THE STORY OF JOHNNY WHOOPER SWAN We go to school trusting our parents. We meet a teacher there who stands up front with a big desk, and a pointer. She or he trains us in an authoritative manner. We attach mentally to a life long need for authority in order to live lives successfully. Right so far? In my case, at the age of 25 I was ready to enter the practice of law where I hoped for success and a happy life finally. Very shortly, very shortly, I became anxious. There was a foreboding. I was made more uncomfortable with each experience. Law work is nothing like what I was told it would be. The system is corrupt. But I still cling to my expectation that career success is necessary to my happiness as a man. Each day my grasp of what the fuck success amounts to after all becomes more clouded, murkier. I hear songs on the airwaves and at concerts which describe my life as the life of a fool. What am I becoming? I want to rip off my business suit to run naked in the street with my hair on fire! But I am too afraid. In strange, weird (weird comes from a word meaning wise), fragmented steps I go about a journey of my own believing myself to be the first man to have failed in such a total way which journey works so as to break up my career, end a marriage, and start an entirely new way of relating with my two children whom I love deeply. Almost magically I meet a woman who is a career counselor who asserts a beautiful message that I am made to be joyful in my work everyday and at all levels. This understanding sets me on a completely new course. It is no longer a world of systems to me but an undivided one of unlimited beauty. It reminds me of a painting. A true masterpiece. I am drawn from within to learn the truth about my identity and nobody else can teach me that. From this point onward I will use thinking capacity for mastering mechanical processes and follow my heart, which includes my whole nature, which includes your whole nature and that of every human being for all the rest. I’ll go by the name Johnny Whooper Swan who does not explain itself to anyone. By my fruits shall I be known. Watch me soar!

Sunday, December 3, 2017

DYLAN'S DIFFERENT, All RIGHT


Why has it been the rule that so many...all...other performers, singers, musicians who work with and know Bob Dylan say, “He's a very private person” when asked to talk about him?

My take on it is that what he is about, has always been about, is so alien to others, even ones who do what appears to be the same work as he does, that they can only express it as, he's different. That much is clear to them. Among the paid commentators, and critics, who philosophize, disgrace, and criticize all fears, some try to go deeper and settle on reporting that he was able in the space of a performance to enter into a song and live through it and that is what the audience who got him saw and heard and felt, and to an extent it's true, but, the real power of Dylan, the private person, lies in the fact he is singing what he lives all day in the hope you, the listener, will also know you are what he is telling you you ought not be...do not have to be, and that telling is not in the music nor the words of the song but from the core of it, making use of music and lyrics, live, onstage, to arouse his audiences- arouse us on our own behalf….for example, the early Dylan, known as the folksinger, sang a song entitled No More Auction Block For Me. For many it is a disagreeable noise that goes right past them and does not apply to them, they believe. For the rest it is heard as a song calling on white people to recognize the plight of black slaves and rise up to the cause of abolition. A very few realize this singer knows about real freedom and knows we, the white folks, do not have it, but could, and just as the black person who has thrown off his chains sings, we could sing. Dylan never served the music business. All those others did...and do still. In closing, is it not so that the slaveholder is as much a slave as the ones he believes to be his human property? Have you never watched a dog train its master on a walk in a city park? Or, watched a child train a parent? An employee train an employer? For Heaven's sake, have you never realized even for a moment how much you serve your cell phone? Your watch? To me, Dylan sings that none of these relationships are real, just a waste of precious time.

Dylan is a true friend. Oscar Wilde said, “A true friend will stab you in the front.” I sometimes miss my true friend. I miss the gifts sent my way. The music. The images. The messages from a secret heart cavern. I thought these things this morning early while watching dawn break in an imperceptible motion of lights. Decided to tell you. Please stab me some more.



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