Mountain Song Revisited

My friend Technobabe frequently comes with cogent comments to my infrequent posts here. Her comment here on Mountain Song:

I like this song. Wanting to put into words things that words cannot say is something I understand. And the part about the useless crutch, truly true. The only thing I would change is the last line, I would say sweetness sorrows bring instead of sorrows sweetness brings.

needs more than the simple thank you as it touches on the insights and visions which are the spring well of these song-poems.

Thank you very much, Techno-babe, for the suggestion - if the line stood alone, your suggestion would likely be the better choice.

However, the line should be seen in context with what comes before, "I want to climb a mountain...", a classical image, in fact, even a method for spiritual work. If there was any doubt, "where a lot of real angels fly" should make it clear. As we know from the popular imagination, angels "sing", that is play harps, praise God and all that sort of thing - so here, God's glory is the "sweetness" of which angels sing for joy with "silver wings" [you might think of a fluttering, tinkling sounds of magical silver bells].

It is an old idea that the angels really don't understand what human being really is all about - heck, this is Satan's problem in Milton's "Paradise Lost" and why he falls from heaven, it can't comprehend why magnificent being like Itself should bow down before soft worms, bags of dirty water the Elohim have brought forth in their creation. It's not surprising that the angels don't understand because they are not sexual beings and cannot grasp how it is that in the reality of things as they are, the physical and spiritual are inseparably intertwined. Therefor, human beings "sing with other wings", that is in love's embrace of the "sorrows [such] sweetness brings".

I don't know how to get closer to what is being said without stepping on it and squishing the life out of it. Let me put it this way, if we don't embrace life, then life is worthless, barren. On the other hand, if we embrace life, we stand there, arms full of rosebuds with the thorns sticking out. All we can do is demand an answer of Eternity - is there anything, was there any meaning to it all?

A pink happy spirit realm in heaven is not enough - it can't answer what all us poor boys and girls have gone through down here below! There must be meaning in this human existence in itself, in these "bloody truths". Job asked the question and the answer was in the whirlwind. Jesus, as historical Christ, lived the question unto the ultimate moment of utter despair and, in Christian terminology the answer is in the mystery of the Resurrection.

Mountain Song

[This song has been hanging out with me for a decade or more, but last night as I had trouble sleeping because of this sharp stabbing pain in my left foot, a new verse appeared, insisting it should be the first verse and and the first should be the last]

If I sang the truth, would you

listen politely.

Or, would you scream and shout

and throw the book at me?

The truth is more than lists of rules

old fools can recite

The truth is like the shining star

that brings day into the night.

I want to sing a song, but

the song cannot be sung

I want to ring a bell, but

the bell cannot be rung

I want to try to put into words

things words cannot say

When you want to do the impossible,

you have to find a way.

The wisdom of the ages will

always be untouched

until the cripple throws away

his useless wooden crutch

That cross I see you wearing is

not the cross you need

The cross you should be bearing is

the cross that makes you bleed

When bankers of illusion try

to modify your soul,

remember when you fled the dead

and wed your self to soul

Remember all those lonely nights

you cried yourself to sleep

Remember all the promises

and the vow you meant to keep!

I want to climb a mountain but

the mountain is so high,

that at the top is where a lot

of real angels fly.

Angels sing with their silver wings

of the joy sweetness brings

Human beings sing with other wings

of the sorrows sweetness brings

Bucky Ball Day

Google was so kind as to remind us all that it is Bucky Ball Day - in fact the 25th.

Buckyballs are one of the most beautiful things you'll never see with the naked eye.

Just like diamonds, a beautiful thing we can see with the naked eye, buckyballs are made of carbon - and the reason that they can be is that carbon is what it is.

That carbon is what it is is why there can be life.

In fact, combined with how the rest of the manifest universe unfolds from something much smaller than a pin-prick, the way carbon is means that life not only did and does but has to be.

And because of life, we see and know the beauty of the diamond and the buckyball - and pearls and sunsets and the love in a lover's eye - that is to say, come into conscious awareness.

Now, isn't that a wonder!

Love - Being - Aware

Happy Birthday, Mr. Fat Man

Looking at another lovely day here in the Happy Little Kingdom, I realize that I had a bit too much to eat this past birthday weekend - all of a sudden the scales tend to tip upwards. That reminds me, it's Fat Man's 65th birthday today.

Poor Fat Man, he must feel a bit left out since they always make a fuss about Little Boy's birthday...

By the way, didja know, the US attended (in the person of the ambassador to Japan) the memorial services at Hiroshima for the first time this Friday?

It's about time one might say, for US to recognize our paternity of the little bastard. That, and a necessary gesture if moves towards nuke disarmament are to have any credence whatsoever.

On the other hand, a nuke exchange is inevitable as long as military force continues to be an prime option in resolving conflicts of interest between nations and their peoples.

Finally, the important birthday which every one always forgets in favor of those of Little Boy and Fat Man, is their poor little sister, Ms. Trinity - that is when the countdown really started

Wake Up?

What happens when you wake up an old fart? Well, I asked myself the question - quietly, so as not to wake myself or anybody else up. You gotta be careful about waking people up! You get a bunch of these "up woke" people running around - you got no way of knowing what might happen. Why, we might even find ourselves in a worse fix than the one were in now!

Lay Down, My Weary Spirit

Well, there I was, wild eyed in the wilderness, and yet, at the same time, in my living room with two Moroni Missionaries sitting across from me on my sofa - they noticed my little octave guitar and suddenly I was playing it and singing a melody, well maybe more of a caterwauling.

Over the years [since 1973], it developed into the song you hear here - a series of rhyming couplets plus a chorus:

There's a glory in the morning 'cause the earth turns 'round
and a promise in the evening when the sun goes down!
Lay down, lay down, lay down my weary spirit, rest you now
No, don't weep - just sleep!

There's an anger in the ocean, such an awful roaring sound,
but these troubled, darkened waters - they shall lay down!
Lay down....

There's a power in the growing of a tree from its seed,
and a lonesome, helpless feeling when you see how life bleeds!
Lay down....

There's a sadness in our joy when we meet old friends,
and a sweetness in our sorrow when we part once again!
Lay down...

There's a glory in the morning, such a precious sight to see,
and a promise in the evening that looks like eternity!
Lay down....

Scribbles on a Train #2

[a thick tablet of paper with scribbles between the thin blue lines fell out of a box while I moving some stuff around - I recognized it as notes I wrote during the spring of 2005 while commuting to and from work. They will be posted off and on as I find time to type them up - Elmer Eggplant ]

Our texts state: God created Man in Gods' Image - male and female created them.

First of all, then, man is not Man alone, for man is also Woman - the two are one, that is: the human.

Similarly, God is not He, nor She, nor It, but all of these, separately and together, infinitely more and none of them.

As soon as the human comes to exist, in a sense, God ceases to exist - in the world, so to speak, it is the human who "creates" God in the human image.

As soon as the human is, the world is there. It is the human who, through human being, determines which aspects of the eternal which will be revealed in the temporal, that is, the world.

This is why I am forced to say [although it is not correct in the absolute sense] that God is not Other - in truth, God is not "up there" telling is what to do, God does not have a "Plan" to impose on us which we must follow, or else. We might say that God, so to speak, has a "portfolio" of plans.

In our common humanity, we determine which "plans" may unfold - by our greed or our compassion, by our love or our hate manifested in the world, we determine the "face" of God to be revealed.

Tickling the Dragon's Tail

Not long after my fourth birthday, in order to refine the ability to make weapons of mass death ever more effective, experiments were done to determine more exactly parameters for the critical mass of the metal of death, plutonium. There was this fellow in the laboratory who’s job was to slowly bring together two halves of a hemisphere of death metal - as they came closer, the increase in radiation was recorded as the setup approached critical mass.

There was a safety mechanism to separate the silvery-white pieces should they come too close. The fellow doing the experiment found this an impediment which prevented him from getting really close as he “tickled the dragon’s tail” - so he disabled the fail-safe device. One afternoon, as he was doing the experiment he had done so many times before, sweat dripped from his nose as the two pieces came closer - observers watched in tense silence. Suddenly, his hand slipped - the two halves came together and touched, a blue light filled the room.

Without a second thought he accepted the death sentence and separated the two pieces of death metal, saving the others in the room. After six weeks of increasingly hopeless agony, Lois Slotin died - his tragedy burned an image in my young pre-teen mind when I first read about it.

It seems to me the image is a symbol of how our common cultural insanity can be seen as a form of “Tickling the Dragon’s Tail” - listen to the night winds wail!

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Deep Water - Diamond Body

The images of the ocean and that of the river descending, that is the River Jordan, the road, that of the mountain and other - they are revolve around and reflect very similar insights into a deep spiritual understanding. If you cannot lose all, you cannot win anything - nothing of value and certainly not freedom.

When I sang this song this afternoon I found myself telling a story about a fellow who won himself a diamond body and ended up losing it in favor of freedom

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Scribbles on a Train #1

[a thick tablet of paper with scribbles between the thin blue lines fell out of a box while I moving some stuff around - I recognized it as notes I wrote during the spring of 2005 while commuting to and from work. They will be posted off and on as I find time to type them up - Elmer Eggplant ]

With the twentieth century behind us, the century we thought was the worst in terms of human misery caused by human interactions, not disease and natural disaster, with the click of an arbitrary calendar date, we hoped or assumed that a better day would dawn in the 21st century.

However, seeing the storm clouds gathering and knowing what has already been perpetrated in this first decade, it seems that the 21st century may very well prove to be a David to the 20th century's Saul.

How simple it would be be if one could believe that all our troubles were the work of rapacious shape-shifting lizards who have infiltrated and taken over control of our poor world.

Ah, but it is all too obvious that it is the work of all of us people and nothing and no one else - what we see is the sum total of what we are are and what we are choosing to become: humans being or rat-like lemmings dashing to the sea.