I made this giffy slide-show thingie to illustrate a piece of music which I can't include here, 'cuz it ain't on the internet anywhere. It's from an old Paul Winter album called Canyon, and it consists of a cello playing doomy, moody arpeggios while a man sings like he is hanging off the edge of the world. It's a wilderness wail, a come-to-the-end-of-everything howl of sorrow and grief that is quite extraordinary, because it has no words. Not many could do that. In fact, I don't think I've heard ANYONE do it besides this guy, whoever he is.
This gif didn't turn out great. It purposely runs quite slowly to try to match the music. I cropped the 46 frames totally wrong, should've gone for widescreen and instead chose something closer to a square. I found some great images, but the gif program spat them back out at me with white margins, which they never had going in. The photos are a collection of private and public ones, all on the theme of - what - angst? Aloneness? Mortality, and the great unfathomable? Maybe all of those things. I look at other people, and it's not that I think they're necessarily richer or smarter, but don't they just have it "better" than me in some indefinable way? Such as being a famous writer. There's one. No one knocked her guts out as much as I did, for so little reward. It just wasn't in the cards for me.
Other things worked out, but how mortal are we? We all hang by a spiderweb. We had a death in the family on Friday, not really close family but very much a part of the circle for years. He had been off the scene for several years when his wife became estranged from my daughter-in-law. But family is family, is it not? - the only glue I've had in my life. Oh, yes, I know these are universal things, we all die, but isn't it terrifying just the same? We don't know when or how, or who. I would like to go first, but I see how selfish that is, and how unlikely. So if you watch these images, sort of badly-cropped because I wasn't thinking, try to imagine a man crying in the wilderness, his voice rising and falling, lamenting in grief, while a cello moans and keens in the background. It's how I'm feeling right now.
POST-BLOG. OK, it's the next day and I see these images totally differently. I think it's one of the best gif slideshows I've made. Who knows how I will feel about it tomorrow.
This isn't the version I wanted to post, but the one I heard in my head simply wasn't available. It was by Barry Greenfield, but a much more luxe version with the first few notes of the American national anthem played on chimes. I woke up this morning with these lines in my head:
I love California
But I'm watching it die
I'm watching it die
Then I realized that, like Save the Country by Laura Nyro/The Fifth Dimension, it was a perfect anthem for these times. These melancholy, frightening times. This was written by an Englishman, I think - haven't had time to research it, there are so many miseries to attend to! So much trauma. This morning I asked myself, why do I feel this weird elation, almost euphoria sometimes? Then it came to me: I'm in crisis mode. I do great in a crisis, lousy all the rest of the time. Adrenaline mobilizes, "fight" supercedes "flight" - but only for a while. Those resources are only to be pulled out and used when they absolutely must.
I've never loved America, but I AM watching it die. And there does not seem to be one damn thing I can do about it.
Have I been feeding this beast (my blog) regularly? Depends on what you mean by regularly. I usually consider that to mean "every day", but to my shock, I now see I haven't posted anything much all week. And I think I know why that is. Something will sneak up on you sometimes, something that snags some issue from the past. Ten months ago I had a serious falling-out with someone whom I considered to be a reasonably close friend for a very long time (he was maybe 6.5 on my friend-o-meter). Then, this past Easter Sunday, and without any warning whatsoever, he died. I only found out about his death because I was part of a mass mailout: somehow I had been left in his email address book, maybe because he didn't bother to remove it. What does it mean when someone dies, and there was unfinished business? Maybe it WAS finished, and that was the whole trouble. I ask myself sometimes: Glass Character, why is it that you seem to be cutting certain people out of your life? And I always come to the same conclusion. They're people who, for one reason or another, appear to have seriously lost their way. In particular, this applies to their personal integrity.
It happens. It happens that people begin to live in a way that is not only deceptive, but deceitful. It happens that a person who has been refreshingly tart turns irreversibly sour. It happens that people begin to use you as a dumping ground for resentments that they're too afraid to meet at the source. Or maybe it's just more convenient that way. So what happened? It's not as if I have lost all my friends, but I will no longer give quarter to anyone who sucks my energy away, or demeans me in any way, or hauls their support out from under me and still expects ME to support THEM (i. e. act as a bottomless receptacle for their toxic waste).
This most recent shock - and shock it was - has had yet more shocks attached to it. When he suddenly died of a massive stroke, my former friend left his longtime partner completely in the lurch financially - not merely penniless, but in an abyss of debt that he cannot possibly cope with. This is so extreme that it's quite possible he will end up homeless and/or have to declare bankruptcy, not exactly a desirable legacy from a 25-year relationship. The community has set up a GoFundMe account for him which so far has only taken in a few hundred dollars. How could he not have known they were in such dire straits? I don't believe he did. I think he just trusted his partner to take care of him. In some ways, he was like an old-fashioned wife who has no idea of the state of her husband's finances until he dies. Then comes the nasty surprise, and the crushing burden that accompanies it. An important aspect of love is financial responsibility, though many people would be incredulous to hear me say that. Or even appalled: dirty, crass money, attached to something as sublime and ideal as Love? Well, think of it. One must live - isn't that so? To live, one needs financial support of some kind. Unless you think you're going to live forever, you must make provisions for your partner, especially if that partner is more than twenty years younger than you (meaning he may have another 30 to 40 years left to live, with no significant means of support except a disability pension). If you don't make these provisions, if you don't think about it or bother about it, it's not only arrogant but thoughtless, ignorant, and - I think - cruel.
Ten months ago when we had our falling-out, I was reacting to something that I now see reflected this arrogance and thoughtlessness, well-concealed by his "sweet" public persona. I felt the ground being cut away under my feet, destroying what I thought was his support. But then, being truly supportive was something he did not seem to know how to do, or even have any interest in. Suddenly I knew nothing, I shouldn't even be taking one step towards the issue at hand because I had not had the years and years of training he had, and blah blah blah blah blah. He had to be right, always, and his righteousness had to be acknowledged. That's the way it went, those were the rules, and I wouldn't play by them.
My reaction and throwing the friendship into reverse is only a particle, not even that, compared to what his partner is going through now. He has less than nothing: he's in the red, the minuses, though to what extent I don't know. How could this happen? How could two ageing men living quietly in one of Canada's favorite retirement communities get themselves into such a godawful mess? I have a bad feeling about it, and it seems to confirm some suspicions that there was a lot going on in this case that is deeply disturbing to contemplate. But I can't write about it now.
When people die, they are often elevated to sainthood. I'm sure this will happen tomorrow afternoon at his memorial service. It's just something we do, a social custom, or else a superstition (don't ever speak ill of the dead or they will rise up out of their grave and fly around your house making pictures jump off the wall and going "Wooooooo!"). Suddenly we can't say enough about them, though it's not really about the person who died at all. It's to make US feel better about harbouring all those resentments and negative feelings, to pretend they don't exist at all. But sometimes they exist for a reason.
It's Friday now, and it hasn't been a good week for blogging because I just feel kind of flat. It depresses me when someone I respected turns out to be this irresponsible. Or should I say: this big an asshole. For that's what he was, or he wouldn't have held his partner hostage to a crushing, stigmatizing financial burden he can never repay. At its worst, debt is dishonest. Even at its best, it's like living on top of a gigantic hole with a fragile floor over it (and there is a name for that, by the way: it's called a "pitfall trap") that will barely hold your weight. Sooner or later disaster strikes, and it all caves in. Then the person you supposedly love the most must fall into the abyss. To quote Bob Dylan, whom I've been thinking a lot about lately: "But oh, what kind of love is this/Which goes from bad to worse?"
We carried you in our arms
On Independence Day
And now you’d throw us all aside
And put us on our way
Oh what dear daughter ’neath the sun
Would treat a father so
To wait upon him hand and foot
And always tell him, “No?”
Tears of rage, tears of grief
Why must I always be the thief?
Come to me now, you know
We’re so alone
And life is brief
We pointed out the way to go
And scratched your name in sand
Though you just thought it was nothing more
Than a place for you to stand
Now, I want you to know that while we watched
You discover there was no one true
Most ev’rybody really thought
It was a childish thing to do
Tears of rage, tears of grief
Why must I always be the thief?
Come to me now, you know
We’re so alone
And life is brief
It was all very painless
When you went out to receive
All that false instruction
Which we never could believe
And now the heart is filled with gold
As if it was a purse
But, oh, what kind of love is this
Which goes from bad to worse?
Tears of rage, tears of grief
Why must I always be the thief?
Come to me now, you know
We’re so alone
And life is brief
TAG-ON: Obsessed with Dylan again, and re-reading one of the bios, I had a bizarre experience last night. Didn't sleep worth a shit, didn't even think I WAS asleep all night, because I kept seeing or experiencing a long series of short films about Dylan. These were all from different times in his life/career and not in any order. They looked sort of like they were on panels or things like piano keys and I went from one to the other, and I didn't want to see them but couldn't stop. Sometimes I felt like I was IN the movies, but probably not. I wanted to get out of them and felt like the movies went on all night and I got no sleep at all. I was full of anxiety because I don't do well when I don't sleep, and serious sleep deprivation has been known to make me go completely crazy. But when I woke up, I said, Jesus, Margaret, don't you know those were dreams, and if they were dreams you must've been asleep? TAG-ON TWO: While Dylaning around on the internet last night, I found a crazy and incredible speech he made at the Grammys in 2015, after receiving some sort of award. It just went on and on. Normally if he gets an award, he nods tersely, takes the award and goes home. In this case, God knows how long the speech took, but this is the part I want to share with you because it moved me so, and somehow ties in with the video I used to illustrate this post. Oh, and I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Joan Baez. She was the queen of folk music then and now. She took a liking to my songs and brought me with her to play concerts, where she had crowds of thousands of people enthralled with her beauty and voice.
People would say, "What are you doing with that ragtag scrubby little waif?" And she'd tell everybody in no uncertain terms, "Now you better be quiet and listen to the songs." We even played a few of them together. Joan Baez is as tough-minded as they come. Love. And she's a free, independent spirit. Nobody can tell her what to do if she doesn't want to do it. I learned a lot of things from her. A woman with devastating honesty. And for her kind of love and devotion, I could never pay that back.
All week my thoughts have been straying. The weather has
been glorious, and yesterday we took a sort of tour of the kwanzan cherry trees,
which are now in their full glory all over Vancouver
and area. This year they are particularly magnificent, heavy clusters of blossoms that are a rich pink, almost fuschia. Like the choir of
birdsong we recently heard at BurnabyLake, they lulled, calmed, and
(wince, I hate the word) even healed my spirit.
It’s difficult when someone dies and there is unfinished
business, or even bad feeling. It’s difficult when you realize that a supposedly-kind, supposedly-generous, much-loved figure was quite abusive to you over the years: that he said
and did demeaning, even contemptuous things in the guise of “helping” you. That he undermined your most cherished and passionate beliefs so you wouldn't make a fool of yourself by sharing them with the world.
In this case, our mutual interest was spiritualism. He considered me a dabbler, himself a master. One of the last things I said in my final email to him was “no one is more hidebound than a hidebound medium”. He
quickly fired back a response, which I deleted unread, because I knew what was
in it already. I was so sick of this, so sick of the pattern, needed to break
it once and for all.
It was disturbing to me to see how often I had ended up this way. Even “best friends” somehow seem to arrange it so that I have to run back
and forth and hit the ball from both sides of the net. It's just so much work to keep the whole thing going. The best I can anticipate is indifference; the worst, abuse.
Not to say I’ve never had real friendships, and some of them
have been incredibly rich. But they’re often problematic. They tend to be like
rivers: long ago in high school geography, I learned that rivers have a life, and
though most of them start off vigorous and splashy and full of liquid energy, some end
as a mere meandering swamp. Who knows why or how this happens. But is it beyond the
realm of possibility that the toxic swamp I grew up in had serious, though unconscious repercussions, that it bent and swayed my choices in friendship in ways that often snapped back cruelly in my face?
I think my former friend probably served a need, and sometimes he listened
when we talked – or so I thought. I had known him about 15 years when he moved
away and started his own church, which he retired from (or left, disaffected? Why do I
think so?) early this year. Starting your own church is always a bad idea, or
at least it always ends badly. The faithful inevitably turn against you – you lose control,
they no longer follow your dictums. All this newfangled stuff comes in, and all of a sudden people want to think for themselves. You have a stranglehold, and eventually it just snaps in your hands and lets go. I won’t get into the
bloody mess, the civil war that happened in my own former church when it all
melted down, nor the stress it caused, which (incredibly!) I denied was a major
factor in my own complete meltdown, the near-death experience of 2005.
But that's another story.
When I first began to share some of my Gershwin stuff with
him last year, the vivid impressions I was receiving through his music and his
voice, at first he was extremely enthusiastic, almost in awe. He claimed I
might even have “undeveloped or underdeveloped psychic ability”. Prior to this,
we had gotten together for coffee for over fifteen years and done nothing BUT
talk about our psychic experiences. I shared my own impressions and beliefs very freely, and he seemed
to be listening. I assumed he acknowledged that I had some degree of ability, else why would we be doing this?
But then, out of the blue, it all changed, and as with most psychological abuse, I don't know why. It took the form of, “Of course, in this case I am speaking as a psychotherapist,
which leads me to believe that having these particular fantasies might serve a
psychological need in you due to your former psychiatric” (blah blah blah blah blah).
It was not the first time he had used the word “fantasy” to
write off my experiences (or pulled the "psychotherapist" card, which is brutal), though his own were always authentic. How did he
know? Because everyone respected his gifts, that’s why – this was some sort of
proof, the fact he had so many followers. It validated him. But why did
everyone respect his gifts? Because his experiences were always authentic.
There’s a word for this:
tautology, a snake that swallows its own tail. I was amazed such an
educated man could be so completely blind to it.
I don’t know about everything that happened in this
particular situation, because it is still murky and muddled. I know he is dead, and his death came as a shock to me. I know that ten months ago I was spitting nails, I was so angry at the stuff he said and did, the way I was dismissed. (Is that the true meaning of "dissed"?). And now this, a completely unexpected development. In fact, bizarrely, I just got an email from him - no kidding, from HIS email account - announcing the particulars of his own memorial service. For a lifelong spiritualist, this is irony taken to the level of the sublime. (The more mundane explanation is that his partner, who has the same first name, is still using his email account.)
I have long believed that people die the way they live. It's a sort of variation of "live by the sword, die by the sword" that proves itself over and over again. They saw off the branch they are perched on, the one they're afraid to climb down from. A lot of workaholic businessmen drop dead on
retirement, having lost their sense of purpose. My former friend “retired” from
his church/spiritualist centre, where he was resident medium for eight years, but I have a funny back-of-the-neck feeling he left, which is a different thing. The
tepid response on Facebook to his retirement notice (just a handful of likes
and comments, after eight years?) and even more tepid response to the death
announcement tells me something. I don't know why, some psychic flash perhaps (heh-heh), but I can see an "open letter to the members of the Blah Blah Church" stating his reasons for leaving. That's just the kind of thing he'd do. Pedantic, lawyer-ish, pounding away at the same point until you want to scream.
(I know all this is far too personal to write about, but I do
get tired, sometimes, of posting Betty Boop gifs, much as I enjoy making them.
This blog has never been quite sure what it is about, and it will never have a
large readership, but one of the purposes of it is to help me wrestle with/hack
my way through the jungle of serious dilemmas. Writing is a way, as far as I am concerned, like the
Way of Zen that Alan Watts used to write about. It’s my way of surviving in the world
and at least trying to make sense of things.)
This is a rapid turnover thing, however. Already, today I am
in a different place, though not through any conscious decision. With my family
of origin, eventually I came around to pitying them, pity being the back door of
compassion. I didn’t leap into the arms of forgiveness, in spite of the current
cultural imperative to forgive people who’ve raped you, murdered your children, etc. etc.,
because if you don’t you’ll walk around seething with hatred for the rest of
your life and it will destroy you. There are no other alternatives, of course:
forgive the person completely, or consume yourself in the acid of hatred, which of course
you “shouldn’t be feeling” anyway. Nice people just don't.
I’m not for hate, and I never have been, but I was surprised
when compassion came in the back gate. It just sort of did, it sat there on the
stump in the yard. I didn’t exactly welcome it in for tea, but I was surprised
and felt something of a sense of awe. I now felt sorry for all of them, especially the ones who are dead, who I can never talk to again. The
more egregious the wrong, the deeper the pity. What else could I feel? Imagine BEING that way. Evil
consumes itself, and you don't even have to concern yourself with revenge. The most you will ever have to do is hold up a mirror.
I don’t know if evil was going on here, but I know there was contempt and
loftiness and pulling the card of superiority (“you must be very, very careful,
Margaret, because I have years and years of intensive training, whereas you. . .
“). I know that loftiness and the swirling cape of expertise hides a hole. It
only has a few branches and some scrub over it, so I know how easy it is to
fall in.
Something about the manner of his dying continues to bother me. It's the same way Lloyd Dykk died, and if ever a man carried a load of poison karma, it was that one. His colleagues stood around his deathbed trying to figure out if they could remember any details of his life. Incredibly, he only worked in one place for his entire career, the backwater arts pages of the Vancouver Sun, and had never spread himself out, probably because his spirit was so small. No one knew if he had kin anywhere - there were only vague, conflicting ideas. So what is a stroke? Something backs up on you, I think. Something in your head disastrously explodes. If you're immensely old, it makes some sense - the vessels age, they wear out - but at 67? At 67, it's a form of autointoxication.
My former friend the medium seems to have been struck down in the same disastrous way, though he was three years older. I DO feel sorry for the people who miss him, as they now
must cope with mixed feelings over how he must have treated them. His former disciples may be of the “you
must forgive" school of thought, not wanting to acknowledge that life isn’t a
dichotomy. In fact, sometimes it’s so bloody complicated, with so many confusing
and conflicting options, that it’s hard to know how to feel at all. But one
thing I do know: it is almost never “either/or”.
I also know that “should” has no place here. Other people’s
agendas have no place. “You should
forgive”, or, worse, “You MUST forgive” only reveals their profound
discomfort with your anger, pain and grief. They want you to freeze that anger,
hide it, even swallow it, though they would be indignant if it were pointed out
to them that all of this is for their own sake, to save THEM grief and
discomfort. In truth, they just don’t want to know.
This whole situation has affected me far more than I thought
it would. I do feel sorry for those involved, because I don’t know how many
people this man had in his life, how much kin, if any. He did seem to lose his
way professionally, and I do think he badly needed the pompous professorial mode
(two Masters degrees and a PhD, whew!).
And the way he died was simply awful, a massive "cerebrovascular accident" on Easter Sunday which
took a couple of days to kill him. His partner posted a heartbreaking account on his blog, and it made for very difficult reading. It also gave me a prickly feeling on the back of my neck, because to be perfectly honest, he was the one and only person I ever formally put a curse on.
Coincidence is a strange thing.
So what now? I don’t know, I guess now it’s none of my
business. There is a memorial service in a week - interestingly enough, NOT at his former church - but it’s inappropriate for me to go, and
I find I just don’t want to. We either go on after we die, or not. Maybe the
energy dwells only in our collective memory, but that’s powerful enough. I was shocked to learn that the church he walked away from had to pass the hat to scrounge up enough money to bury him. Here I’m not revealing any secrets, just repeating something which is stated on the church's Facebook page. There was a plea for donations to help his surviving partner cope with the massive debt he left behind.
This
is sad, but you reap what you sow. Debt is a hole you fall into eventually
– it means you’re living on someone
else’s money and should be making restitution, but you’re not, for whatever
reason. And it usually comes about not through chance or a sudden event, but by a whole series of very unwise decisions.
And to leave massive debt on the shoulders of your surviving partner, particularly a person who appears to be emotionally fragile, is nothing short of irresponsible.
So all this has made for a very strange, sometimes melancholy week. I keep thinking of Celie in The Color Purple: one of the most powerful scenes in moviehood,
where she points at her tormenter and flings a curse which is full of
righteousness. CAN a curse be righteous? I think it can, because in essence it
merely turns the dark beam around at the person emanating it. In an awful lot of
cases, it turns out to be too much for them to stand.
(This is a rerun of the "Gershwin time travel" piece that started the whole thing. Or perhaps it started much longer ago than that. My big question is: when does it end?)
Gershwin is a time traveller - you can see him out of the corner of your eye. He did not die in the normal sense of the word, because he did not know where he was. He was in a very high fever and dying all alone in a hospital room after failed brain surgery. When he left his body, he experienced extreme disorientation and for quite a while did not realize he was dead. This meant that a light, loose Gershwin-shaped energy field still moved about the world, and lit up whenever his music was played (which was almost all the time).
After a very long time, though it was a mere moment in eternity, he began to realize who and how he actually was, that he was no longer in a body and would have to exist in a very different form. Being a soul sojourner from the beginning, this was not a threat but an adventure to him. But even in spite of this necessary metamorphosis, to a remarkable degree, he retained a George Gershwin shape. No matter what sort of problems he was having in his life, and he had many that we don't know anything about, there was a ferocious static-charged supernatural pumped boost of energy that somehow kept on connecting people with each other when he was around.
But ironically, in spite of his sacred mission to join people joyously, in his life he had many struggles with intimacy, which led to a loneliness even as he was the most popular man in the room. During this strange leaving-his-body-and-not-being-sure-where-he-was period, he began to have extraordinary insight into not just his own condition, but the human condition. GG's emotional affect and his emotions seemed curiously light, but there was a galaxy of melancholy within that he did not show to too many people. The stars in that galaxy exploded out of his fingers and his brain and were made manifest as notes of music on the page.
Though he lived at a hurtling pace few people could equal, little did he know that he was absorbing all of humanity's travails, gaining an understanding of suffering that would not be fully realized until he found himself in a different form outside his body. It would have been unbearably painful, had his life (as he knew it) not been over, a blessed cessation of all earthly pain. When a soul or entity gains this sort of awareness, mysterious alchemy takes place because the need here on earth for that level of understanding is so dire. Those pained and anguished places in that broken thing we call the human condition began to draw and attract this generous, gentle, deeply broken spirit. There was Gershwin dust in the room sifting down like stardust, particularly when there was music playing. And there was music playing a lot.
Someone, not keeping up their guard, felt something strange or warm and not quite familiar in the room, yet also hauntingly familiar. Someone else thought they saw him for a second, or someone that looked like him. There was in some subconscious way a powerful sense that a healing was beginning to happen. As the entity begins to heal, so it heals itself. George's brain gave way, the most disturbing way to die, so that he was basically humbled by losing the genius brain he was celebrated for. Stripped of that, even of that, all that was left was his essence. How can I say how this happens? How can I be sure that George Gershwin is a time traveller and an entity who is basically free to move about within time and space wherever and whenever he wishes?
This started off as a tack-on for my last post on Sunflower, but then I realized that, even for this blog, which trades in twists and turns and irrelevancies, it was just too irrelevant to be there. But I have to deal with it, somehow. This is something of an update on another tack-on from my Bob Dylan post, Darkness at the Break of Noon. Yes, my former friend is dead. He is not asleep; he is dead. At the end of the Dylan post, I wondered what exactly had happened to him: his longtime partner, someone I have never connected with (they were, strangely, both named Paul), emailed me to say he'd had a stroke and was "not expected to survive the weekend". It was a mass email that went out to a couple dozen people, none of whom I knew. Nothing came after that. I didn't feel comfortable answering the email, and I needed to know, so I had to do some detective work. I found out on the Facebook page for his former church (which he founded and made himself the head of) that he died on Easter Sunday.
Is he in the Afterlife, whatever that is? I feel him batting around me like a fly. It's a nuisance, is what it is. Not a good energy, if it IS him. Black magic - was there some black magic going on here? Nonsense, I know nothing about it, even though I took his class in traditional/aboriginal medicine many moons ago. That's how I learned about curses, poisoned darts, boiled toads and datura. So it's interesting that if - a big if - an impossible if - IF there were any black magic going on at all here, the source of it would actually be him. What happened for me was anything but magic. His was a particularly fine-edged abuse: take an interest at first, be kind, be helpful, be supportive even, and then, for reasons impossible to ascertain, or for no reason at all - chwwwwwwt! (The sound of a guillotine blade making a lizardy little breeze). I only know that, having set himself up as an expert on certain things I was interested in, he said some hateful, hurtful, condescending, even contemptuous things about me and my beliefs.
Yet everyone thought he was the most wonderful, big-hearted, kind - but here, I am not sure. He left that church at some point - "retired", but if I knew the man at all - knew the hole in the centre of his sureness - I think he left because he lost control of the whole thing. No one was falling in line any more. He had ceased to be the Little Prince, holding sway over his own little spiritualist fiefdom. It was a long time ago I met him, I was a different person then, and I would never let anyone like that into my life now. I had enough of it growing up in my family of origin, thank you very much. (But then again: most of THEM are dead now, too. Funny how, in a strange sort of way, death solves everything.)
But it's unpleasant, the way things come back to me, disparaging things I put up with: having my own spiritualist experiences, which I was testing out because I wasn't sure what to make of them, dismissed as "oh I don't know, it's probably just some kind of fantasy", said in a bored sort of voice. Whereas he would go on, and on, and on about his own experiences, with the assumption that all of them were bona fide. Did anyone even need to question it? The Gershwin thing hurt and angered me. I am the first to say it may well be 100% imagination, but my exploration at first seemed to be greeted with enthusiasm and even fascination. I started sending him things. I don't know when, exactly, the turning point came, but it's hard to hear that nasty little metallic "chwwwwwwt!" before you've even had breakfast.
No, this doesn't sound authentic at all. No, I could check with some of my friends who know something about this, but I know what they'd all say. Don't forget, Margaret, that you don't really have a grounding in this tradition and that I trained myself for many, many decades to blah blah blah. I don't see anything here that blah blah blah blah blah. He did not have to say, "Oh yes, write a book about it, why don't you." But the sudden trap door opening under my feet reminded me of another vicious sadist, a man whom I later found out was virtually sociopathic in his cruelty to others. I actually found it out from a psychiatrist who had "inside knowledge" that I did not doubt. Later I found some blog posts from people who turned themselves inside-out apologizing for him because he was dead, but then went on to compare him to Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, with his lethal trap door. A direct quote from a dear friend of his (name changed to protect the innocent, namely me): My good friend writer R. D. died last week. This is not an obituary. Nor is it a paean to him. He would have hated that. R. was not a perfect person. He was funny and kind but he frequently isolated himself and he cut off some friends like Sweeney Todd dispatching a client.
He was also deeply private. As he lay dying of a stroke at age 67, colleagues were arguing about the particulars of his life. Did he have one brother or two? Had his father been a school teacher or farmer? Did R. really play the cello and, if not, how did this small town Prairie boy develop such a profound knowledge of music?
I hope that, when my time comes, work colleagues don't stand around my deathbed trying to piece together my life, trying to determine if I had anyone in my life at all (which these rather chilling words imply). Obviously they were attempting to scrape up particulars for his obituary, having no one else to ask. I think this goes beyond being "deeply private". I wondered at first if someone had found him weeks later, as sometimes, sadly, happens with people who "frequently isolate themselves". I also hope there are no comparisons in my obituary to Sweeney Todd, who slit people's throats in his barber chair, slid them down a trap door, had them ground up into meat and made them into pies that people then purchased and ate. (Sidebar: in the usual published tribute, someone at the Sun strongly implied he had been wasted in the backwater of Canada and should have been writing for somebody important, like the New Yorker. I'm trying to figure out who this says the most about: R. D., the commentator, the Vancouver Sun or the New Yorker.)
And a curious thought: both men died of sudden strokes. I don't want to go too far down the road of what that might mean symbolically. Neither of them were old: seventy-ish, if that. In fact, R. D. was maybe 67. First there is a person, then there is no person, then. . . The last email I ever got from Paul I deleted unread. I already knew what was in it. I just pushed the whole thing away from me. Part of me wanted some kind of revenge - I admit it now! And yes, I admit that at that particular point, I had my mojo working. What does that mean, exactly? What that means, and all it means, is that one holds up a mirror. One holds up a mirror, and whatever bad vibes that person is emanating, they bounce right back at them and hit them in the face. You don't have to do anything, not anything at all. That's the way it works. That's why I opened this post with Celie's famous statement from The Color Purple. It's the scene in which she gets her power back. I got mine back a very long time ago, but it is nasty to be reminded that someone, anyone, can toy with it and do damage the way Paul did.
I can't sit here and say I'm glad he's dead, because surely he did have people who cared about him, and I wouldn't insult them. But I am glad that the nastiness in him, unacknowledged by anyone around him, is dead. I am glad his pomposity and intellectual bullying and constantly pulling rank on people to make himself feel better is dead. I am glad that peculiar form of sinking dismay will never happen to me again. I know I have learned from him, but not even remotely what he thought I would/"should" learn. From him I learned I can step around narcissists who seem to believe they have special knowledge, wield special power, and are thus innately entitled to tell you that your own beliefs are ill-informed and of no value. From him, I learned what to avoid - what to ignore - and how to keep on walking.
But meanwhile. . . LET'S SING!
Seems a downright shame
Shame?
Seems an awful waste
Such a nice, plump frame
Wot's his name has
Had
Has
Nor it can't be traced!
Business needs a lift
Debts to be erased
Think of it as thrift as a gift
If you get my drift, no?
Seems an awful waste
I mean, with the price of meat
What it is? When you get it
If you get it
Hah
Good, you got it
Take for instance, Mrs. Mooney and her pie shop
Business never better using only pussycats and toast
And a pussy's good for maybe six or seven at the most
And I'm sure they can't compare as far as taste
Mrs. Lovett, what a charming notion
Well, it does seem a waste
Eminently practical
And yet appropriate as always, it's an idea
Mrs. Lovett, how I've lived
Without you all these years, I'll never know
How delectable, also undetectable
Think about it
Lots of other gentlemen'll
Soon be comin' for a shave
Won't they?
Think of all them pies
How choice
How rare
For what's the sound of the world out there?
What, Mr. Todd?
What, Mr. Todd?
What is that sound?
Those crunching noises pervading the air
Yes, Mr. Todd, yes, Mr. Todd
Yes, all around
It's man devouring man, my dear
And then who are we to deny it in here?
These are desperate times
Mrs. Lovett and desperate measures are called for
Here we are, now, hot out of the oven
What is that?
It's priest, have a little priest
Is it really good? Sir, it's too good, at least
Then again, they don't commit sins of the flesh
So it's pretty fresh
Awful lot of fat only where it sat
Haven't you got poet, or something like that?
No, y'see, the trouble with poet is
'Ow do you know it's deceased? Try the priest
Heavenly
Not as hearty as bishop, perhaps
But then again
Not as bland as curate, either
And good for business too
Always leaves you wantin' more
Trouble is
We only get it on Sundays
Lawyer's rather nice
If it's for a price
Order something else, though to follow
Since no one should swallow it twice
Anything that's lean
Well then, if you're British and loyal
You might enjoy Royal Marine
Anyway, it's clean
Though of course it tastes of wherever it's been
Is that squire on the fire?
Mercy, no sir, look closer
You'll notice it's grocer
Looks thicker, more like vicar
No, it has to be grocer, it's green
The history of the world, my love
Save a lot of graves
Do a lot of relatives favors
Is those below serving those up above
Everybody shaves
So there should be plenty of flavors
How gratifying for once to know
That those above will serve those down below
Now let's see, here we've got tinker
Something pinker
Tailor? Paler, Butler? Subtler
Potter? Hotter, Locksmith?
Lovely bit of clerk
Maybe for a lark
Then again there's sweep
If you want it cheap
And you like it dark
Try the financier, peak of his career
That looks pretty rank
Well, he drank, it's a bank
Cashier, never really sold
Maybe it was old
Have you any Beadle?
Next week, so I'm told
Beadle isn't bad till you smell it and
Notice 'ow, well, it's been greased
Stick to priest
Now then, this might be a little bit stringy
But then of course it's fiddle player
No, this isn't fiddle player, it's piccolo player
'Ow can you tell? It's piping hot then blow on it first
The history of the world, my sweet
Oh, Mr. Todd, ooh, Mr. Todd
What does it tell?
Is who gets eaten, and who gets to eat
And, Mr. Todd, too, Mr. Todd
Who gets to sell
But fortunately, it's also clear
That, but everybody goes down well with beer
Since marine doesn't appeal to you
'Ow about rear admiral?
Too salty, I prefer general
With or without his privates? 'With' is extra
What is that? It's fop
Finest in the shop
And we have some shepherd's pie peppered
With actual shepherd on top
And I've just begun
Here's the politician, so oily
It's served with a doily
Have one, put it on a bun
Well, you never know if it's going to run
Try the friar
Fried, it's drier
No, the clergy is really
Too coarse and too mealy
Then actor, that's compacter
Yes, and always arrives overdone
I'll come again
When you have judge on the menu
Wait, true, we don't have judge yet
But we've got something you might fancy even better
