where soul meets body

(written afternoon of 3/30/07)

I never realize how right it feels to be driving through lake country until I'm actually doing it. I got off the interstate a few exits before I needed to (but exactly when I needed to), and enjoyed trundling along on a day that was just the right temperature for a jacket and an open window.

The right song makes all the difference.

It has been discovered (!) that I'm one of those rare breeds who takes pleasure in music for the music itself, not because of an associated memory or anything else secondary. The music is enough. It's always enough. I (trust and) understand implicitly that the third person outside the "I" that takes over and makes these limbs sway, makes this head nod and this pulse jump. There is an other. What is it? God? Is art God? It is a thing seperate from humanity, that much is certain. We appreciate it apart from the artist, for it is a thing apart from the artist. (I'm not being redundant, repeatedly.) It is dependent on the artist for creation, to be sure, but then it is capable of being free standing, long after the artist ceases to be- and it can represent something entirely new and unique to a different body of people with no idea of the artist's original intent. This is not a problem, more like a solution in the absence of a problem. Beyond all else, art is a communicator, but not solely this- it is a mirror. Those who connect with a certain art or piece of art do so because they see themselves somewhere within the myriad of intangibles present there.

How is it that one person could create one thing that then becomes symbol of so many other things to so many? It is the separateness of art from the individual creator that makes it accessible to all. Herein lies the rub- something that is borne of one is really the mirror for many. The artist in such situations hardly seems in control of themselves- often creating because they don't have a choice.

Get out of the way.

I'm sitting in a Barnes & Noble cafe right now, looking up at the mural covered in so many loved and lined faces - Shaw, Wilde, Wharton, James, Woolf. You powerless fools. We hold your images up in effigy for what you channelled, not who you are. It is these words here, winking on the inked page, that will remain when I'm in the ground. It is this push towards the other that drives me even as they were driven. But if not God, if God is separate from art with the same amount of separateness God has with all this, which is to say not much, or an unknown amount, is art merely a manifestation of a higher, collective conscience of humans? Or is it still "other?"

Will things always, still, be "other"? The Bible says that Jesus did not consider equality with God something to be grasped. I wonder how much, in his infinite wisdom, he also left out of the "grasping" category.

I want to know
I want to know

But when the grace is found in the unknown, the stillness, the quietness, the ineffable and mysterious cloud (!), how much better off am I with open hands? As opposed to grasped ones? Or even grasping? And if art and grace are beyond similar- this rightness found in the mirror, the second of seeing yourself for even one moment in the same skin of everyone else, is it any wonder that both are unexplainable?

BE BOLD, SON.

In spite of everything else, they are both wrapped up in this skin so far as to be beyond the point of no return. I am chained to loveliness. I am a prisoner of bliss. If grace, art, and I all exist in one moment, and I am able to look beyond and contemplate all three with a smile and a nodding head and that "third" of me, I may not be whole, but I can get a taste.

And that's beyond allright.