It was Saturday night and our son for once had no place to go. Instead he practiced his mixology and made margaritas with real strawberries, and of course real tequila, to which we oldsters said, what the heck and salud! After a while the guitar came out and he played one of his favorites, a Kurt Cobain -influenced dirge that, with all its minor chords, was still almost beautiful, even though it was dedicated to the dead of Tienanmen Square. It is played with the low string, usually on E, dropped to D, so that if played with the D chord makes a drone, or low reverberating sound. I got on my high horse then and explained how this ‘drone’ had been used by monks in the medieval ages to elicit a feeling of God, just as the Buddhists make a similar drone in their chanting. I did a few numbers in Drop D on my own and, ever mindful of myself, told him how I often disappeared into this music when I played it. I call such music an active prayer, in that it gives you what the best of prayers should give you – a taste, or hint, of the ecstatic union with God.
This is the beginning, the hint of what we want although we usually don’t know it. This is often made very clear to us from other’s lives.
We have been watching a Ken Burn’s documentary, “The Roosevelts,” about our two presidential Roosevelts. Since Teddy was the elder of the two, we were first treated to his life – to his intense need for action and to distinguish himself among men – particularly among men - by showing indomitable courage. He was driven, as all future presidents must be, but he was also a creature of his time, a man of extreme generational wealth who was deeply immersed in 19th century romanticism. This included, most famously (or infamously now), his romantizisation of war, but also his romantic notion of connubial love, which he found in overwhelming abundance in his wife Alice. He had written in his diary before marriage that she was so perfect, so imbued with feminine grace, that it almost seemed a sacrilege to touch her.
But of course he did touch her after marriage, and in due time she became pregnant. He was only in his mid- 20’s then and was already making a name for himself in politics. He was, I recall, at the state house in Albany when his wife went into labor in NYC, to which he anxiously rushed. Once there, he found that both his mother and his wife were desperately ill, the latter from problems in childbirth. He spent the night running back and forth from one bedroom to the other until, first, his mother died, and then, that next morning, his wife. The baby lived, but he would have nothing to do with her (also named Alice) until a year or more later. Rather, he would write one phrase, “The light has gone out of my life,” in his diary, before he fell into a deep depression. It was only the time spent in the wilderness of @1884 North Dakota that allowed him to pull back from the brink, although the historian in the documentary related that he was never quite the same after the deaths.
We can bet that he would have given up his future reputation as a Rough Rider, and his future as President, if those losses would have given him his wife and mother back. But of course, as the world is, he would never have realized this had the tragedy not happened.
The night after the Drop D guitar solos, I had another one of my “failure” dreams, this time with many of my adventures tied in, from my trip to England in 1972 to the life with Indians in Venezuela in the late 80’s and early 90’s, to my pilgrimages to Europe and the Near East in the last five or so years. Incidentally, in all of these episodes I was looking for a place to pee, so we understand why I woke to remember this dream, but the feeling throughout was, “not enough, never enough;” that is, that whatever these adventures were about, they did not fulfill the need that had sent me towards them. In the dream I was always lacking, alienated even from the others in the adventure, always on the outside. I awoke with this painful sense of lack and need, which is the very definition of failure. I told my wife that is was my subconscious crying out for the fulfillment it thought I (we) should have had after all the academic preparation and travel. I said that, although I know consciously that academic life usually means the death of any spiritual feelings, which would have been a disaster for me, this still did not alleviate the inner feeling of failure. It did not alleviate it because reasoning is usually only discursive and can only reach so far into the emotional world; but also, I realized later, it was because this explanation wasn’t enough – that there was another dimension that I had missed.
That morning we had gotten up late, and as it was a Sunday, I tuned into the radio station carrying “Musica Antigua,” ancient music, that always plays during breakfast time on that day. Immediately I was struck by the beautiful singing of a woman, with the “drone” sound humming without pause on a stringed instrument in the background. It brought me close to heaven, even though I briefly mused that it might have been only a troubadour song about lost love (as it was in a foreign language). Finally the heavenly music stopped and the DJ told us just what it was: Music written in the 12th century by St. Hildegard of Bingen, an abbess and one the greatest composers of sacred music, as well as perhaps the only woman composer, of that time. The collection of the songs on the album was called “A Feather on the Breath of God.”
Teddy Roosevelt would have wished for his wife and mother above his ambitions, although he probably would never have known how important they were in his life had they not died. But something in me still wishes for the drama of adventures and travel and success, even though the drone of heavenly music is playing louder and louder. Slowly it is becoming clearer, however, that it was towards this, this vision of heaven, that all the adventures have been about. It is why none have ever fully appeased my need, and why any success in any field would have felt dry in the mouth after the initial feeling of pleasure and power. I am beginning to understand that this is true. However, it appears that it will not be from anyone else’s death but my own when I will finally and irrevocably come to understand this - that this heavenly union was always the goal, and that all efforts towards it in this world never were and never will be enough. Just as the ghost of Teddy’s wife Alice must have brought him awake and broken even in the White House, so I am brought awake and broken in a humbler home, fumbling with insecurities that only point, in the end, to the message hidden in the one letter and one note of Drop D.