Cello

I don't know what to say——your notes go deeper than my toes, your face with more curves than a ballerina juggling oranges. Yesterday the rain was only a thought. Today it is still a thought. Clouds descend in the night and take us in. I dream about you. You strike a chord. Your long neck dances in the shadows. One song after another thrusts itself across your bow. All across the planet we listen to your high rise harmonics, your castles in the air, your dungeons quiet with the mummified past in chains, your walls wet with thoughts of tomorrow——across the ocean your skittering flight catches white caps and your lips kiss the piano keys at such a rate there's no stopping you now, there's no resisting your zither lips...the vibrations are too much. I feel old in your presence. My heartbeat races after you but I can't keep up and it's still daytime, somewhere. How many minutes now, your hand has been holding my pulse. Yes, okay, I'm alive, but I've forgotten how to breathe. I'm on my knees still standing before your long low smile——everyone's head's turned and the staircase is spiral

Makana

Makes me smile thinking back on Makana's performance at the Kahilu Tuesday night. How masterful, yes, but how balanced, with a great deal of respect paid to Sonny Chillingsworth, his kumu. Makana sent out maybe four of Sonny's trademark songs, with a little talkstory explaining Sonny's other life as an opera singer and Sonny's nickname as The Waimea Cowboy, before giving us that extraordinary portrait of Sonny himself performing Kaula'ili with precise, clipped strumming and fretwork, whole-body waves, head-snaps, jerks, and the rhythm of the horse in the hammer thumb on the open bass string——and Sonny's heartfelt moralizing——this acknowledgment of Makana's own influences expressed with grace and humor, so Hawaiian... Meantime the rest of the concert filled to bursting——think of all those smile muscles and sprinkle in some tears of sheer joy——with songs like Pu'uanahulu, Hi'ilawe, Ku'ulei 'Awapuhi, Makee Ailana——how did he do it? Sometimes his head thrown back in song as his fingers danced like wave-chasing crabs, back and forth, up and down the shoreline of Evening Star, his guitar. Now his fingers fly over the frets——we know them now as the bones, the iwi——while his long, long notes rise up into the dark flying grid of the Kahilu.

Influences I

Introibo ad altare Dei...and if you recognize the antiphon which kicks off the Tridentine Mass, then you're showing your childhood religion and your age at the same time; or else you're a James Joyce fanatic. Hard to believe I served Mass as an altar boy before school, before the age of nine. Influence number one?

Well, I was already addressing my angel most nights, sensing his presence, too, whilst sensing a kind of bisexuality in that holy invisibility. After all, there was the long hair and the long dress-like apparel we saw the priest wearing. One of my earliest memories is lying in bed working out the sheer numbers of people, animals, not to mention the weather, all things God is charged with managing, well, creating, then, now, and in the future. I knew the direct line to God notion was rather tenuous, let's put it that way. So I addressed my angel.

So there's a lot there in that early influence, a plethora of Greek and Latin, the superstructure of Catholicism in our lives, the lives of the saints, the authority of the priest coinciding with the humanity of the priests whom I got to know and work with as an altar boy—by the way, never any hanky panky, mostly positive, only one cranky curmudgeon, with one devoted pastor in the old sense of one who looks after his sheep, taking us to Weston-super-Mare on field trips, rehearsing the various kinds of services with patience and wisdom—which brings me to the profound theatrical nature of the Church service.

The church in which I served, still there as far as I know, is called St. Mary's-on-the-Quay, Bristol. Right there you have an early grasp on hyphenation! Right there you have a sense of Bristol's own history, with the word "quay" weighed and qualified over and over till I understood Bristol's romance with ships. And in the architecture you have the Greek columns, Ionic in appearance, although the structure was built in 1840. Those columns loomed monumentally to my eight year old self. When I revisited the place years later, everything seemed smaller, though the echoing of single steps upon the wooden floor within still rang out. A Palladian symmetry one finds in theatre in no small way. Most of the theatres I've worked in were Palladian by design. The concept of the "fourth wall" that separates audience from players, that of the proscenium arch which frames the drama, was intimately familiar to me in form and function by the time I was five years old.

Backstage was the sacristy, where we got ready, put on our costumes, and on Sundays, for high Mass, readied our ceremonial candles.

I was fascinated and gratified to read George Bernard Shaw's comments in his "Our Theatre in the Nineties" regarding the origins of the Christian Church, "founded gaily with a pun...where you must not laugh...giving way to that older and greater Church to which I [Shaw] belong: the Church where the oftener you laugh the better, because by laughter only can you destroy evil without malice, and affirm good fellowship without mawkishness."

In that same essay comprising "The Author's Apology"——you can find it in Shaw's "Prefaces" 1906——one significant influence in my life dovetails beautifully into another when Shaw writes: "...if the theatre took itself seriously as a factory of thought, a prompter of conscience, an elucidator of social conduct, an armory against despair and dullness, and a temple of the Ascent of Man." The context of that manifesto-like statement is that Shaw notes how play-going in London may well have replaced church-going, which is fine, he says, if only the theatre took itself seriously. I took Shaw so seriously that I look back in wonder at how I left it, how many years it's been since I was a stage door regular, and what the devil——what the angel!——am I doing about it now. I could say I'm doing my best to chronicle the things I experienced while I did the work in the theatre. But somehow I know in my heart of hearts that's not enough. Once you've experience the power and possibility of the theatre, and you believe in it like I came to believe in it, there's not a day goes by when you don't say to yourself you owe it to the community in which you live to make it happen. That is another topic entirely.

Church and theatre as early influences come easily to the fore, that's the point here. And with that, a fascination with audience. What makes them work? In the I Ching one finds Thunder over Earth in the 16th hexagram, an arrangement of lines where one strong line makes its way into the fourth place, a shift in balance, so to speak, a shift heavenward... Wilhem writes "This begins a movement that meets with devotion and therefore inspires enthusiasm, carrying all with it. Of great importance...is the law of movement along the line of least resistance..." Wilhem goes on to describe the birth of theatre in his commentary on this hexagram. Finally, he quotes Confucius, "He who could wholly comprehend this sacrifice could rule the world as though it were spinning on his hand." For me, that's a sparkling jewel set in the ocean of book called the I Ching. "It is good to organize helpers and to set people in motion," writes our friend, Blythe in her version of the I Ching at this point, where "thunder comes resounding out of the earth."

I suppose I've come to this island in the Pacific to get as far away from theatre as possible, in order to "see it". That is a generous perspective written after the fact of moving here, but there's a truth in it that I recognize.

At a very early age I saw the activities in the church where I was a backstage regular produce an effect on the audience, though it ranged from season to season. Christmas Mass was a power to reckon with. Day in, day out, yes, yes, yes, we will go through the motions, speak the lines, carry the heavy book from one side of the altar to another at the given point, tinkle our small bells at the raising of the host, but the nature of worship seems to depend so much on props and a kind of duty to a trinity of powers, the higher power being worshiped, the medium power of the church mucky-mucks, and the low power voltage of the handful of worshipers who attend daily Mass. Come Christmas, all that changes. The colorful vestments come out. The number of acolytes is more than quadrupled. Four times that! Who are these guys? Never seen them before! And they're all bigger than me! And the congregation? No room at the inn. They're lining the streets, squeezed into the portico, pressed against the inner walls of the church itself where the Stations of the Cross threaten to knock them on the heads...where were you people last week? last month? This was a tremendous influence on me, to see this show of strength from both sides of the divide, coming together with intonations, concatenations, bells, books, candles, colors red and gold, incense for the divine, voices raised in glory...you just want to shout out, Oh My God! And I guess you do, at various points in the proceedings. And I'm just a pipsqueak in red and white, not the usual black and white of everyday Mass, but I'm "in it" and it's terribly powerful, this coming together, this Enthusiasm, as the I Ching rightly points out. Oh the collection baskets are full on Christmas Day!

Early influences...

Go far, dear book

and speak again of meteors and men, how the poet held a running grasp on life, catching it up and letting it go simultaneously free as a red robin in winter, yet rooted as the almond tree in spring come awake in pink blooms in full cloud on Tuesday, become carpet of petals underfoot by next Sunday night. The falling.

I knew him not as the musician, actor and playwright, but as a magician. I even met him in a blackout. His old cottage was ablaze with candlelight that first night. Where the flames grew between the elm logs in the inglenook fireplace, he carefully positioned lumps of coal, to extend the fire into the night. He listened and watched till the embers became muted and the silences grew apart. It was there he spoke carefully of Gogarty and Stephens, Plotinus and Steven McKenna's translations, Darwin's grandchildren at the zoo, Shelley's presence of mind filling a bathtub of ice for his child's fever, authors who simply cannot read their own work aloud, and worse, authors who return and tamper with earlier drafts, to "improve" today something they'd written a long time ago, or how some plants insist on blooming early, forsyth and almond being two examples. And did you know "glamour" and "grammar" are the same?

He reached for the matches, plucking one of the two wooden ends offering themselves to him from the shut box, poked around the bowl of his pipe for a bit and then touched the flame to its contents, curls and wafts of smoke now joining their counterparts in fire and candle till there was an almighty haze over the proceedings as each book became a doorway to another world. When he took down Coleridge, we all went to the Lakes and complained about the damned postman who knocked too soon. Blake took longer to get back from his long walks, maybe days. And Stephens calmed us all down again, got our breathing to follow the rhythm of goats on their path until we looked down and saw our own souls big as life right there in the room.

In the doorway

There is shelter on the threshold
an opening in the strange world
a word to be twisted out across
the page
a metaphor in the rain, say,
a difficult night in the city
a number
sometimes a slit, the mouth of the door,
a brass flap for letters
or a child's enquiries
too short for the rapper, the knocker,
the bell
Who's inside?
I hear them coming
Let me catch my breath up in the chest
and pretend I'm ready
a simple thing, really,
without which there would be no house
no entry, no room, no stairs
leading somewhere
What's on the other side?
In the this sacred belief we call
The Way of the Door
open yourself to my entreaties
Twist the doorknob left or right
and you will see me there
half in shadow
almost waiting
always poised
Anticipate my coming
without footsteps only heartbeats
Bring in the light from which I came
and break it like an egg
Beat it into tonight
so we can see our dreams
Take away your draftproof seal
and your deadbolts
Take away the cobwebs and
autumnal debris caught up
in the corner of your post
and lintel existence Take away
the frame and open up
to me

That's the catch

That's the catch, she said.

Martha was overcome with fumes of fatality. Or do I mean, fatalism. Yes, that's right, more of an -ism sort of day if you can believe that. Pinched shoes were just one more sign that her life was being squeezed out by sacrificial justifications: Oh it's all right, I'll just...or Nevermind, it's only a small sacrifice to make...

It's as if she was as they say always waiting, not for a bus that would take her somewhere fun or purposeful, but for the penny to drop, the catch to click shut and make another blood blister on Martha's fickle finger of fate. Everything but everything was a matter of fate for poor Martha——as if her childhood wounds and fears had become the roadmap for her life of superstition. She saw it in the mirror each morning and walked away from it quickly.

Giving up early

Some say don't. A sign of weakness. Come to find out, it's smart action, called listening to yourself. But what about the effort it takes?

You know, the effort, the work, the blood, sweat and tears, the little agro, the traffic jam on the way to the golden fleece, the major deal, the hassle, the fol-de-rol, the right old whatsit, the set-to, the pain-in-the-arse that's worth it at the end, you know, the end that never comes...

I mean, what about the time you really didn't want to but you did and then you became a better person——you know, win or lose it all, meaning, sleep, credibility, confidence, money and self-respect, just to become a better a person. Or would you rather be a couch potato? I suppose a famous memoir called Confessions of a Couch Potato would really sell at Barnes and Noble don't you think? Fast action there, all those bags of chips, maybe some ranch dip or to really spice things up, salsa, yeah! And then there's the world of the couch: all things must come to the couch, as Harry S. Freud once said. And there you are, giving it up for the cushions, the mites, the coulds, the TV remote, the crumbs and ancient raisins, once jewels from Cleopatra's famous barge——that's it, you're floating now——is it the Nile or the Zambezi? The Thames or the Mississippi?——Ah, just put your feet up and float away——or nowhere in particular.

More vivid than reality

Well sure. Absolutely. Certainly. Say no more. Or do I hear, Say more, Say more! Perhaps less is more. Perhaps less has an edge before which each unfolds their shoji screen willing it to be cut. There on the other side, something more acute, the shadow fled, the mother alarmed by all the signs, our hair stands to attention, our sense of smell takes over and leads our senses into the light, where we find pinks like secret mucous linings, a cave illuminated where only the foolish dared venture——outside, explosions, an engine revs up and then recedes, the other part of the equation come alive, shifting our focus like the dial of an antique microscope, back, back, till we see monstrous detail become intricate patterns, till the general shape of things gives way to a gathering of three, bent in silence over a table in a café, and then a crowd, a movement, handing the precious book from one to another, and then the coastline where ants all walk on the right, and then, the blue orb spinning, turning, cloud-hidden, as the philosopher warned us, and then, a speck of light, and the shadow returns.

This morning

This morning the waves are weaker than yesterday which is curious when you consider how the moon is waxing and perhaps even more telling, the entire population of the northern hemisphere is breathing out at regular intervals and you have to admit that is a gravitational force to reckon with. Personally I don't subscribe to the theory I saw written on a student locker at the U of W back in the late 60s, that there is no gravity, the earth sucks—but it did give me pause for thought. I mean if all the cow farts in the known world can add up to an overwhelming toxic accumulation of methane in the atmosphere around our planet, who will stand up and denigrate the theory of the effect of mass breathing on gravity? Not to mention the effect of fogging up the glasses of all who are wearing them—a spectacle indeed!

Where was I? This morning the waves are weaker but you know I can only speak for myself really and I have been eating more of everything of late, just to keep my feet on the ground—a sure sign I'm an air sign in great danger of getting sucked into a lunar gravitational pull at any moment.