Deaf Beethoven, Listening to Timeless Music

Dog Poet Transmitting.......

May your noses always be cold and wet.

Foreign lands can be fun to visit, or they can be fraught with difficulties, borne of the unexpected and simple things lost in translation that can become complex difficulties. Brief excursions grant colorful insights into dreamscapes, like something from Manet or Renoir, especially if you happen to be in France (grin). They can also be reminiscent of Bosch, if things don't go well and you can't leave.

Yesterday I had so many things to do. These days are filled with industry and less time than needed to meet the requirements of the hours that press like mindless, mesmerized shoppers, grasping for new items to be stored, with the older objects already stored and waiting for the day that the collector gets collected. So... yesterday I paused a dozen times, here and there and thought about my life; all the turns and twists that led me finally to be sitting there and thinking about what had gone before. I thought about the decisions that it appeared I had made and the unforeseen events that made my decisions for me. How did I get here? Was it under my own power, or is that just a fantasy, constructed out of some idea of a personal will?

I thought about the undelivered promises and the otherwise occupied states of being. The rare moments in rare lives, like deaf Beethoven still hearing music. Is it the same music heard by those who can still hear? Must the sounds around us always overwhelm the sounds within? I thought of all the things I did not have and the uncertainty that attends my next leap into unformed space which, will all too quickly take those shapes and identities based upon the way I see and name them. Will it be easy and fluid, or will it be fraught with an entirely new series of tests and challenges?

Somewhere along the moments of this recurrent period of reflection, another presence entered into my mind and said, “Come with me”. I followed the voice through a series of images that continued for some period of time. I don't know how long. I was immersed in them.

I saw people suffering from terrible diseases and people in whom similar diseases were growing and emerging but they had no idea of what was coming and were still going about their lives, sometimes thoughtful, sometimes playful, loving their families or bemoaning the lack of one. I saw old people sitting in chairs in state homes and private facilities, waiting for death. Some of those places are dreadful. I visited prisons, where men and women lived out the heavy, heavy hours, like the monotonous drip from an ancient faucet. Fear, malice and anger fill the air like some separate weather system. They die and worse, in places like that. I saw mental institutions, where the tormented howled in their private hells. They screamed and waved their arms at things that no one else could see. I saw men and women reaching for bottles and canisters of pills and substances, trying to momentarily change, hide or transform their world but serving only to make it unmanageable.

I saw people losing their jobs, being forced from their homes and screaming in silent and not so silent anguish about their losses; finally sleeping in tents, campers and cars; by the sides of the road, alone or with their families. There were broken veterans from the Banker Wars and millions of Banker victims in various states of distress. I saw whole countries that were little more than graveyards with deformed children, horribly misshapen by Banker uranium. I saw fluid ranks of sightless souls, bound toward countless repetitions of suffering, born out of a hunger for the misunderstood.

I saw millions of animals trapped in cages, where they couldn't even move, where they pecked each other to death and were herded through chutes. They could smell the suffocating fumes of death, wafting in the air around them. Then, mercifully freed from their imprisoned consciousness, their lifeless forms were butchered and shrink-wrapped and shipped to their final port of call.

Suddenly I was once again on the road into Thiruvannamalai, where indigents and sadhus, walked and sat or slept on the sidewalk; waiting for something, in search of something. I could see my driver weeping because there would be no more jaunts to the Thangyam Hotel Bar and all the spontaneous meetings with whomever might appear; the long evenings in the apartment, hearing the stories about how any and all of us came to be in that place and moment in time. I saw people betrayed and dishonored and swallowed up in grief ...and the voice said to me, at various turns, “How bad do you have it, really”? I have always taken care of you. You have always landed on your feet and whatever temporary world I intended for you has always formed around you”.

Some days, I often feel like Lord Alfred Prufrock, though much different too. Having never grown up, I can scarcely be considered old, nor do I feel much different from when I was quite young, except for an acquired wariness; very newly acquired too.

I have dwelt in exile in foreign lands for fourteen years, never successfully integrating, I spent the years in a single room, for the most part, creating this, bypassing that and putting all the rest of it on hold. Traveling in foreign lands can be intoxicating and it can be enervating too. It can be both. One can never really be at home when they are not at home, wherever that is. For some, their major endeavor is to distract themselves from an awareness of that. I have traveled the world from this swiveling office chair; inner worlds, outer worlds, worlds of promise with solid footing and worlds like mangrove swamps, where tigers prowl.

The world is in turmoil. Like the birth of any creature into this realm, it comes with shock and pain. Make no mistake, though one world is dying, another is being born. Some have no inclination to transit into this new world. They are too enamored of the old world. Their appetites have not been satiated. How much wood can you feed a fire before it tells you it has had enough? There is no end to desire, or to the errors made in the pursuit of that which, having been miss-perceived, can never be acquired in its true form; not until it is truly seen.

You cannot clearly see yourself in a smoking mirror. You cannot truly see another when your eyes are fogged with desire. I don't think it's an accident that desire and aspire happen to rhyme, even though they are quite unlike one another, there is an association that can be seen by a penetrating mind that knows how ropes and carpets are made.

Now come the days of Banker Folly. Now comes the redlining of tension, between the predators and the prey. Now comes Push for it's engagement with Shove. The rock and the hard place are set to embrace and many shall finally get that threesome they were fantasizing about. As is generally the case, it won't be as they imagined it would be.

The possibilities are many. What is meant to happen, what might happen and what will happen; these are all in flux and they are all equally as personal as they are general. Only a fool does not see the potential for conflagration and planetary wide distress. The Bankers are like the monkeys with their hands trapped in the vase, grasping the avocado or mango that they are terminally reluctant to release. This madness will cost them their lives but it will also cost them far more than that. Oh, that is something no longer under consideration. They gave that up a long time ago.

Though we are soon to see the things we have not wanted to see, we are also going to see things that far too many of us never considered the existence of. Yes, they have their collective versions of the invisible, ineffable; an old white man with a beard, a cartoon Madonna in blue, whose dress is the water of oceans, composed of so many thousands of years of falling tears. They've dined on scriptures that tell them who their friends and enemies are. They've learned that natural things are evil and now they are learning that the unnatural is the contemporary preference, of the silent and faceless unknown. For some reason it is not difficult at all for the blind and deluded to hold conflicting visions, side by side. One of them is the hope for some promised benevolence and the other is the usual surrenders to that which makes the first impossible, or maybe not. We'll have to see, won't we?

The dominoes are falling, along with the basketballs and bombs. The stupefied public looks directly into their doom and sees nothing. Something else has been woven there. It looks colorful and alluring, much like a jungle fresh from rain, with the sunlight reflecting off of the water on the leaves. It looks beautiful and beckoning but... like any jungle there are all kinds of life forms resident therein. Cities are also called jungles, urban jungles and they contain similar life forms, going about in camouflage. Cities are wholly dependent on objects and energies that come from somewhere else. One can easily imagine what happens when the transports stop.

A few of us destroyed the system for personal gain and the majority of the rest of us played along in the hopes of personal gain. Spend too much time thinking about consequences and personal responsibility and you'll lose your place in line, or miss that window of opportunity for smash and grab, or... “Please, yes, thank you”, I don't want to forget that some of us still have manners, even if, by this time, we're just going through the motions, just like we do in our workplaces, our churches, our bedrooms and our lives; a perfunctory purgatory. In the end it will be as real as you made it, depending on how real that was in the first place. We get a wide margin of error, up to the point where it can be assumed, we should have learned something by that point. “Step right up! Step right up”!


End Transmission.......

Visible sings: ♫ Every Fairytale ♫
'Every Fairytale' is track no. 4 of 10 on Visible's 2006 album 'Songwriter'
Lyrics (pops up)



There will be a radio show Sunday night.