Dawn Breaks
In about forty minutes anyway...
Today’s “Book of Days” entry features an image shot by Patti Smith of Kurt Cobain. Her caption reads:
20 FEBRUARY
In his fleeting life all aspects of his work embodied the sacred and damned duality of being a rock and roll star.
Kurt Cobain, February 20, 1967 - April 5, 1994.
As I read the date now, 6:17 AM, listening to the Open Culture-provided 1981 documentary on the Chelsea Hotel, I’m noting that Cobain’s date of death was 30 years and 2 days before the passing of my late father. We step over the bodies.
Grim. It is a grim matter, living this life with this awareness of how fleeting it is.
I’m grateful for all of our artists who inform my own consciousness on days like today.
Creativity has its price. It can result in a feeling of futility. It can feel that the more we attempt to express something of ourselves, the goal recedes all the more rapidly. Are we not now aware of the acceleration of the expansion of the entire universe? What are we to do with this awareness and how brief is the flash of our existence on the surface of reality? I’m reminded now of a work by Lucas Cranach, the Elder, which hung in the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen, Denmark. I visited it often.
It depicts the Angel of Melancholy benignly watching some kids rolling a ball through a hoop. So long as they remain aloof to her presence, engaged in the play of the present moment, she smiles upon them. Meanwhile, in the clouds on the left, a philosopher in a red robe is taken on a terrifying ride by evil spirits. It’s a warning to stay engaged with where we are and what we are doing and not to worry ourselves with the questions of “why?” I studied it for hours, marveling at the transmission of the message across the years.
All this has let me here, now:
Colin wrote the February 20 Open Culture essay on the Chelsea Hotel. It’s all in a day’s work, going from one thing to another. There are rabbit holes galore out here.
We can support each other. That’s the thing. If not now, when? If not us, who? We are the ones who are riding the globe on its spin around the sun that we number 2026. What kind of a future are we going to be leaving to our progeny? I remember 1994, the year when Curt Kobain took his life, so well. I was living that spring in the house my first wife and I had bought in 1991. I had learned on March 25 that she was going to follow through on a plan to divorce me about which she had acquainted me on January 23 of that year. Telling that story may take some time and I’m not entirely certain it is worth telling. Suffice it to say that it was one of those many times when I was forced to recognize that I had placed myself in a position to be hurt and was. She tried to make it fair, but having half of myself amputated is how it felt in the moment. I survived - barely.
When Cobain killed himself, I had nearly achieved the same just a few weeks earlier. I was a week away from seeing my ex-wife for the last time - so far. I have no plans to see her again in this lifetime. She’d arrive with her sister and a U-Haul to take half the furniture and our healthy cat, leaving me with the dying one. If it were not for the support of my parents, particularly my late father, I’m not sure what I would have done, but, as it was, I followed through on the plan that I had made when putting my ex through school to get her certification to teach art. It wasn’t too long before I received word that I had been accepted to the universities to which I had applied to go back for my Master’s degree in German, having earned my BA eight years earlier at Randolph-Macon College, something I touched upon in the article posted earlier this morning:
It was the merest touch, the story of my BA and the professor to whom I owe having it.
However, my writing is nothing if not digressive. Again, it suffices to say that I was supported as I followed through on that plan - emotionally traumatized, but what else was there to do? Lick my wounds? They were well licked by the time all was said and done. Oh, and so much more is always said than done, for we are the most loquacious of primates!
I remember what it was like, waiting out that week for the moving to take place. Cobain was dead. I was numb. I’d be even more numb when I arrived home to find that every pot for our plants but one was gone. So it went. I went too. Within a few months, I left my job at Colonial Williamsburg, closing a twenty year chapter of my life that had started when I arrived as a recruit at the Fife and Drum Building which stood near the Williamsburg Lodge at the time. I had been 11. I was now 31. It was time to go.
I flew on Continental Airlines first to Newark and then on to Munich where I stayed for one night in a hotel by the train station and then I embarked for Prien am Chiemsee where I’d live for 8 weeks in “Bahnmeisterei,” a small building owned then by the “Goethe Institut.” It must have been the home of the station master at one time. I spent an idyllic time there getting my German skills up to par before heading in August to Pittsburgh to take up my role as a Teaching Assistant. I’d teach for 11 semesters in total while earning my degree. I really loved teaching even though I always felt that I wasn’t particularly good at it. I have since learned that I was very good at it. I might return to it sometime, I have thought. I haven’t yet - not formally.
However, are we not all teachers?
Dawn has now broken, a minute ago. That’s where this post started. Where it will end, I am not sure. (pause) Breakfast has been prepared for this day in the bonus round. We aren’t promised another and there will be somewhere between 150-200 thousand who make their final exits today. Something to consider.
What should our response be to this stark fact?
“We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”
- Charles Bukowski
It SHOULD make us love each other…that’s true. That is all that I can do. This put me in mind of this tune:
The lyrics:
Sleeping dog by the open fire
You're sleeping your life away
You don't know how far you've got to go
Or the trouble that you'll have to face
Yet all I can do is love you
Provide you with some fun and food
All I can do is love you
And that is what I do
Sleeping children laying in your beds
Tomorrow you'll be back at school
You look so young but you've come so far
You'll never be any soul's fool
All I can do is love you
Provide you with some fun and food
All I can do is love you
And that is what I do
All I can do is love you
Provide you with some fun and food
All I can do is love you
And that is what I doNow I'm going up to my wife
Baba I pray to you
Love me just a little like I love them
And I can do some sleeping too
All I can do is love you
Provide you with a song
All I can do is love you
Like you've been loving me all along
All I can do is love you
Provide you with a verse or two
All I can do is love you
And that is what I do
This was inspired by Pete’s devotion to Meher Baba - something that I share in my tenuous way. How did that all get started? It happened that a young woman invited me to join “Waging Peace” and “Amnesty International” chapters at Randolph-Macon. I was a very isolated person in the mix of college, so joined gratefully. The only image of me to appear in a college year book is there. I remember myself in those days. The connection back to Baba was provided by our faculty sponsor, Charles Haynes. When he was very young, he had known Baba personally.
Although, over the years, I’ve supported Amnesty International, I haven’t been actively involved since I was in college as an undergraduate. That will change next month. There is a national gathering here not far from where I live in DC. Doing what we can with what we have is what it’s all about, after all.
Onward!
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