This card was stuck in our windshield when we came back from shopping today. Up to now, such things have been ads for gutter cleaning, roofing, landscaping, or something mundane like that. But this was different.
Haven't seen anything quite like it - it seems to cover any known human issue (including Mother Katery and Removing of Obiya), a few that aren't even known yet, problems that you don't have and may never have, or CANNOT have ("Help! I'm stuck on the moon!"). I don't wish to be too critical here, as something like this may help someone, or maybe a lot of someones.
If this person has some real ability to help with SOME of these issues, or can at least provide a listening ear. . . but that's NOT what it's usually about.
Like Benny Hinn and Joel Osteen and Creflo Dollar, this person may well be preying on the weak and vulnerable. OR NOT. The fact that this advertisement likely represents a different culture (South Asian, I think) makes me want to tread carefully - for how do I know what it's like to live within that culture?
Still, when a solution to EVERY SINGLE problem is laid out for you like a banquet of exaggeration, you've got to wonder. And I'd have to go all the way out to Delta to partake of this, unless it can be done by text message or Zoom (the way most "therapy" is done these days. You have to have the app.)
I can't begin to go into the times I've been taken in by people who seemed to have a genuine gift. But at some point, the "gift" became more important than they were - and the whole thing got corrupted, if it ever had any value to begin with.
My former friend Paul Biscop, whom I met when he was teaching a university course in anthropology, claimed to be a spiritualist medium, and even founded his own church on Vancouver Island (though that ended rather badly). But the relationship was rocky and uneven, and eventually he dismissed all of my spiritual experiences as "fantasies" or even mental illness - which really hurt, though I can't imagine why. He said he was trying to help me with this insight, and of course I should have been grateful. But he often pulled rank, citing his two Masters degrees and his PhD as proof that all of HIS experiences were obviously valid, and mine were bogus.
Many years later, long after I had broken off the dubious friendship, he suddenly died, and what he left in his wake appalled me. His partner/spouse of 24 years (also named Paul) was left with more than $10,000.00 indebt that he had no idea existed. Far from being left with no insurance money, he was left with a gaping hole that couldn't be filled. Last I heard he was literally homeless, and the spiritualist church Paul Biscop stomped away from was trying to help him by setting up a GoFundMe page.
As nice as the folks at this church were, I could tell there had been bad blood there. It had become Paul's little pocket cult, and the rest of the congregation ultimately protested. When he died, his memorial was held at a local Masonic Hall, and very few from the church attended. A table was set up at the back of the hall to sell off some of his books on anthropology and spiritualisms in order to help his surviving partner. . . survive.
To this day, there's a page-long tribute online all about how wonderful the man was, with none of the problematic things he did even mentioned. It almost seems like, as with Elvis, dying was a good career move for Paul. In any case, it's a cautionary tale, for it's just possible Paul set off on this spiritual journey with good intentions. Like Marshall Applewhite, like David Koresh, like Jim Jones? ALL of these men started off as relatively mainstream Christian preachers who may have thought their intentions were good. And they brought a lot of people along with them, one way or another.
Let's just say it didn't end well.
OK then. . . what does this have to do with this card? Everything and nothing. It may be a whole 'nother circumstance, and I hope it is, but I also hope it isn't another form of Benny Hinn-ism, where people pour all their hopes and most of their savings into something that will only leave them spiritually bankrupt.
FURTHER READING. I went into more detail in this blog post, which deals with some of the same issues. Read it if you like.
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
Where should I begin? I don't know when it began. After I realized my third novel was crashing in flames, and would never rise again? Perhaps. But I think it started long before that. How can you NOT know about Gershwin? At least something. At least some of those songs: The way you wear your hat. I got rhythm. And even (though we don't know where, or why) Swanee, how I love ya, how I love ya. It's a delicate thing when you begin to feel a presence in your life. You're not sure how to receive it. And it's a lonely thing, because either you offer it up to mediums and spiritualists and those who are supposed to understand, or you tell non-spiritualists and are seen as basically crazy. I would not recommend you offer it up at all, lonely as it is. You take a terrible risk. The presence I feel now-this-minute is catlike, sleek, lovely, indescribable, and even describing it here is somehow risky because I begin to feel foolish. Most of all, I wonder if it's the right thing for him. But wouldn't he understand?
GG was rougher around the edges than most people knew, or saw. He cursed more. He fumed. Didn't get openly angry because he did not want to appear vulnerable, which he was, terribly. Tin Pan Alley followed him all his life, to the point that the critics ripped into him for writing Porgy and Bess without having the proper classical roots to even attempt such a thing. He was sensitive about technical know-how and hated it when they accused him of not having it. It was kind of like expecting Picasso to learn art techniques with a paint-by-numbers set. If he had had that standardized technical background, Porgy and Bess would have been forgotten a very long time ago. I could write about GG the autodidact, the pianist, lover, etc., and it would all be right, or at least correct. But what about the lonely soul, seemingly even lonelier after his passing? What about all those frequent, baffling George appearances, which seem to make people's hair stand on end? For he keeps appearing, perhaps as revenge (no matter how playful) for his horrible, unforgiveably botched and bungled death. His diseased brain, that beautiful brain that gave us the transporting miracle of his music, was gutted, cored like a grapefruit. The medical staff, embarrassed that they could not cure him and perhaps hoping he would die rather than turn into a vegetable, abandoned him to a room, where he died alone. George. Gershwin. Died. Alone.
Some spiritualist friends of mine have told me that the WORST thing that can happen to a person is to die in a room alone, especially in a state of spiritual confusion. GG had lapsed into a coma when the tumor in his brain finally exploded. He didn't know what was happening to him. He must have been looking down at his ravaged, ruined body and brain, knowing he had to leave, but not understanding, not understanding at all. I remember that thing in A Christmas Carol about Jacob Marley. If a man's spirit doesn't engage with his fellow man during his lifetime, he's cursed to wander around endlessly after his death, seeking something he can never find. Is it too late for George? I am not a medium, but I do not sweep aside the (many, many) impressions I receive from people who have passed. It happens all the time, really. When I dared share my George adventure with a medium in Nanaimo, someone I've known for 25 years, he at first seemed interested - "fascinating!", he exclaimed again and again - and then, suddenly, with no warning or explanation at all, he dumped all my revelations as phony, inauthentic, even concocted by me to try to play the spiritualist and overstep the bounds, because after all, I've had no Medium Training and thus know nothing.
So Paul B. (I won't give his full name, not to protect him but me) ripped into my vision. I cannot tell you how devastated I was. It didn't merely pull the rug out from under. It was more like falling through the ice. This man's arrogance is nothing new. Years ago I sent him some samples of the novel I was writing, because he seemed very interested, and I had already read an entire manuscript of his (which was extremely dull and even offensive in places). I got this answer from him: well, Margaret, I think you need to be extremely careful not to make a fool of yourself sending this out to publishers, because they're going to see it as some kind of zany soap opera (the thing was a gut-wrenching take on the abuse I suffered as a child). Devastated, I wrote back to say: listen, Paul, these were just samples, not the whole novel. Please, read the whole thing before saying stuff like that! And this was a so-called "friend". At that point, I wished I had not trusted ANYONE with my work.
Years went by, I didn't count how many, and then I got one of his calligraphy-written letters ("I don't know how I know how to do this", he told me), saying he wanted to apologize to me for saying those nasty dismissive things, but he couldn't help it because the subject matter of my novel had triggered all his "unresolved issues". It was a case of "look what you made me do", I see now, but of course I couldn't see it then. I just felt amazed that anyone had apologized to me for being abusive: it had never happened before, not in my lifetime. I tried to put the "zany soap opera" remark behind me, even though he admitted he had not even read the excerpts from the novel before condemning it. The outline was enough for him to form an opinion. Fuckface, bastard, I hope he dies. . . but he won't. He has set up a backwater fiefdom in Nanaimo, and is now a little prince strutting around with little old ladies hanging on to his every word. When he suddenly cut my George impressions out from under me, it was "zany soap opera" all over again, only worse, because he was accusing me of being an amateur and a fraud, someone who should keep her fingers out of this stuff before the Devil comes marching into her living room. Fuck that.
But something happens with George, and I have found out about it. He appears to people, not always where he knows he will be understood. I don't see him, but I feel him and I always know who it is. He walked in, just like Love walked in, and walked around the left side of my office chair and stood in front of me. I still feel him, slipping around the room, silently, occasionally tapping me on my (always) left shoulder to correct something I'm thinking, or clarify. "Display" was one word I received (it's a felt knowledge, so I sort of have to translate it into actual words). I was thinking about his appearance, how elegantly he dressed, how well-turned-out he was, and I wondered if it was at least partly a - hmmm - a - Now I know. Yes, it makes sense because he was already wildly famous by the time he was in his mid-twenties. It's not such a long way from being a song-plugger on Tin Pan Alley to world fame. Not if you're George Gershwin. A hop, skip and a jump is enough.
Why is he here? You can make up your own mind whether he is or not, as I often have to do. I never went to Medium School, and I firmly believe each person who practices spiritualism in any form IS their method. You don't learn it out of a book. Paul B. is so overeducated I am surprised he doesn't waddle when he walks. He has two Master's degrees and a PhD. To my mind, no one is duller and less-equipped to handle reality than an academic. Like Napoleon, he has grabbed the crown of mediumship and plunked it down on his own swelled head. George is smiling, though only a little, and I feel warmth on my left side. It's like a cat rubbing on me, almost imperceptibly. Sleek and warm and lovely, but there is a melancholy, a heartbreak really, or he wouldn't have been able to write those songs. "All my friends are leaving me," he said when he was very near to his deathbed. It's true. Scared of his illness and the bizarre behaviour that went along with an undiagnosed/untreated, grapefruit-sized tumour in his head, they did abandon him, even his soul-mate Kay Swift who was not allowed anywhere near him. Only a few remained, including Oscar Levant, who was so phobic about death that he could not stand to hear the word "insurance". But he stayed, played him songs out of Porgy and Bess on the piano (which George, his co-ordination destroyed, could no longer play), and sang them in his bellowing baritone. It's often said that in a crisis, you find out who your real friends are.
But even Oscar's dogged loyalty couldn't save George. When you pass out of this world in confusion, with not even a kindly nurse or a cleaning lady in the room with you, no human energy at all, you don't know you're dead, don't know where the hell you are and what's going on. This has to be resolved somehow, and the upshot of it is that this world and the next become separated by a gauzy veil, the thinnest and most permeable of membranes. You can easily slip back and forth between worlds. It's called being a ghost, folks. Why don't I finally say it? George Gershwin, as amiable and benevolent as he is, is a ghost. So who am I to be receiving these impressions, I who have never gone to Medium School? Why is it someone so famous? Do you think I know? Is it like reincarnation, where everyone thinks they used to be George Washington or Cleopatra, not just some schlub digging potatoes in the fields? Is it the fact I open to him, I welcome him, I pay attention to him, I - in fact - love him?
Mediums and spiritualists go on and on about Love being the Ultimate Reality and all that. But I am here to tell you something. There are things more important than love, and I will tell you what they are. I will list them for you right now. Respect. Understanding. Loyalty. Compassion. Courage. Acceptance. Forgiveness. Yes, even that, the thing I often scorn and rage about. Forgiveness is more important than Love, because without it, Love is soon destroyed. It is more fragile than we realize. So if all these other things are more important than Love, then loving George isn't such a big deal, is it? Of course it's a big deal, it's huge. It graces my life. I feel his presence and it wraps around my left side. He faces me and wants me to understand, and in that plea I almost see him.
I wouldn't be afraid to see him, I would know who he was and why he was doing this. I'm not meant to go trumpet all this to the world, and in fact I only write it here because I know only a handful of people ever read this blog (with the exception of the entry I See Dead People, which has had more than 110,000 views to date because, I think, it's on Pinterest). It's safe. I can do this. I need to, because goddamn, sometimes it's lonely being who I am and carrying all this baggage, and losing so much along the way. And I think, somehow, George would understand.
