Stay With It Sally!
So are you ready for a followup from Tom’s session? It’s a natural expectation if you think like a normal, logical human. Maybe linear sequences are our birthright. “How dare you wander off into another sidebar VB!” But for me, “tell it slant” still hovers, and Jung’s radical quote about consciousness as our new religion dangles in mid-air like a Sherman tank looking for a safe place to land. Perhaps the problem is that it actually needs to land on our collective heads, but never mind. So now, I hear a voice urging me to “stay with it Sally!” And now another metaphor and another memory intervenes in this impossibly chaotic and non linear-mind. Multiple personality disorder indeed! Sally is a wonderful dancer, who was a dear friend until I moved from New York to California. One of my favorite pastimes was to take a subway downtown to one of those large, ubiquitous dance studios that used to exist before New York morphed into Disneyland East, and to watch my friend Sally in her dance class. Oh my! Talk about sensate experience. I was always transfixed watching her teacher shouting encouragement to all those beautiful dancers lifting, soaring, sweating and sometimes falling from midair. “Stay with it Robert!” Stay with it Matt!” Stay with it Sally!” The teacher was physically quite small but that voice! And that power! Her encouragement seemed to lift the dancers higher as they strained their bodies to Mozart rhythmically pounded out on an old upright piano. This was a sight to behold: gorgeous bodies infused with such power and grace. And the concentration! If a dancer’s concentration broke for even one second - serious injury to a leg or ankle was an ever present possibility.
This was a life teaching for me. These were dancers from major companies in New York giving everything to the dance. It occurs to me that most of us were never taught how to sustain intensity and concentration from the beginning of a leap to its end. Jung learned that; James Hillman learned that; Madame Curie learned that and Kobe Bryant, leaping through the air and dunking a basketball learned that. But most of us? God help us. Without exception, when beginner meditation students learn how to concentrate, some electric signal in the mind automatically seems to say, “ It’s time to sleep now, dear one.” It’s like Pavlov’s dog. The bell rings and heads begin to nod almost on cue. I remember one meditator who fell asleep almost simultaneously with the ringing of the bell. He would lean forward then jerk himself up, lean forward then jerk himself up; each time making a racket as he leaned more precariously forward and then jerked himself up. I mentioned to him “Bob, are you aware that you tend to fall asleep during a sit?” He was shocked and quite convinced that I was incorrect. Bob changed his mind when he fell out of his chair and landed flat on the floor, no damage done except to his pride. No one taught us what it means to stay with it from the beginning of a leap through to the end. At least no one in the last two centuries.
I once wrote a song for Sally and sang it at Freddies Supper Club the very night that she was dancing in France. It’s not a poem; it’s a lyric, which depends on music for loving completion. Its the only healthy example of co-dependency I can think of. (A poem is its own music.) I learned to write lyrics when I joined Lehman Engle’s workshop, which was sponsored by BMI. He flew to Nashville once a month to lead his famous Broadway Theater Workshop, and I suspect arranged to have me named “young composer of the year” by BMI. With that money ($3,000 was a fortune to me) and his words, “You belong in New York, Victor, and if you do not move there, I will personally kill you,” I moved to New York City at age 29. So don’t compare this lyric about Sally to “Tell it slant,” please. The music is in three-four time and the melody is lovely (unfortunately, you will have to imagine it, clever me).
“One two three, one two three
One two three;
It’s okay to be afraid sweet Sally,
There are many things that frighten
you and me,
All the flowers are fading much to quickly
As the years go running by
One two three.
So keep on dancing, spinning ‘round
Even though sometimes you may fall down,
When you leap though the air
you help me believe I can fly.
Keep on dancing! And I promise you, I’ll try.
It is scary on the edge sweet Sally
And I know sometimes you hide in bed all day,
And perhaps the dance is single Sally,
But the light in you shines bright on my way.
So keep on dancing, spinning round
Even though sometimes you will fall down
When you leap through the air
you help me believe I can fly
Keep on dancing! And I promise you I’ll try.
It’s okay to be afraid sweet Sally,
That’s the price that we will pay
To be free.”
I have never forgotten how much I learned from watching Sally dance.
Once at a meditation retreat I decided to explain sunyatta to the meditators in a new way. Sunyatta means “emptiness,” and I noticed long ago that any mention of sunyatta and the eyes start glazing over. A Dharma talk on anatta, which is the Buddha’s teaching on the impossibility of conceptualizing “self” has the same effect, instant ambien. I pondered this problem of talking about something that, by definition, is frightening to either side of our ego, male or female. Basically, “emptiness” is a psychological experience rather than a spiritual experience. That’s important to repeat. “Emptiness” is a psychological experience rather than a spiritual experience. To be more precise, feelings of emptiness are epidemic in our culture. Can you spell pot? A drink after work to take the edge off? Sex? One thousand activities to keep a feeling of dread, anxiety or emptiness at bey. Emptiness is an awful feeling.
When a meditation teacher, who has become friends with her silence, (which probably took 20 years of practice) talks about how wonderful sunyatta is - well, you get the picture. So how to “tell it slant?” Here’s what I finally did at one meditation retreat.
I held up our beautiful Korean bowl for everyone to see, and turned it upside down showing everyone that the bowl was quite empty. Then I held it gently in the palm of the hand and “bonged” it with a soft mallet. The sound was gorgeous. We had just finished lunch and there was an empty can of coke on the dias. I put the can in the bowl and rang it again. The sound was harsh and clangy. It was so obvious that the beautiful sound was created within the emptiness of the bowl. I did not not need to press the point of what a mind sounds like when it is full of crap.
This is my example of telling all the truth but telling it slant, and my way of staying with it Sally. The second part, which is Jung’s quote I will have to ponder before I can tell it slant. Stay tuned, but just to show you that I can write a poem as well as a lyric, I’ll close with a poem I wrote in New York one lonely night when I realized how mindlessly I was giving away too much inner treasure.
“If my lips were legs,
Would I spread them quite so often?
Would I be discreet and seldom speak,
Would that my manner soften?
God give me strength to walk the streets
And keep what’s mine in me,
And stop incessant, flapping lips
From whoring mystery. ”
