant by day, a bit of a drop out as far as landing a gig in the academy.  In his desk drawer, he kept his own "department of theoretical physics."  He was one of those people, an independent thinker, on the rare order of those who come along and change the way we think in the direction of accuracy and insight.  Interestingly enough, and not surprisingly, as a young fellow he played violin for his women friends and seems to have been a bit of a ladies man, to use an archaic term, hopefully without offense.  He had a certain energy about him.

And so it's not a bad call on the part of Marilyn Monroe to regard Abraham Lincoln as the sexiest man in American History (from the New York Times Civil War Timeline's piece of on the growth of Presidential whiskers.)   Takes one to know one.  We read, in the same piece, that Picasso kept pictures of Lincoln, regarding him as the height of American elegance, important to a Spaniard.  One abundant creative force recognizing another across history, challenges and occupations.  A great writer, a great thinker, an artist, really, and it shows.  Could it be that thinking deep thoughts, fleshing out beautiful theories, that writing immortal lines of balance and power and truth is, well, part and parcel of abundant hotness, tied to a certain observable sexual vitality.

Kerouac did his headstands (good for the chakras.)  JFK, the modern artist of statecraft, of charming and formidable intellect, of grace and power, of great clarity of public thought, was a bit of a life-long sex addict, it seems.  What can you do?  Hemingway was dumped by his nurse, and all that energy had to go somewhere, channeling back into Nick Adams adventures big and small, some of them quite frankly sexual.  Of course he tried to work it all out, his once happy relationship with Agnes Von Kurowsky, in A Farewell to Arms, to whatever extent he could, not that it necessarily did him all good.

The physicists are discovering that the force of gravity and that of the weak force operating on the atomic level are basically one and the same, just operating in different fields.  It is a bit of a poetic stretch to see that the form of big thinking, the kind we rightly get remembered for, and the form of little thinking, which healthily happens quite often and every day (and sometimes preoccupying) and much more privately, are of the same.

Well, duh.  Yoga began as an enhancement of the sexual.  Maybe writing and thinking broadly and independently, with as much originality as one cares to claim, are the same sort of happy chakra business.  And maybe that's why people write.


Now naturally people, with all this energy coursing through them, will find ways to let it out.  They will misbehave, even the most modest and pure of motive, even the socially adept, the energy's abundance leading them to alternative ways of well being.  They'll go out and sometimes act like fools and have more wine than is good for them as they are taken with the mood of liberation.  Less restrained, bawdiness will come out. And so the energy is put into love letters, poetry, and symphonies, which may be, practically speaking just as foolish and ineffectual and even counterproductive.  And this is, I suppose, why there is the forgiveness, why there is religion.  And of course, there is, after all, the great almost surprising utter cleanliness of sex, the healthiest thing for you, as 'dirty' as it may be.