Chapel Tanka

It’s not true until

it’s on screen: veritas in

cathode ray: don’t say

“I’ll CU-IRL”–there’s

no more dancer, just dance.

Commodity and Self

Despite Plato’s admonitions, we’re not a people keen on self-examination. We’re much more interested in the self-as-commodity: selling our high-concept idealizations of who we think we are to others and becoming frustrated when those we deal with don’t live up to the high-concept idealizations of who they think they are we’ve bought. So we should no feel too bad about being objectified, as commodification is the apotheosis of objectification. We can be physically admired, after all, and still be loved, but we can’t be commodified without being objectified. This comes not just in the form of selling Doritos or Mercury Mariners or Michelob Light with sex but by selling whole lifestyles by association with these products, or, on the other side of the transaction (and with a more Marxian bent), selling selves as sets of skills.

Human interaction in the global economy, then, is primarily a monetary affair, governed not by actual relationships but by how we can afford to live, to whom we can sell our objectified selves, and what sort or lifestyle we’ve bought ourselves into.

The Undeniable Wrench of Zen

“Idealism is a hypothesis to account for nature by other principles than those of carpentry and chemistry”

–Ralph Waldo Emerson

My father knows how to hold a wrench. Or rather, it knows how to hold him—or rather, the wrench knows, through him how to act, it’s motion back and forth about the nut becomes an analogy of unscrewing. Until, by some zen magic, some studied non-magic, the nut is off and in his hand.

One of my father’s favorite books is Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, not so much because my father is a Buddhist of any but the most practical sort, but because he is a mechanic of the most enlightened sort.

In the background of his workshop, classical music plays; his shop stereo is always tuned to a local NPR affiliate with a heavily orchestral playlist. This juxtaposition is strange only to those who’ve never held a wrench for long, never felt its cool logic, never felt the warmth of the movement of a long-stuck bolt finally sliding free. Those who find this strange haven’t felt much or often the burning in the muscles of the forearm on what seems to be the thousandth micro-revolution of a hard-to-reach nut, never felt the muscles cramp and bind until a stasis is achieved in which not muscle nor wrench nor hand are felt as distinct and become the punctuated inevitability of a seedling sprouting a little every time out lighted consciousness allows a brief moment to see.

Illumination is the price we pay for the inability to witness larger superpositions. Things polarize for us constantly, either cold or hot, moving or still, particle or wave, created miracle or accident of the physical law.

This, too, fascinates my father. A good Mennonite boy who grew up with a literal Genesis, the thumbprint of God behind every cloud, he was also saddled with an engineer’s mental trap, capturing the thrum of the spheres and revealing it as the beating wings of a frightened gull.

He spends hours, still, reading about physics and faith, trying always to marry the two, straining, through one more act of study, to put the frequency of that bird’s wings back into the pantheon of metaphysical motions. But we all have our own skies populated by our own set of angels—some fundamental paradox the reconciliation of which drives us, the illogic of which tells its presence, despite our practical desire to see either/or, to bit out all by zeroes and ones, to record that the wind again today was from the south, and not from everywhere at once.

This is what time means to us: the inevitable trope towards what it is hard to say—the eternal reward of what may be nothing at all.

Note by Note

The usher said, “Your music fell down, so you might want to check your place.”

My music fell down. My Napster fell down. My iTunes, my collection of old and musty vinyl. What of those songs taken to heart, symphonies poked over in digital bitstream mapping, re-productions of the rhythms of those loved pop songs infused with meaning beyond their bearing for having been heard in a youthful pizza shop over a calzone after a breakup. We laugh:

at teenagers’ online diaries, the new boyfriends every two days, their names typed and hyped in scintillating electronic neon onscreen: Carlos, Tyler, Hunter, Logan.

But we’re no better.

We’re just more pensive, aware, perhaps, of the complexities of our own deep symbolism, of the effervescent connection to some higher art imparted by our pet names. But if I remember the girl’s name—and in this case how could I forget, being each others’ first time?—I recall just as vividly the taste of the sauce, rich and a bit more acidic than is the wont these days.

I remember the bite of the pepperoni.

You may call me unromantic, but Giorgio’s was a damn good calzone.

But as well, the inevitable perfume—Fendi was big that year—and the Stones singing “Angie” over the pizza joint’s speakers, a “classic” even then, and the light moving slowly on toward afternoon across the gaudy pink tile.

“Your music” is that realm of ink blotted into half notes and quarter notes, into treble and bass clef, imagined tones of rough timbre on bad guitars and failing amps in stinking rooms with peeling plaster stuck back together by gallons upon gallons of Navajo White.

S____ and I lived for a while in a tiny house, mostly square, previously rented by one Walter Mays. He was a composer and, while there, I had liked to think that music—his music—was somehow in those walls, infused into that moldering plaster.

It wasn’t, of course, but we did get his mail.

His mail was extraordinary. It boasted of artists’ retreats and symphonic symposia, workshops for composers and musicians. There is a long gestational period, apparently, before his music could be mine as well, and it can’t be born through plaster walls.

It came, one day, through my radio. I was driving an old Volvo 240 turbo down Douglas and the local public radio station was broadcasting a recording it had made at a local arts festival. And there was his music, Dr. Walter Mays’, blasting out in brass at 3,000 hertz, onto DAT, through a temporal tunnel from two weeks before, through the translator station to the big antenna, through the big antenna and across the airwaves, into my car’s antenna, through its tuner stage and amplifier, through a few feet of speaker wire, into a couple of electro-magnetic transducers and across a paper cone, and, at about 3,000 hertz, through the air in my car to my ears.

And even then it wasn’t mine.

For it was good, and it was new, but where was the girl and the light, the perfume, and where, oh where, was my calzone?

Music falls on us, sometimes, like a frost falls: by the time we can see it, the realization has already happened somewhere in the atmospheric chemistry we breathe in. The frost has fallen before the dawn, even, but the dawn is that day many years later, decades after the first time, when we awaken hearing Bach and begin, again, to cry.