Noble Soul

Reflect upon your aspirations, O noble one. No matter what your station be, keep searching.

Rumi
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Hello Jon
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Watchman, tell us of the night.
Tonight it's in the tropics
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My friend Marty is on vacation. He spends his days sitting in the sun, smoking his cigarettes, drinking his vodka, staring at the palm trees and the pelicans. He's in the Caribbean.

Normally Marty lives in Brooklyn. He's a basic New Yorker as I am.. Concrete brains and asphalt nerves. That's one reason why we're friends.

The rest of the year Marty works. He's a word processor and he's one of the best in the business. But that's not what he really is. He's really a musician. And that's another reason why we're friends. He plays keyboard: rock, jazz and classical.

Some day Marty will retire from his job, probably move to the Caribbean and play music because he carries music in his noble soul wherever he goes.

His saga is about facing necessities, grounding himself in the things and people that matter and searching for the answers that quell the questions. His is the grand search. It's the search for meaning. It's an active search done through accomplishment and force of character.

His is a vigorous search. While my search is mainly intellectual, with my nose in a book, Marty will be gathering adventures like a collector. We are very different in our approach to life. And that's another reason why we're friends.

But if I ever scrape the money together to buy a clarinet and learn how to play it, I may join him in the Caribbean, stare at the palm trees and pelicans and make music.

DB - The Vagabond
Never give up.
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Seriously

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Ad Reinhardt
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Hello Sandy
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The only people who take serious art seriously are some artists, (occasionally), people who buy art and art critics. The people who don't take it seriously are those who do it, those who sell it and those wretched people who are somehow forced unfortunately to look at it or listen to it against their will. How do I know this? Because I'm an artist and because I've observed the way art is handled in this age.

Watch a good musician in concert. You may see intense concentration while a piece is being performed, but at the end the musician will probably break into a big smile and maybe even a laugh. Sometimes you even see the smile while the piece is being played. It is the joy of music, or dance that you are seeing. The smiles on the faces of the actors at a curtain call are showing the same joy.

I've known artists who will chuckle at a painting they've done or are working on. It's the same with writers. I know that I will get a laugh out of a particularly strange and subtle twist of language when I'm writing. I avoid cliches, because I champion original thought in myself and in others, so I will go searching for the expression that tells the story without repeating the tried and true. And when I see it in other arts, the dancer who pushes his body into a movement I've never seen, or the musician who gives me a surprising cluster of tones, I feel the same delight.

There is a solid bedrock of mystery involved in the relationship between an artist and the work being done. It has to do with value and origination, an invisible generic bond of co-creation between the artist, the work and the inspiration that demands and forces it into being. It is as if there is an anonymous angel of pure spirit that finds it in whatever galaxy it lives, brings it out of hiding and gives it to the artist who is ready to respond.

The scientist will study to uncover the secret laws of nature. The engineer will design the mechanism that measures. moves and controls the natural forces. But what the artist does is transcendental. And who can be serious about that.

DB - Vagabond Journeys
Never Give Up
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What are you?

It's strange how one feels drawn forward without knowing at first where one is going.

Gustav Mahler
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There's the story of the man who became a nuclear physicist because when he was in high school he found, by accident, in an encyclopedia, the scientific explanation of rainbows.

There's the story of the South American Indian who found a guitar sitting alongside a remote trail, picked it up and discovered that he could play it and went on to become a well known musician.

And there's the story of the business man who developed a problem with his throat and, on the doctor's suggestion, took up singing to exercise it. Within a few years he sold his business and became a full time opera singer, something he never thought he would be.

Here's my story.

It was 1958. I was 19 years old. I had just left college prematurely because I didn't want to be a well rounded liberal arts student, or a well rounded anything else. It was the era of the Beatniks. My sister once said she thought I was probably one of the originals. That was probably so.

I knew I wanted to do something interesting with my life, but I couldn't decide what that was. There were several options, specialties of activity, roads into the unknown, sturdy brass hinges to hear scraping as they opened the door I would step through.

I enjoyed writing. I had written a short story and some poetry which a lot of people seemed to like. I had been a music student, learning violin, percussion and composition, and I had played drums for a jazz trio in the area. I had done some work for the local police department and was encouraged by the captain to go to the police academy and have a career in law enforcement. I had worked for a French chef, a wonderful man I admired, who wanted to teach me all about cooking and how to be a chef and manage a kitchen. I had done some acting in school and for local theatre groups and I enjoyed it. While in school I took a geology course from an inspiring teacher and became very interested in geology, an interest I still have. I had done some drawing, painting and design and wanted to get formal training in art. I really didn't know which direction I was going in, but I also didn't think about it much.

One afternoon I went to visit my sister. She was having a dinner party later that day. I was early and tired from something, so I lay down on her living room couch to take a nap. In the middle of the floor was her vacuum cleaner waiting for me to wake from my nap so she could vacuum the floor. She was in her kitchen preparing the dinner. The radio was on to a classical music station.

When I began to awaken the radio was playing the Symphony #2 by Sibelius, As it neared the end I, in my half sleep, was seeing a vision. It seemed that screens were passing in front of my face, each one replacing the one before it, back and forth, in and out they went. And each one had an image that represented one of the options of my life. There was a screen the showed me as a drummer, another that showed me as a painter, another as a chef, another as a cop, another as a composer, another as an actor, another as a poet, another as a scientist and so on. These screens just kept passing in front of my mind's eye as I listened to the finale of the Symphony which is a combination of march and hymn. When it was over I got up and stepped quickly over the vacuum cleaner and when I did one of those screens popped back into my head and on it was written "You're an actor." I knew right then it was true.

Everything else became a hobby or a special interest. From that very moment I became an actor and I never looked back.

Dana Bate
The True Vagabond
(Never give up.)
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SUMMER QUESTION

Summer is moving along, people.

It's a long, hot, sticky summer, so here's a hot, sticky question for you.

Same sex marriage. Should it be legal or not? If so, why? If not, why not?

dbdacoba@aol.com

17 answers so far.

You have until the last day of summer, but don't dally.
I eagerly await your answer.

DB
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