POEM: ON THAT WINDY DAY

 

 

On That Windy Day

On that windy day in November

at dusk, when the power went out,

as it sometimes does

when storms come

to disturb the calm of trees,

gusts of rain patter the window

with such impatient drumming

I nearly answer their call.

Later in the darkening room

I light candles and sit by their glow

waiting, without guile, for the lights

to come back on.

 

Well, this must be a November poem, mustn't? Too much outside like the inside for my liking. Yes, storms come, winds blow, raindrops smack and splatter, and tree limbs fall across power lines. Darkness comes a little sooner. Big deal!  Why bother? One place or setting, one day or season or bit of weather is about as good as the next. Why is one moment special and the next isn't? Why focus on this particular slice of life? Why stop and ponder here?

I guess because when your internal clock, for a short while at least, stops its incessant ticking and the countdown is temporarily halted, it's befitting that some recording of the event should be taken, some acknowledgement of...what, exactly? When such moments come, as in a dream, or reading a book, or contemplating a work of art, if it takes you out of your normal frame of reference, well it must mean something, at the very least it does something, and that process or interaction should be looked at and understood, if possible.

I once had a dream, years ago, where I was walking across a barren, desert landscape, with vague machinery and mechanical contraptions scattered about, all silent and rusted, like a field of broken farm machinery. There were some buildings, but they were dark, empty ruins. Nothing moved around me, and as I walked, it was as if I were on a tiny moon or satellite. I could take in the span of my rusty world with just a few strides, traversing its length and breadth in no time at all. I can't recall how I felt  or what happened next, all I remember is standing on a world that was little more than a giant ball. [Thinking about it  now, I wonder if I hadn't, at the time, been reading Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince or seen the book cover illustration of the prince on his tiny world. Ed.]

Here's one thing about dreams: you never seem to feel bored in them. You can feel frightened or angry, sad, guilty, dutiful, helpless, a whole host of emotions and sensations, but bored somehow doesn't seem to be part of the dreamscape. You can wake up and think: "What a boring dream that was", stacking shoeboxes or whatever, but not so while your dreaming, where you might feel, instead,  tense and under pressure to stack a certain of number of them by noon hour, or whatever the dream's storyline happens to be. Why aren't we bored inside our dreams? Maybe it's because dreams are our everyday experiences laid bare, uncontrolled, the Id no longer dictating "should" and "aught", "not now" and dozens more societal conventions and norms. And they're certainly not simply spools of memory tapes played over and over. They have their own beginnings and endings, and their own 'takes' on who you are and what kind of world you live in. 

And those waking moments during the day, when you stop spinning all your bullshit for five minutes, and just  listen or look or feel are perhaps better thought of as waking dreams. Do we need to dream more? Or dream better? Well, that's my take on dreams for now. Dreams come and go as is their wont and it's nearly impossible to have them ready-made and shipped, same day delivery, direct to your door from Amazon, and that's a good thing....

 

Dreamland Bus Stop

Recently, I was watching the YouTube podcast, “Useful Idiots” with journalist Matt Taibbi and Katie Halper, where they interviewed Roger Walters, the legendary bass-player from the rock band, Pink Floyd, who is well known for his political activism. Near the end of the interview, Taibbi asked the musician about previous statements he had made concerning music and why he said the performative arts in general were not particularly effective vehicles to promote social or political change. Walters commented that music was most effective in bringing about changes in the individual’s view of the world and themselves. He said music and the arts in general can, for example, give people moments of clarity and feelings of empathy, joy in life, a reverence for the world, and so on. That was what music, at its best, can do—make changes in people’s perceptions—not marshal social forces or alter political agendas. Music, art, and literature affect change at the level of the individual. They act on the individual in various ways and at various times in their lives. What the arts can’t do is be used as some sort of societal soma that's intravenously fed en masse into the population's veins.

He explained his somewhat unexpected, even contrarian point of view (i.e. we expect most musicians to say: "Yes, music can change the world!"), with the example of how he was deeply moved by Cormac McCarthy’s 1991 novel, All the Pretty Horses. After reading it, he says he sent the author a poem, inspired by the book, which Waters recited from memory for Matt and Katie:

 

“There is a magic in some books

that sucks a man into spirits harder to touch,

that joins him to his times

so that a man will eke the reading out

and guard it like a canteen in a desert heat,

but sometimes needs must drink—

and the final drop falls sweet,

the last page turns. The end.”  

 

Waters says some books or pieces of music or art can, at different times and places, touch and reach inside us, expanding our understanding, help to develop our empathy with others, our sense of rapport and strengthen our connection with the natural world to better appreciate our place within it. He says we need to take hold of such experiences when they come to us and treasure them, that we need to allow them to become part of us and to let them grow as we grow. But whether we will embrace our new-found awareness and emotion, or not, and just how we might nurture them so that they become active in our lives (and ‘activate’ our lives), is up to us.

Cheers, Jake. 

HANGMAN: The Irate Corpse Edition