Under the Atlantic

Nine thirty PM.

A bit ago I remembered my love for Chris Squire’s bass with Yes, back when I bought every Yes record I could get my hands on. This was forty years ago and I was in high school. The band did beautiful work: creative, artistic, and poetic. I want to say that their lyrical inspiration came from Romantic and Victorian poetry, particularly Blake and maybe Tennyson; but I can find no hard evidence of such influences. Nobody seems to know about Jon Anderson’s reading habits along these lines, though I imagine that every young English student was exposed to the classics. So all my guesswork on it is fruitless at least for now… Sometimes I think that, for the sheer quality of the poetry, no one can compete with Alfred, Lord Tennyson. You can see it in a short lyric like “The Eagle,” especially the last line: “Like a thunderbolt he falls.” If I were to dedicate myself to poetry writing, I’d want to be like Tennyson, even though I’m American and he was English. Indeed, such an ambition is probably absurd… 

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Loveless

Quarter after nine. I think I might schedule a ride to take me to the bookstore for tomorrow. I don’t know; everyone is so apathetic these days, it doesn’t matter what I do. Yesterday I got pretty excited thinking about my birthday next month. I’ll be 55 years old, and it happens that 5 is my soul number in numerology. Five means things like sex and rock and roll and other extraordinary pleasures. I might get my heart’s desire or then again maybe not. Nothing happens unless you put some effort into the endeavor. As of now, nothing is happening anyway. There isn’t even a breath of air outdoors to disturb the trees. It’s cloudy and cold, gray and lifeless as a cadaver. But Aesop ate his dog food and gives some signs of life. There’s something alive. I just heard a mail truck over on N. Park to break the spell of silence. “The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls / And tenement halls.” Hello darkness, my old friend… I’d kind of like to buy a nicer edition of Dubliners. This gives me an excuse to go to the bookstore tomorrow. I see so much of people missing opportunities to enjoy life, and religious asceticism makes the situation worse. You won’t go to hell for having a good time today. And yet I feel I’m whistling in a hurricane. “It is better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all.” 

Power and Light

Quarter of ten at night.

Lately my thoughts at night, lying in bed, are rather difficult since I revisited my childhood memories by means of old music. Basically I am concerned for my mortality and what that means for me personally: heaven, hell, or maybe nothing will greet my consciousness when I cross the bar, in Tennyson’s words. He believed he would meet his Pilot at that time, and you know, that’s a poem I ought to read again… I just did that, and he said he hoped to meet his Pilot face to face, but he wasn’t a hundred percent certain. It’s a beautiful lyric poem; I wish I’d written it myself. But as far as the question of the afterlife, I might as well resign myself to ignorance, for it’s a puzzle no one has ever solved for humanity.

Beginning in my thirties, I used to dream recurrently of being in the house alone during a power outage. I flicked a light switch on and nothing happened: no power or light. I was already a ghost in a dark house. It always makes me think hard about the nature of existence: what is the light and where does it come from? And where does it go when it’s gone?