[MD] Grace beats Karma pt. 1

[MarshaV]

John,

I've never heard it said more beautifully, "All of Nature is the 
greatest idea, and we are but passing expression of what she wants to 
say through us in the moment."  The very first mention of the 
red-winged blackbird had me.  It put me on the back of that bike, and 
I didn't want to miss anything.

You take your time...   There's Love here.


Marsha






At 02:32 PM 7/11/2009, you wrote:
>"For a time I held a unique position: among the hundreds of isolated
>creatures who haunted the streets of lower downtown Denver there was not one
>so young as myself.  Of these dreary men who had committed themselves, each
>for his own good reason, to the task of finishing their days as pennyless
>drunkards, I alone, as the sharer of their way of life, presented a replica
>of childhood to which their vision could daily turn, and in being thus
>grafted onto them, I became the unnatural son of a few score beaten men."
>
>
>And thus Neal Cassady starts his story, The First Third.  The first third of
>his life, that is.  The one third he completed and could look back on and
>explain.
>
>He was a deep and profound thinker, the famous N.C., with piercing insights
>into his own life and the life of those around him. It's a shame his only
>published work was set in the context of homeless, nameless broken men.  In
>its clarity of thought and simple expression his book shows us what we
>missed out on when Neal committed himself, for his own good reason, to
>finish his days as an impoverished meth addict, alone on those San Miguel
>railroad ties.  Just imagine if he'd been able to complete and write his
>Second Third, featuring Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs and more.
>
>My friend Bill had met his famous grandad within days of being born.  At the
>hospital, they let moms rest a bit longer back then.   Neal stopped by to
>visit his oldest child and most troubled relationship, Kathy.   While the
>world needs its shaman-heroes,  girls need their dads, especially during
>those awkward teens years.   And while we read Kerouac today and can
>understand its characters, the action took place in the fifties and early
>sixties - the truly Neo Victorian age of American culture.  If you grew up
>in that time, with those kind of social conformity pressures and your dad is
>some sort of fornicating,  pot smoking, free love experimenting, country
>hopping weirdo, you don't care if he's a dynamic world changing shaman hero.
>  All you know is he's missing and your pissed.
>
>Fathers, be good to your daughters.  That's my advice.  They have their ways
>of revenge.
>
>Kathy got hers by first marrying somebody as opposite from her dad as she
>could find and second by ostracising the memory of him from his one and only
>grandson.
>
>Of course Neal one -upped her by dying within half a year, but older folks
>always get the last word.  It's a rule.
>
>The first inkling Bill had that his grandpa was famous, was getting invited
>on the set of a movie featuring Nick Nolte playing his grandpa and Sissy
>Spacek playing his grandma.  Bill wasn't as impressed with meeting movie
>stars as he was with getting to ride on the train. He did say that were both
>real nice but he especially liked her.  They were shooting a scene on a
>train, featuring Neal working as a conductor (which he didn't do in real
>life, stoopid hollywood) passing some woman reading On the Road sorta softly
>smiling to himself.  Ah the vagaries of being anonomously famous.
>
>I saw the movie, Heartbeat.  I thought it kinda sucked.  They were big on
>the whole episode with Jack and Neal sharing a wife in shifts while working
>for the railroad in shifts, and thinking about it, I guess it would be hard
>to explain to a young child what it was that made his grandpa famous - when
>what made his grandpa famous  was his degenerate moral behaviour.  I guess
>the ostracism of young Bill from stories about his grandpa wasn't just a
>revenge issue, was it?
>
>
>Anyway, Bill has had a life long fascination with trains, and he is
>red-green colorblind.  Those are the two main things he has in common with
>his famous grandpa.  Or not so famous. Everybody who wrote about Neal used
>pseudonyms  and thus you had to be an enthusiast of literature history to
>connect the dots and know who this man was.   But everybody's heard of Nick
>Nolte.  So that defines famous.
>
>Sigh.  Neal was a hyperkinetic, smoothly skilled juggler of ideas and mind,
>his restless spirit making connections in the ether while his bodily grace
>always right in the moment of being appropriatly there, and yet suprisingly
>there at the same time.  You know what I mean?  I don't either.  I'm just
>trusting the descriptions of those who knew him and I can't conjure Nick
>Nolte conjuring Neal.   But social fame does not follow intellectual
>excellence.  In fact, I think something different occurs.  I think when a
>new set of  ideas are so good and so timely that they get almost perfect
>social acceptance, that they quickly become what "everybody knows".  And
>nobody specific gets credit for what everybody knows, unless they have just
>the right PR.
>
>IMO, something similar happens with Pirsig.  Ever since I read him, I see
>signs of him all over.  Authors I know have been influenced but they don't
>really talk about it.  They don't comment that Quality as an idea is
>important.  Everybody knows what Quality is.  So we don't give credit when
>it's pointed out.  Even though that pointing was vital.  I go around feeling
>like Dan described with an attitude "How can you say you liked this book and
>not get a reverent tone in your voice and genuflect?" It's not just a "good
>read".  But hey, that's just my subjective judgement I guess.
>
>Most of the following years of my friendship with Bill, he'd include me on
>all his projects and jaunts.  For a college class at UC Santa Cruz, he went
>and interviewed his aunt and uncle and mom.  We went together, driving in
>turns for six days of our own on the road, on the 25th anniversary of Neal's
>death, to count the railroad ties out of San Miguel Allende's station and
>see where the number (according to legend) that was Neal's last words took
>us, and talk to more people who lived there who knew Neal then, including
>the Dr. who saw him at the end.  Many stories I've always wanted to share,
>and did try at one time.
>
>It was on a long ago and far away experience for me called "Nerdnosh".  It
>was an exhiliarating thing then to see the magic created around strangers
>just telling their stories.  Magic indeed.  Tell your stories children, was
>our mantra.  My wife even contributed a logo for a t shirt and it was all
>gonna be big big big someday.  I dropped out when  a personal tragedy in my
>life  made me retreat and back off from everything for about a decade - quit
>my  web programming job with the biggest marketing company in town and
>retreat to the hills and hunker down a bit.  Just be with my family, cut
>wood, carry water.   Be a dad for my three remaining daughters, having lost
>the littlest one to a drowning accident.  I felt like I had permission to
>just hide and so I did.
>
>So... tell your stories children, I've been admonished.  I've been bottled
>up a bit, actually.  Since the whole blogosphere has blown up into a world
>wide phenomena, I feel like getting back in the saddle again.  Telling my
>stories, to my children.  They are out there.  My three remaining daughters.
>  They are in their own rooms at the moment.  We will interact, we will
>communicate, but I don't tell them my stories.
>
>See, they all have e-mail and face book and that social networking stuff,
>and me, who along with Al Gore practically INVENTED the internet, I've been
>so out and out reactionary that I haven't even written to them, the ones I
>retreated from virtual reality for.  They're there!  I gotta go get them.  I
>started by cc'ing that story I wrote last week, about how I met Bill and
>thus their mom.  The story, from their point of view of their coming into
>being and now the story goes on.  I'll cc them this one as well.    If my
>only audience in the whole world is my own daughters and people of quality,
>people who get it, the AW GI cult, then I'll have everything a writer could
>want.
>
>Now, spacing... pacing... that is the thing. Once a week works for my
>particular muse,  ZAMM was to me an amazing thing when I read it aloud
>because it granted something profound in its spaces.  Great ideas need a
>little room to grow in your brain.  If you try and cram in too much, you get
>overload. A true teacher knows this.  So we'd get some metaphysical marvel
>followed by some commentary on the passing scenery, and I gotta say, some of
>that passing scenery was my favorite parts.  Digression from the great
>idea??? Never.  All of Nature is the greatest idea, and we are but passing
>expression of what she wants to say through us in the moment.  But I notice
>nobody around here ever quotes the parts that are just passing scenery...
>containing magic sometimes.










"Compassion diminishes fright about your own pain and increases inner 
strength." ~His Holiness, the Dalai Lama