JOHN PRINE

Toss One Down For John Prine

The response to the hospitalization of singer-songwriter John Prine has been startling in its size and support. The man has come a long way since his debut album in 1971. I still have that album. Listened to it yesterday. What follows is my two bits worth.

Webb Chiles is 78 years old. His weblog of March 30 had this:

An article in the NY TIMES yesterday on medical ethics confirmed what I expected:  I am expendable.  If decisions have to be made between giving medical treatment to some and not others, the criteria are likely to be who has the best chance of survival and who likely has the most years left.  I agree entirely.  Quality of life cannot be measured; quantity can.  Those of us who have lived as long as I have had a life.  Twenty year olds have not.  So it is incumbent on me to avoid being in the situation where others have the power to make that decision about me.  That is not entirely in my control,  but I am going to do what I can.

http://self-portraitinthepresentseajournal.blogspot.com/

I, too, am an old man; and I agree.

John Prine is 73 years old. Though he, too, is expendable, doctors are working hard to keep the man alive. He remains, as of yesterday, in critical condition. His first album appeared in 1971; his latest, 'Tree Of Forgiveness', just last year. His songs have made me laugh and cry, provided needed perspective, provoked thought, and inspired my own creativity.

Yesterday afternoon, I cued up 'John Prine' on my turntable, poured a couple of fingers of Green Spot, and sat down to have a listen. All the songs, though nearly 50 years old, are worth hearing. Two songs struck me as more relevant now than when they were written. Links to both are added below. The third song, 'Please Don't Bury Me', is something of a novelty tune. Good for a laugh. John has an active sense of humor, and likes to make me people laugh. The song is good for much more than just a laugh, though, if you think about it. What better way to consider one's mortality? nd, of course, maintaining a sense of humor is a key ingredient in any survival situation.

The song's fifth stanza could well serve as Prine's epithet:

Please don't bury me down in that cold, cold ground.

No, I'd rather have them cut me up and pass me all around ...

That 'passing around' ends with this:

... send my mouth way down south and kiss my ass good by

No better way to pass the time then listening to John Prine.

Hello In There

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVhA01J0Zsg

Flashback Blues

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H332qsXz2k8

           

Please Don't Bury Me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEhqzOeJnto

One more time, a live version of old JP singer 'Please Don't Bury Me'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGCi5LUJRnY

SLACK WATER and the Crinoids of Chomolungma

(A glossary of archaic or uncommon words is added at the end of the essay.)

For all of us, mountains turn into images after a short time and the images turn true. Gold-tossed waves change into the purple backs of monsters, and so forth. Always something out of the moving deep, and nearly always oceanic.¹

Can buoys, green in color, six to nine feet in diameter, as tall as twenty feet, can weigh several tons. The Owner had decided to follow the green cans across the bar and stood by the forward shrouds directing traffic. The Cabin Boy, Mozzo by name, manned the helm. The two men might have been friends ...

A four or five foot swell, rather benign, provided a bit of spice. The boat, a 41 foot ketch designed by William Garden, wallowed about, struggling up the steep face of wind waves, motoring, slamming into troughs, the tide making. The boat, stuffed to bursting with the Owner's toys, was taking him, his dog, and his family on vacation. Mozzo and the dog had come along for the first part of the journey, delivering the boat to Victoria where the family would join the Owner. The family, apparently, wanted no part of the voyage up the coast.

The helm was sluggish, and Mozzo, in his inexperience, became anxious. Just off Peacock Spit, the Owner suddenly thrust out his right arm, pointing, and yelled, “Turn.” The dog, a Norwegian elkhound, barked.

Mozzo cranked the wheel to the right.

“The other way,” screamed the Owner, arms waving. The dog stood on the gunnel peering over the combing. He looked at Mozzo and barked. Twice.

And so Mozzo cranked the wheel back the other way. The Owner had pointed at the green can buoy coming just a whisker off their bow. Mozzo saw it then, close to, bobbing down the starboard side, a near miss. Not the most auspicious start to the voyage.

Three miles out, ten miles up the coast, still motoring, the ketch decided it had had enough and stopped. The sudden quiet was unnerving. They drifted a bit. Mozzo suggested sails, but with little or no wind the suggestion was ill received. Besides, the sails had not been out of their covers in years. The Owner motored; he chose not to sail.

Mozzo sat at the lifeless helm watching the Washington coast bob up and down. Willapa Bay, he reckoned, off there to starboard. Japan, off there to port. The Owner on his hands and knees down below, cursing, as he tinkered with fuel lines and filters; but the ketch adamantly refused to cooperate. The dog sat on the stern sheets watching gulls lift and turn and mewl. They drifted.

“Call the Coast Guard,” suggested Mozzo.

“Shut up,” retorted the Owner.

Time passed. The Long Beach peninsula continued its up and down, the purple hills beyond provided a backdrop at once maudlin and sublime. The mizzen boom rolled to starboard then back to port, giving the winches a good bang each time. Though frustrated with the failure of his motor, untoward anxiety, edginess, also marked the Owner's face. He cursed. A box wrench was flung through the companionway into the gentle heave of sea. The boom swung to port. The boom swung back. Thump.

The dog went below. He hopped onto the settee, sat and considered the Owner.

"What?" said the Owner.

The dog turned and curled up in the corner. He sighed.

Damn it, yelled the Owner.

Raised eyebrows from Mozzo. Definitely out of sorts, he thought. More than the situation warranted. He wondered, knowing the fellow's history, what goodies might be stashed aboard. Did he fear having the federales on board?

Reluctantly, the Owner called the Coast Guard for assistance. They waited in silence. The dog slept. The Coast Guard arrived, a stout line looped the ketch's samson post and off they went. They crossed back over the bar which was, of course, a milk pond. Mozzo thought he might easily canoe this glassy expanse. Well timed, this rescue. Slack water.

A story is one medium for explicating the difficulties of concepts. A film is able to provide visual information to fill in the blanks. Ultimately, humans, with their limited ability to see beyond the end of their noses, must be moved by some epiphanic occurrence and then expand themselves, physically and mentally, to find Slack Water, and so become their obverse.

 

Trail Dog, a film

Between ebb and flow is slack. Not always a milk pond, but usually quite benign. For the businessman, slack is a slow period. For a climber, a loose bit of rope. Also, the dictionary tells us, the word suggests negligence. The link below is to a video that is not about ocean, but about ocean's obverse which is mountain. The Euclidean perspective (a hairball best left to mathematicians, but useful in this context) suggests that all space is unique yet comparable. Its otherness lies in its nature.² Many mountains were once sea floor; much of the seafloor was once mountains.

Slack features prominently in the short film. The contention made in "Trail Dog" that happiness is beyond good and guilt is almost so. Almost. But beyond happiness and its opposite, which is sorrow, beyond all dualities, is what I chose to label Slack Water. Slack Water is a place as well as a state of mind. It is where animals---dogs and cats, deer and whales---live. That is, if the animal in question has not been too domesticated. Slack Water is what humans---especially those who are out of sorts---seek. Slack water, to all who know the tides, gives a tangible image for an abstract concept.

No words can adequately describe that which is beyond all dualities. The term offered here merely suggests the complete integration that lies beyond concepts. The film linked below is narrated, and the words are well written and compliment the images equally well. But it is the images themselves which tell the story. The Runner and his friends are beyond mischief, happiness: they are dancing Slack Water.

Trail Dog

Glossary

Chomolungma, Tibetan name for Mt Everest (K15)

crinoids, marine fossils some of which can be found on the summit of Chomolungma. See website linked here ( https://www.volcanocafe.org/fossils-of-mount-everest/ ) for more information

epiphantic, an intuitive perception or insight, usually unexpected, into the reality or essential meaning of something, usually triggered by some commonplace occurrence or experience.

obverse, the counterpart of a fact or truth.

1Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1976), 144.

2The tallest mountain on the planet is Mauna Kea, Hawaii, at 33,000 feet from its underwater base to its summit.

CHOP WOOD, CARRY WATER

(A glossary of archaic or uncommon words is added at the end of the essay.)

Sir Isaac Newton is noted for his concise descriptions of the physical world. His three laws of motion are well known and the third law is so often cited that it has become something of a cliche. The third law states that for every action in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction. If object A exerts a force on object B, then object B also exerts an equal force on object A. The lift generated by a wing exemplifies this principle as does the game of billiards, the martial arts of aikido and judo, tsunamis, marbles, walking, and intercontinental ballistic missiles.

While this exchange of forces is quite predictable for inanimate objects and the autonomic movement of animate objects, any attempt to apply the principle to human behavior is far more problematic.

How does one respond to an upraised middle finger (action)? Certainly, context is critical to any informed decision. However, the phallus finger seems to trigger such an emotional, visceral response (reaction) that informed reasoning is short circuited, adrenaline surges, and before we can say oh fooie one's middle digit is raised in return, the arm outthrusted, jaw clenched.

Thus the conundrum. Controlling one's emotional reactions is often beyond reason.

Neville Chamberlain is often reviled for his vain attempt to appease Adolf Hitler. Appeasement, of course, is most often considered a form of flight. In order to avoid confrontation, one attempts to pacify and conciliate one's opponent. Winston Churchill, on the other hand, is often lauded for his famous speech to Parliament in June of 1940 that proclaimed " ... we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight in the fields and streets, we shall fight in the hills ..." Two of the Bible's most often quoted anecdotes suggest either course as correct: One can passively turn the other cheek or vengefully take an eye for an eye.

The United States Supreme Court, that once august body, has given this opinion on unbridled responses: "fighting words," speech and actions that incite others to imminent lawless actions, obscenities that might do the same, as well as certain types of defamatory speech and specific types of threat are not protected by the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment and so can be regulated and even punished by the legal entity involved (the state of Pennsylvania in this case). Laws that have been upheld as constitutional are laws which range from a simple summary offense of Disorderly Conduct to felonies such as Terroristic Threats.

Controlling one's limbic system, it seems, might well be imperative in order to remain at large and free from the capricious nature of some hanging judge. No simple matter apparently. Statistics from the Bureau of Justice from the year 2012 give the total of federal, state and local expenditures on prisons, jails and the like at just over $80 billion.

So consider the movement of water which is, of course, a body of knowledge encompassed in the science of hydrology. Moving water offers an analogy that might serve to untie the Gordian knot that is the feedback from one's limbic system. If one embarks on a river of some size, or a coastal voyage in a small boat whose motive power is the wind or one's muscles, the analogy becomes more apt.

The Columbia River does not need much encouragement to run at four or five knots. If the main channel is narrow or the flow is constricted by islands, the water will crown and carry away the less than intrepid sailor or paddler. Head on confrontations with currents, however they may arise, rarely profit the small boat sailor, paddler or rower. Flight is the order of the day. Back eddies, slack water and the lee side of some prominence provide the means to tame the aggressive current (might such current be labeled the aqueous world's limbic system?).

Flight, unfortunately, carries a connotation of cowardice. So euphemisms are in order.

Flight can mean simply running away; but the word surely connotes more than that. In terms of the working analogy, both back eddies and lee sides can equate with avoidance, a more complicated form of flight which involves keen awareness of one's environment as well as an astute awareness of human nature. Slack water, my personal favorite, at first glance appears to be merely indifference. The following anecdote implies much more.

Morihei Ueshiba, the man who put aikido on the map, often traveled by train. As a slight seemingly frail old man, eighty-something, he had his students carry the luggage. No matter how crowded the platform Ueshiba was able to walk sprightly along, parting the waters as it were, with his students hustling along behind in his wake. Committed to neutrality, focused, the old man lived upon slack water. He gave no thought to fight or flight. His only concern, to add an old Chinese analogy, was to chop wood and carry water.

Concentrating on one thing at a time seems beyond possibility in this digital age. Focus is wanting generally. But there is this: Sick with flu, prostrate on the couch, wallowing in self-pity, the cell phone rings (vibrates, chortles, clangs, dingdings, whatever) and reluctantly the call is answered. A long lost friend has reached out. Smiles and laughter and hail-fellow-well-mets blossom and flourish. And the flu? Well, one's illness is apparently in remission for the moment. Similar focused moments are common experience, if one but considers. And it is such moments that I label slack water: the disconnected haven between Scylla and Charybdis. And if moments are possible, why not hours or days or a lifetime.

Asians seem better at this mindset than western folk. Two prominent individuals who attained neutrality (centrality?) were Mahatma Gandhi and the Dali Lama. In an interview with Bill Moyers (still available on YouTube), the Dalai Lama was asked a question that cut to the core of the issue. How did he deal with insect pests like mosquitoes. The Dalai Lama laughed (a very happy fellow this fellow) and said at first he would gently wave a hand. And if that didn't work? asked Moyers. Ah, then perhaps a puff of air. And ... The Dalai Lama laughed his laugh, and then smack, he slapped his forearm. Chop wood, he said. Ha ha ha.

GLOSSARY:

autonomic, involuntary or unconscious, relating to the autonomic nervous system which includes heartbeat and breathing among other less obvious examples (cellular homeostasis, e.g.).

conundrum, a confusing and difficult question or problem.

limbic system, that part of the brain involved in our behavioral and emotional responses, especially when it comes to behaviors one needs for survival: feeding, reproduction and caring for one's young, and fight or flight responses.

Scylla and Charybdis, in Greek mythology, Scyylla was a rather nasty six-headed monster who lived on a rock on one side of a narrow strait (said to be the Strait of Messina between Italy and Sicily), and Charybdis was a whirlpool on the other side.

summary offense, the least serious type of crime. Felonies are most serious and misdemeanors less so. Summary offenses can be decided without jury trial.