Ten minutes on July 23, 2008
Ten minutes on July 23, 2008
The Zombies are playing on the café stereo, and the young woman next to me is humming along and seat-dancing as she types away on her iBook. I imagine she was about negative eighteen when the song came out. There is something primal about those Hammond reed organs, and about the sixties psychedelic sound. The lyrics are even more than usually banal, but as they plunk along in time to the way cool sounds, the singer gets to croon “Tell you what? I really want to knooo-oow.” Sometimes that is worth the price of the ticket. We all really, really want to know. And therein lies the genius of pop music, such as it is. Catchy hooks, and lyrics general enough to cover a vast array of human experience.
Jem, Nick Drake, “Crazy Love” by Van Morrison…I write by the side of a babbling brook, a clear stream, a slow and lazy river of music, with the occasional warble of customers (“English breakfast tea”) and passersby just outside the window (“So I really will call you…”). Just below consciousness, the cricket sounds of keys, five laptops rubbing their legs and chirruping and occasionally emitting buzzes or whistles or chimes, electronic insects.
Once again I sat down determined to write about one thing – in this case, my four day, hundreds of miles, six guys in a van disc golf tour of Stockton, Orangevale, Auburn, Grass Valley, Penn Valley, Toney’s Mountain. And certainly, a number of wild images stand out in my mind, and the fragments make for a possibly interesting collage: Zack’s amazing day, playing oh hell until two in the morning, my partners in doubles twice dropping their drives literally on top of the drives of our opponents, taking away their advantage on the hole. Playing Penn Valley on a hot-as-coals day and then stripping everything off but shorts and sliding like an animal into the blessedly cool water next to the course, feeling my head so hot it had a halo around it as I dove under and felt the cold cold water sculpt me as a skin-covered consciousness. The big old dogs up at Toney’s Mountain who would uproot stones, then huge boulders, and nose them down inclines, so that on hole #5 Will had to evade a cartoon-size Wiley coyote style rock crashing down the mountain at him, the sound of it impossible to adequately express, the sound of severe and insane injury and at the same time the joy of stolid stones achieving movement and speed.
Eating pizza outside the Round Table after ordering 2 minutes before they closed, the mall empty except for us and employees planning the rest of their night and a clutch of teenagers watching us throw long backhands across the empty lines of the parking lot…and then looking up as two cars drove past on their way to the Dark Knight opening at midnight, all ten of the inmates staring out at us with perfect Joker faces, white with long scary painted-on grins, framed by the car windows. And the way something you do many times, such as the tour, takes on a structure of its own that holds everyone, a four day fiesta and ritual that smooths out highs and lows, crappy shots and miraculous shots, into the general tired happy sunburnt selves that crowd into the food- and clothing-strewn van at fourth day’s end.
And of course there was the sound, just outside of West Sacramento, of the top of the rocket box lifting up and tearing off its hinges and 65 mph, flying up like the rigid model of the Batman’s wings and smashing down on the highway, taking with it Z’s coat with his cell phone and Peter’s computer bag with more or less his whole school life in it.
But what I really felt called to write about – now that my ten minutes is up – is something slightly different. Or rather, something which is the general to the specific of the Tour, which began with bringing my nephew Jeremiah back to Nevada City back how many years ago? Eight? And now it ends with us throwing a disc with Jeremiah’s name on it, and staying at the hotel where I stayed six months ago when Jeremiah’s mom was waiting for us in a casket, and both of them dead and me not.
And that thing is: the passing of time means that we don’t step in the same river twice, and yet we do the same things over and over and over. And so the sheer element of repetition somehow kills the spirit, and the great experiment we are all involved in pursuing is: if repetition is dulling, and yet essential, and inescapable, then how do we repeat and still stay alive to the life in the repeated?
And if time takes away things we once had, people we once knew…as it will, then do we carry them, and ourselves as we were, and the things we did earlier, with us, down the road?
The sheer freedom of existence is, as the existentialists wrote, terrifying, dizzying, even nauseating. And so we create stories, rituals, family networks, organizations, religions, to balance this tension between what is repeated and what is alive, present, meaningful. Just now, in the circles I run in, these are all in question, all up for grabs, all questioned as to their authority and usefulness. Like software, our versions of Meaning are often radically redesigned; like software, if our version of meaning is not compatible with our operating system, doesn’t work well or is not robust enough, then…we experience Problems up to and including psychological Blue Screens.
So sometimes it is blessedly reassuring to go back to things that repeat. Grab disc; stand still; center mind in/as body; see the throw, already thrown, in your mind; step, step, crossover step, turning torso, shoulders, hips, head now looking not up and forward but sideways, even down a bit; feel the moment of limit and begin the uncoiling; bring the arm fast across the chest; at the last moment, nanomoment, the wrist adjusts to the throw and the disc leaves the hand at just this angle, just this speed, just this amount of rotation. But the body is not done: hand and arm continue through the motion, final step is completed, as the body finishes becoming a machine, an interface with an object round and sharp and tapered like a jet wing, so that the body ends as a sculpture of a discus thrower from ancient Greece and the object flies out into air and travels fast and its spin moves it as it must, through air and time accelerating and then slowing and then turning back and then hitting the ground, way way out there, in the future, part way to a goal, but perfect in the moment of marriage of body and tool, all the various parameters of the body disciplined not grimly but ecstatically.
Each throw a prayer, repeated endlessly, until the end.
The Zombies are playing on the café stereo, and the young woman next to me is humming along and seat-dancing as she types away on her iBook. I imagine she was about negative eighteen when the song came out. There is something primal about those Hammond reed organs, and about the sixties psychedelic sound. The lyrics are even more than usually banal, but as they plunk along in time to the way cool sounds, the singer gets to croon “Tell you what? I really want to knooo-oow.” Sometimes that is worth the price of the ticket. We all really, really want to know. And therein lies the genius of pop music, such as it is. Catchy hooks, and lyrics general enough to cover a vast array of human experience.
Jem, Nick Drake, “Crazy Love” by Van Morrison…I write by the side of a babbling brook, a clear stream, a slow and lazy river of music, with the occasional warble of customers (“English breakfast tea”) and passersby just outside the window (“So I really will call you…”). Just below consciousness, the cricket sounds of keys, five laptops rubbing their legs and chirruping and occasionally emitting buzzes or whistles or chimes, electronic insects.
Once again I sat down determined to write about one thing – in this case, my four day, hundreds of miles, six guys in a van disc golf tour of Stockton, Orangevale, Auburn, Grass Valley, Penn Valley, Toney’s Mountain. And certainly, a number of wild images stand out in my mind, and the fragments make for a possibly interesting collage: Zack’s amazing day, playing oh hell until two in the morning, my partners in doubles twice dropping their drives literally on top of the drives of our opponents, taking away their advantage on the hole. Playing Penn Valley on a hot-as-coals day and then stripping everything off but shorts and sliding like an animal into the blessedly cool water next to the course, feeling my head so hot it had a halo around it as I dove under and felt the cold cold water sculpt me as a skin-covered consciousness. The big old dogs up at Toney’s Mountain who would uproot stones, then huge boulders, and nose them down inclines, so that on hole #5 Will had to evade a cartoon-size Wiley coyote style rock crashing down the mountain at him, the sound of it impossible to adequately express, the sound of severe and insane injury and at the same time the joy of stolid stones achieving movement and speed.
Eating pizza outside the Round Table after ordering 2 minutes before they closed, the mall empty except for us and employees planning the rest of their night and a clutch of teenagers watching us throw long backhands across the empty lines of the parking lot…and then looking up as two cars drove past on their way to the Dark Knight opening at midnight, all ten of the inmates staring out at us with perfect Joker faces, white with long scary painted-on grins, framed by the car windows. And the way something you do many times, such as the tour, takes on a structure of its own that holds everyone, a four day fiesta and ritual that smooths out highs and lows, crappy shots and miraculous shots, into the general tired happy sunburnt selves that crowd into the food- and clothing-strewn van at fourth day’s end.
And of course there was the sound, just outside of West Sacramento, of the top of the rocket box lifting up and tearing off its hinges and 65 mph, flying up like the rigid model of the Batman’s wings and smashing down on the highway, taking with it Z’s coat with his cell phone and Peter’s computer bag with more or less his whole school life in it.
But what I really felt called to write about – now that my ten minutes is up – is something slightly different. Or rather, something which is the general to the specific of the Tour, which began with bringing my nephew Jeremiah back to Nevada City back how many years ago? Eight? And now it ends with us throwing a disc with Jeremiah’s name on it, and staying at the hotel where I stayed six months ago when Jeremiah’s mom was waiting for us in a casket, and both of them dead and me not.
And that thing is: the passing of time means that we don’t step in the same river twice, and yet we do the same things over and over and over. And so the sheer element of repetition somehow kills the spirit, and the great experiment we are all involved in pursuing is: if repetition is dulling, and yet essential, and inescapable, then how do we repeat and still stay alive to the life in the repeated?
And if time takes away things we once had, people we once knew…as it will, then do we carry them, and ourselves as we were, and the things we did earlier, with us, down the road?
The sheer freedom of existence is, as the existentialists wrote, terrifying, dizzying, even nauseating. And so we create stories, rituals, family networks, organizations, religions, to balance this tension between what is repeated and what is alive, present, meaningful. Just now, in the circles I run in, these are all in question, all up for grabs, all questioned as to their authority and usefulness. Like software, our versions of Meaning are often radically redesigned; like software, if our version of meaning is not compatible with our operating system, doesn’t work well or is not robust enough, then…we experience Problems up to and including psychological Blue Screens.
So sometimes it is blessedly reassuring to go back to things that repeat. Grab disc; stand still; center mind in/as body; see the throw, already thrown, in your mind; step, step, crossover step, turning torso, shoulders, hips, head now looking not up and forward but sideways, even down a bit; feel the moment of limit and begin the uncoiling; bring the arm fast across the chest; at the last moment, nanomoment, the wrist adjusts to the throw and the disc leaves the hand at just this angle, just this speed, just this amount of rotation. But the body is not done: hand and arm continue through the motion, final step is completed, as the body finishes becoming a machine, an interface with an object round and sharp and tapered like a jet wing, so that the body ends as a sculpture of a discus thrower from ancient Greece and the object flies out into air and travels fast and its spin moves it as it must, through air and time accelerating and then slowing and then turning back and then hitting the ground, way way out there, in the future, part way to a goal, but perfect in the moment of marriage of body and tool, all the various parameters of the body disciplined not grimly but ecstatically.
Each throw a prayer, repeated endlessly, until the end.
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