Words.
The world words generate. Genesis.
Poesis.
I love the world I enter when I’m talking with Carol
The things Carol talks about are good things
Words are about things
Recently, Carol talked about how hard it is to practice The Principles
In the midst of arrangements for her father’s dementia
Carol talks about what makes her happy
Like the bobble-head that came with a ticket to a football game
Watching dancers two-step
The things Carol cares about are good things
Carol talks about what the good thing to do is
Like her health administrator friend, debating mandatory vaccines
Caring shapes itself into words
Words enter into conversations
I enter into conversations with words
Words I speak shape my soul into existence
I love to shape my soul through good words
In the world invoked by good words as if the genesis of Sacred Scripture
And so I love when Carol and I talk about good things
And shape the world into a place I love
I am a friend in all the world I meet
Though involvement with distasteful words strains my friendship
When I don’t love the words I speak, or hear
Words that shape me into a conversation distant from my soul
Not like the world I enter when I’m talking with Carol
The world of good things talking with Carol generates
Oh, the way I can slough through life
When there are good things I can do
Some days I have no will to do any good thing
Then I’ll start a few scales and the music seduces me
Into the fulness of hours without CNN or Facebook
Words are used in ways
Words are about things and words are active
Words do things
Intentionality generates word choice and contrives to render an effect
Rooted unmoveable in the good as who she is
Carol’s intentionality can’t but effect the good in me
Carol talks to me and tries to make me feel good
Carol makes me feel good, feel better, when I’m feeling bad
Feel better about myself when I doubtful about the good in me
Which is other than being OK with whatever
Feeling good is being brought into good regions of my soul
Those regions religion has brought me to love
Regions that fill my soul with the impulse to manifest what is good
So, I’ll be at the piano, write a sermon, compose a poem
|I love the world I enter when I talk with Carol
It is a good place to be, a place I love, a place of love
Carol and I are in love and it generates good words
For and to each other, generates the world our words make
ABOUT WORDS
13 Oct 2021 1 Comment
in Blog Tags: existence, Facebook, friendship, love, poem, poetry, religion, soul, vaccines, words
THE EYES OF ALL NEED NOT WAIT UPON ME
16 Jun 2020 Leave a comment
in Blog Tags: art, Borofsky, critic, greatness, insignificance, peace, Picasso, poetry, publication, soul, Swedenborg
He turned toward me
As if for comment, or what didn’t need to be said
To indict Borofsky’s words painted black on a white canvass
“I want to be great”
I, a Swedenborgian divinity student; he, a photographer married to a conceptual artist
The lust to be great is quite a thing different from what is
Great in se
Not likely to produce what is great
–What is great–
Greatness is a gift
Vibrational resonance on the sound-board heartstrings thrilling the ode
That is what is human
A gift to us all—co-cooperation—collective consciousness all-soul
That is we human solidarity together
It is great to share all together collected around
A Prime Mover of soul
As is to me Borofsky’s Hammering Man and Picasso’s Untitled in Chicago’s Daley Plaza
Condense what is human freely among the affairs of daily life
These are not what humans commonly thought are metrics of greatness
A publication, a work alive 100 years after the artist’s demise, to be a class in a university, a
critic’s nod, mass appeal
Peace breathes in the spirit attendant relaxation of the choke-hold that is
The lust for greatness
And insignificance be not a curse;
The eyes of all need not wait not upon me
The satisfactions of being a good man among our common men are great enough to sustain
To be happy with the faces that you meet
And perhaps to touch a soul or two or two or three among the faces that you meet
And to touch the sky in private
For you don’t have to be tall to see the moon
And to walk humbly with a soul or two or two or three
And to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God
MUSINGS ON MUSIC
05 May 2020 Leave a comment
in Blog Tags: Beethoven, cultivation, culture, free verse, language, muse, music, recording, singing, soul, symphony, synapses
Music isn’t just pretty sounds, a pulse
Rock isn’t just a distorted guitar
Blues isn’t just a 12-bar form
Music should strike fire from the heart, so said Beethoven,
Music is poetry of the soul, heart and soul
Soul music, the existence of the soul
Touched by fire, music is a living thing
Life-giving, live or recorded, alive through ages
Living with individuals through life, through aging,
In youth or age, youth and age
Peasant and king hear the same music, so say the Chinese
Pounding through the heart, hearing, heard with soul
Existence of the soul, sounds’ salve, alive
Conducted through electricity in the brain
Singing through synapses in the soul
Symphony of the senses sent from on high
Humans sang before they spoke,
The lilt of language’s inflections
Performances perfecting the human condition
Culture, cultivation, culmination of the muse’s calling
Meaning so much more than pretty sounds, a pulse
25 YEARS
30 Aug 2019 Leave a comment
in Blog Tags: avolition, bipolar disorder, Jesus, memory, performance, practicing, sleeping, soul, spirituality
25 years largely lost
Doctors call it avolition
No will even to get up
Sleeping
Days, weekends
Those 25 years could have been:
Practice time
Gigging
Progressing
But . . .
25 years largely lost
Mind turned to fog
Memory shot
Which is an end to learning
Thought processes so slow
Which is an end to performance
Where I could have been
But . . .
25 years largely lost
I see my friends
Where they’re at
Where I could have been
But . . .
25 years largely lost
But then . . .
There’s the soul
“My kingdom is not of this world”
Spirituality
Humility, compassion, neighbor-love
“I do not give to you as the world gives”
“Where your treasure is, there your heart will be.”
I could have come to worse
25 years of spiritual progress
What Is the Blues?
12 Jul 2019 Leave a comment
in Blog Tags: blues, Buddy Guy's Legends, Chicago, community, guitars, heart, House of Blues, music, shrine, soul
As a musician, I thought that I knew what the blues is. But after a visit to Chicago, I don’t know. I had thought that the blues was a feel, certain notes and often a stylized 12-bar chord pattern. But after my visit to Chicago, I’m not sure that the blues is a matter of musical notes.
My first experience of Chicago blues was the House of Blues. The walls of the Chicago House of Blues are covered with folk art. The folk art was powerful, sometimes “abstract,” striking and soulful. It affected me, and set the tone for my experience in the club. One collection of drawings had someone shot in every picture. One woman had about 20 bleeding bullet holes in her. There was a Santa Claus dead and bleeding from a gunshot. There were other artworks that had smiles, grimaces, faces, figures–all carrying a heartfelt message. In the upstairs concert hall, above the stage were symbols of many world religions with the words, “All Are One” in the central panel. The stage of the downstairs club had red curtains with a large heart on fire on them behind the band. The impression I had in the House of Blues was that I was in a shrine. I even told my partner that this place was spiritual. The music was part of this spiritual experience. Heart. Community. Togetherness.
In Buddy Guy’s Legends, guitars were hung on the walls signed by the likes of Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, B. B. King, George Thorogood, Stevie Ray Vaughn, and other legends. The MC who introduced the band worked the audience. He asked where we all came from. There were people from Canada, Switzerland, Turkey, England, Texas, South Side of Chicago, and other places all over the world. As people in the audience called out their homes, the rest of us cheered. The MC made jokes, warmed up the audience and brought us all together. The music was communal, communion. Heart. Togetherness. The music was part of the overall experience.
I live in Canada, and we have a good blues club here that brings in bands from all over North America and even Spain. The music here is good. As good as Chicago. But we don’t have the bond of hearts I experienced in Chicago. It’s more like an informal concert. And I have never felt our club is a shrine. I don’t know what the blues is. It may be heart–soul. Not good notes.
A RIPOFF OF WALLACE STEVENS
03 May 2019 Leave a comment
in Blog Tags: blues, grooving, music, oscilloscope, poem, soul, synapse
I was enjoying the music
Loud music, sometimes
When everybody in the band landed with the drums
On the same beat
Such a powerful pulse of air was produced
It hurt
The music wasn’t the rhythmic pulses of air
Nor would it be cathode-ray oscilloscopal wave forms
Nor was it resonating vibrating ear cilia
Maybe it was the electric synapse lightning-flowing pathways of sparks
Of the brain,–some people think so
The cascades of my emotions
Grooving like air pulses can’t
Grieving in the blues
Thrilling to the guitar licks
Loving the ensemble harmonious sound and the beat
As no oscilloscope can
Movements of my soul
Undulating to what is now music
Is the music
CALENDAR AND SOUL
02 Jan 2019 Leave a comment
in Blog Tags: family, holiness, meaning, pain, poetry, soul, status, success, time
And the calendar marks another
Year, month, day, hour, minute, second
Calendar and clock
Time and the soul’s time
Long ago, a crushed career, crushed future, crushed life, carved time in my soul
Giving my soul relations
Before and after, what I am now, since
Pain
And moments at church camp, church, with pastors, watching the sun, stars, synergy at interfaith
seminars
Mark states in my soul, relations
To the material world
Calendars and clocks
Year, month, day, hour, minute, second
To meaning, moment
Revealing and retreating, manifesting and hiding
Holiness
And Blessed time with a beloved
Grandparent, parent, brother, sister, child, grandchild
Friend, colleague, fellows, congregation
Leaving lasting moods measuring remaining
Movements of the soul
Community
Meeting the world, a world of people
Success, triumph, embarrassment, achievement and failure
Summa Cum Laude, Harvard, Ph.D. articles published, a book, professor, pastor, money, poverty
Personal achievement, recognized success, successes
Status
Time marking—soul and calendar
Year, month, day, hour, minute, second
Pain, holiness, community, status
Measuring, containing, marking time
Age and state
Time and the soul
Another year today
And all that has made me
Epistemology and What Words Are
11 Sep 2018 Leave a comment
in Blog Tags: epistemology, experience, language, lies, Locke, poetry, soul, truth, words
Words are created by people;
They help us function.
Words have meaning only when
Our experience meshes with the origin
Of any given word.
Then there is the consideration
Of experience.
To Locke, experience is
Inner and outer.
The motions of our soul are inner.
The world we all share is outer.
Words created to mediate what is inner
Confront what is outer.
When they coincide,
We call it truth.
A preponderance of words from what is inner
That don’t coincide with words from what is outer
Is what we call a lie.
Linguistic processes affirm the art of epistemology.
And there is what we call truth.
For those who care.
David Fekete 