0 comments
With closed eyes I hear the sound of a kerplunk coming from somewhere in the lake, the classic sound of kerplunk and splash, and hearing this sound brings a few scattered thoughts to the surface of my mind. I think of the interview, which I’ve watched at least ten times on Youtube, between Neal Cassidy and Allen Ginsberg. Both, well into their years by the time of the recording, are not so keen on each other, or so it seems. The reasons are given, somewhat sporadically, by Neal. He responds to Allen’s questions in a non-committal way, lighting a cigarette and glancing around at the small audience. To one of Allen’s showy questions he answers, “The forms are all known, so I just go along with the forms, everything’s known, so why bother to do anything new if all the forms are known?” This response having definite roots in the way Neal’s life had changed since the publication of their other friend’s work, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Neal, frustrated with living up to the cowboy image which Jack drew him as, gives into Allen’s questioning in a way that shows this frustration; he also shows the natural and philosophical frustration which he held toward the forms of government control which were then making themselves known in the U.S. I bring this up in this little piece of writing here because I had similar thoughts about the kerplunk sound which I recently heard while sitting on the bench here, enjoying the sunset in Caldonazzo, Italy, by the lakeside. The sound, to my ears, sounded almost as if it came from a pair of shabby speakers, resounding out upon the lakeside airs as if it was some default sound effect from a movie. The human ears straining for the real reality. Any real reality. They, my ears, can no longer distinguish between defaulted sound effects and the causal, earth-bound materials which the effects originally sprang from. “The forms are all known,” said Neal Cassady. Even here, over a half century later, in another country, the effects are exhibited. The forms. The sounds. Beatitudini. The trained ear, straining for the essentials in a world of static-fed glory. Feasts of unfound thoughts. Lacking material, lacking reality, lacking the feel of the kerplunk, the one which originally fell in.
I am here, a foreigner by a lakeside, in a beautiful village near the Italian Alps. I am hearing the real sound, yet I, in my trained and formalized and inherited fear of the modern artist sympatico, hear still merely the radio waves, and not the essential and alive plunge into the lake. I am here, yet I hear only the echoes of a television, moronic memories, and the soundless.
A foreigner in Italy. A man of poetic license bound to a lakeside for the length of a sunset’s caretaker-shoveling. Hearing. Listening. Knowing he has found a sound, yet, asking himself, what sound?
Kerplunk. Kerplunk.
Kerplunk. Kerplunk.
Kerplunk. Kerplunk.
Kerplunk.
(….& he’s jumped right into the lake)
Here at the lake, Lake Caldonazzo, there are many camping parks and RV-parks which line the lake’s breadth on its north side. In order to clear my thoughts, and better design the word-play which I’d like to express myself with, I picked up my MacBook and my copy of Dante (the English translation), and walked over to the lake to sit and watch the German and Dutch tourists play along the lakeside. During the summer months the village and lakeside are full of German and Dutch tourists. All one hears at night, and during the day, is the strange, somehow silly, sound of the Dutch people’s colloquialisms. These sounds give one a sense of self, as one, being a native English speaking American, becomes more aware of the silly-sounding nature of one’s own colloquialisms. Sounds. Languages. Sitting here on the bench, the sky over the lake melting into an Italian evening, I think of kerplunk, and listen to the Dutch couples speak to each other in that silly language of theirs. Kerplunk. Kerplunk. It has a strange sound to it, but it is real. I cannot dive into it with a kerplunk, though, because I am diving into the Italian language.
It is refreshing, and oddly warm, as the water of this lake. I jump into the lake daily, and listen to the silence as I surface. I jump into the language, and listen to its beauty.
Tired, drenched with warm water, drying in the evening mildness, I stop my typing to listen to the Dutch as I let dry my budding Italian, and also to open and read through the short journal entry which I wrote a few weeks ago while on the 17 hour plane-ride here. I’ve been here in Italy for a few weeks now.
I sat next to a High School history teacher from Dallas, Texas on the plane. She wasn’t very into sharing much more than that about her life. I, on the other hand, can’t stop unveiling myself, even though I'm essentially an introvert: I'm an absolute extrovert on the written page. I dive right into the autobiographical essence of self-exploration. Kerplunk.
Here is the entry written at 12:52 PM en route to Italy on the 9th of Luglio:
The formation of a creed takes place over a series of years, a series of years which are spent following, obeying only one’s own feet, and being somewhat haphazard with the planning of one’s future. I think of Miller and his throwing his entire life upon the call and beck and sense of direction and adventure of one woman, and subsequently, his writing his first little masterpiece. I think of my situation here, sitting in the airport, waiting for my flight to Dallas, which will take me thus to Rome, where a woman awaits me. I am throwing out everything for her. I am trusting life in doing so. We are eloping in the old fashion way. Haphazard and wild, free and frightened, two people against the world.
As I was saying, going on about creed formations, I have formed mine through a series of inner and outer transactions which have more or less been in following with my creative will. I dropped out of college to go on the road. I dropped out of the road life to live on a farm. I dropped out of the farm life to apprentice under a Shaman. I dropped out of the apprenticeship because of differences with the Shaman. I then found meditation, the practice of Kriya Yoga, which has remained, throughout the rocky road which has been my life, the sole foundational counterpart of my haphazard philosophy in life, my creed.
Now on the American Airlines flight to Rome, the seriousness and utter sanctity of my life’s situation is slowly making itself clear. Only in slow, disjointed visions. Literally everything about the past is being thrown away. The only things I’ve kept with me are my sporadic will to write, and through writing, to facilitate a main function of my life, that of self-expression and self-creation. I’ve also brought along with me a copy of Dante’s Comedia, a copy of Catcher in the Rye, a copy of Der Zauberberg, and Daya Mata’s transcribed collection of talks, entitled Only Love. These, along with the many, many notebooks which I’ve filled over the years, some from my times on the farm in Oregon and some from before that, some from my time under the apprenticeship and some from the more recent years which I spent in L.A., when I first began on the path, and some even more recent expressive discourses with self, many of these more recent entries being transcribed onto a blog which I have written for over the past few months.
The somewhat fragmented visions are peppered with a callosal happiness, a type of fragrant joyousness which peeks in the door from the immediate future here and there. Tastes of purest sunlight. Sure, over the past month as me and my fiancée planned this journey’s advent together, we planned the ins and outs, the lefts and rights, always deeply in tune with each other’s ferment. But, and I think this is true for her also, I think I’m only now realizing what we’re about to do. Or, I’m only now emotionally beginning to understand the valid fruitfulness which is about to transform my life for good.
I mean, I am leaving everything behind. I have in my bags my SS card, my birth certificate, and all the Apostilles needed for the Italian bureaucrats’ purposes, for my up and coming wedding and steps into a dual citizenship. I left everything behind except my yogic self-promise, my will to create art, my love for my one donna, my notebooks, my laptop, and a few books. Clothes, too, of course. My ego must look in the mirror and see a full-on bohemian every damn day, or it’ll blow a gasket, or something.
So, life. See, I’ve tried living the regular kinds of life, the going after jobs, the planning for a normal, conventional (at least, monetarily) life, and all that, and it never fit. Just never fit. Hence my history as a bum on the road, a couch surfer, a dilettantish writer, and now a romantic eloper.
Life chooses us, I guess. That’s how it went with meeting my fiancée, at least. Life chose us. I didn’t choose, initially, to read Catcher in the Rye, as millions and millions of teenage boys did, during a lull in my adolescence. During that time in my life, I was oppressed by the weight of living with my parents at home, 19 years old, and I had it in my head that I would be a civil engineer and design freeway off-ramps or something, as I was going to school for that sort of thing. Then, father found the pot stash, his 19 year old son’s pot stash, my father, the cop. Then, weeks spent at home instead of going out and partying with my friends, which led me one lazy and do-nothing evening to slouch my back into a love-seat with Salinger’s debut novel. I chomped that thing down in one gulp. And that wasn’t the money shot. Oh, no. The money shot followed directly after I finished my first read through of Catcher in the Rye. I felt something within me stir, something powerful, something tender, something vague but ever-familiar, as if it had always been there, a power source I had within me which I had never before noticed. This feeling led to me Googling “books like Catcher in the Rye”. The search listed a number of suggestions, one of which caught my burgeoning artistic eye, as it were. The novel’s name was On the Road, by a fella named Jack Kerouac. The rest is, well, my heart’s and my mind’s history.
A foreigner in Italy. A man of poetic license bound to a lakeside for the length of a sunset’s caretaker-shoveling. Hearing. Watching, and looking up.
He sees, far up in the purpling blue of skydome, a plane.
He writes a Haiku.
You must sign up or log in to submit a comment.
0 comments