What is different about me me from my life-threatened brothers and sisters in Gaza and Yemen? I asked myself last night during Zikr meditation? The answer astonished me: "You at least can curse God in comfort and safety. They must curse him in unrelieved danger." Bombs, drones, sniper fire, these Arabs live in flight, even when frozen in fear. So I asked my pretend-other and hidden self, "So what can I do?" The answer, one I have received before: "Whether or not you believe in so-called 'God', you must cherish the leisure you have been given to think of and reunite with the all-encompassing vastness in which you presently serve as light-node and sentient throb. Soon your life-force will pass into another body and 'you' will return to quiescence. If your vitality is sufficient, it will be relayed into another being. This is the only re-incarnation you can be sure of: the indestructibility of consciousness and its passageway of continual embodiment. You must work for a world where contemplative leisure, and actions based on it, are greater norms than now. For the sake of all those who live in war zones, you must declare yourself and be a peace zone."
Although I am supposed to be a source of my own solace, I still seek in my forbears solace for earlier times of correlative calamity. But I see they often struggled with the same disquieted leisure. This poem by Lorine Niedecker, written just after WWII, for her friend, mentor and fellow poet, Louis Zukofsky, sums up my fight for song's survival:
"An acre of music"
or a room closer to it
movement, rest, repeat,
for those making music
but not allowed to hear it
and those in peril
on the street
If there is a prayer for me to make, it is a yearning for a wider, and one day entire, cessation of the danger to the sacred privacy of meditation. What is truly to be pursued, and meant, as happiness, is found there: Connection, so intense and immense that it is autonomic. I have been blessed with the time and space to end the latency of light within us; to transform idleness into stillness and the activities native and exclusive to it. I feel duty-bound to help restore America to its transcendentalist moorings. In a post-war poem, Lorine writes: "My only / fear: I'll go blind before I give / the soil my phosphorous." When spelled with a capital P, Phosphorous is the name of the Morning Star. When spelled with a small p, it means the power of radiance within a substance. The poet is talking about death as an exchange of power. Something inside me now knows this is the relay system of which I feel a part when I let the vastness console me.
This "pursuit of happiness" now summarizes what I mean by citizenship. And in this nation founded on the central notion of such happiness, there can be no unwelcome immigrants. I have been granted a sacred leisure which I do not yet exercise enough. But it has helped with exorcism of ignorance. As Lorine puts it: " . . . I'm not stuck / in that old stuff: cosmos versus puny / man, God, no. . . ." When true seeing is the metric, we are Seers who see all as in All! Ah!.
In closing, let me offer a 1930 Song of Solace, "Bye Bye Blues," as sung by George Metaxa, courtesy of my friend, Andy Senior. Metaxa sings the usually-ignored verse, which once you hear, will give the song deeper meaning. This has become my favorite recording of this standard. You'll find it here for the next 7 days.
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