The Music Of Love

The Music Of Love



Sting sings in The Greenfield bathtub: "Love is stronger than justice---Love is thicker than blood." Karen
Carpenter croons on top of the walls above the bathtub in her throaty sentimental voice. I stand in front of the
mirror and put on my muscle lips. It's kissing time in the cosmos. My mouth is coming back into life.
After all these years of kisslessness. It doesn't stand still any more. Karen C. has me moving the muscle of love
out of mothballs. She lullabies me back into the bathtub where I linger in anticipation. Karen C. sang to me 20
years ago in the L.A. County Jail when I lived in pathetic isolation from Wendy Reeves of the one and only
beautiful eyes. Karen Carpenter's songs almost matched Wendy's matchless eyes and her irresistible voice
during those forlorn days and weeks behind bars. As I walked from my cell down the long jailhouse halls to the
Visitor's Room K.C.'s voice came wafting over the intercom and lifted me up to the ceiling put me in Seventh
Heaven for 60 seconds. I was Prince of the World of Magic. I could dance. I was Karen Carpenter's Man of The Moment. She was still alive then in some place unknown to me. She was not yet 32 years old and dead of
heart failure from anorexia nervosa.

Linda Ronstadt pulls me up out of my brain stem and levels me with "Blue Bayou" as I lay back again in the tub
which is my sacred shrine. My temple of Tao. True love begins with purity of heart. And nothing stops here in
my bathtub of music. Frank Sinatra is singing this very moment: 'I'll never smile again until I smile at you. I'll
never laugh again until I laugh with you.' And before I have time to write another essay Joe Cocker is beginning
his inimitable whisper, his hoarse rhapsody of unutterable love---'You are so beautiful to me.' Almost
croaking the line. And pulling me out of my cranium. Lifting my soul out of my creaking carcass. 'You are
so beautiful to me.' (The way that little me leaps out at the last second). 'You're everything I hoped
for, you're everything I need. You are so beautiful to me (whisper, tune, crash)---can't you see (can't you see!)---You're everything I hoped for, you're everything I need---You.....are.....so..... beautiful.....to me.' I listen. There is no one else in the room---save the most beautiful woman in the history of the human race. Draw some more hot water in the tub to keep that water in The Hot Zone. Play some Jimmy Taylor: 'Carolina In My Mind.' Not on but in my mind! Inside the cells of the bones and the blood driving my horse through the Garden of Eden. Sing it, Jimmy---celebrate this minute of living blood cells.

And now Joni Mitchell is going to tell us how it was on the other side of the tracks in the love and marriage
racket. The beautiful elegant blonde from Canada sings of weak men who can't handle her courage or her refusal to be distracted by something so foolish as 99-cent lust for each passing young body that appears on the path.
No, Joni will not fall for just any old 2 oclock in the morning claptrap compliments designed and manufactured to score an easy lay. She has a mind and a body of her own making. Joni Mitchell sings with sociological precision
and pristine vision of the human condition as it is unveiled at this moment in her history and ours. I listen. It
takes me a while to hear her. All the words don't get through on the first trip through the pipes. Nor even the
second or third. This woman bears listening to. She summarizes the era. She does not shut her eyes and soul to
the crushed victims of The Money Machine. She is wooing us to rise above the banalities of the cheap version.
Her eloquence is absolute as she chants (and enchants us with) her rhapsody to Canada: 'I could drink a case of
you---and I would still be on my feet.' It embeds itself forever in the psyche: 'I could drink a case of you-ou-ou---
a ca-ase of you.' And there is no rejoinder from the bathtub. Just the absolute satisfaction of the sudden
hole in the cave of Silence. And then, the Voice, rising in a tremendous Joni Mitchell soprano crescendo---
quavering in Ecstasy---shooting upward through the ceiling of my bathroom and entering easily the blue sky
ether of The Eternal Now---out out out into the realm of freedom and yet also staying here on rock solid terra
firma. The hard brilliance of diamonds: that piercing clarity James Joyce spoke of, also called radiance. The
truest song of love leaves all other art in its carcass---in the frame of its body. Music at its best is radiance and
wholeness and harmony itself: Pure form in eternal motion. It moves! muttered Galileo under his breath to his
sceptical Inquisitors, concerning the earth.

Patsy Cline bleeds her song "Crazy" into our blood cells. We shall never cease hearing it. We are forever
crippled by her anguish. The fact that Patsy Cline herself was bodily broken and crushed at age 29 in a
plane crash that killed her blows hot on the flames of meaning. And meaning itself is always the last refuge of
death. Nobody will ever engrave a more fitting epitaph on the screeds of time than Miss Cline's own
"Crazy"---rendered by herself. Thus The Creator must have solitude and her own/his own Self-created Silence.
How else can It hear the voices of The Necessary Angel? In this world of eternal babble and schmoozing the
radiance and harmony and the wholeness vanish beneath the voices of anarchy. Silence, exile & cunning
wrote James Joyce: the three conditions necessary for the true creator. And, I would add, the true lover. For
creation and love are pure demanding acts that will bear no distraction.

RLG copyright 2006

To Anonymous: Don't Send Me Any More Notes

Anonymous: I appreciate the opinions of people who sign their actual names. Thanks for yr encouragement. Please, no more notes to me.
RLG

The Greenfield Detox Plan

I'm slow man. I stop the world. You must wait. You must stop. You must quit fidgeting now. Cut it out. The waste. The mental wreckage. That talking inside your head. Here is my detox cure. Get out of your skull-head. Climb slowly down the steps. Enter your chest. Stay there a while. Envelope your head inside your heart. Melt it down in the warm red linings. Sit there inside the middle of your heart. Shut up & bleed good red blood. Until you are full of it. Do not hurry.

Now you can descend slowly farther down to your guts. Burn your trash. You have to get down. You have to walk down those steps from your happy red chest. Down to the dark linings. And you have to burn. You have to burn at the middle in your solar plexus. I can't help you. Your doctor is useless to you. You are the only doctor in the world able to treat your ailment. And you do have an ailment. You have to get down inside your guts where your sins cleave to you. Your literal physical iniquities cling to your intestines. You are full of shit. And you are the only cause and the only cure. And you are going to have to burn many days & many nights in order to purify your soul which is your very insides---the whole of your vast interior. You will suffer beautifully, gloriously. You will suffer the torments of hell. It will be a good hurt.

And if you do not suffer---if you do not invite the angels of purification into your inner tissues & organs---then you will wither away and rot. You will be a decadent factory of wretched inside bacteria which will devour you with Death at the controls. Then you will be a rotting piece of fading meat feeling nothing but your own stale sickness & the sterile medicines that jerk at your blood cells. If you are unwilling to cleanse your inner body you are history.

You must begin. You must. You must find the way to stun yourself into Awareness. Otherwise you're a lost decadent ship sinking into the stench of your own muck & mire. If you can find The Irresistible Source outside yourself---if you are so ecstatically lucky, so divine as to have true love as your everlasting guide & scourge & your irrevocable Muse---I need tell you nothing. You know. You are already in eternal & decisive motion. You are in unutterable organic form. You have been truly awakened. But in all other cases you must dig inside your inner depths & you must cleanse your house of flesh for this is the only home that is yours---inalienably & responsibly yours. You must purify yourself of all your diseases---that you made with your very own hands and mouth and intestines and your habits of a lifetime and a deathtime. You must do this. And you better not wait. You better get started now. I am your friend & I know whereof I speak.


RLG copyright 2006

John R. Cash, American Singer

Johnny Cash is singing about
his escape from The Pit. He's
still white beneath the gills from
all that heroin he needled in his
brain pipes. He wears a long-
sleeved black dress shirt & blue
overalls with a wide belt holding
up the pants. He's got a firm
grip on his guitar between his
knees & he's standing up lean-
ing over it & scraping it with his
fingers like he's shaving a baby
hunting for that song along the
tight strings as his mouth chews
on the microphone. He's got his
own Voice not made & manufac-
tured by The Company: it's got
whiskey in it & cigarette smoke &
cheap bitter black coffee crying
babies rusty old automobiles &
jails ruffians on motorcycles & at
the very middle of it stands one
beautiful pure woman in Heart
Center: The Music rules The House.
John Cash is singing. His voice
is a railroad map of America made
of living tissues. I am going to sit
here at the bottom of the bathtub
& drink this song. Then I'm going
to get up & dry off, put on some
fresh clothes & get on my hands
& knees & crawl to the mailbox to
see if I got a love letter from the
most beautiful woman in the world.

RLG copyright 2006

The Johnny Cash Blues For Breakfast

Johnny Cash was singing this morning of the time he woke up one sunday morning with his head bent completely out of shape and Johnny sings, "The beer I had for breakfast wasn't bad, so I had one more for dessert." This song, "Sunday Morning Coming Down" contains the essence of the John Cash modus operandi. Music rules. The words come & go, the images flicker in and out of the big picture. But what remains at the very center of operations is the great Johnny Cash sensibility. He does not sing these songs so much as exude them. They drip from his very marrow & joints, his bones & his liver & intestines, his sweat his blood his sperm and his brain heart and that wounded thing---his memory & conscience, the sensitivity buds that drive the music. Johnny Cash is singing about how waking up on sunday morning he is suddenly beat into the ground by the melancholia & loneliness of sundays. Sundays won't let him have any pleasure. This is a southern redneck culture song of the sermons & soda water and chicken for dinner at noon and that's all she wrote so you better get used to it. Johnny Cash is not going to go back to college and review the history of the church or religion or southern attitudes toward having fun on The Lord's Day. O no. He is going to give it to you straight from the blood.

And what is this "it" that comes out of his unfiltered unconscious? It is life in the impoverished small-town South without the mighty sophistications of a university education and an upscale family income and educational program. And this life is distinguished by its pain & its unrelieved suffering. No money, few things. Here we have the story of busted marriages and failed love affairs. These people struggle to get their feet on terra firma. But they have no property. They have scrawny possessions. They have a bare iota of dignity. And they have no future. This is all in the throat of Johnny Cash. It is in the inner linings of his song. Poor redneck housewives who don't have the money to put one solid meal a day on the table for their husbands who are squeaking by on moon-light jobs that will take them nowhere or they're sitting around the house smoking & drinking & thinking about the next song or the woman they encountered last night in the honky tonk. These husbands & wives smoke a lot of cigarettes & they drink whatever they can get their hands on---booze coffee or soda pop. The ladies do the wash every Monday morning & hang it on the line with wooden clothes pins. Only there isn't much to hang. Mainly worn-out white underwear with holes in it for the kids. Not one new stylish dress in the house for the mistress of the empty kitchen. Do you know what a brand new set of underwear feels like? A brand new pair of sparkling shoes? The appliances all gone to seed. And 2 or 3 kids drenched in poverty. Well, they just come with the territory. And they keep coming. Like the rent. And they are miserable most of the time. Husband & wife & mistress & children. They are poor. And they are ill educated and can not afford to go to the dentist. Thus their teeth are gray or missing in action.

John Cash is grieving but he'll never admit it to you. He must sing to get this damned ache out of his nuts out of his brain out of his eyeballs that he woke up itching this a.m. John is singing of Death in America that feeds its citizens bullets & coffee & all the cigarettes you can eat. Just so you never squawk about the conditions. There won't be any changes in the weather. The kids will be playing on gray grass under bone trees with no green leaves on them. And the cancer rates are going up by the dozen every month because radiation is in the air spewed by American bombs & machines that spew poison all over the world including right here in the Bible-spewing South. These marriages are mainly shot in the ass. They have no hope. There is no money here that can buy these people a decent set of clothes a new car & a good decent house and schools for the children. Guess what? These poor folks think of education last. First come the cigarettes & booze. Then food. Then a table to put it on. And then maybe a car and a job & a family. Right now most people are going to church. It's sunday morning. And Johnny Cash wakes up sicker than a dog from too much booze last night and too much reality this morning. He says this is the loneliest day of all days. Sunday. The Christian Sabbath. The Bible. Preachers. Sermons & threats. And the litany of promises. To be fulfilled when you're safely dead & buried. He feels lonelier than the damned of hell. Listen. You will hear it. You will smell it. You will taste something you thought you could not taste: the hunger of an empty belly & a starved mind & a hopeless heart. Try that one for size as I did this a.m. in my bathtub. This is not music to get drunk by.

John Cash is not going to go to college to cure himself of the pain & the suffering & the afflictions. He is going to sing the raw songs of the unrehabilitated heart. He is not going to invent some sophisticated college crap that sublimates the original raw experience. No, he is not going to enter the University of Utopia and give you the story of how I made it big in the land of Academia & Sublimation. He will not go that route. You are going to learn of southern redneck divorcees & kids so poor they'll break your heart in pieces. You are going to go to the school of poverty & failure of the American Dream and the big lies of the USA that promise you you are Special & will be treated so as honored citizens of a vastly rich country of privileged billionaires & millionaires who mainly came by the money by hook & by crook. This is all inside the throat of John Cash it quavers in the music. These little poor uneducated & sickly people who so often live in shacks or dingy apartments where nothing ever quite works who are addicted to cigarettes and booze and coffee & maybe a hamburger & fries on a good day. They will never put three solid meals on the kitchen table. And certainly never lay that table with a dinner featuring three solid vegetables & a balanced meal.

You feel it grab at your throat. Johnny Cash gets to you with his literal insides. He penetrates your guts. You can smell & taste his history in the very fiber of his music in the tremor of John's ever vigilant voice. He is reporting from hell, the world of the damned. Make no mistake. You are not to be free of its history. The history of John Cash's voice. JC carries his history in his very pleading bleeding heart-breaking melody. He does not spell it out for you. He does not preach. He gives you a sketch, an outline. He names a back yard with a fence & some cigarette smoke and his own beer for breakfast that tasted so good he has a second for dessert. You won't be taken in by the comedy. You won't miss the tragedy going on under your nose. Your own major tragedy that J.C. is singing to you in C Major. O, no. John's vocal cords soaked in the suffering of the damned will make sure of that.

Elvis Presley the minute he rang the cash bell with his songs gave up overalls and the clothing of the poor & the underclasses. Elvis refused to allow any girl friend to wear blue jeans or tennis shoes. He saw these items as symbols of poverty defeat & death & as the stigma of the lowest classes. And he could not stand to be clothed in symbols that called him back to his impoverished Tupelo, Mississippi roots. John Cash on the other hand waded up to his neck in the experiences of the oppressed and the impoverished & the semi literate & the sick of body & of mind & of heart. And John gave us back our hells & our deaths redeemed in the voice The One & Only Voice of John R. Cash, singer, born in Arkansas, USA. John also wrote almost all his own songs. So this would be the telling point here. John's songs are his very soul. Elvis sang and transformed & elevated the songs composed by others. I do not write these words to denigrate Elvis Presly a singer of extraordinary & absolutely unique & unequivocal power. I merely point up the differences in origin. A singer who has etched every word he sings owns it in a different way. The singer & his song are biologically inseparable.
RLG copyright 2006

Bertrand Russell & The Quest For A Civilized World

Bertrand Arthur William Russell: 1872-1970



When he was 12 Bertrand Russell received a Bible from his grandmother upon graduation from lower school with this inscription in the flyleaf:

'Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil.' The quote comes from the Book of Leviticus.

Bertie's mother died when he was 2 years old. His father died 18 months later. His parents were extremely enlightened 19th century Victorians & had left his future in the hands of enlightened non-family members unaffiliated with the church. However, Russell's grandparents contested the will & eventually Bertrand was turned over to his maternal grandmother, the one remaining family guardian. This woman was a fanatical puritan who gave Bertrand a terrific dose of Biblical proverbs and other useless for the most part Puritanical doctrine. Russell says in his Autobiography that at age 5 he figured if he lived to the average 70 years of life that he still had 14 times his five years yet to live and he found this prospect a profoundly boredom. By the time he hit 15, 16 he says that suicide was in his mind all the time but what kept him going was his love of mathematics & the desire to learn more of it. By the time he hit 40 he was he writes happy as one is permitted to be on earth.

Mr. Russell was a conscientious objector during World War 1 when he had been a lecturer and respected philosopher & lecturer & original thinker at Cambridge. He began to write articles against World War 1 & was taken into custody & incarcerated. All of his Cambridge colleagues held their tongues and refused to honor this man of probity & conscience. He stood virtually alone in the academy against the whole establishment that rushed like a mob to war. It is true his time in jail was made simpler & easier by Russell's membership in the aristocracy. He was allowed his own private cell and also his own books. So he continued his scholarship. But his absolute integrity during these crucial years testify of his rare courage as well as his intelligence. Throughout his 97 years & 10 months on earth Bertrand Russell wrote and spoke and argued on behalf of those people and individuals who were being cheated out of a fair existence in society. He battled against war & poverty & & disease & stupidity & superstition & humbug his entire time on earth. And he honored his existence by taking risks & offending popular opinion & the favorite sacred cows of the establishment while the self-righteous slept and mumbled the platitudes of the day exactly as they do today.

I write these words while America sleeps & hides under a great neon sign of false propaganda & lies orchestrated by the state & endorsed by the bought media & pronounced hale & hearty by liberals & conservatives alike that it is ok for Israel to slaughter innocent civilians by the thousand in order possibly to kill a few Islamists who believe Israel is an illegitimate nation that has gained its power through violence & theft against Palestinians & Arabs & Muslims. The case for the Islamists is powerful. And the fact that the American public is so hoodwinked comes from the massive stupidity of the American electorate coupled with an equally massive indifference to what goes on in foreign lands as long as U.S. children don't bleed---plus of course the endemic racism of the Judaeo-Christian fiction. It is the case that "only" a few thousand Americans have died so far---and their deaths are only the property of families & close friends. And many of the families are ignorant of America's involvement in Iraq of the last 16 years. How many American citizens know that close to 2 million Iraqis have died through bombing & The Sanctions since 1990? How many Americans know that Clinton's Secretary of State Madeleine Albright faced Lesley Stahl on CBS's 60 Minutes on May11, 1996 and was confronted by Stahl with these charges: According to first-hand U.N. observers upwards of 500,000 (one half million) children under the age of 6 have died in Iraq from The Sanctions alone. What do you have to say to that, Madame Secretary? "We think it's worth the price," said Madeleine Albright. That terrifying answer of a cold-blooded mercenary yet remains to be measured & weighed & understood by citizens of the United States of America & the pupils in its high schools & grade schools & colleges. Such horrendous truths cannot be buried without doing permanent damage to this entire nation.

We literally destroyed by bombing all the silos in Iraq holding food between 1991-1997---including their powdered milk & dates for which they are renowned. Iraq produced 17 percent of the powdered milk in the region. American airplanes bombed those silos because America was attempting to destroy Iraq's food supply---& starve the Iraqis to death. And we did in fact kill thousands of Iraqis by starvation & caused millions of others to experience severe cases of malnutrition. We destroyed the water system of Baghdad. We wiped out its very public school system---an extremely efficient school system. 10,000 school teachers were required to quit--- 10,000! because there were no funds to pay teachers or buy supplies. The school grounds of Baghdad were overflowing with sewage in many instances. This was before Bush II's insane & fatal invasion by which time Iraq was already so weak from the bombings & sanctions it had almost nothing left to fight for let alone the weapons & soldiers needed to wage a war. We destroyed Baghdad's hospitals to the point where they had no penicillin or supplies no electrical equipment to treat the sick & dying. We murdered all those helpless & utterly needy people. We murdered them rather than assist them! And reputable physicians and scientists report that 50 percent of all Iraqis are infected with cancer cells from the promiscuous bombing that had been taking place durthe sanctions and which released deadly amounts of depleted uranium (Uranium 290) into the atmosphere & which latter stays in the air for 1 billion years. This clandestine nightmare bombing had been going on three days a week during Clinton's 7 1/2 years in office. William Jefferson Clinton was the leader of this nation during that massacre of Iraq which was called Genocide by rational observers from the UN & from experienced American government employee who had worked in Baghdad for many years in the oil for food program. Clinton---the same commercial democrat who went back to his native Arkansas & oversaw the State execution of a convicted 16 yr old RETARDED black boy to prove how tough he was on crime. He wouldn't hesitate to murder a retarded person or be the lead accomplice in the malicious deaths of 500,000 civilians in Iraq who after all did not contribute to his Presidential campaign as had The Israel Lobby. All carnage occurred under Bush I & Clinton & then Bush2 without any of them flinching AND without their ever telling The American people of this Genocide of the Arabs. 'The Sovereignty of The American people'---it was pissed out the window & shit down the walls of Iraq by Bush Clinton & Bush2 and nary a complaint from any Republicans or Democrats who work for the fat cats.

The United States by these systematically deadly actions against the citizens of Iraq created an entire criminal class in Iraq which, before Bush I's invasion, was a highly efficient country with low crimes rates & very high lireracy rates and a highly efficient medical system---all of which sanctions and our goddammed bombs wiped out. Many previously excellent students became so depressed from the loss of schools & absence of jobs they had to turn to crime. We took bread out of the mouths of these people. But we also destroyed their very hope for a future of love & well being. We The United States of America drove the people of Iraq essentially insane. And I mean by "we" the government of George Walker Bush & William J. Clinton & GW Bush. And to this day these facts are not reported on American television or radio or in the major newspapers & Time, Newsweek or US News & World Report. We destroyed the entire infrastructure of Baghdad & Iraq---schools, hospitals, city government, the utilities---gas, water & electricity---wiped out. No drinking water untainted by the goddammed poisoning of the American bombs. This was & is an attempt to exterminate Iraqis & Muslims. And the blood of every one of those dead & maimed & diseased Iraqis from those monstrous years are forever on the hands of Bush, Clinton, BushII & every other individual who willfully participated in this massive violation of human law & of international law and of democratic morality & of human decency.

And where are our Bertrand Russells today? They better be you & me. Let female and male be aligned as one in our opposition to these state serial murders of Palestinians Lebanese & Iraqis & Afghanis & of our own sons and daughters sacrificed to Moloch & the munitions industry & Halliburton hiding under the banner of The Cross of Jesus and pretending their cold-blooded murders of a whole civilization of Arabs & Muslims & Persians is "patriotic" when it is nothing but murder in cold blood & without just cause. We must rise above this absolute low point of morality in our history. And we must point this country in the direction of democracy & the humanizing qualities of a healthy society. And we have millions of miles ago to reach that humanity. At this moment we are a sick and a deranged nation out of touch with the very malicious deeds taking place around the world of which we ourselves the USA are the author and shall be held accountable for our deeds. And who will speak for these utterly crushed & forever silenced victims of the U.S.-Israel war machine the Iraqis, The Palestinians, The Lebanese if not you & me. Look about you. The Democratic Party mouths the same phony falsehoods as Republicans when it comes to matters pertaining to Israel.
'Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil!.'



RLG Copyright 2006