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There are two kinds of Mondays: special Mondays where one is on a beach in the Caribbean, or regular Mondays, where one looks forward to another week of the grind, inching one’s way from meaningless jobs to meaningless death.  Grace Slick and the Jefferson Starship chanted it this way at the beginning of an album I think was named “Starship” : “Waiting to die, waiting to die, waiting to die…,” on and on, until…
 
We will hold off on the ‘until’ part for a paragraph or two, and get back to Monday, the day we usually can trust to bring us down.  Today (as I start this), for instance, is a Monday.  It is cold and (apparently) permanently gray in my section of the world, and the next few days look to stay pretty much the same.  There are chores to do, unpleasant appointments to keep and calls put off that can no longer be put off, as well as simply annoying things going on that cannot be controlled.  Right now, for instance, the dog is barking because the manure wagon across the street is being backed off the road with the safety ‘beep- beep- beep’ blaring as it prepares to spread another several tons of fermented cow dung over hundreds of acres of drying corn stalks.   The air is putrid with the smell.  Not that I mind it that much, as I grew up shoveling the stuff, but there’s a lot of it, and its Monday.  My tea was not hot enough, either, although it would have been fine for a Friday.  Such it is on those Mondays when we are not overlooking pristine tropical beaches.  Such it is when I often feel just as Gracie said: “waiting to die.”
 
There was a time, though…Just last week I was reminded of it while driving back from grocery and hardware shopping after dusk (which comes too damn early these days, so don’t remind me).  The DJ was on the college station in Ivory Tower Madison, and he had gotten together the best of the early drug and euphoria pop singles of the middle 1960’s.  “Good Vibrations” by the Beach Boys stands at the top of the list for me, but there was “Itchy-Coo Park”, “Incense Peppermints”,  “Hush”, “Eight Miles High”, “Everybody Get Together (Gotta Love One Another)” , and, of course, “Magic Carpet Ride.”  Utopia-through – drugs music all, and when I was 13, 14 and 15 I believed it.  After using the drugs a little later, I still believed, but there was something lacking: the high wasn’t always heavenly, and it always ended.  It was then that I hit the road to find paradise, which is what my book Dream Weaver is about in a nutshell.  It was several years after then that Mondays became Mondays.  Paradise, I found along with most everybody else, had indeed been lost.
 
Ah, but those few years!  With those tunes I could feel paradise on the tip of my soul, there just inches from my spiritual grasp.  A little LSD here, a lot of pot there, and it would come, or so the music assured, and so I felt.  Millions of young people felt it as well, and by @ 1970 its outlines had been drawn.  Most prophesied gettin’ back to the land on free love and dope communes, but some, like Jefferson Starship, saw something different: an evolutionary movement onward, where we cracked the cosmic code so that we could wander throughout the stars, never bored, always forward, forward, forward, always moving with youthful zeal rooted in God-given destiny.  Never mind the engineering and physics and chemistry classes that would have to be crunched for such a feat: with God all things were possible.  Was not genius a spiritual gift send from God Himself? 
 
The spaceship wasn’t there for me in the car that night as the old druggy tunes rolled on.  This was 1966 again and I was a 12-year-old kid dreaming of gaining heaven the fun way, forward, always moving, if not in space, then in the space of mind.  I felt that ancient ecstasy again in the car and was deeply moved by the nostalgia of youthful optimism.  Within minutes I then felt the painful loss of that vigor and hope.   We carry the knowledge of paradise within us, and this is what makes being human so painful.  We feel the loss.  We feel it when drugs or sex or high tech or even – I hate to say this – beer don’t take us any closer than to give us a passing glance, as if we were on a quarantined cruise ship catching only glimpses of tropical islands from afar.  That is pretty much where we are.   Gaining paradise means going through the disease and taking the medicine.  It is not fun but hard and often grim work, with nothing more to goad us on than that silver seed of paradise that remains within us, a grace that gives us both despair and hope.
 
It is why, because of this grim work, that so many have come to hate religion.  It, all of the effective ones, demand discipline and denial of basic urges that try to convince us that there are alternative, less difficult paths to paradise.  We see this now as youth culture replaces the culture of elders, and as people liberate themselves from old constraints in an effort to satisfy the deep vision within.   Such actions will not deliver us, and I am no happier about it than anyone else.  I like fun and I like easy.   But I am called to paradise, along with everyone else, and I have to read the writing in the soul.  It ends in paradise, but it calls for the hardships of an Arctic expedition, for our separation from paradise is that removed, is that far.  The journey through the Arctic calls for heroism, and being a real hero is not easy.  That’s what makes the hero a hero.
 
I am still told by some old friends that we should not sell out, that we should keep the dreams of our youth.  When I am driving in my car on a cold and dark evening and the promise of youth is poured into my ears, I want to hear their words as well.  But paradise doesn’t come that way.  It comes not the way of the playboy or the idealist but of the saint and the prophet.  It is why it is said that we must give up the world to gain ‘it’, the real and eternal world.  One, the temporary, negates the other. 
 
It is now Wednesday, Monday long gone as Thanksgiving approaches.  The Pilgrims celebrated their unlikely survival on that first Thanksgiving, but they were still Puritans – hard, inflexible, suffering Puritans.  I don’t want their life, nor the life of the equally tough Indians who celebrated with them, but their approach was more right than wrong.   While witches were not roaming their bleak autumn countryside, as many thought, the temptation of the young and of the foolish was with them as it is with us now.   Since then, the call for earthly utopia has arisen again and again, only to fail one time after another.  Those of my time and place lived through one such generational episode, and it seems we are now living with the side effects of that delusion, as even gender is being considered a mere state of mind. 
 
This, too, shall pass; this, too, will not pass the test.  But still I look back and hear the music that tells of a truth delivered through lies.  I can wish only to hear that part that talks of truth, as it gets me past the Mondays of the soul.  Such is the happiness of youth in its ignorance.  Such I can still hear just as the Pilgrims drank and were merry in the wilderness of their greatest fears.  So I can celebrate even as Monday will come again to surround me with a wilderness of my own.
 
   
 
 
 
 
 

Today, a new essay, "Perspective," under Essays in the website. FK

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            But there’s a tree, of many, one,
            A single field which I have looked upon,
            Both of them speak of something gone;
            The Pansy at my feet
            Doth the same tale repeat:
            Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
            Where is it now, the glory and the dream?             
                    (from “Intimations of Immortality…,”  W. Wordsworth)
 
            To see a world in a grain of sand
            And a heaven in a wild flower,
            Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
            And eternity in an hour.
                        (from “Auguries of Innocence,”  W. Blake)
 
 
One of our favorite holiday jokes in the house is from Gary Larson’s cartoon, “The Far Side,” in which he draws three old-fashioned style kings seated at a Joe Poluka bar.  Behind the bar is the bartender drying a glass with this reply:  “More like three wise GUYS, I’d say!”  That would be me and my rebellious friends back in high school as we pondered the literary greats, especially the Romantic Poets.  Just reading it made us feel wise, even though we were teens with superiority complexes as long as a king’s robe with no, as in zero, experience in the greater universe.  We would seek it out, of course, and I for one have become sadder for it, and in pale compensation, somewhat wiser.   We had the drive, though, sparked by the Romantics because they spoke to us of what we had so recently lost: a fundamental innocence that made us closer to paradise – or God, if you wish.  As children we did not know of our greater kinship with God, because we had nothing to compare it to.  It was as teens coming into the world that we began to understand the price of adult reasoning.  We could then regret the loss of what we had formerly taken for granted.  As said, pale compensation – so pale that we wanted that lost glimpse of heaven back.  That is why we used the hippie drugs and took paths in directions that would lead us away from standard success.  I will not know if it was worth it until I am dead and have received an even greater depth of comparison.  I am not always hopeful of what I will find.
 
The Romantics, though: they were at the forefront of the Age of Reason, writing only a few years or decades after the world-shattering revolutions in America and France.  The Industrial Revolution was beginning as well, and the last shreds of innocence – not kindness, but innocence – from ancient times were disappearing.  The world was becoming hard with pragmatism and science and the complexities of capitalism, and the Romantics were perhaps the first to recognize what Europe – and someday the world – was losing.  Just as my friends and I in adolescence, those before the poets had not realized what they once had – a simple, non-judgmental relationship with God and nature.  They killed, lusted, enslaved and plundered, but they did not doubt the existence of a God-driven universe, one filled with spirits and magic at all turns.  Now it was slipping from not only the poets’ but society’s grasp, and they longed for it as only those who are hopelessly bereaved can. 
 
I should not say “hopeless,” for just as us wise guy kids sought a direction, so did the Romantics.  They thought that they could get back to heaven through nature, but not as a farmer might.  Rather, they thought it could be done through art.  Just as the religious tried – and still try - to dispel all things from their minds other than God, so the artists of the new Age of Reason sought to clear all impurities from their minds that did not relate to his art. 
 
Those who call themselves artists still do.  Last weekend I attended a classical guitar workshop where we not only played our amateur pieces, but received advice from the impossibly talented professionals.  One, a guy I already knew from Madison, virtually bared his soul before us as he told of his journeys with the guitar.  He had begun as a teenage shredder, a fan of hard rock, before he heard a classical guitarist play.  “I can do that,” he told himself, and for the next thirty years that is exactly what he has done.  Trying to find the right sound obviously controls every aspect of his life.  He is still embittered, for instance, by his experience on stage when a student of the world-famed Segovia harangued him for forty five minutes for not using the right fingering to play the same notes.  He also told us of a recent experience with a dying friend and student, Jimmy, who had come to him for last words of advice on his playing.  Our expert told him that he would have to learn to sight-read those things that were memorized, and memorize those things that were sight-read.  This does not seem like much to us, but it meant everything to the two of them, as I found out later at the wine and cheese table.
 
It must have been the wine, but I had already intuited it.  As he passed by our group, I said, “Please don’t take this in an offensive way, but…” there was a pause of expectation – “you seem to hold for music and guitar what others hold for God.  What I heard you say was that you had to clear your head of all other things to truly grasp the music as it should be, in its purist form.  You are looking for perfection in form and beauty.  You are looking for heaven in your art.”  Too which I received a genuinely grateful response: “Yes,” he sighed, happy that I understood, “I have replaced religion with music.” 
 
He had.  I have changed my practice method because of this understanding which he conveyed almost magically, something hidden cryptically in his words.  I understand better now that somewhere in music, and in anything we call true art, are the footsteps of God.
 
I have thought about this concept since then, wishing to find truth that is beyond dogma or self-righteousness.   The Greeks understood that truth was beauty and vice-versa, but might not have fully grasped the situation, just as our expert guitarist seems to be a little off.  The truth is, oddly enough, that truth itself and beauty are artifacts of creation, not the urge or power of creation itself.  Music and art in perfect form imitate foundational creation, but are not this, are not the impulse that could only come from the prime source.  There is no art or appreciation of art in a vacuum.  Rather, perfect art is sought after and appreciated for its imitation of God’s will.  This can bring us to the foot of the source, but still not bring us to grasp the source itself.  Art is not an idol, but is rather more like a liturgy, there to bring us before God, while not being God himself. 
 
Thus the Romantics, other serious artists, and ignorant adolescents sensing a fundamental loss, are on the same path as the great mystics of the great religions.  They are all seeking a purity that will bring them to the source, to paradise – to God himself, however envisioned.  Artists have only to understand that art itself is the path rather than the endgame.
 
Which brings me to one more thing I think our Madison guitarist has found out: just as with the great mystics, I think he has realized that to find perfect art, one must die to everything else, to experience what the mystics have called, ever since St John of the Cross, the “dark night of the soul.”  It is a lonely and terrifying place, the necessary transitional space that must be lived before coming before God.   In this we become absolutely pure, carrying no baggage.  It was the reason that I think our guitarist mentioned Jimmy, his dying friend.  In the no-bull transitional space of death, they were both finding the language of eternity through the practice of the guitar.  I think this had brought the two of them to take the first frightening step beyond the altar of art to touch the true Holy Grail that is the chalice, the being, of God. 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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Poor Garcia Marquez, Nobel Prize winning author, has gone the way of all flesh, as has his bestest buddy, Fidel “Fidelito”  Castro, but his astounding book One Hundred Years of Solitude lives on as one of the most entertaining and profound books of our age.  As with works by many authors, the novel exceeds the wisdom of the author.  Marquez’s masterpiece takes place in Columbia, right next door to Venezuela, whose revolutionary leader, Hugo Chavez, was also a bestest buddy of Fidelito.  The record of that relationship is writ tragically large in Venezuela now.  Marquez should have known better, as he himself wrote of the violence and ruin we court when we forget history.  In so doing, or so he wrote, we are not only doomed to repeat history, but are eventually doomed, period. 
 
We go back to the primary fictional village in his book, Macondo, founded by the wandering patriarch of the Buendia family.  We see it grow into a town and then into a small city as it goes through a set of personal histories affected and reflected by the looming events of national history, all in surreal Technicolor similar in its magical realism and depth to the Bible.  At one point, everyone begins to forget things.  They forget things so much that they put notes up to themselves to remember things, only to forget who put them up in the first place, and why.  The town falls into a state of stupor.  Somewhere around then, the civil war begins (a civil war which continues in reality, albeit subdued, to this day), and at one point thousands are killed and taken out of town by rail to be dumped somewhere off in the jungle, or off into the distant sea.  Nobody remembers this, either, or at least no one is supposed to remember this.  In this, Marquez is giving us the message: don’t forget your history; remember what has already occurred to understand what is happening today.  If one does not do so, one will never understand the present.  
 
While Marquez presented the situation in quirky nightmarish form, we would do well to read and ponder his story, for it is obvious that we are caught in the same trap of forgetfulness ourselves.  As I see it, it manifests itself in two primary ways.  The first concerns modernistic hubris, in that we seem to think that all the ugly stuff of the past is now long gone, put behind us by our supreme sophistication.  This is ridiculous: the horrors of our past are alive and well within us now.  I am not just talking about Hitler and antebellum slavery, but our larger past, which includes the Roman Empire, the feudal states, the religious wars, the Inquisition, the pogroms – all of it.  The point of this history is not to shame us or just to humble us, but to show us what we as humans are made of.  We, all of us, have a violent and greedy dark side.  This is not just true of certain classes or races of people, but of all of us who share the human genome.  With this realization we should understand that we can fall into barbarity or totalitarianism at any moment.  It is not something to play around with.   We are not fundamentally different emotionally and morally from our collective ancestors.   Rather, it is only our fragile and relatively recent discoveries about our potential that keep us, however tenuously, from terror and enslavement.   
 
Second: in forgetting our history, we have allowed others to rewrite it.  As a former history student, I have been alarmed by the – I almost hesitate to call it what it is – selectively destructive propaganda that students are now taught.  If you consider yourself a centrist or right- of - center in the political debate, you are already familiar with the complaint.  In this (for instance), George Washington is defined by his ownership of slaves, not his unbelievable sacrifice to his country for an idea of freedom, or his epic courage.  Abolitionists such as Adams and Franklin are forgotten as the current historical eye focuses instead on slave-owner Jefferson, forgetting his own brilliance and call for freedom for all, at least eventually.  In this, it is forgotten that all the civilized world from China to the Mississippi Basin to Peru had slaves that were often brutally mistreated or killed.  Instead, the expanse of real history is perverted and distorted and reshaped for certain ends which seem ominously like something Marquez would mistakenly admire in 20th century Havana.    
 
There is more to history than just politics.  In the end of One Hundred Years, the descendants of the founding Buendia patriarch become morally perverse.  The male inheritor begins to have sex with his sister, bizarre sex that is presented with some humor to slightly veil a greater ugliness.  It is through this, in a magical way that seems quite ordinary in the context of the book, that the remnants of the city implode, and it reverts to the chaos of vine and forest that it once was.  We see that in one hundred years, the history of civilization has been writ small:  we are taken from foundation to prosperity to violence and political corruption, then to moral decay, then to final and total destruction.  It is Rome, Byzantium, Persia, Egypt, the Mayans and the Ming dynasty, all of the great empires in a nutshell.  In Macondo, as in most empires, the end began when people forgot their history, that which tells all of us who we really are.  It is knowledge that can spur us on towards our potential for greatness as well as warn us of our potential for barbarity. 
 
This, our moral history, is now being taught in distorted form.  We are now being told that the great moral structure of our civilization painstakingly built over millennia is bigoted and wrong.  As one former truth is demonized, those who want to are then able to move on and demonize the whole thing.  Is theft really theft if one is only stealing from an (presumably) undeserving upper class?  Is it really murder if the victim is too young (or too old) to speak, let alone vote?  Is any of the moral code for sexual behavior valid if parts of it have already been tossed into the rubbish heap?
 
What does real history tell us happens to a civilization that does such things?  It took Macondo only one hundred years to find out, but that is fiction.  In reality, collapse might come in a year from without, or over centuries from within.  In each case the trend is downward.  Renewal is possible, but only if we have the courage to remember who and what we are as fully and honestly as possible.