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
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
posted by rlg at 1:04 PM
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