an in-process essay on hearts, V's
& a song from 11 years ago
I remember taking this photograph of this decaying leaf on the asphalt on the path outside of my home in my community. The day was January 19, 2013. This image was taken at 11:07am on a Saturday.
I love that the phone/computer can record a moment with such precision. This is so accurately how it felt. It was a chilly sunny winter Saturday late morning. I hadn’t remembered that but it feels right.
For me, this leaf image is in the shape of a V and a broken heart. Is this obvious? It’s such a strong example of how I see the world. What causes a particular image to have such a powerful impact? Is this a piece of art? Does it need to hang in a gallery in order to be worth noticing? Could it change your life as it did mine? Did it change my life? What does that even mean?
A decomposing brittle fragment of a leaf on the ground. This is me. And this was me on the ground on this day 11 years ago.
There were painful things happening in my personal life at the time. So it felt like some decaying brokenness was unfolding in me. It’s a decaying brokenness that somehow carries through to this day, 11ish years later.
I was feeling lost and broken-hearted that day. Nothing unusual about that. What was noteworthy was that I could feel like the spirit was coming through the open wound in me. It felt like a dark angel, dark in the loving way. It felt like what I’ve heard described as grace. [I wince a bit at using this word, but I can’t find a better word to describe the feeling.]
So I stood on the asphalt pathway looking at that leaf and the weeds and all the leaves in the bushes and I imagine I was crying or wishing I could cry. And, in those moments, a melody started playing in me. Right through that opening of suffering. In the winter sunshine and the leaves on the bushes and the shadows inside of me. Suddenly, a melody was there.
How can a melody just come out of nowhere? From spirit? Who comes up with this stuff? Completely without invitation. It was already created. I was just trying to listen to what it was saying.
I believe this melody was a message from spirit to me. And it doesn’t belong to me. It doesn’t belong to anyone. Melodies are living spirit entities. A song is a being with a life that is alive as long as people know how to sing it. I didn’t make it up so much as try to hear it clearly and carry the spirit forward as best I could. This essay is me finally pushing this seed through a crack in the asphalt of this miserable culture and its see/sea of pollution, despair, and learned helplessness.
I recorded what I could hear of the melody on my phone. That recording was actually a few minutes earlier than the photograph at 10:51am that day, which sounds correct. You can hear the bird song in the background. I like to believe that the birds were there in support of this creation. This audio recording isn’t how I remember the experience, but I was trying to listen to the beautiful music coming through and try to dictate it down.
Let go of whether my voice sounds good or not in this recording. Some notes are off-key. This is not a performance; it’s a peek into a moment of my life. I’m sharing it because that is my impulse. Is it wrong for me to share this with you? I haven’t included it here because it sounds good. I’m trying to bring you with me. Can you place yourself with me in this moment of trying to listen to something coming in from spirit?
Words got independently married to this melody a day later. I recall it being a week or two later but the phone recordings apparently don’t lie. I remember riding my bike to dance in Fremont, and the spirits gave me the idea to superimpose this quote from June Singer over top of that melody. It sounded like a pretty random idea. But again, it felt like this was the impulse from the spirit moving through me. So that’s what I did.
Married independently to the haunting melody. Words about the prison of the self and the pathway of liberation.
Strangely enough, I am unable to find this quote on the internet right now, but this is a reasonable paraphrase of the quote as I remember it and this is how it appears in the song:
Just by using my voice, I can break out of this cage of my making. ~ June Singer
When I started to try the words in the melody, I noticed that the words in the quote like to be spoken with these line breaks.
Just by using
my voice
I can
break out
of this cage
of my
making
(Inner Sabotuer Service Announcement: My sabotage voices now need to intervene and protest this creative essay. The voice in my head is saying, “no one cares about any of this dross”, “all they care about is the finished product”, “and they won’t even care about that”. “It’s arrogant to share all of your rough drafts. You’re not Picasso. No one gives a shit about all the minutia of your creative process. This is arrogant. This is just a bunch of mental masturbation. Be considerate of others. Only show the clean polished stuff. People are busy and don’t have time to wade through all your crap. Who do you think you are?”. ~~~~ Thanks for sharing judgmental sabotage voices! And thanks for being a part of this poetic essay. My whole point is to shine light on a bit of the interior of my house backstage. I’m tired of everything being in shadow. We’re gonna take some risks. My judgmental voices are protesting. So noted. Let’s try some different pathways. Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.)
At this time, I was also reading the book by Daniel Singer, the Untethered Soul. I liked the synchronicity of the two last names: Singer. This was important somehow, a clue. So this book was also connected and a part of this art making.
Then, later, I added a second verse of some new words. Did I come up with those? Somebody came up with those.
A decaying leaf on the asphalt. The stones embedded in the asphalt. The winter sunlight on the path and in the bushes. A quote I heard. A book I was reading. A terrible, lost, haunted feeling inside of me. Shame and despair. A song. What the spirits were trying to say to me. These were the ingredients for this winter soup. Who does this art belong to? Who owns it? Who is it for?
Why does a V look like a heart to me?
It just does, eh? Is this obvious? Can you unsee it, once you see it? (I need space to say things wrong ok? I need space to take guesses and stretch the truth and speculate. I need to have a safe space to play with possibility. I am coming out my ears with possibility. )
Another aside: I want to be clear that I don’t claim to own the symbol of the heart or the V. It’s more truthful and accurate for me to say that I’m haunted by these images. Spirit keeps insisting that these images and symbols of me are true and I recognize in them repeated coherent spirit teachings not about me but about the nature of things. It’s more true for me to say I belong to these symbols. Or that I am a devotee of the heart and of the letter V as sacred symbols. I expressly disavow any attempt to claim intellectual property of these sacred symbols, which is a desecration, it seems to me. And you aren’t allowed to own them either.
I’ve said before that a V is a heart with the top cut off. So there’s no top on it. So there’s no protection and everything just rains in and overflows. All pollution, all love. It’s like what we do to mother ocean, pour all of our shit into her. That’s me too.
The V seems like the masculine part of the heart without the feminine part which is the top part. And so there is for me this longing to merge with the divine feminine. It’s a longing that I don’t know if it will ever be satisfied. I don’t know why I would say that other than it just feels true. And I can find evidence of this in lovers chasing each other on Grecian urns, etc.
So my heart is a decaying leaf on the path and a haunting melody on an autumn day 11 years ago.
And this photograph has somehow still been in the background of my phone all these years and everyday, it is in front of my eyes and everyday and it gets ignored. It’s there subliminally. There’s many things in me that I don’t have access to. Little alcoves of things sort of protected from myself. Is this true?
So I love this photograph of me and this song. And the symbol of the V which is my name and the symbol of the heart. And the word vanity, which might be connected to the word narcissism and the prison of the self. So even my egoic victim self is beautiful and a source of this pattern making. It so wants to no longer be in exile. That suppurating wretched part of me longs to be home in the embrace of community. And that trail of woundedness winds out the door and over the hills to infinity. I really don’t understand how forgiveness is going to be able to clean up the astonishing disaster of my people.
In my mind, all these things are connected because my mind is filled with all these connections that my culture says are useless and should be discarded and ignored. How can it be that I live in this much pollution and sickness? It feels like a psychic wasteland.
And how about the photo and the song as art? It’s just really a snapshot.
And the recording of the song here is a live recording of me and the piano from 11 years ago. There is no professional recording of this song. Does that matter? There are plenty of errors in this recording. There’s an error in the ending. This is not a clean recording of the song? When does the song become cared for enough to be listened to? To be ready to be shared?
Another aside: if I take a snapshot of a leaf on the ground, is this my art? Whose art is this? Who is the creator here?
There really is no technical mastery here at all. No craftsmanship. There is no pretense for its specialness. And I’m not a special, noteworthy person. I’m just a regular white dude and haven’t we heard enough from them? I have nothing valuable to say, right? I’m just another crazy artist dude now with a vanity website spouting nonsense. I don’t even exist in this sea of mind numbing in-formation. I’m just more ones and zeroes.
So it’s all about the spirit entity. It’s all about what is flowing through this image for me and this song. It’s all about the dark angel.
And what if this is art that only I can understand? What if this art is only for me? Why would I bother to share it with you? Maybe no one pays attention. Maybe no one cares. That has to be ok with me.
Because I’m seeking to somehow release art and creative expression from the medicated prison of this culture. Even the wounded word “art”. I’m chewing on the locks and the ropes and the bondages. I’m intending to convey how much bigger art is than what we’ve done to it. I’m attempting to deconstruct art into what it is made of, what it is about. It’s about what the spirit wants to say. And that can’t be confined to a gallery or a museum or to a number of hits or likes. It’s more free and more ordinary and more slippery. And more radical. And it doesn’t belong to me or you and can’t be owned.
I am just beginning to learn how to speak spirit and find a way to share with you what they have given to me to say. It will be messy, at best. I pray to learn and grow and find some way to pay the gifts of this life forward.
What the spirits have to say to me. This is what I can trust. And they are very consistent.
May what the spirits have to say come through all of us clearly and freely.