This photo struck me as a sort of fabulous twilight area: where one could actually hear them say "What if Everyone Got Along" It is some Hindu temple, and the only problem with Hindus is like in every religion there are some who will avoid the bloody mess of the particularity of the soul.
One of the deepest commentaries on Ring Around the Rosie I have ever seen. (Edwin Roskam, Chicago. 1941): because here Ring Around the Rosie is about the best thing there is, of any human life."This is deadly serious here! We are not playing Ring around the Rosie!"
What are we being serious about? That we love our fellow man? That we are all potential Witnesses? Victims? Perpetrators of genocide?
"Of course today....." comes the voice of the man drowned out by the arctic fury of a gale, so his face looks like a skidmark: "...Today is the problem of loneliness and the infinite receptivity of the storm of ice in Isis!"
This is a fairly complex complex: listening this voice strained to a skidding vertical wall of ice in isis:
"I married Isis on the fifth day of May!" ... comes the voice ripping out of Bob Dylan's Lungs...
"...Is that all there is?" Sings out Peggy Lee in a moment of middle-America existential anguish (cookie cutter homes in the projects after the Second World War).
To be honest I would rather head out into the Bob Dylan Ice storm than stay round in bars listening to Peggy Lee and her cabaret impersonations of a Weimar band. ("Well, at least that's trickier," I heard some voice did say.)
"I was thinking about Isis and how she thought I was so reckless!"
Dylan dared to dream a few dreams: he and his unshorn, rough-shod millionaire-style "Uniqueness!" (but did anybody wonder: "is that a good thing?")
Me, I cut off all my hair (I shaved my beard), "and I rode straight away. I gave up all that metaphysical disposition palaver of a Sadhu and a seeker, for the sake of an aerodynamic head and a clean job: maybe I will be part of the fulfillment of some man's dream: that here was a white man standing in a black facility: loving, truly crossing across into the promised land: "the land of milk and honey." Watch out if it's too sweet. You got to swing on the land where you make money. Don't want to repeat... so beat back once again.
Money is dust I heard you say. We got to make dreams and the money will follow them. We got to make the dreams (but even that becomes tired and tedious unless you can re-imagine things, when I have run out of tricks to amaze the infant: and it realizes that its stuck on this piss pot and cried):
"I married Isis...!" Can you do better than that?
Gotta get you ship-boat over the mountain! (been reading at a lot of cliche's lately, saying, who can find faith in that ...rather than in a bottle or crack coccaine?)
You've got to pray till you believe that Jesus Comes! You've got to pray!
-Tell me what the shape of my prayers should look like?
Gotta make the dreams happenin!
Gotta pour forth the coals and goals of life: got to keep them burning: that much is true: fire needs to feed.
I am not just dry-eyed about Isis: there is more than that: there is more than the mother:
There is the future as well.
And in the future we are well ensconced: faces among the stars.
Isnt that what we'd crave ourselves to be: stellar open-ness, stellar uniqueness:
Singularity in the void!
-Well, we got all that.
Well we've got Isis (I must remember her now amidst this great trembling abstraction of our future), daughter of the starry sky, we got her here coming to me, born on a day that was made for her.
To have a future without wishing for abstraction: to have a future without letting go of the suffocating embrace of the particular. What do we want in a future? For us all to get along?
Well have you noticed? Isis aint been on this earth for quite some time! In the meantime we crucified a man, but we ain't got him! He is currently sitting in Cypress or Istanbul, in dark sunglasses waiting for a vacation: we are almost talking about the Dude, but to be honest he has the heart to travel and live well: to love the face of this trembling Europe.
Bob Dylan marries Isis: well, ain't he the man of his age!
That's quite a deal you struck there my lad! Where'd you get such lucky graces?
Did you got them from the devil? The underbred, inbred vision of Pan?
But I am sick and tired of no blues singer who sold his soul to the devil.
I am sick and tired of the Devil, ain't sold my soul to none.
No, Son! Ain't gonna happen!
What is the devil but the place you must be most wary of yourself!
Them and them spiritual aspirations!
They gonna get you boy!
I said I would rather be crucified for my idealism
At least I have had my dreams
And the dreams died
And the dreams surrendured to the mud
But at least I have had my dreams!
I was enabled to be awake when I had my vision:
And didn't I already say I had one, other than
Dylan's ragged voice crying: "I married Isis," from out of an ice storm.
Emotions turned hard can be made of ice: when you grow cold, and when the season grows cold, you know its time to leave.
Emotion, like water.
Yes, well, what sort of water?
A still pure mountain tarn?
High up that most things will not venture here
High up so that no living excrement will taint these waters.
Isn't that what we want?
Heavenly Distillation!
And yet what distills we know as some part of a secret instrument: a stillery, a factory, a farm, a place of technology and refinement (let us not speak of the ruby complexity of the heart of glass, made with fire)
Yes, there are Haiku
Written to obscenity
Leaving dust on stone.
Stone must be fit with running water: the passage of water from cold to hot, the passage of a river over the faces of the stone faces: looking up to the sky from each of them a dream of a stony grave in the moonlight: "once we woke and did dream man! And man dreamed us! And we dreamed him again!"
Last night I dreamed that I saw the man dreaming us: I mean we all know we are part of someone else's dream, so lets get over it! Let's just get along! And what then? What if we all just got along? Would that be the end of the old man's dream? Would life be a boring place if we all just got the heck along?
We keep differing! We keep "begging" to differ! They keep saying "Why must we dust all the dust away from the eyes of the women and the children and the husbands and the lovers behind all the faces of the TV and video screens!"
What if we all just got along? Would I then be able to see a place in the sunset? Would I be able to worship amidst the quarrels of all the older gods? What if we all just got along?
Place of purity?
A roaring and dangerous sea on a windswept night, with nothing but cold black water!
The problem of loneliness in film making: enter Tarkovsky's Mirror: here alone does the heart ache from the mind dulling beauty of the place? I mean what to say about a Tarkovsky film? (what if I open my eyes to the film of another man? isn't there enough? Only when you grow exhausted with Herzog's pushing the ship up the mountain! Only when Bob Dylan's ragged voice, it fails to soothe you: then you might ride the runaway train of a Tarkovsky-episode!
The heart aches from the brittleness of water: it is water turned to land: it is the brittle solidity of water: it is the breaking apart of glaciers: that is what it is like to inhabit such a lonely heart! It is an earth-quake: if there are earthquakes in dreams then there are heart-aches! Watch out for the heartaches! Did i ever tell you it was bad that I had one... Heart ache? Did I ever tell you that your frozen broken-ness was not the most precious stone? Broken hearts, and lonely hearts and seargent Pepper (he seems like a really nice guy) and mean hearted bastards in pool hall queues saying: "This ain't no lonely-hearts club, buddy! You'd better beat it! We ain't playing Ring Around the Rosie!" You'd better save small talk for the wise guy who will beat you down with his lyrics. (This time MOO-ing is heard in the distance!):
"I m-m-m-married I-sis-sis-sis-sis-sis on the Fifth day of May!"
Ring around the Rosie!
Pockets full of Posies
Ashes, ashes, we all fall down!
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