[MD] Grace beats Karma pt. 1

[John Carl]

Thanks Marsh,  Your words, as always, mean a lot to me.


On Sat, Jul 11, 2009 at 12:01 PM, MarshaV <valkyr at att.net> wrote:

>
> 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
>
>
> Moq_Discuss mailing list
> Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
> http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
> Archives:
> http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
> http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
>



-- 
------------
There are differing interpretations of Reality, some are just better than
others, that's all.
------------