What is Music?

Movies are experienced from the outside in; Music is experienced from the inside out.

What is Music?

We take music in like air, like food, like sustenance and let it feed our innermost identity. We enjoy music on our vocal chords like a soul exercise. We live the beat of music with our dance, with our drum hands, with our impulses. Is it the rhythmic nature of music on the eardrum like a Neanderthal drum beat that awakens within us? Or is music so pleasing in its hum like our mother’s voice?

So personal we can suggest it to others without the same experience transferred. But we can come together in a great arena of collective reality to sponge in the experience and be a single vibration.

What is Music?

My insides turned out for you to see

The consoling thing about the concept, “Life is just a dream” is that if it gets too bad we can always just wake up.

I thought it took all colors to paint a picture of God. But then I talked to a fundamentalist. He said there is only black and white.

After I sent two aerial bombing missions of fire ant killer on to the mound, the death of the queen was assured. A lone ninja ant scaled my shoe to strike his revenge, lancing into my flesh repeatedly with his sacred sword. His subsequent flattening in one slap was an honorable death worthy of the warrior. The itching white pock was a memorial to him and his regal queen for days.

We like to have our photos taken with celebrity so our friends and family can see us standing beside someone whom they actually admire.

We are stage actors projecting a self image out to others that will make us content with who we think we should be.

She carried you inside her body for 9 months, went thru labor, and was there for you all those years. Dads just made that initial deposit, and then went thru labor to make bank deposits for you during all those years. It’s no contest who is in first place.

Film is experienced from the outside in, but Music is experienced from the inside out.

I realize I am inside the fun life pinball machine, bouncing off surprises with noise and flashing lights, scoring points for my bank, rebounding, but always falling toward the inevitable end game.

I still feel Alice. She's alive out there in Wonderland. But she went down a different portal and we never found each other again. But I feel her presence like the smile on a Cheshire Cat.

Lower your cholesterol, said the Doctor. Take out the trash, said the spouse. Buy this, said the television. Increase business, said the boss. Gimme sumpin’, said the grandchild. Line forms here, said the sign. You never listen to me, said the beloved. “Be still,” said the spirit voice inside.

Fifty-two degrees, October drizzle that turns into big drops now and then, like a moody tearful afternoon, but I’m smiling. Drove with slapping wipers and ran the shiny parking lot to fetch the hot chicken tortilla soup so when back in the carefree kitchen nook, we could sit and watch the drops play chase on the atrium window panes. Good day to put on Sinatra through every speaker in the house and cozy up the fireplace with some snapping flames, or play a noir film from the Criterion Collection. But don’t turn on any heat, just grab a comforter, and wear soft white socks. Want to take this afternoon and frame it and place it on the memory wall and go back there some humid July afternoon to curl up on the couch.

INSIDE

My soul was in the cranial theater, watching the big life screen on the optic nerve, and I had a character role in the movie. My error was thinking that was me out there in the character instead of me in here with the soul.

I used to work in an aerosol can and hiss out stress. Now I can hear myself think again and my arteries are user friendly.

The intuitive soft voice of the soul is best heard by the blind mute.

The perfect couple is depicted in a garden and orchard and they speak to God every day... They are full of fresh antioxidants and listening to heavenly inner peace. On what channel of my cable station can I watch more of that?

Perhaps we are on a rotating Planet Earth to remind us that:
Time on Earth is a linear loop but eternity is an endless circle.
We can travel to new time zones, but our now never changes.
The sun and stars are not moving out of view soon, we are.
Perhaps the Earth rotates toward the light to teach us the balance of why there is also darkness.

There are swarms of white corpuscles, memory neurons, and DNA related health issues affected by those lies we’ve been telling.

I like living in the now, but if you don’t really need it now, put it away for then. If so, your person then will thank you in the future now.

Spring is budding petals, kind sunshine, flowered bursts of color, and new life. Summer is exposed skin, sped up molecules, harvested tomatoes and watermelons, blue sky, and excited life. Fall is oil painted ochre and blood orange leaves, an orange full moon, and crisp air and hayride love affairs. Winter is suddenly bare trees, ecru grass, pristine snow with sinful boot tracks, I.V.s at the E.R.s, and goodbyes. Then there is spring again….

Everyone is looking out two port holes (there above the cheekbones) to watch the journey and guide the navigation while on this planet. Some are poor drivers. Give them plenty of room.

Are we mankind or man unkind?

If they did an autopsy, inside her hardened heart would be all of his money.

Inside the swirling eddy of molecules & of DNA, the spiritual being Myra, thought she was a human relations person. She was distortedly close to the truth.

A bike tire is like an ego, when deflated it is hard to go very far. When confidently inflated able to go a long way, but when overinflated in for many topples.

One time I went back into the house to unplug the iron and it saved my house from burning down and it took me out of sequence with the time line in which I had that head on collision.

Man is limited so he made up time measurement. This invention is very popular as a counting game while waiting for death. This New Year’s Eve man will say things will be different starting tomorrow, but he will continue in the very same circles of Earth he has always traveled. And the hangover will be exactly the same.

So inside the two hemispheres of the brain there is the soft almost inaudible voice of the soul consciousness, the physicality and survival messages of the nervous system, the boisterous voice of the ego, the educated voice of the intellect, and the sensory overload of incoming signals from the ears, eyes, smell, taste, and fingertips, not to mention the aches, pains, and other distractions. “Be still and know that I Am God.” Well, we can’t hear Him in all that distraction.

Thank you for opening your pupils to let me in. Nice brain. May I look around? What’s this behind the curtain over there? Hmmm… why the guilt?

Mr. Stanley

My profession for some years was as a representive for an American upper end clothing manufacturer, traveling and directing sales in the field nationally to one account, Neiman Marcus. The retired "President Emeritus" of Neiman Marcus and also the son of the founder of this American retail empire, Mr. Stanley Marcus joined our manufacturing company as a consultant. It was my distinct pleasure to spend time with this gentleman on a number of occasions. It was my perception that he was a uniquely keen observer of the human condition, a man who thought concisely and precisely, and an icon in his industry. Here are a couple of my stories about this wonderful fellow.

Stanley Marcus was an invited writer of editorials to the Dallas Morning News. Once he told me that he had over 1200 email responses to one of his controversial editorials on the subject of drug users, and whether it would wise to convict only the pushers and hospitalize and treat the users as victims. He said that he answered every single email. “How in the world did you do that?” I asked. He answered, “I simply sent out a blanket email in response and told them all, 'Thank you. You may be right.”

Stanley Marcus leased an office in a high rise building near downtown when he was at ninety years of age. He set the lease for ten years. The first time I visited his office I waited on a couch that faced the wall of the hallway leading to his office. There was a work of art facing out toward the couch that immediately was identifiable from that distance as the image of his face. This was not oil but instead appeared to be an unusual medium. I thought perhaps it was like those toys we once played with, where one could push up a hand from below a frame, and spikes would rise above the frame to create the shape of whatever was pushing from below. This art could also be described like protruding nails, with some white flat heads and others black, arranged in such a manner as to image his skin, his beard, his receding scalp, the outline of his head. When the receptionist said that Mr. Stanley would see me now, and I rose and neared the door, the image disappeared into separate white spots against the black with the image now gone. When I arrived at the turn into the hallway and could examine the work closely I could see that it was framed dominos.

Masters Blog 2005

On Sunday morning the air was crisp and cool and smelled of azaleas. The flags were asleep on the flag poles. The sun was smiling.

We stood outside the merchandise shop that morning and watched the traditional running of the fans. When the gates open and crowds enter, the marshals police the throng with shouts of, no running! So this becomes an Olympic stiff walking race to place the fold out chairs in positions at the greens of Augusta. This was the 1970’s cartoon “Keep on Trucking” character with his legs well in front of his body, trying to outpace everyone else in the parade. The merchandise director had warned us before we watched to stifle our laughter, but that was too difficult.
Despite third round play, we were busy as ever. There was a constant drift of the crowd past our counter and I was lost in the work. Then Chris nudged my elbow and told me I needed to come with him for a break.

He led me out of the shop and down the hill to the bleachers of the sixteenth tee telling me, every step of the way, what Tiger Woods was doing. Tiger was about to set a course record. Chris told me that Tiger had birdied seven holes in a row. The previous leader, Chris DiMarco had faded and Tiger had taken the lead.

We arrived at my same favorite greens at the sixteenth tee. From there the crowd can witness both the green of fifteen and the tee shot and putt at sixteen. Suddenly the large leader board posted Tiger’s result at fourteen. He had broken the string and made a bogey. We watched him bogey again on fifteen and miss his birdie and settle for a par on sixteen. Maybe he was human after all.

By the time the final round began we had moved all the remaining merchandise on to the long serving counter top at our station. When a customer drifted by we could point him to the stack of his size. It had become self service. If he were a medium there were only two shirts and if he were a double extra large there were none. We asked one of the girls to baby sit the piles and we went to the course to watch golf.

On thirteen we watched Mickelson and Singh who were ironically matched for the last round. Singh had asked the officials to check Mickelson’s cleats during play on Saturday, complaining that the shoes were tearing up the greens. Mickelson had confronted Singh in the locker room and there had been words. I wondered if there might be a secret wager between them today. Neither struck the other in the neck with an eight iron, however.

Then we decided to climb the hill and perch behind the green at number five, where the hill is above the turn at fifteen and sixteen. On arrival we discovered that the view was too obstructed by the trees, and we wanted a clear look at the man in red and black, so we followed the trail down from the tee box on number six. Half way down that trail, we found our spot. We were like those strangers no one saw in the grassy knoll, with clear vision to the green below. Behind the pink, white, and red azalea bushes we stood with the green of sixteen below us like a pool table top. With a turn of the head we could watch the putting on fifteen. The crowd below was tight to the ropes on all sides and up here there were no shoulders to peek over.
We had been prepared to watch Tiger pass by on his way to the coronation. But to our surprise DiMarco had struggled back into contention and now, as they approached fifteen, Tiger held only a two stroke advantage.

I looked at the white word Ping on DiMarco’s black cap and asked Chris, “Shouldn’t that be Polo on DiMarco?”

There was a distraction for both leaders before their putt on fifteen. The South African, Trevor Immelman soared his ball to the sixteenth green and it struck above the hole and came rolling back. That can go! Chris husked, and like a jolt of electricity the crowd erupted in one voice as the ball rolled neatly back and into the cup for a hole in one. This was the same hole where back to back hole in ones had greeted Mickelson’s arrival to fifteen just the year before. Now I stood on the same hollowed ground with the same sudden rush of adrenaline and was astounded once more. DiMarco sunk his birdie and suddenly his was a one stroke game.
When DiMarco’s ball came down to the right of the cup, Chris and I knew it was a make able birdie lie. But when Tiger’s ball struck left and rolled into the low slump in the fringe, we knew it was a wicked lie. Chris whispered, “I’ve been there before on this hole. That’s a tough place to be.” Yes, he gets to play Augusta once a year.

And that is when time started moving in freeze frames. How important is this shot? I thought. It’s just for a few hundred thousand dollars, a fourth green jacket in nine tries, the silencing of a media who questioned his elite ability, and remarkable golf history.

When he struck the ball and it ran some ten feet up the incline of the green and made a lazy Indy 500 turn, every pupil was focused on the ball. And now the ball started down the slant, and the crowd drew a collective breath and it trickled down, not so much rolling as drifting, being drawn like a magnet toward a special moment. This scene was directed by Alfred Hitchcock. This was a scene of a child playing with a revolver. This was watching the last card placed delicately atop a hundred decks in a castle of cards. The ball rolled to the lip of the cup and stopped. Or so it seemed in that freeze frame of time. For one millisecond it was the Twilight Zone episode where all the people are frozen in place while the astronauts walk around in lone animation. And then the collective energy of every soul there and every soul watching on television willed the black Nike swoop on that ball another rotation and it plopped into the hole. The crowd voice was an earthquake and Chris and I found ourselves bounding into free space in a glory leap. Chris’s eyebrows neared his hair line, his open mouth moved into a grin, and our hands slapped in high fives. We began to assess what we had just seen.... How many times will we see that shot again in our lives? How many times will that highlight be shown in the broadcasts to come? And these two orbs in these two sockets were witness.

“The difference,” said DiMarco after his sudden death playoff loss,” was that his chip went in and mine didn’t.” DiMarco’s chip on eighteen hit the flagstick and deflected, or Tiger’s remarkable twenty foot break would have lost some glamour. But that could not happen. Not this day.
This had been the passing of the guard. Jack Nicklaus had sat before the cameras and said that this was most likely his last Masters. His time had come to face the reality of his physical decline from the pinnacle he had crafted. It would have been fitting if he, rather than Mickelson, could have placed that green jacket on Tiger’s shoulders. This was the new era and the crowning of a new king.

Flashback

Today it is raining and I am inside, and I’m dry, and I’m cozy.

Acute memory though, of my twenty-one year old ass fitting into an upside down steel pot helmet that held me out of the rice patty water. I’m on night guard and my poncho drapes around me and into the water at my boot ankles and my M-16 is between my knees like a tent pole. It is such a drenching downpour that I have zero fear of Viet Cong intruders. They are wet and cold too. I have the poncho drawn to a fine pinhole over one pupil and I am marinating my body inside in the smoke from my cigarette. The poncho is thick enough that it hides the glow of each smoky draw, and this wee hour smoke, out here in the bush, is an unusual treat. So I peer through the pinhole into nothingness but rain lines that are popping the rice patty surface, and I sit in the arc of my squad perimeter that circle in a protective pattern. No trip flares are out, the rice patty too soggy for a firmly staked grip. So the rain drops drill the outside poncho against my light helmet liner and I conger up visions of the United States, women who are not Asian, freedom to just go for a drive, dry clothes, fresh fruit and sliced tomatoes. These thoughts are in the slice of custard in my cranium where I go for refuge, for down time, for escape.

Then I am here again in my cozy home looking out at the splashing rain. I go back to the kitchen for another cup of coffee and ponder whether I should go outside and get cold and soaked, just because of my freedom to come back inside and be dry and cozy.