THE GS RETURNS WITH NEWS OF
HIS BIRTHDAY GETAWAY:
THOUGHTS FALLING ON THE
AUTUMNAL EQUINOX AT AN AVALON SUNSET
The sun was setting over Avalon
The last time we stood in the west
Suffering long time angels enraptured by Blake
Burn out the dross innocence captured again.
Standing on the beach at sunset all the boats
All the boats keep moving slow
In the glory of the flashing light in the
evenings glow.
(Van the Man--from song on car cd player
9/22/12)
The GS has retuned home from his birthday outing (backpacking
to the Monterey Bay seashore), and given the interest—the many birthday
well wishes from his FB Friends for a great birthday time—, he thought
y'all would want to know how it went.
Let's put it this way É there are few times in
life when a person is allowed, guilt-free, to just get away from it all, and
one's birthday has to be the best alibi. So one can declare to one's family and
friends, without shame, that "I just want to get away someplace!"
Well I'm takin' some time with my quiet friend.
Well I'm takin' some time on my own.
Well I'm makin' some plans for my getaway
There'll be blue skies shining up above
When I'm cloud hidden
Cloud hidden
Whereabouts unknown
Well I've got to get out of the rat-race now
I'm tired of the ways of mice and men
And the empires all turning into rust again.
Out of everything nothing remains the same
That's why I'm cloud hidden
Cloud hidden
Whereabouts unknown É.
("Van the Man", from song/video
posted to FB on the road.)
Someplace where one is not wired in 24/7;
disconnected É from the internet/tv/radio & etc. In favor of being
re-connected to the natural rhythms of the cycle of day and night; preferably
where there's some silence, least enough where one can hear oneself think. No
routine, no need to be anywhere. In other words, today on his Autumnal Equinox
birthday the GS decided it was high time to take that getaway, and just for one
day not have to think of the up-coming election—not once!—or what
he wanted to post about it on FB. So, while he left this for his FB Friends to
do, he got "cloud-hidden"—well, actually "fog-hidden"
at the seashore.
As he got in the car to drive up the California
coast (something he hasn't done in a long, long time), he got help praying to
find just the right spot to spend the day from his September birthday-buddy LC
(since he had brought his latest album/cd to the station to celebrate LC's
birthday this week and it was still in the car)—track #3:
Show me the place É
I've forgotten, I don't know
Show me the place
For my head is bending low É
Show me the place,
Help me roll away the stone,
Show me the place
I can't move this thing alone
Show me the place É
And it wouldn't be too much to say that the GS was
"led" to the trailhead that ended up at this series of relatively
secluded coastal beaches. Truly majestic windswept seascape of that special
autumn light/dark gold/greyblue dynamic balance. Can't say this was the best
time he ever had at the seashore for a mini-summer's end vacation (with his
"quiet friend"), but he's happy to report that it was a calming and
energizing respite for the world-weary soul, even (dare I say)
psycho-spiritually uplifting ("psycho-spiritually uplifting"? More
about this in a moment).
Just simple pleasures on his
birthday—tripping and splashing around the breakwater, nice lunch, even
managed to get into a peaceful meditative state. But sorry friends (who cared
enough to send their well-wishes for a Baby-Boomer's birthday), no great
insights to report about aging or one's mortality. Just carried along in a
rhythmic crest of the breathing in-and-out-out-and-in of the Pacific
goddess—content to "just be," as the new-age wisemen say. To be
part of a moment-to-moment unfolding of light and dark, and amazed at the
overwhelming beauty of the planet—so powerfully incarnated in the poetry
of our Big Sur poet, Robinson Jeffers (whose verse I brought in my backpack).
This, the GS is proud to report, the nearest to the "grace" state the
Christians brag about that this temperamentally committed "pagan" can
get.)
Speaking of Christians and pagans É While the GS
was actively committed to suppressing any indulgence with the "issues of
the day" (which dominate his FB Newsfeed) on his birthday, he must confess
to one small "issue" indulgence, as the sun did fall into the western
sea. It was about "the war." No, not the one involving our country
with Afghanistan. Nor the war of the "clash of civilizations" (the
West vs. Islam) that's been in the news of late. No, no, these were not The War
that the GS was reminded of on that autumnal sunset beach É
You'd think
This rocked-in gorge would be the last place in
the world to bear
the brunt: but it's not so: they told me
This is the prow and plunging cutwater,
This rock shore here, bound to strike first,
and the world behind
will watch us endure prophetical things
And learn its fate from our ends.
(from thumbed pages of Robinson Jeffers)
"And learn its fate from our ends" É
Okay, so with the echoes of the pounding surf resounding off the steep
wind-carved cliffs at his back, the GS calmly reasoned: the "West,"
the western sea, the western land's end and prow of the Monterey coast É
Autumn, that Fall, that summer's end time of year + sunset; that ending of the
light time of day. ("The west, as archetypal region, is the sundown
quarter, and sundown means death." –Regional poet William Everson on
poet Robinson Jeffers.)
Okay É when the GS's Fall Equinox birthday-buddy,
LC, sings of what "Everybody Knows" (as heard on the birthday tribute
program this week)—"Everybody knows that the war is over / Everybody
knows that the good-guys lost" (those "Beautiful Losers: the History
of Them All")—he could be referring to any war; take your pick! But
on this birthday out there on the edge of the Pacific shelf, the GS couldn't
help muse on that War prior to the wars of the 20th century and
beyond—no, not those "wars"! (And God knows, along with
everybody knows, that our side, "fighting the good fight," have lost
some big ones!)
The War the GS was thinking of was both
historically and ontologically prior to all these that shaped our modern world.
That War was basically decided at the close of the Middle Ages and began the
early-modern period, with its Scientific Revolution.
But why waste his time in idle thought about a War
that never got much press? Which has no memorials to its victims? Because on
that semi-deserted stretch of "plugging cutwater" (in the presence of
elemental beauty of Turtle Island and the ghosts of the indigenous peoples
scouting in the fog-bank, not to mention the Esselen Indians and their Ventana
["window"] Wilderness, with its "Window to the West;" a
portal through which transmigrating souls, passing between Mount Manuel and
Pico Blanc launched off into the setting Sun, "the Isle of the Dead"
[like Avalon in "the west"]), the GS couldn't help but ask himself :
Why would it be allowed to carry on a full metal-jacket/military-industrial
complex sustained 500 year assault on Natural Beauty—that WAR on nature
and its creatures Éin the name of Western civilization and progress?
Therefore, in the balance (of ÒequinoxÓ), this is
what the GS realized on this birthday venture to the "whereabouts
unknown" wilderness. He's back to share it with y'all now: In the medieval
WAR over worldviews, the radical Monotheists (The Inquisitors: "torture
and kill all the witches and rid the countryside of their surviving
crypto-pagan earth deities"; and their so-called foes, but bastard
cousins, Bacon and the materialists/mechanists: "we must put Nature on the
rack and extract her secrets")—these guys won, and the good-guys
(the animist-pagans) lost (and history is now told from their point of view).
The evidence that the animist en-souled cosmos (and the Anima Mundi) has been lost is everywhere to
see returning from a "getaway," from even just a day away from the
"rat race," where "empires turning into rust again." And we
(in the "West" at least) just may be forced "to endure
prophetical things / And learn its fate from our ends."
Maybe humankind's a pinnacle, but only a
disastrous one. Like a delirium of sunset, the dying person sinks into
magnificence that escapes him and escapes to the degree that it enlarges him.
In that instant tears start to laugh, laughter weeps. And Time? Time reaches a
simplicity that cancels it. –George Bataille
GS
Autumnal Equinox / First Day of Fall
9/22/12