Free Thought

Richie Havens talks about freedom, this was before your time, but it was palpable. Maybe it's that open tuning but it made sense at the time. Melanie and I had spent a mad summer, being chased from one place to another. You better find somebody to love. Grace, expressing what we felt. Slick. Concurrent with what we were talking about, AC and DC, and Tesla, electrifying the atmosphere. You and I while I can. Rain. Dripping late green, bad moon rising. Don't come around tonight. I can't stand myself. What I seem to be is not something I choose to be, I merely am. Now I wear white gloves against the stain. D has assigned me reading material so we can talk, Iris Murdoch on Plato, specifically on why Plato banished the artists, and Judith Butler, "Antigone's Claim" on the kinship between life and death. A nice coolish rainy Sunday and I curl up between several rocks and the usual hard places. Much of what Plato says about art is moral or political and not aesthetic. Anamnesis (recollection) is several steps removed from reality. P seems to be saying that this removal interferes with knowing. Yet, elsewhere, he states that learning is recollection. The Muses are all daughters of Memory. In the cave the fire is the sun, the shadows only pass for real. The vision, coming by grace, is the form of beauty, absolutely pure. Which P approaches by a Tantric channeling of sexuality. "Phaedrus" is an intensely erotic text. An embedded irony is that P is a great writer. Human beings are natural liars, and artists are the worst. There seems to be an argument that the 'plastic' arts are disingenuous, that Beauty is too important a concept to be left to artists. Hogwash, it is precisely artists, by their leaps, that expose the sublime. Pulling the disparate threads together exposes the weave. P is much taken with nature, but not the Romantic take on nature, not the reflection of moonrise on a mountain lake, but the simple patterns, that seem to be a test of truth. Artists merely imagine that everything has a place. He bugs me, in his insistence that art is fundamentally frivolous. Arguing for the artist, Murdoch finally says, beautifully, "The artist is a great informant, at least a gossip, at best a sage, and much loved in both roles. He lends to the elusive particular a local habitation and a name." Take that, Plato. But I have to admit, after a couple of days of this (D is getting the degree, not me) that a lot of academic writing is pure bullshit. The explanation, the re-explanation, the explication, it wears on me, I know what I think 'the' means. And I'm bright enough to know that you might mean something else, and that's fine, I can accept that, I can read you with that word meaning something slightly different than what I mean when I use it. Actually, I've taken to going back and eliminating as many as possible. Articles are seldom necessary. I carry a knife, James carries a combo Leatherman tool, I have one close at hand, but I carry a knife always, to slit tape, eliminate the unnecessary. Not in a violent way, just trimming, we might call it. Since I type with just two fingers, less words are better. If you've read me for three years maybe there are a million words, at that point excess becomes an issue. I like the film, ADM fixes my attention. Corn, who would think, it's all deception. Maybe I should reconsider Plato. Whitehead famously said everything was a footnote to him. Consider that. We're still living up to Sappho. The world I find myself in, a ten year cycle that makes no sense at all. Maybe it's time to move to the arctic, or the antarctic, where nothing is ever green and the white goes on forever. Norma pulls in some harmonics and suddenly there's sense. I can't explain it. It has to do with the way notes cascade. Sometimes, late at night, I just listen to the wind. Hot Tuna. Old Dead songs. I'm a creature of habits. The crows only rarely don't make sense. It's always Robert Johnson or Dante, hold that harmonic, I went down to the station. Nothing was the same. I could hear you, but nothing made any sense, despite what you said.