Dr. King remembered

I was a white boy growing up in the deep south.
In my life, 1951 . . .  a vivid memory stands out: the remembrance of this brave man:


. . . his life, his work, his service to mankind, his leadership in the perilous project of fulfilling our Creator's call to 

. . . bring good news to the afflicted, . . . to proclaim liberty to the captives and freedom to prisoners . . . (Isaiah 61:1)

In my lifetime, I can think of no other American who demonstrated greater courage than Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He persisted tirelessly in the sacred call to blaze a trail of opportunity for oppressed people. He persevered in the face of certain death, as he fully understood the vengeful opposition of other men--white and black--who  ultimately took him down.

The name assigned to him at birth, King, was appropriate, as he went on to conduct the life of a true leader, a born leader, an orator, an organizer who truly fulfilled  the declaration of our nation's founding principles:

We find these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,  that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

In my lifetime, I can recall no other person who more deserves annual remembrance during a national holiday. Although he had his faults, his own sins as we all do,  he was a man of whom this world was not worthy.  In this world, he helped God and fellowman to "make a way where there is no way." He blazed a trail toward that "equal" status mentioned by Mr. Jefferson and the Continental Congress when they composed our Declaration back in 1776.

I am looking forward to meeting Dr. King in heaven, or whatever you call it. Many years ago, I wrote this song about him and an ancient leader named Moses:

Mountaintop

Boomers' Choice (reprise)

Is this world screwed up or what?

Tell me about it.

Nevertheless, there may be reason enough to find happiness,

contentment fulfillment and all that stuff

in the silver lining that highlights those dark clouds.

We baby boomers do have a choice, you know,

about whether to cry in our beer

or find cause enough to rejoice while

we’re here on planet earth.

Have a listen:

Boomers’ Choice:

Well, the boys came marching home from Germany and France

and the bomb had made a blast in in Hiroshima.

We were driving brand new cars; we were waving

stars and bars

and everywhere was another factory.

Back in 1953,

cruising with Dwight E.,

Elvis sang the whiteboy blues,

McCarthy looking under every bush.

In the home of the brave and the free

rolling on prosperity

and all the kids were going off to school.

 

Ten years down the road

another dream had come and gone

and the power of one gun had made itself known.

Back in 1964

big Lyndon opened the door

for civil rights and a bloody Asian war—

young men on porkchop hill

young women on the pill.

At home they said don’t kill;

get a psychedelic thrill.

But the dreams of a woodstock nation

were just an imagination

when the boys came trudging home in ’73.

 

So it’s hey hey ho is there anybody home

and its hie hie hey, seeking light in the night of day:

the dreams of a woodstock nation

were just an imagination

when the boys came trudging home in ’73.

 

Well, it just don’t pay to sob;

guess I’ll get myself a job

selling leisure suits, maybe real estate.

I’m not moving very fast,

just waiting in line for gas

and Johnny Carson gives me all my news.

Back in 1976,

overcoming dirty tricks,

some were moving back to the sticks;

some were looking for a fix.

Ayatollahs on the rise

sulfur dioxide in the skies

and the system makes the man that’s got his own.

 

They say an elephant won’t forget;

let’s play another set.

There’s always another ghost on pac-man’s tail.

Don’t let this boom go stale.

Let’s find an airline for sale

or pop another tape in the VCR.

Back in 1989,

we’re living on borrowed time

getting lost in subtle sin

eating oat bran at the gym.

But there’s an empty place inside

and I was wondering why

these vanities don’t suit.

I’m going back to the gospel truth.

 

And it’s hey hey ho is there anybody home

and it’s hie hie hey, seeking light in the night of day;

There’s an empty place inside and I was wondering why.

These vanities don’t suit;

I’m going back to the gospel truth.

 

Put on your Sarejevo, Mogadishu, Kalishnikov and Columbine shoes,

for the way is treacherous with ruts and rocks.

Yeah, we figured out digits out

before that Y2K could spoil our rout,

but that 9/11 call was in the cards.

Did you consider the question of heaven

before the wreck of ’07?

Will you hear the trumpet call

from the Ancient of Days.

Our way is littered with freaks and fads

from Baghdad through our mouse pads

as the reaper swings his steely scythe

across our wicked ways.

And it’s hey hey ho is there anybody home?

And it’s hie hie hey, seeking light of day.

It’s a dangerous place outside

and I was wondering why.

This world don’t give a hoot;

I’m going back to the gospel truth.

 

  King of Soul

On the Rails of Old Memory

Memories linger mysteriously in our minds, sometimes like precious old photographs, sometimes like skeletons in the closet; they can hang around being stubbornly unpleasant and fearful, or they can shine happy and hopeful like a walk in the park in springtime.

I suppose most memories are intimately personal, but not all of them.

I feel we have collective memories, especially in this modern atmosphere of media saturation, where public events pry deeply into our private imaginations.

My g-generation, the baby boomers—we were the first to grow up with this thing called TV. Now our kids are the first to grow up with this thing called the worldwide web. These media—TV, Internet, radio, cellphones etc. fortify and intensify our memories, especially the collective ones.

Most of us American boomers remember, for instance, where we were and what we were doing on the day that President Kennedy was shot in Dallas.

And we and our children remember, most of us, where we were and what we were doing on that fateful day in 2001—9/11 when the twin towers came down.

These collective memories are potent; they latch on to us; and while they do recede into dark tunnels they can be easily brought to the surface at the mention of those circumstances.

And we have, of course, powerful  personal memories from our own youth. Most vivid perhaps, are those that surround a first love or romance. These vague vestiges of the past are capitalized upon by our songwriters and movie-makers. Here’s an excellent example of a very special song about the mysterious aspect of memories.  It was popular when I was a teenager, Dusty Springfield’s Windmills of Your Mind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKV9bK-CBXo

But there is another kind of collective memory that goes back even further than modern pop-music or movies. It is tucked away in the crevices of history itself. And I find that certain settings or objects can serve as talismans through which human memories are passed from generation to generation and possibly from age to age, even from century to century.

You’ve heard of deja vu, haven’t you? That’s the feeling you can suddenly experience sometimes in a situation that you could not have been in because it took place before you were born.

This deja vu, which is French for “already seen”  is a feeling I get whenever I’m near or in an old train.

So yesterday I was uncovering some serious deja vu when I toured the North Carolina Transportation Museum which is located at an old, obsolete railroad service yard in Spencer, NC, near Salisbury.

http://www.nctrans.org/

There is, for me, something very special about these old trains . . . something that stirs intensely in my soul pertaining to days long ago, in past centuries, when these steaming iron beasts roared across the vast landscapes of that hastily-industrializing age. The feeling that I get has something to do with retrieving past memories that I myself could never have experienced, almost as if the locomotives themselves were mnemonic repositories of 19th-century passengers who embarked to ride in those ancient passenger cars.

In the 2014 novel I wrote, Smoke, I attempted to capture this feeling in the story I was composing at that time. The collective memory, mentioned at the end of the scene described below, is implanted in Philip's mind when he grabs a brass handrail on a French train passenger car. The scene takes place in 1937, in Paris.  It depicts the beginning of a journey being taken by a young American and an old Frenchman who are about to travel from Paris to Lille, in northern France:

Half a morning later they were boarding the northbound train. By that time, whatever it was that had brought together this aged Frenchman and  his young, attentive American charge had been uncorked to its full expression.  The old fellow was intermittently pouring out his life’s vintage in a slow trickle of memory;  its balmy flow had begun to endow their embarkation with a kind of therapeutic anointing, the beneficiary of which was neither the young man nor the old, but that Man of the ages whose fermented wisdom percolated through deepened souls of both men.

Now they were walking beside the train, small luggage in hand. Pausing in mid-stride, Mel managed to recap, in the midst of crowd and bustle, a simple advisement that he had begun last night and had already landed upon this morning. “Half the battle in this life, I think, is deciding what to keep and what to let go. You have got to know when to hold them.”      

They arrived at the railcar to which they had been billeted. Philip appropriated Mel’s briefcase, collecting it with his own, both in his left hand. Placing his right gently hand on Mel’s lower back for support, he waited patiently as the old fellow carefully climbed  onto the steps to ascend into their coach. As Mel’s bony, spotted hand grasped a vertical brass handrail inside the little stair, it seemed to Philip that the ghosts of ten thousand French souls were lingering there. The rail’s brass patina had been worn to a dullish sheen as ten thousand reaching hands had, in the beginnings of their ten thousand journeys on this train, taken hold of it.

I felt like I, or somebody, had grabbed this rail before. The worn brass summons up a kind of  old, collective memory from days gone by.

I guess you'd have to be there . . . Maybe I was, in a sense, there, yesterday when I visited the Railroad museum.

Smoke

Woke up with the Angels

Our first twelve hours in Los Angeles has already included a trip down memory lane.

It's not that I ever spent much time here; I only breezed through back in the early '70s. But rather, this immediate reminiscence is triggered by a deeply insistent behind-the-scenes presence of this fabled city in my g-generation's memory.

Not personal memory. Collective memory. LA was all over our baby boomer adolescence and young adult misadventures: Hollywood is here, with all its celluloid-manufactured dreams, along with the Dodgers, the surfers, the cop shows on network TV, even the Beverly Hillbillies.

I suppose I'm a 2016 hillbilly, blowing in last nigh from my back-east Blue Ridge mountain home. But I'm here to tell ya this megalopolis has made such an immense impact on my 64-year consciousness, I hardly know how to mention all the influences.

Our son and his bride-to-be fetched us at LAX last night, about eight o'clock. After the tension of negotiating our airport pickup--"negotiating" with all the other hundred passing vehicles and passengers at the curb of the A terminal, and "negotiating" with an irate neon-vested traffic controller about our hazardous rendezvous tactics in the midst of their managed confusion--after that little eye-of-the-needle thing, next thing I know we're out on the freeway at night in a river of whizzing lights and gleaming glass, metal and speed.

On one heightened stretch of this highly energized raceway I caught a glimpse in the distance of this glistening mega-city into which we were fast propelling. Then out of nowhere a phrase from some old song was jangly in my head:

"but I couldn't let go of L A, city of the fallen angels"

Not literally true of course. There are plenty of good people here, millions of them. But that phrase is a cleverly cynical play on the name itself: Los Angeles, Spanish for "The angels."

I knew the phrase was from an old Joni Mitchell song; I could hear the line sung in my head, but didn't remember which song.

This morning when we woke up, this was the AirBnB view from our window:

After a couple of cups of coffee, and a time-warp discovery in our apartment of an ancient artifact:

This must be what an MP33rpm looks like.

With that old turntable spinning snippets of misspent youth around in my brain, I decided to take a chance on writing this blog, as a vehicle for summoning up whatever memories are zinging around in my mind just now, while sipping coffee in eL A in the morning. Look at this old phonograph; grok its significance in the history of communication technology; cherish its unique position in the collective consciousness stream of my g-generation. You can perhaps imagine within its groovy vinyl-etched peaks and canyons, the adventurous wanderings of our g-generation as we sought far and wide for something we know not what nor where we might find it. Through those pathways of memory you may recall earlier mention, back in the first paragraph, of: reminiscence . . . triggered by a deeply insistent behind-the-scenes presence of this fabled city in my g-generation's memory.

Joni Mitchell, back in the day, wrote a beautiful, piano-based song, Court and Spark.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHEDdecvLpU&nohtml5=False

Her crooning imagery, describing in this song some encountered street-singing man, captures well the wandering spirit of those times--the obsession with freedom in all things--love, travels, thoughts, romantic interludes that did or did not happen.

And it was in that song, Court and Spark, that the jangly phrase ". . . couldn't let go of L A, city of the fallen angels" is found, in the very last line.

The flights of flirtatious fancy therein are a prospect that a man or woman could spend a lifetime pursuing.

But I do believe that, while the prospect of such a life of romantic rendezvous seems quite attractive and very compelling, the actual living of it, long term, is probably very problematical, perhaps traumatic, maybe even tragic. Tragic romanticism--I knew it well. For a while. And I associate it with the stuff of our dreams, my g-generation's dreams that floated from Hollywood and eL A and the city by the bay and all that groovy stuff.

I imagine the lovely genius woman who composed that musical phrase about the city of the fallen angels; she must have lived a life in adventurous pursuit of such exciting moments and passionate encounters, one after another for a whole lifetime.

Me, I did not. I settled down, got a hold of the Christian faith, became a one-woman man. After 36 years of shared adventure, including the present one of visiting Micah and Kyong-Jin in this great city of Los Angeles, Pat and I sit here contentedly this morning with our coffee and our leftovers from last night's Korean feast for breakfast. And nothing could be finer than to be in Carolina California in the morning.

What a great ride!



Glass half-Full

D-day Dream or Memory

I was awakened in the middle of the night, or the wee hours of the morning, whatever you call that time. There was a memory in my mind of being in a military boat, one of those assault vessels that was used back in the day when our guys hit the beaches at Normandy in order to initiate the grand invasion, the terrible task of running the third reich out of Germany.

I do not know how or why this memory, or dream or whatever it was, happened to me. I have not served in the military. What is most vivid in this slumbery experience was the feeling or knowledge that I was entering into a battle zone with a clear understanding and extreme fear that I might not come out of this alive. And that I might just dash up onto that beach, weighed down with all this gear, and that all these bullets flying at us--that one or two of them might hit me and that would be the end of it for me.

Maybe I was having this fearful thought or dream because this D-Day thing, like 9/11 or the Kennedy assassination or some such other collective memory, is part of our national subconscious and it is a thing that pops up every now and then from deep down under the surface of things.

I don't think this occurrence was random. It was probably triggered within me by some recent images in my mind from movies or video or what I've been reading or what I myself have written about in the novelistic pursuits of my research. I have to take note of the fact that I did watch Thirteen Hours four nights ago, the movie about Benghazi in which there was some graphic combat imagery portraying the heroic acts of our guys that defended the American outpost there on that fateful night back in 2012 when four of our people did not get alive out.

Maybe that's what it was; maybe there were other imagery elements of warfare floating around in my mind, our mind, pertaining to our collective experience as a nation, a people, or a culturally Western retention of the akashic records. Maybe it was the documentary I watched yesterday evening about the terrorist massacre at the Charlie Hebdo magazine office in Paris about a year ago.

Maybe it was because I was watching an episode or two of Foyle's War a week or so ago, which is one of those understated British TV series about a stiff-upper-lip detective during the time of WWII. His home and work, in the show, is in Hastings, Sussex, England, on the Channel, across from Normandy, and many of the show's story lines are closely connected to WWII strivings.

Or maybe this dream visitation was because I was reading, last night, Charles Taylor's massive historical study, A Secular Age,

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002KFZLK2/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?ie=UTF8&btkr=1

in which I encountered on page 409, and pondered, this thought:

"In a sense, the terrible trauma of the First World War was paradoxically resolved at least in part by the Second. This is because it really was a war to defend civilization. Hitler brought reality dow to match and surpass the war propaganda of the previous conflict. This, plus the moral discrediting of Communism, emptied the ranks of extreme Left and Right . . ."

Now that Left and Right are at each others throats again, we wonder if somehow this ancient Contention is cyclical in history, or is this just the human condition in which we are always and always have been on one side or the other in the grand struggle of right vs. wrong, good vs. evil, etcetera etcetera etcetera and so on and so on,

As Peter, Paul and Mary sang back in the day, when I was coming of age, Take your place on the great Mandella.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpIh68Kh_-s

or maybe its just that the entire Western world is at a crossroads now that so many are actively rejecting our Judeo-Christian substratum in order to have it surreptitiously replaced with Imamic balderdash.

I will end this little rabbit trail meander down collective memory lane with a pic (positioned at the top of this posting) that we snapped at the Korean War memorial last summer. In the photo, we see an eerie kind of mingling of past and present souls, a mixture of imagery from our brief stop during a Washington DC tour, and a memorial of sacrificial service that took place in a war on the other side of the world while I was being born in 1951.

Maybe that's it--something to do with being born, or dying. . .

Smoke

The Wind

I don't remember the first time

I ever felt it,

or saw or heard it, but

I know it is there.

I mean I know its here

or at least it was a minute ago.

And before that I saw a picture of it,

evidence that it was there

or here or somewhere.

It was in an art gallery where Mr. Wyeth had

done something or other that

moved me, really moved me although

I don't know why.

This involved brushing paint on a canvas.

It was a wistful scene but then a few minutes later

I saw another work that some artist had left behind

about a shipwreck, and it looked pretty severe.

So it works both ways.

Don't know how or when

but I remember too, some poet or his

singing about it, and he said the answer was

blowing in it,

the answer to what I don't know

maybe how many times must the cannonballs fly

or the winds of war blow or

the winds of change rearrange

everything that is or ever was or ever will be.

A few days ago I was in that windy city

where stuff had happened

long ago, back in the day,

and I remembered

part of what had happened

but I wasn't sure if it had happened to me

or if I just remembered it from some

news report I saw or some

painting I viewed or collective memory from

my g-generation

and then I remembered that ye must be born

again. The wind blows where it wishes and you hear

the sound of it, but do not know where it comes from

and where it is going; so is everyone who is born

of the Spirit

and that's enough for me.

You feel it?

I'm not making this up.



King of Soul