Wednesday, April 22, 2009

The Dead!

I am no deadhead, and remain therefore utterly disabled from offering up any opinions about whether they remain Grateful or not. The only time I met Jerry, I was toasted beyond oblivion, and I still retain my preference for small venues toward that crescendo mind orgy which well orchestrated stimulation can provide. A jamming blues band, say, with only alcohol to dampen the boundary crashing. When they rock, so does your soul!

But the Dead is still the Dead, most amazingly because they absolutely must be older than I am. And they do manage to mediate the electricity among a really large crowd, somehow retaining rights to feedback and sending out again those hard hitting ear splitting percussive not quite wailing vibes. I have this on good authority.



Still, it does remind me of Yankee stadium and excess of all sorts. It reminds me most of lookings up toward God, and expecting that the response, which is always for the crowd, could possibly be for me alone. No matter how amped, this venue is too large for the kind of orgy those rockers all around me were striving for in their minds. Alone, it seemed, all focused on the stage. And drawing way too many hits for simply getting stoned. This bordered on obsessive. A bit too much like holy rolling in some Church.

I "get" the thrill, don't get me wrong, but I don't think I'd work for this (I was someone else's date, just as I always am at sports events). This must simply make me deficient. I lack that enthusiasm complex. But then I do contain some kind of hypergraphic temporal lobe cosmic overstimulation. Barely. How could this make sense? Or are they always paired such. In just the way that I am bothered by phone calls from that very region of the globe where my heart lies. Even though the person there is off on silent Buddhistic retreat, and couldn't possibly have that number. The mind gets redirected.

So yes, dull affect must be paired with inner bursting, except that my smiles never ever get returned while dancing. There are cosmic stimuli, and to ignore them would be perverse. Inward glows, jack-hammered split eardrumming twang, still cannot dull mind's redirecting to where the truer heart would go.  And still, I am always thrilled by the very existence of these crowds, and whatever gets them together. Not so much by sports, which rehearse such a martial enthusiasm; a redirected anger. 

This Dead enthusing feels so awfully and purely American, and somehow when the Man looks carefully over and around and through all the lightings up of pipe-dreams, it makes me glad.

I do maintain that there can be no monologic heart. There is no center without its emotional wanting. There is no proper consciousness without the internal brain-split divided mind, at first, and then some dialogic spin toward culture. The mind cannot exist alone. This would leave God not only quite alone, but actually, well, impossible without some adoring crowd.

Though many impostors can be proposed. These get defined as fallings back from pure abstraction. Some attempt, short of metaphor, to delineate God's character, as it were. To true his Name with words.

But, now here's the rub, it's the pure abstraction which creates the problem in the first place. When there's no there there, then there's hardly anything to focus the adoration. You need a Christ in Man. 

But what you want is a Grim Reaper. A Dead. Someone to pound your senses silly, when renderings up to whatever Man, cannot ever take a joke. There was that teabag party, got sent up so utterly and without ruth. There is that Chinese Grass Mud Horse joke, where yo mama is a whore.

The only way these days, it would seem, to speak truth to power is by means of some court jester. Oh, yeah, wait, hasn't it ever been so?

Well, that's my point too (although I really really can't tell a good joke). The pairing of God with Mother Earth renders silly all the God talk.

Rock on Mama!

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