Number 10 September 17, 2009

Mary Travers dies at 72. David Crosby is 68. Dylan is up there. My generation started to lose icons in childhood; JFK when I was 11, MLK and RFK when I was 16, Jimi and Janice when I was 18. We are the elders now, as Surya Das says. Listening to Kind of Blue last night, it’s hard to believe it’s 50 years old, it sounds so fresh. And that just 10 years later, Miles would record In A Silent Way, and Bitches Brew. That’s like going from painting like Vermeer to Picasso in ten years. (Or like going from Picasso’s Blue Period to Abstraction in ten years, which Picasso did!). Art tells the big lie, that tells the truth, as Picasso said.

For someone who aspires to Buddhist thought, I’ve always been intrigued and horrified by the idea of impermanence. How many shared experiences; picnics, hikes, sails, are gone forever, because my friends are gone. Good times that I was sure would be repeated more than once, were in fact a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

There is apparently a section of the brain that exists solely to give us the illusion that we are in complete control (it was discovered by researchers working with head injuries). Samsara is often defined as the pain, or suffering of this earthly plane. A more accurate definition would be unsatisfactoriness. On the most beautiful day, driving down the coast with the most beautiful girl, there is always the dim, nagging thought that this can’t last. And, in fact, the only certainty is that it CAN”T last. We all die. And yet, in the realm of art, Mary Travers still shakes her long blonde hair out of her eyes in rhythm as she sings at The March on Washington, The Beatles are still witty and young as they chain-smoke their way through Hard Day’s Night, Jimi still reinvents The Star Spangled Banner. And with one note from Miles, it’s April 1959, and September 16, 2009, at the same time.

Gregory James