[MD] The Furthur Enquiry

[John Carl]

Pretty eyed,
pirate smile,
you'll marry a music man

Ballerina,
you must have seen her
dancing in the sand

And now she's in me,
always with me,
tiny dancer in my hand

Jesus freaks
out in the street
Handing tickets out for God
Turning back she just laughs
The boulevard is not that bad


Looking on
she sings the songs
The words she knows,
the tune she hums

But oh how it feels so real
Lying here with no one near
Only you, and you can hear me


Bernie Taupin

There's a scene I really
like<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Qn3tel9FWU&feature=related>,
in a movie, sort of autobiographical exploration of Cameron Crowe's.
Introduced us to Goldie's spHawn.  Almost Famous, it was called.  Good
movie, about a kid who writes reel gud and gets picked to follow a mega-rock
band around the country.  Every highschooler's dream: lose your virginity to
a groupie.

In this scene I like, they are all on the bus.  Everybody lost in thought,
lost in sadness and their own little worlds.  And then this stupid pappy
elton john song that was in the background soundtrack of the movie, becomes
part of the movie as one, another and then the whole bus starts singing
along and suddenly this dumb song I've heard a million times till its boring
becomes something really good.  It transcends in a moment, its own ordinary
reality.

How cool is that?

In that moment it says something profound to the way people in groups come
together.   And stay apart  The good old question that always stays fresh,
"how do you make love stay?"

I, with my own baggage and fascinations, think back to the heroic efforts of
Kesey and the Pranksters - to maintain courage and gumption for what they
were trying to do, in the midst of bus breakdowns (it was an old bus) and
driver weirdness (he was a wired driver) and the general ways people who are
forced into tight and uncomfortable quarters get on each other's nerves.

He wrote a finale to it all, called the "Furthur Inquiry", a re-examination
of the  affair.  The facts presented.  A judge selected, A jury sequestered
ala the Devil and Dan Webster, the living and the dead.   A worthy effort,
I'd say.  I've got the book somewhere on a shelf.  It's got a certain
interest, but it misses too.  His short story Demon Box, I think, captured
more of the spirit of what I'd say is the Furthur Inquiry into the moral
judgement of Neal Cassady's soul.

But the Furthur Inquiry was more comprehensive of later viewpoints, ya
know.  The intersubjective comparison of the same subject from differing
viewpoints, doncha know.  It's an explication of the subject, of course, but
also an explication of the subject's context.  The people around him on the
bus.

The Community, as it were.  The item of furthur inquiry, Ken asking in his
old age, did we do good?

Always a valid question.  One worthy of much deep inquiry.  Take here for
instance.  Does MD do us any good?  Has it been worthwhile for ya?  Do you
ever contemplate these questions?  Or do you just keep banging the keys,
pounding down the road, to get the next stop and put off deciding til after
yer dead.

Steve turned to MD for help.  Once upon a time.  It started as a plea for
some help in a figuring out relationship troubles.  I mean, I mention he was
the most introverted person I've ever known, so he didn't really have any
friends or family to talk things out, only his wife.  So he wrote to MD.  A
response to something of Wim's, I believe.


Steve & Oxsana Marquis
(*marquis at nccn.net*<marquis at nccn.net?Subject=Re:%20MD%20Epigrams%20on%20Quality>
)
*Date:* Sun Apr 03 2005


I like your comment on 'personal preference'. This points to the value of
different personality types. However, maybe habitual thinking / behavior
(the basis of the personality 'type'), even if that 'habit' is spontaneity,
results in a 'stuckness' for the individual. This is a bone of contention
that has cost me a friendship it looks like, and is the primary motivation
for joining MD right now, even though I've considered it for a long while.

Live well,
Steve

Now, of course I know better than anyone what Steve was talking about, being
the "bone of contention" that he's refering to, and I didn't have any idea
that he'd written to MD, venting about our problems.  I found out much later
and it made me mad.  Not because I was opposed to the invasion of privacy
(don't give a crap about "privacy') but because the very bone of contention
I had was based upon his unwillingness to deal with issues, his evasion of
this very sort of soul-searching.  He was always avoiding me because he said
he just didn't like people.  He was an introvert, and he liked being by
himself.  That was the biggest bone of contention.

Second, he was so structured as an engineer, type A, everything in it's
place and under control freak, that he thought of me as a dynamic wild man
in comparison.  And my very dynamicism was itself a weird static pattern.

Which was admittedly, an interesting point and worthy of dialogue.  But I
didn't see it as worthy of rejection.

His rejection was based more on the fact that he just didn't have much
appetite for social relations.

 What he never admitted, which drove me crazy, was that he also appreciated
social interactions with me.  I knew this was true, because we'd been
friends for 30 years and I'd always been careful not to over-intrude upon
him.

Although he'd jokingly refer to my infrequent visits as "intruding", we both
knew he was joking because I averaged less than 6 times a year, stopping in
to his apartment in Sacto, never stayed too long and he didn't have any
other friends.

Just his cat.

And because of our many common interests and years together, discussing
philosophy and ZAMM and then Lila,  we'd gotten to the point, I thought,
where we had a real solid friendship and could communicate about anything.
But something obviously went wrong. Something new came into our
relationship.  Something destructive.  I mean, I always intuitively knew
Steve was very narcissistic, but it seemed to me that he started getting
social reinforcement for his narcissism.  Where was that coming from?

The facts must be examined.  The Enquiry must go further.