the sawpit

Happy Birthday Harry

Who is Harry Nilsson?

I recently discovered that a new documentary about Harry Nilsson has been released this year called Who is Harry Nilsson? (And Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him)? written and directed by John Scheinfeld. The film features rare footage of Nilsson performing, and interviews with members of the Nilsson family, Ringo Starr, Brian Wilson, Randy Newman, the voice of John Lennon, The Smothers Brothers and many other old friends and collaborators. I'm really looking forward to learning more about one of my all time favorite singers and songwriters. Thanks for the music Harry.

 

1941

Well in 1941 a happy father had a son
And by 1944 the father walked right out the door
And in '45 the mom and son were still alive
But who could tell in '46 if the two were to survive

Well the years were passing quickly
But not fast enough for him
So he close his eyes through '55
And he opened them up again
When he looked around he saw a clown
And the clown seemed very gay
And he set that night to join that circus clown and run away

{Scat solo}

Well he followed every railroad track
An every highway sign
And he had a girl in each new town
And the towns he left behind
And the open road
Was the only road he knew
But the color of his dreams
Slowly turning into blue

The he met a girl the kind of girl
He wanted all his life
She was soft and kind and good to him
So he took her for a wife
And they got a house not far from town
And in a little while
The girl had seen the doctor
And she came home with a smile

Now in 1961 a happy father had a son
And by 1964 the father walked right out the door
And in '65 the mom and son were still around
But what will happen to the boy
When the circus comes to town

Harry Nilsson (June 15, 1941 – January 15, 1994)

This Beautiful Black Marriage

Photograph negative
her black arm: a diving porpoise,
sprawled across the ice-banked pillow.
Head: a sheet of falling water.
Her legs: icicle branches breaking into light.

This woman,
photographed sleeping.
The man,
making the photograph in the acid pan of his brain.
Sleep stain them both,
as if cloudy semen
rubbed shiningly over the surface
will be used to develop their images.

on the desert
the porpoises curl up,
their skeleton teeth are bared by
parched lips;
her sleeping feet
trod on scarabs,
holding the names of the dead
tight in the steady breathing.

This man and woman have married
and travel reciting
chanting
names of missing objects.

They enter a pyramid.
A black butterfly covers the doorway
like a cobweb,
folds around her body,
the snake of its body
closing her lips.
her breasts are stone stairs.
She calls the name, "Isis,"
and waits for the white face to appear.

No one walks in these pyramids at night.
No one walks during
the day.
You walk in that negative time,
the woman's presence filling up the space
as if she were incense; man walks
down the crevices and
hills of her body.
Sounds of the black marriage
are ritual sounds.
Of the porpoises dying on the desert.
The butterfly curtaining the body,
The snake filling the mouth.
The sounds of all the parts coming together
in this one place,
the desert pyramid,
built with the clean historical
ugliness of men dying at work.

If you imagine, friend, that I do not have those
black serpents in the pit of my body,
that I am not crushed in fragments by the tough
butterfly wing
broken and crumpled like a black silk stocking,
if you imagine that my body is not
blackened
burned wood,
then you imagine a false woman.

This marriage could not change me.
Could not change my life.
Not is it that different from any other marriage.
They are all filled with desert journeys,
with Isis who hold us in her terror,
with Horus who will not let us see
the parts of his body joined
but must make us witness them in dark corners,
in bloody confusion;
and yet this black marriage,
as you call it,
has its own beauty.
As the black cat with its rich fur
stretched and gliding smoothly down the tree trunks.
Or the shining black obsidian
pulled out of mines and polished to the cat's eye.
Black as the neat seeds of a watermelon,
or a pool of oil, prisming the light.
Do not despair this "black marriage."
You must let the darkness out of your own body;
acknowledge it
and let it enter your mouth,
taste the historical darkness openly.
Taste your own beautiful death,
see your own photo image,
as x-ray,
Bone bleaching inside the blackening
flesh

Diane Wakoski (8/3/37 — Present)

A Sect of One: Emerson's Unity of God

More than any other American writer, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) has influenced my ideas about God, religion, the creative mind, and the very nature of human existance. In honor of the 202nd anniversary of Emerson's birth, I have decided to post a paper I wrote back in college on the subject of Emerson's secular spirituality. After taking a class on Melville, my fellow literature majors and I petitioned our professor to offer a class soley on the writings of Emerson. He granted our wish and this paper is one of the results of my academic explorations into this uniquely American thinker.

The Authority of the Soul: Finding God in Emerson

Emerson's vision of God is secular, and at times can be seen as pantheistic; however, even this is too narrow an interpretation. The "Unity of God" found in his Unitarian beginnings blooms into a self made reality where "appearances indicate the fact that the universe is represented in every one of its particles. Everything in nature contains all the powers of nature," and is thus, the "hidden stuff" of an active God.

Naturalistic Chinese philosopher, Hsun Tzu (300-230 BCE) asserted that "each of the thousand things attains its harmony, and thus grows. Each obtains its nourishment, and thus achieves full development. We do not see their activities but we do see their results. This is what is called spirit." Emerson's unity is not wholly new, it has its roots in ancient Chinese Naturalistic Confucianism as well as other predecessors. When Emerson speaks of "following one's nature" and the spontaneous flux of nature, he is echoing their philosophy in one respect, and yet he strays from all tradition.

We don't have Emerson speaking of meditating on God in order to ignore or shut out the world of appearances (as we do in, say, certain schools of Buddhism and Vedantic Yoga) but rather, we have a delight in nature and the senses as shown in his essay The Poet: "Every line we draw in the sand has expression; there is no body without its spirit or genius." Emerson regards nature as the soul of the body: "We stand before the secret of the world, there where Being passes into Appearance and Unity into Variety." Nature and all that comprise reality in the universe are but "externalizations of the soul." Emerson asserts, quite clearly, the self-existence of nature and the soul in Self-Reliance: "Where there is he, there is Nature," and that, "Time and space are but physiological colors which the eye makes, but the souls is light: where it is, is day; where it was, is night." Thus, the result is an intrinsic connection to our "being" and the "becoming soul."

Nature sets the groundwork for Emerson's concept that, "the beauty of nature shines in his own breast" and therefore, God is an unknowable and mysterious "essence" What is he really telling us? If the world is a "divine dream" then it does not account for matter. "It leaves God out of me." So the "nature of things" must be comprised equally with the "soul and the world." He makes this claim in Compensation: "An inevitable dualism bisects nature, so that each thing is a half, and suggests the other thing to make it whole..." But where does God fit into this dualism? Emerson gives us, like Hsun Tzu, an account of the invisible force behind nature, for "spirit, that is, the Supreme Being, does not build up nature around us, but puts it forth through us, as the life of a tree puts forth new branches and leaves through the pours of the old." Emerson tropes nature, claiming that it "reflects the spirit," and that "all of nature is but a metaphor of the human mind." So, the dualism is simply the "whole" in a state of dependent flux and change - a dualistic unity, if you will.

If nature, the mind, and the soul are changing constantly, then that is the ultimate law of God. Those who are bound by tradition, by the past's attempts to know God, will fail. As Emerson writes in his journal prior to the Divinity School Address: "there are parts of faith so great, so self-evident, that when the mind rests in them, the pretensions of the most illuminated, most pretending sect, pass for nothing…" Emerson is claiming that there is a secular way to know the soul, and ultimately God, which relies solely upon individual insight. Yoga meditation has been described by Swami Sivananda (1887-1963), as "the extinction of all functions of the mind, the art of emptying the mind and making it a blank page." However, we should not interpret Emerson's faith to be an ultimate by-product of meditation, but that’s no reason to dismiss it entirely. The simple control of breath has been considered for ages to be a vehicle to peace of mind.

In the book Christian Yoga by J.M. Dechanet, the author asserts that with breath control one "directs the energy towards the centers where the true self will come to realize its own real nature." Dechanet's reasoning is that the Christian can utilize the methods of Yoga without accepting the religious and philosophical beliefs of Hinduism. Emerson goes further because he claims no loyalty to Christianity as a dogma any more than other faiths. "The instinct of man," he states in Circles, "presents eagerly onward to the impersonal and illimitable, and gladly arms itself against the dogmatism of bigots with this generous word out of the book itself," that even "the Son be subject unto Him who put all things under him, that God may be all in all." Emerson, in his constant experimenting admits that the words of God are as "fugitive as other words," and that is because "this surface on which we now stand on is not fixed, but sliding" and that "Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit."

Ralph DeMarco (11/13/89)