Above the City

I am looking at an image from the Looney Tunes catalog that has wrangled me out of reality and into a dream.  This is being facilitated by listening to something on Apple Music called “Ambient Chill” through ear buds.  Follow me if you can.

I will float here for just a bit.  There is no fear, no vertigo, only a pregnant-now that swells with the sound of wind and rain.  Round dots of color are blooming on the street below as pedestrians open their umbrellas.  

They scurry along not knowing that I am watching them as God must from up above.  “Hello!  I love you!”  There is a strong smell of ozone and water on hot concrete all around, but then the whiff of a flower wafts through on a breeze.

How long will I stay in this state?  As long as I can.  As long as the image stays clear in my mind and the flow of formless music continues through my thoughts.  I believe the cottage on the roof of the building is mine.  I gladly claim it.

I descend to its door and stand on the flagstone path.  The smells now are of wet wooden shingles and a mild moldiness.  My heart expands and contracts in my chest, my body a bellows of melancholy memories.  “Mom?  Are you home?”

It is empty but there is a kettle steaming on a wood burning stove.  I find a cup in a cupboard and blow out the dust.  Further foraging reveals dried tea leaves in a tin that I dump into the kettle and allow it to steep while I explore the space.

A small cast iron bed sits against the wall under two windows with a green wool blanket tucked in and finished out with a white sheet folded over its lip.  A threadbare rug covers a good bit of the plank floor.  The tea is ready and I pour myself a cup.

Outside the cottage there is a side table and chair underneath a large umbrella.  I sit in its shade with my tea and look to the horizon from my high perch.  A bird lights on the edge of a window box full of flowers and fixes me with its gaze.

I sense the bird is a conduit of sorts and I open myself to communicate to and through it.  I feel myself surrendering to a deep flow of affection that is timeless and impossibly light.  As the bird launches into flight I follow it into the yielding air.

And land on this padded seat in a corner of the Physician’s Dining Room, my fingers tapping out these words as the dream recedes and others nearby talk boisterously about sports and politics.  It is a place of respite, but only in my mind.  

***

ABID - Incantation of the Ego

 

Ancient Beast of Impossible Derivation

we call to your bones and lost sinews

to reassemble into woeful vengeance. 

Strike down our enemies but not be-

fore sowing terror and painful discord.

We have suffered enough in dishonor.

Our humiliation has reached its nadir.

The time for mercy has passed us by.

Empty mouths now cry out for blood.

ABID, we bid you to undo what is done.

***

The Benefits of Writing

 

I’d like to put in a plug for writing.  It has been a lifesaver for me through some pretty dark times, especially in the past few years of this pandemic.  It’s been a way to connect with others in a world where isolation can be crushing.  In the past decade it has even been a dialogue through time and space between me and my younger self who exists only in memories but influences so much of what I say and do in the here and now.

Maybe the form of writing at hand is a poem because they are short and “easy”.  I didn’t say “good”, just easy in the sense they can be written down quickly and concisely.  I leave iambic pentameter and the outpouring of cantos to other more skilled practitioners.  And rhyming is fun, but I do not use it very often.  I mostly settle for micro-bits of emotion and glimmers of insight that pop out from time to time, like when heat transforms a kernel of corn into popcorn.  If I can capture these burst kernels on paper the benefits are more filling and longer lasting. 

Memories of younger years generate a fair amount of what I’ve written, but the other major source is photographs I’ve taken.  I highly recommend this strategy for generating words because for me it has inspired the lion’s share of what I have written in the past decade and been a well of ideas to draw from.  It is typically something peculiar that catches my eye and suggests a story of some kind, like a Rorschach test. 

I’ve also benefited from books that give advice and/or ideas for writing prompts.  These include “Writing Down the Bones” by Natalie Goldberg, “On Writing” by Stephen King, and “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron among others.  I used these mostly in my early to mid-40’s when I was trying to get started writing before transitioning to using childhood memories and photographs as the major sources for inspiration and writing ideas.  And speaking of childhood, my kids have done their fair share of heavy lifting in regards to being my muses.

Most of the writing advice I’ve come across emphasizes the importance of reading and reading a lot.  This is especially true of Stephen King who follows his own advice and has written book reviews for books that I’ve ended up reading due to his enthusiasms.  I have to say I don’t read a lot nowadays but when I was a kid I read all the time to escape the mundaneness of small town life.  I had a penchant for Fantasy with Science Fiction as a close second (and then Roger Zelazny blew my mind by mixing the two).

Most recently I’ve gotten on a Kurt Vonnegut kick and I’m watching the documentary “Unstuck in Time” on Hulu.  I’m also reading “PITY THE READER - on writing with style” by Suzanne McConnell who uses KV as her touchstone for writing and writing advice.  I’ve learned a lot from his brevity of style that he attributes to his early writing years when he was doing a lot of journalistic work which requires one to get to the point quickly and distill things down to their essence as much as possible.  His literary journal “So It Goes” has become a home for some of my poems and photographs and something I look forward to submitting to every year.

All that to say, whatever your motivation or life experiences, writing may very well be the “easiest” and most accessible way of engaging in a therapeutic process.  I highly recommend it.

***

The Power of Thin Mints

 

There is something undeniably powerful about a Girl Scout cookie thin mint.  Today I saw a nurse’s assistant come into the 6th floor work area with an armful of those lovely green boxes and I made comment about how much I love them.  She offered to sell me a box from her limited supply but when I told her I had no way to pay her she said I could pay for it when I see her next. 

That’s when the Nurse Manager swept in and bought a box for me despite my protestations.  It was an act of kindness that I wasn’t sure I deserved and it made me a bit verklempt.  It  became clear to me in that moment that I would be remiss if I did not share this windfall with others in this place that has been so good to me over the years.

I quickly took on the role of a thin mint street dealer by hiding the box in my inside jacket pocket and sidling up to people with a whisper, “Hey, you wanna thin mint?” and giving them only the slightest glimpse of the green box.  The smiles were worth a lifetime supply of thin mints and by the time I was headed out the door for the day I’d eaten about four and given the rest away.

To be honest, I don’t know what came over me when I was handed that box of cookies.  My inclination was to hurry back to my office and eat them in the dark like Gollum on his island in the cave with his “Precious”.  But there are few things more precious to me than my coworkers at Grant Medical Center.

***

The Beauty of Us

In the search for grand vistas 

or man-made wonders

let’s not forget the beauty of us.

Even if we wander through galleries of

priceless paintings and stunning sculptures

let’s not forget the beauty of us.

You know, there are two of us 

who made two more, doubling the love

that is the beauty of us.

***

Jesus Needs His Sandwich

 

Jesus needs His sandwich 

and I nearly forgot it in my haste

to leave the hospital today.

I got as far as the parking garage, 

my driver’s side door partially open,

when it hit me, “Jesus needs…”

So I sprinted back to the hospital

and snatched up a ham with 

muenster and a bottle of water.

Sure enough, he was standing 

in his typical spot at the bottom 

of the exit ramp with his sign.

He greeted me with a crooked 

smile and a pensive wave but 

I knew it was Him standing there.

The beard and longish hair was

a dead give away, frequenting 

the highways and the byways

as I’d read in the Good Book.

I didn’t want to be caught 

empty handed when I met Him.

So Jesus got his sandwich today

and He said “God bless you”.

Score!  What a lucky man I am!

***

What Kurt has to Say

 

Is there a more clear-sighted observer of our modern American experience than Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.?  That is a rhetorical question.

I couldn’t tolerate his stories when I was younger because I was trapped in the warm delusional embrace of the insulated American Midwest.  When it came to our historical and national consciousness it was all a Ra Ra self-congratulatory affair with flags flapping from poles and porches throughout my town.   It didn’t help that the Soviet Union was such a monstrous system as a point of comparison on the other side of the world.  We were pretty darn good in that light, right?  But we were human beings just like everyone else on the planet with similar foibles and outright repugnant behaviors mixed in with moments of selflessness and virtue.  

Our black and white way of seeing things outwardly had a tendency to turn inwardly creating a bind.  If we personally were either black or white, who can tolerate thinking of themselves as black?  So that left being white and therefore in a state of self-delusion and denial as a way to square that circle.  I’ll leave the implications for racism to your imagination as just one aspect of that phenomenon.

And KVJ ruthlessly destroyed all of this in his short stories and novels in the most humorous of ways.  He was honest enough about his approach to quote a British critic “who said that I put bitter coatings on sugar pills, and I consider that fair”.  His witnessing of the utter destruction and decimation of Dresden by the Allied Powers was the purifying event that opened his eyes, traumatic as it was, like a huge slap in the face.  Wake up!  

I was probably in my thirties before I had an “ear to hear” what KVJ was telling me.  It took at least a decade post-high school with stints in the Army, living overseas, medical school, and changing my childhood religion to open my eyes to what he had to show me.  Suffering was a key teacher in that regard.  I had to get past myself and the need for self-justification.  

And now I must circle back to the idea of "love of country".  I love my friends, family, and community as concrete points of interaction.  This is my “USA”.  What I don’t love so much are the abstractions created by the powers that be to manipulate me for their own purposes.  

And Kurt, God bless him, asserted in Breakfast of Champions that “at the core of each person who reads this book is a band of unwavering light.”  I believe it is a light that dispels the darkness of hatred and ignorance if we let it.

***

Somewhere near Whitehall

 

Somewhere near Whitehall

I saw an empty can crushed

by the side of the road next to

car-bought carrion for crows.

And a colorful sign welcoming

a carcass of a man dead to

a world in which he does not

feel he has a place to pause.

But a cross towers above it all

looking like a telephone poll

signaling the way from death to life 

somewhere near Whitehall.

***

Living with War

 

I saw the cover of Neil Young’s 

“Living with War” on a FB post

yesterday.  The letters were 

stenciled black on a paper sack.

I bought my copy at the BX on

COB Speicher in 2006 just out-

side of Tikrit, Iraq where I was

deployed as a medical officer.

I was a reluctant participant in

an unjustified war seemingly

created out of whole cloth by

the Vice President of the USA.

When I returned from the war

my two year old son took a

liking to the music that this

strange man had brought.

He would dance defiantly

to its driving beats, feeling it

as a child is prone to do in the

immediacy of their experience.

I was living with war but dying

to see my son too long

separated by the artifice of

one man’s maladjusted ego.

***

God’s Garden

 

My four year old daughter asked

if I would listen to her heart and 

so I flattened my large ear to 

her chest and listened to it beat.

She then asked if she could hear mine 

and placed her small ear on my chest.

She observed it was “slow” and then 

shared something that shook me,

“Maybe God is digging up his yard to plant a garden.”

It was as if Keats himself had 

materialized in her mini-mind

and gave a little push to create 

something bordering on pure poetry.

***

Imagination vs Reality

Imagination for a child

is his intuitive grasp

that what he sees

and what he is told he sees

is not all that there is

and in this sense

what is considered "real"

may actually be a distraction

from what is essential.

***

STATION ELEVEN Hits Home

 

I will sorely miss seeing STATION ELEVEN for the first time.  

After watching 9 of the 10 episodes alone I hooked my son into watching it with me and re-watched all of them with the same degree of joy and wonder as the first time.  The finale came and went last week but I refused to watch it or visit the Facebook fan page in order to experience it in its fullness with him.  I was surprised more than once when he picked up on some early clues and made connections that had taken significantly longer to register for me.  And this series is thoroughly interconnected like a beautiful tapestry weaving together the lives of its characters over the expanse of 10 episodes created with a mosaic of flashbacks and cathartic moments.

I was astounded to find there were some specific touching points in what was unfolding in regards to things that have happened in my own life.  The best example of this is when Clark is talking with Arthur about Arthur’s attempt to regain relevance and/or legitimacy as an actor by taking on the role of King Lear in a Shakespeare production.  Arthur is a movie star whose fame stems from superficial action films and it is his face on the poster that is a draw for people to watch Shakespeare who might not otherwise do so.  It seems to be a win-win for Arthur and the theater he is performing for but then he dies on stage on opening night and the story is set in motion.

The relevance to me has to do with the time I saw the movie version of Hamlet in early 1991 starring Mel Gibson.  It was ostensibly the same scenario as Arthur’s attempt at Shakespeare, ie, a famous Hollywood actor attempting some “serious” acting.  I was in the midst of Basic Training at an infantry training center in Georgia after impulsively dropping out of college at the start of the first Gulf War.  Over a period of several months I sustained daily attacks on my humanity meant to mold me into a compliant soldier.  There did not appear to be any respite from this dehumanizing process due to our near total isolation from the wider world or access to personal items that might remind us of who we once were.  I always describe that time as the days feeling like weeks, the weeks like months, and the months like years.

At one of my lowest points we marched past the Post movie theater and I saw Mel Gibson’s “Hamlet” was being shown.  It struck me that I needed to see this movie, like needing a sip of water while lost in the desert.  I found a way to sneak out from the barracks and slip into that theater where there were only one or two other people present.  As I watched Hamlet unfold in front of my eyes the miserable existence of Basic Training dissolved from my consciousness like waking up from a bad dream.  I was transfixed by what was happening on that screen.  Every emotion was felt at peak intensity to the point at times of tears streaming down my cheeks.  I was so caught up in the moment I lost track of time.  

When I did glance down at my watch I was stunned to see that it was 5 minutes until lights out and head count.  I leapt from my seat, sped walked up the aisle, and then broke into a dead run through the parking lot, through the darkness of two grassy fields, and onto the concrete pad at the back of my barracks complex where I transitioned again to speed walking to not look too suspicious if spied by a Drill Sergeant.  I took the stairs two at a time to the second floor and lit in my barracks bay like a bird returning to its cage.  I immediately laid down in bed and pulled the covers over my BDU’s and boots trying to pant as quietly as possible.  The Drill Sergeant came through the door right on cue.

I can’t help but make the connection that in Station Eleven this was the experience of the isolated survivors in the airport when the Traveling Symphony arrived and put on their production of Hamlet.  When I told my son the story of younger me sneaking out and almost not making it back for headcount he said I was “savage” but for me at the time it was about survival or, better yet, reaching past just surviving.  “Survival is insufficient” is the motto of the Traveling Symphony in Station Eleven.  I don’t think I truly understood the power of art to humanize us and reveal our interconnectedness prior to that experience as a young man.

***

Lucky Ones

 

Snow falls from unfathomable heights

filling the sky with white points of light

floating and flitting at the wind’s whim.

Here in the sad city it is something to see,

nature’s invasion of stone and steel,

we lucky ones watching from windows.

***

Jim Forest, Memory Eternal

 

I was heart broken to learn last night that Jim Forest has passed away.  Like my recent post about the passing of Dr. Sheila Hafter Gray I considered Jim a friend and mentor.  Our correspondence began prior to my time in Iraq in 2006 but picked up in earnest after my deployment there and continued with few interruptions up until just this past year.  

He encouraged my writing and photography in its infancy, even buying me a professional account on flickr.com when Elias was first born and I was only able to post a few photos a month on my limited account.  It opened up a wider world of creativity and inquiry that set the mold for me in using these outlets to cope with the stress and struggles of life, to find hope and meaning.

We shared a love of photography but it was his writing life that sung most sweetly.  Like Forest Gump he was involved in some form or manner with many of the people and events that helped shape our modern era, but on the positive side of things.  He was close friends with many of the spiritual giants of the 20^th century to include Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, and Thich Nhat Hanh.  He wrote biographies for each of them and more than one in some cases, but I was most influenced by his spiritual writings to include “Praying with Icons” and “Loving Your Enemies”.  

He founded the Orthodox Peace Fellowship whose periodical and active online community was a refuge for me during my time in the Army.  I was conflicted in my life choices at the time and Jim was a source of encouragement and love without judgment.  When he was planning to come to the US (from the Netherlands) for a speaking tour during a politically fraught time I suggested we spirit him from house to house and region to region in the “Forest Underground”, tongue firmly in cheek.  He loved that sentiment and the playful idea I floated of creating t-shirts from a doodle I made for the “occasion”.  

And thank the good Lord he was able to recently publish a memoir for us to share in his adventures over the  course of his 80 years here, “Writing Straight with Crooked Lines”.  May his memory be eternal.

The Search

 

NF is a rapper that has things to say.  His nom-de-rap is simply his initials which speaks to a lack of pretense.  Hello Nathan Feuerstein, aka Nate, aka NF.

Elias and I first heard his music while playing basketball at the outside courts of our local middle school in the summer of 2019.  It was “The Search” blasting out of court side speakers.  There were no cuss words and the lyrics were raw and real like they were coming from someone who was searching for some deeper meaning to life.  It was like the antithesis of so-called Gangsta Rap.

Then later that summer as Elias became more and more enamored with him I found out NF was going to be in Columbus at an outdoor venue (pre-pandemic by about 6 months).  It was perfect timing and I bought tickets for us which included having his latest CD mailed to me included in the cost.  Anytime Elias was in the car we would pop it in to the player… "Hey, Nate, how's life?  I don't know, it's alright.  I've been dealin' with some things like every human being and really didn't sleep much last night.”   

We went at least a few hours early to the concert and stood in a line that ended up snaking around a couple of city blocks behind us.  It gave us some time to talk as well as observe humanity in all of its sincerity and silliness around us.  We were standing near a twenty-something red-headed guy with a red beard who was obviously full of himself and going on to others about how people thought he looked like the MMA fighter Connor McGregor.  And then a young struggling artist-type came by walking up and down the line handing out little business cards with a web link to his music trying to get his own rap career kickstarted.  I even had time to snap a photo of the ghostly outline of leaves on the sidewalk that I later submitted for a publication whose theme that issue was about our abuse of the environment (rejected).  

Another interesting phenomenon I watched unfold was the arrival of a man in a yellow reflective vest who had developed a scam of sorts.  He was standing at the entrance of a public parking lot that was nearest the venue and stopping cars that pulled up looking for parking.  He had a wad of cash and was telling people it was five dollars to park there.  Most gladly paid b/c it was so close to the concert, but a few were wise to him and simply drove past him and into the lot.  He made a good amount of money the two hours we stood there and when the concert doors opened he simply walked away with his tidy sum of mendacious earnings.  Not that I begrudged him any of it.

The opening act was “Kyd the Band” which was a young guy sitting at keyboards singing earnest songs that had vaguely Christian themes trying hard to be emotionally edgy.  They weren’t bad, but the crowd was uninterested.  Black balloons (an NF trademark of sorts) suddenly began appearing from somewhere to be bounced around and provide distraction from what was happening on stage.  I took notice when a few songs in the singer picked up a bass guitar and I braced myself for either some wicked slap bass action or melodic jazz stylings a la Jaco.  I was disappointed when neither happened.  He simply used it for repetitive plucking to go along with some pre-recorded tracks he sang over top of.  Thank goodness for the balloons.

When Kyd’s equipment was mercifully taken off the stage by the roadies the crowd began to quiver with excitement.  White translucent sheeting was draped down covering the front of the stage and lights began pulsing from the inside.  The musical intro from “The Search” started things off and the crowd roared in a quick crescendo of sound to acknowledge their love for NF who was soon to appear in disembodied voice.  When the beat drop hit a few minutes in the sheeting fell to the ground revealing NF on stage and emotional pandemonium ensued as everyone began jumping in sync and rapping along with him.

Elias and I were about 30 feet from where NF stood on stage and in the thick of the crowd.  As far as I could tell I was the oldest person in that lower section of the venue nearest the stage by a long shot.  Elias glanced over at me with a beaming smile like “Can you believe this Dad?!” and I felt my own heart light up with joy.

I am thankful for what NF has meant to my son.  He shows that acknowledging your own struggles and the suffering that comes from that is OK and is the starting point for healing.  Just last night we watched a Youtube reaction video from a man who was listening to “Nate” off of that album.  It is a song about NF talking to his six year old self and at some point he tells his younger self “Even good people are great at making bad decisions.”  His raps are full of these little nuggets of insight.  NF has let it be known in his lyrics and interviews that he struggles with depression and anxiety for which he sees a therapist.  What the Youtube reactor so astutely pointed out was that it is like NF has taken the therapist’s notes from their sessions and turned them into raps.  It immediately struck me that this is an excellent way of understanding NF’s songs and what he explores in them.

For example, in the title song he raps “Last year I had a breakdown, thoughts tellin' me I'm lost gettin' too loud, had to see a therapist then I found out, somethin' funny's goin' on up in my house” as he gestures at his head with wiggling fingers.  He has a kind of dark humor that he creatively intersperses through his songs that forces you to smile even when he’s talking about something really heavy.  He lacks the rapping skill of Eminem (who he has been compared to) but what he has to say is much more impactful when it comes to learning what it means to be a human being.  And for that I am grateful.

Dr. Gray has Passed Away

 

A colleague from Washington DC informed me last night that my friend and mentor Dr. Sheila Hafter Gray passed away on Tuesday.

She was my mentor/preceptor/supervisor during the four years I spent as a psychiatry resident at Walter Reed in DC from 2002 to 2006.  We considered her our own personal Yoda due to her age, diminutive size, and piercing intellect.  She was a Harvard grad years before I was even born and an OG analyst who also embraced the biomedical side of psychiatry and had her hand in developing the field through research and teaching.

She was a faithful attendee of our Grand Rounds and regularly participated in the question and answer portion by slowly raising her hand with index finger pointed skyward.  Her voice was quiet and a bit shaky which made it difficult to hear her so a microphone would be quickly placed in her hands despite her mild protestations that she did not need it.  WE needed it.  We wanted to hear what she was going to say because it was sometimes funny, oftentimes profound, and always on point, drawn from her vast experience and study.

Dr. Gray was who I sought out to be my supervisor when doing longterm therapy with patients and when I needed a faculty sponsor for my research project that I would ostensibly use for my senior Grand Rounds presentation.  All of the information and data needed for that presentation did not come together in time for that purpose but she helped guide it to publication when it was eventually finished.  In the meantime she provided feedback for a back up presentation I entitled “Combat Stress Control: Past, Present, and Future” that I pulled together as a precursor to my own deployment to a Combat Stress Control unit in Iraq that faced me upon graduation in just a few short months.

And it was during that deployment to Iraq post-graduation where her mentorship as well as friendship was most appreciated.  I found myself in a situation where my commander was forcing me to be involved in a situation that I found morally suspect.  I felt powerless and complicit with seemingly no support which brought out strange feelings of rage and despair in me.  When it was all said and done I thought of Dr. Gray and I sent her an email laying out the situation.  She immediately responded with her wisdom and insight to help me navigate those feelings in order to find some healthy way forward.

A few years later she was putting together a panel for the American Psychiatric Association’s annual conference being held in Washington, DC that year and invited me to join it as a co-presenter.  It included her and the Army’s top research psychiatrist proposing the possibility of adding a military-specific diagnosis to the DSM.  I was tasked to provide the perspective of the boots-on-the-ground soldier-psychiatrist as it were.  We had lunch as a group after the presentation which led to a kind of tradition of finding each other at subsequent annual conferences to have lunch and catch up.

Several years later I finally found a way to process that experience in Iraq by writing a poem about it, "Hiding from the War".  I’d tried to just write it out as a story a time or two over the years, but what I wanted to convey was getting lost and it was put aside.  When the poem was finished Dr. Gray was the first person I shared it with and I subsequently submitted it to be published in the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library literary journal “So It Goes”.

After that I would hear about Dr. Gray from time to time through Doximity notifications that she had been cited in someone’s research paper.  I did not go to the APA conference in early 2020 due to the pandemic but I thought there would be other opportunities to see her there and meet up for lunch.  She seemed quite elderly even back in 2002 and over the years I fell under the delusion that she was going to live forever.  May her memory be eternal.

***

Red Light Green Light

 

It’s on some of the on-ramps here in Columbus, Ohio.  They are stop and go lights on the top of a pole that alternate red and green to control the flow of traffic onto the highway.

My mind is prone to metaphors and switches to the flow of humans into this world coming in at a steady but staggered pace: red light, green light, red light, green light.

I’d been on the highway for quite some time before my son got his green light and then several years later my daughter got hers.  They are lights in their own right, impossibly shiny.     

And now I’m thinking more about off-ramps, especially with the radio informing me this morning we are having over a thousand deaths a day from this pandemic.

I personally know several who have been forced off the highway at this particular off-ramp and I am sure I will learn of several more before it is all said and done.  

Drive safely and care for your neighbor.

***

No Words

 

Sometimes there are just no words.

You hear the keys clicking.

Letters appear on the screen.

But they are empty promises to understanding.  

They don’t mean what you think they mean.  

The things most necessary to say are swallowed.

Yet the words keep coming to wrestle 

meaning from what seems meaningless.  

***

Get Back

I have to say I’ve been a bit taken aback by the new Beatles documentary “Get Back”. It’s such an intimate look that conveys the feeling of being in the room with the boys joking around and making music together. It covers a few week’s period that they are tasked to come up with enough music to stage a concert and make a live album.

The first few days are painful as the task seems so daunting and their anxieties bubble up in various ways to include George Harrison actually leaving town for a few days with no guarantees he’ll be back. They get a bit short with each other under the pressure, yet music starts to trickle out.

There’s Paul strumming out a rhythm on his bass that sounds like he’s playing a guitar and with some slight of hand the ear suddenly picks up in his mumbles the beginnings of the song “Get Back”. It’s like when you’re a kid at a carnival and the guy walks up to you and pulls a gold coin from behind your ear and you are like “where did that come from?!” At first George and Ringo seem uninterested in Paul’s noodling but as they begin to pick up on what he’s doing with it and the refrain pops into existence they are bobbing their heads and singing along, “get back, get back…”

And Yoko, God bless her misunderstood soul, is quiet and unobtrusive throughout until the moment she is allowed to have some fun with the boys in a manic impromptu jam, smiles all around. She exchanges pleasantries with Linda McCartney and stays out of the way. Where is her meddling? Where is her command of John? It’s all missing in what has become standard Beatles lore; that she broke them up; that she was insufferable.

And speaking of John, he is so much more passive than I thought he’d be. Sure he loosens up as the sessions move on to more productive days and he is a constant jokester, but he is not as overbearing and potentially caustic as I supposed he would be, especially when it comes to forging the new songs with Paul. He is almost demure.   I subsequently learned he was using opiates at the time which could explain this phenomenon in part.

And Anya is watching much of it with me. She once mistook John for me in the video for "Watching the Wheels" when she was about 3 years old. Now that she is 10 she points out that I really did look like John when I was in my 20’s, but adds that his being goofy and jigging around in the documentary shows that I ACT like him as well. It was a surreal moment for us both because it was undeniable. I just wish I had his musical genius as well.

I have not seen the 3rd installment, but another magical moment comes in the 2nd part when their old friend Billy Preston shows up and they rope him into sticking around to play the electric piano so John can be free to go back to guitar and sing. They start grooving with “Don’t Let Me Down” and when Billy slides in with some soulful piano licks Paul’s face pops up from his bass to give Billy a look of surprise and wonder. He realizes in that moment that Billy’s playing just made the song ten times better! Later in conversation with Paul, John is so impressed he wants to make Billy the fifth Beatle and not just a paid session musician.

Another surprising moment is when John is singing a song fragment he has come up with that is listed as “Road to Marrakesh/Child of Nature” in the subtitles, but it is the exact tune of his later song “Jealous Guy” that shows up on a solo album after he has left the Beatles. I loved watching them hash and rehash music in this way as a creative outpouring that later finds a final form that we recognize.

The whole process played out in this documentary reminds me of the process I go through when writing stories or poems where at the git-go the ideas are poorly formed and the page is too white and too empty of words. There is the temptation to give up or become irritable with the process, but if you just continue to plow through and accumulate some things a flow starts to develop and drudgery turns into delight as inspiration strikes in surprising ways. It is a testament to the creativity of the human spirit.



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Flying Saucer over 315

An honest-to-goodness flying saucer appeared in the sky on my morning commute today, I kid you not.  It was a glorious glowing disk of mysterious intent that both fascinated and terrified at the same time.  A circle of lights were rotating underneath it making a pulsing noise that could be felt if not heard.  It reminded me of a baby’s heart beat when using a doppler, but at about 20 beats per minute instead of 120.

And it chose an amazing morning to show up!  The rising sun was yet to be seen but the clouds were heralding its arrival in grand fashion with yellows, oranges, and pinks at the horizon transitioning into blues and deep purples further up in the sky.  I felt like it knew it looked fabulous in this context and just hovered in a kind of solipsistic splendor.  Look at me!  I do what I please!  Gawk in awe, simple earthlings!

But then it must have gotten bored with so much suspended gravitas and no plans to use the death ray or tractor beam to suck up some unlucky motorist.  I say this because the lights began spinning faster and it suddenly shot vertical out of sight.  By this time I’d slowed to a stop because of the car pile up on the highway that the spectacle had triggered.  Maybe they felt guilty and gave up on their fun.

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