June

1st of June

Recording at Stompy's
A musician goes to the home of another musician, a ukulele in one hand, a bag of hot chips in the other. A digital camera is set up on a cluttered desk. Actually, saying the desk is cluttered makes it sound much neater than it is. No surface is visible beneath the drifting topography of books, cd's records and scraps of note paper. Upon a crooked stack of books (one of which I note with some pleasure is a paperback edition of The Book of Five Rings, by Miyamoto Musashi), is the tiny digital video camera, about the size of a pocket noepad.

The room is small, three people could stand up in the tiny floorspace left by the furniture. A bed takes up two thirds, a desktop computer sits on the bedside table. Posters, photos, a chinese fan and a painting in a frame hang fixed upon the wall with blue-tac, sticky tape or string. Heavy duty guitar cases are stacked against the foot of the bed, which presses against the front of a tall bookshelf. A clothes rack stands before the frosted glass window; shirts, pants, a leather pilots cap, a trilby hat with a harmoinca shaped pin on the ribbon, leather boots and sneakers. The narrow door leads to the laundry at the back of the of the house, where more guitar cases are stacked on the floor.

Lord Stompy is a man Devoted to music. Working with him, coming to terms with our shared aesthetic, developing songs, recording, playing live - Stompy and I have worked consistently together since we met five or so years ago. Playing gypsy music on the street, writing shared poetry, recording with a travelling accordian player from Texas, forming a dirty four piece poetry band and recording an album, helping each other move house, twice each.

I have been meaning to come to his house to record some video for youtube for a long time. I finally did it, on a night when band practice was on, but Gardy couldn't make it because he was too busy rehearsing music for his school exams. So, hot chips and ukulele in hand, I arrive.

You never know how any recording session will turn out. I have gone in confident and come out defeated, I have gone in half drunk and heartbroken and come out a transformed man. Music is so much more than the music. It is a way of relating to everything, particularly it is a vocabulary for emotions which do not otherwise have names correspondent with spoken or written language. Tonight I walk in nervous, a few coffee jitters, I sit on the wooden chair, look at the small image of myself on the camera screen, tune up, hum a little.

My first take is excellent, but by the end of it my heart is absolutely racing and my hands are shaking. My mind clashes with images of an imagined audience, and the solitary eye of the camera, unblinking, unmoved, impartial and that clash is audible in the nature of my playing; at times hurried, at times restraining that haste, moments of doubt, miniscule flickers, but the music hides nothing. I take a few deep breaths, Stompy plugs my uke into his amp and sets it low, sitting it behind me by the door. I play again, only this time I imagine Regan sitting before me, and I play the song that I wrote for her. She has been such a steadying influence on me. I imagine her smile, which I always delight to see when she dances, and I sing for her. When I finish the song, my heart is steady, my body relaxed.

There are two audiences. The one in the room, and the one in your mind.

I record three more songs, each flowing out of me with ease, and the precision of that ease. I imagine that I am alone. Just me and the music.

Every tiny error I make, is preceeded by a moment of self doubt. I do not believe that I can do it, and so I can't. I doubt that the music is interesting for others who are listening, so I try to do something fancy to impress them and I make a mistake. The audience in my mind is a real enemy, and the self doubt that allows this illusion to continue haunting me, though diminshed in recent months, is a steady trickle at the back of my thoughts.

Despite the doubts, my confidence is stronger and the videos are excellent. In a few days I will upload them to youtube and await the results of public opinion.

　


June 5th

Bridgewater Trio at the Football
The Bridgewater Trio played at a football game yesteday, Panthers vs Magpies at the Hickinbotham Oval. The newsprint wasn't even dry reporting the latest terrorist attack in London. Blood in the streets while we dance in the sunshine. Everyone at the game was very welcoming, beaming smiles perhaps a little too bright, like they had all read the news and were worried about what might happen here. Three dancers from Arabesque accompanied us, Jenny, Sari and Eleanor.


Facing the amphitheatre and the members clubrooms above it, we stood on the edge of the oval, warm grass beneath us, microphones, cables, foldback speakers, the busy, eager faces of the sound techs, bespectacled before the sound desk, before the spectacle between half-time sirens. The amplified sound of our music could be heard loud and clear across to the far side of the oval, the softest tap on our drums resounding all around us and the strident voice of the violin lifting past the buildings and up into into the sky, taking us with it.

Thirteen minutes painted perfect in the sunlit spotlight, dancing the only solution we know to the war in the east. Most of the time I sink with dread and powerlessness at the thought of what is yet to come. And it is going to come. There has never been a more important time to do what we do, to engage with the culture of our enemy, to humanise the innocent who have been taken hostage by their own worst fears, just as we are being taken hostage by our own. We simple folk upon the stage are making peace, just as others are making war. We endeavour to help others enjoy the profits of peace, even as our leaders manipulate the profits of war.

"In such an ugly time, the only true rebellion is beauty."

Crimethink

　

9th June

Recording at home in Nairne
A musician goes to the home of another musician, this time, it is my home. Stompy brings his webcam, his amp, and a bundle of harmonicas. We stay up late by the fireplace, listening to music, playing music, talking. Stompy and I have no trouble talking, like a couple of old housewives, as they say.

In the morning I get my son ready for school, preparing porridge for breakfast, making his lunch, packing his bag. Wren and Stompy get along really well, they always have, taking delight in the total weirdness of each other's imaginations. I drive Wren to school then return home to light the fire and make a second coffee. We sit warming ourselves for a couple of hours, mucking around on ukulele, talking, talking, talking.

The camera sits atop a pile of books, mostly world mythology since they are the thickest hardback books I have, stacked upon a stool by my back door where the morning light trickles past the drooping wet autumn leaves. I live in a three room flat beside an old fashioned toystore, in a pioneer building made of stone with a basement spanning the underside of the entire building. The basement is full of ghosts, mice, and my landlord's old furniture, books, theatre props and a surfboard. My front steps land in the middle of the footpath and from my bedroom window I can sit at my writing desk and look out upon the street. We begin recording in the loungeroom/kitchen, shadows and light fall upon me as I take my seat and lift up my Setar.

I am getting used to the camera, learning how to look into it, how to look through it and into myself. It is a mirror. Hakim Bey (in his book The Temporary Autonomous Zone,) once suggested that the Shaman is one who puts on his spirit mask, then stands before the mirror and asks, 'what is my true desire'. Staring into the dark reflection of the lense, I seem to have become my true desire, and the mask I see tells the story of my destiny. I study my face as if I were a stranger, I try to read the lines in my skin, the flicker of my eye, the bitten lip, the crease between my eyebreows, the curve of my spine and the huddle of my shoulders. I try to understand what I am seeing, who I am seeing. I ask, who is this?

I guess that answer only comes at the end of the story, and even then it is the answer to a different question.

　


Saturday June 10th

Drum Classes at Arabesque
In the flophouse next to the dance studio, amidst the torn bags of garbage, rat eaten mattresses and dust clogged dunes of waste upon the floor, down the hallway with every floorboard flexing beneath my feet, the supporting beams rotten through to nothing, in the front room of the building, a hole in the floor opens into a cellar of utter darkness. Shining my torch down into the cavity I see only its emptiness, and the garbage bags rolled down upon rotten stairs descending. This dilapidated six room wreck has been so important to me over recent years, a place removed from everyday reality yet visibly dissolving in a reality all its own. Decades of neglect shine through holes in the brick walls, the beams of morning sunlight blinding me as I enter. In the moments before drum class I sit to write, my unhurried pen floating softly cursive upon the last page of my journal, another verse for the flophouse blues.

Soon I will return with Stompy and his webcam.

* * *

Iron Dwarf (formerly Operation Firehat) gig at the Gaslight Hotel.

The Sun has long since set as we take the stage, we three with our hearts in our throats and in our hands, ready to start again, again. It seems every day is another reason to be born, and every time we take the stage it is as different people. Tonight we took the stage and for a moment it was ours, for a moment the moment was hours, and the audience looking up at us saw us as we dreamed of ourselves being.

Week after week, months passing with slivers of the moon peeling days from the calendar of our lives, a year is gone in the blink of a summer and already it is winter again and we are on this warm stage with the freezing night outside the windows where no-one walks beneath the smoky fog-lit street lights.

Where once there were four, now there are three, and we three make the best of what we have to give each other, and honestly, we fucking rock. Our two new songs, Water Avenue, and The Mexican are our best work yet, making our prior achievments seem faded as last years roses still clinging to the bush. I am amazed at the development of our songwrtiting now that we are a three piece. Without the clouding sound from a guitar, the voice of each remaining instrument becomes sharply audible, and our devotion is strengthened by what we hear.

* * *

I feel compelled to write more about Stompy and Ryan. Stompy is a much maligned, misunderstood misfit, he is my brother, and there are very few friendships in a lifetime that can be worthy of that title. Ryan is a plainclothed undercover gnostic monk practicing his zen funk discipline in an attic room above a Parkour gym in the heart of the city. He too, I call my brother. Music makes family of us, and the trials we go through together in the pursuit of our shared goals makes us strong. Being onstage with them is the fulfillment of a dream. In red lights upon a tiny carpeted stage in the corner of an old backstreet pub, we three see a grandeur in each other that is not apparent in our humble surroundings. We are devoted to this music, it means something to us that goes beyond the songs and delves deep into our mutual need to be challenged musically. Each song calls our bluff and requires us to develop new techniques in order to play it, pushing us deeper into the real potential of this three part arrangement.

The gig on Saturday night was fantastic. I feel amazing about it. We were just an unknown three piece band opening a show in a pub that was full with forty people in it, but we held ourseves to a high standard of playing, we rehearsed thoroughly and the end result was a seven song set of our best material played with real passion and intensity. Without Nick, it feels like starting the band all over again, there is a lot of lost ground to recover, perhaps ten songs now scrubbed from our set, but we have a deep shared musical vocabulary and the trust we have built through the last year and a half is a solid foundation to base the new music on.

　


Monday June 12th

Recording with Diana at LB Studio
When Diana walked in I could see there was something different, she seemed taller, her shoulders square, lifted from within. Confidence is a cloak my family wear unconvincingly at most times; there is a story to be told there, but that is not for today.

My sister has an amazing voice, but little confidence with it. She has spent years writing songs for her children and honing her voice singing for them, and she played as Adelaide Adams in the Adelaide Theatre Comapny's production of Calamity Jane, but she has never recorded music. Last night's recording was our first rehearsal of the song, and the first time I ever heard Diana really open up with her voice. During a chorus practice run, my whole body tingled with the buzzing energy of her vocal harmony, I had to stop playing as a shiver ran the length of my spine making me drop the pick.

Then when the microphones were on, her confidence failed, her voice was overworked from practice and one flat note preceeded the next, her tone deflating with each passing verse. Music is odd this way. You could do something five minutes before, but now it is impossible. I know when to stop pushing, so we took a break, drank a shot of whiskey and started on a spoken word piece, a haunted movie scene called 'The runaway'.

We returned to the song later in the evening, but two more takes showed us that Diana had lots of ideas, but needed more time to practice the song. In the five years since the first parts of the melody were developed, the song has grown to become woven with nuance and subtle melody variations. So now Diana has a copy of the dulcimer base recording and another month to practice.

The album is almost complete. I have one more song to record on Setar, The Bridge. Then come the overdubs on Street Dance and Road less travelled, then...then...then...

　


Tuesday June 13th

Rehearsal at Stompy's

Another sesssion at Stompy's, rehearsing a new song for Iron Dwarf and editing the videos we took at my house last week. We discovered the sepia filters and other colour settings on the software that give the videos the perfect shade I have wanted to use for the Zebulon project since the beginning. One video was unusable due to the camera shaking throughout the song because of my stomping foot on the floor, but the Setar (Song of the South) and Harmonica (Dance the pain away) have both turned out very well. I will probably use the sound from these videos as the songs on the album. With almost all the songs recorded, I am about to enter phase two of the album, finalising the overdubs and completing first mixes on all the songs. Then phase three is final mixing, song selecting and ordering. Phase four is the final mastering process, balancing the volume of all the tracks and smoothing all the song transitions. Phase five is the completion of the album cover, editing of the blog (this blog you are reading) and uploading of the album to Bandcamp. Phase six is the album launch party, which is actually the part I dread the most, yet somehow also the most important part of the project and the one that requires almost as much work as the entire recording process. I should probably contact the venue now and book a date...having a hard deadline is a good thing to work towards.

　


Friday June 16th
I have had time to listen to all the recordings and put them into a test order, with the short atmospheric vignettes slotted in amongst the songs. It is like the soundtrack to a movie, each transition of the album is carried along by these scenes conjuring images of the main charater on his journey. It makes me consider re-naming the album 'The Runaway' and packaging it as if it were the sountrack to a film. So as of today, I am ready to send out the pre-release demo version of the album for review. Time to make some covers and burn some cd's.

* * *

I have finally sunk beneath the waterline. I owe money for my last car service, while my car is overdue for its next one, my income has slipped to only $490 for next fortnight while my rent is $460. I have thirty dollars in my pocket and seventy in the bank. I'm not drowning yet, but I'm holding my breath.

But...I have made contact and set a trial work day next week for another garden job in Bridgewater. Also, the new owners of Peechabella are local vignerons and I should be able to talk with them next week about my future employment, which may include working on their other properties.

So...not drowning yet, but I'm holding my breath.

 It pulls heavy on my heart that I cannot provide for myself. I feel I have failed at something fundamental in a man's life, and I have no-one to blame but myself. My life is the consequence of my choices. I chose to put money and work low on my priorities, instead choosing music and family, and it makes me poor. But when I cannot even pay my bills or feed myself and my son, I really wonder about the distance between needs and wants.

Yet I don't want to busk in Mt Barker. It feels like begging. I cringe inside when I think of standing on those streets playing music in the winter. I have a lot of mixed up feelings about poverty and wealth. I am simultaneously proud and ashamed of both qualities in myself, the dialogue between these two sides governing my whole relationship to work and money. It is a reflection of my inner struggle between wildness and civility, central themes of the human endeavour.

Yet...I must play on the street, I must use my time to earn money somehow.

　


June 19th

Busking in Mt Barker
First I played at the Gawler Street Cafe for an hour, it was busy, the perfect Autumnal weather has put a smile on everyone's face. I know that technically, it is Winter now, but the earth says otherwise. Too many leaves still on the trees and the Jonquils haven't really put on their floral show yet. In the cafe it is loud, I feel as though my ukulele sounds quiet, muffled by the crashing joyful noises of the kitchen and the customers over breakfast. The owners sit at the very front of the place, eating breakfast at the long table and talking with customers as they enter. Cafe owners are usually overworked, perpetually exhausted and drink too much booze. These guys seem as relaxed as a sunday starting with champagne.

Playing here is like going back in time, it has a distinctly medieval village feel, an atmosphere that starts with the wood fire oven and kichen completely visible from the tables, runs up the old brick walls and tall ceiling, gathers in the centre of the room at the long communal trestle table where three or four groups of people may sit to eat, a table where strangers meet and from my corner, ukulele in hand I listen to the music of their conversations, and I play my melodies all around them and all around the room I can hear them listening as they talk and laugh and eat and smile in the perfect Autumn light. A lady I know put a few coins in my uke case and said she wished she could have given me more.

When I had played my fill, I packed up and drove across town to a busking spot behind a supermarket, next to the 2 level car park. I have seen buskers stand or sit beneath the beautiful branches of an old oak tree and serenade shoppers as they cross the road. I sat on my cajon, swung my leg over my knee and smiled as I played. I observed a few things. Those who put $5 notes into my case, were a very old lady, and a young man with a plaited beard. Professional, or well dressed persons were least likely to turn their heads to acknowledge the music. I also saw a guy with the palest skin I can recall wait 20 minutes for a cab. I saw a mum with two kids and two trolleys piled high with food. I saw my old friend Damien, (he is Chantelle's father), walking with his toddler son on his one day off a week. He runs his own handyman service and works six days a week, and is having to continually knock back work.

Moments like these remind me that my poverty is chosen. I play music while others work. They earn money while I earn....well, what do I earn?

I took a break to eat some lunch I had brought from home, sitting behind the carpark, hidden from view in a sunny spot by the creek, down where the kids smoke cigarettes and break bottles. I ate fried chicken and scrambled eggs and soaked up the sunshine. I love to feel unobserved, especially on days when I play music. The isolation is powerful, it helps me re-set my balance, my sense of who I actually am, rather than who I am as a performer. I went back out, warm to my toes and played a few more songs before flexing my sore fingers and closing my case on the fifteen odd dollars I had earned for my time.

I left Mt Barker and stopped off at home in Nairne to grab my folder of notes on Middle Eastern music theory and begin transcribing the Makams I want to start learning. I have been practicing Setar for an hour or more each day, working over and over on the two songs I have left to record for my album. They are songs I have played for years, but they seem the least familiar to me. Bridge segments remain un-analysed, patterns in the syncopation uncounted, it is like studying someone else's music, listening over and over to the melody trying to get it right, exactly right. Makam study is something I have been putting off for a long time, being unable to read sheet music, and feeling daunted by the extra notation and unfamiliar language of Middle Eastern modes. Still, today I trascribed two makams into tab format, just like I have done for the gypsy and oriental scales on the uke. I am still uncertain about the correct tuning of some of the quarter notes, but I will muddle through and use my ear to find something that sounds balanced. I trust my instincts in the absence of formal instruction. Still, when I have a few dollars to spare, I must return to Sina Aria for more lessons.

　


20th June

Iron Dwarf rehearsal
We all arrive in a good mood so we warm up with The Mexican, then go on to write a new doom metal song, and a calypso reggae. I have a lot of music study to do. I'm starting to get the funk groove rhythm, listening to Herbie Hancock (Man Child, Fat Albert Rotunda, Headhunters), and today Stompy gave me a James Brown CD. He also gave me a DVD of Nina Hagen, a punk rocker from East Germany in the 70's. Tonight I gave both Stompy and Gardy a copy of my new album in its present demo form, they will be the first people to hear it in such a way.

Like a tiny whisper, I release my music of invisible enclaves into the world.


　

24th of June

(Sitting in my car before rehearsal at Raj's)
I am the saboteur of my own future. I prevent myself from pursuing my dreams by keeping myself too poor to afford to them. My pride keeps me from wealth, and now, even from basic sustenance. Too proud to beg on the streets, even with an instrument in my hand, too proud to beg from the goverment. I am trying to prove myself a man, I am trying to prove that I can support myself, that I can earn and pay my way through the world, but I seem incapable of working enough to even feed myself. I am trapped by my own inactivity, blocked. Poverty prevents me from investing in my own future, I feel guilty for putting so much time into music, for the way it drags me away from my family responsibilities. I feel guilty that I cannot earn enough from music to justify the time it takes from my family.

I actually seem to feel guilty about everything. I burned a very bad paradigm into myself during the last few years. "Everything I do is wrong." There it is. The code that I have lived by since Hannah left me. Everything I do is wrong, everything I do hurts others. My devotion to music is a slander upon my devotion to my partner. I should be working to earn money to make our home into what it needs to be in order for Wren and I to move back in.

(Solomon has arrived, time to go in and meet this new guitarist Raj wants me to meet. Another musical expense at a time when I can barely afford to feed myself.)

* * *

The rehearsal was amazing actually. The wealth I earn from music is not counted in dollars. Drumming with Solomon and Rajesh is incredible, reminding me of my earliest drumming experiences, improvised wonderment, spontaneous creation of MUSIC! Rajesh said that he would try to get us some paid work at Casablabla. I also played a few of my ukulele songs while Solomon drummed...this is the first time I have ever really felt comfortable having my music being accompanied. Solomon and I are on the same wavelength, and when he played the frame drum it was like...well, it was like finding a home I didn't know I belonged to. Such a familiar sound, it was the music I have been trying to create all this time, and now I am finally able to achieve it.

The guitarist, Sunny, who joined us later, played in a style half western, half Indian. He is Punjabi, North Indian, a region famous for its fast, (and very fast) music. Sunny played in a sweet, relaxed way, a western folk guitar style with bits of blues, rock and flamenco, as well as Indian raga influences. For a first jam session, I thought we found some good common ground to build songs upon. I got to play harmonica as well as drums, and standing before the microphone I felt myself seeing the world as Stompy sees it. The potential for my musical aspirations to see fruition with this group of people seems very real.

　


25th of June

Fiesta!
I played a few songs at the Littlehampton primary school fiesta on Friday night. My own childhood memories of school fairs and the like are of miserable, dull daytime gatherings with shitty craft stalls, shitty kids games, hot weather and everything set up in the school quardrangle where knees were grazed upon the rough bitumen-like surface. Ugh. The Littlehampton school fiesta ran from 5-9pm, there was mexican food, beer and wine, live music and dance and what seemed to be a crowd of every single family in the whole school, three hundred or so people crammed into the sheltered courtyard beside the school class kitchen. Children ran and played all around us, moustaches painted on boys faces making them seem like tiny bandits. In the darkness of the gardens, gangs of kids played among the bushes, visible only by the tiny coloured LED lights on their fingers. The crowd was thick, people pressing against each other as they mingle, burritos in their hands, mexican hats upon their heads and warm smiles on their faces.

I have been a part of many communities, some of which were little more than blind grudges and bindng by-laws, but this school community is a genuine collective, people voluntarilly working together to create a beautiful and lively environment for their children to grow up in. On the tiny stage boys performed breakdances they had rehearsed, I saw a young girl play a trumpet solo, the front office lady played the Tuba, doing a cover of 'The bare necessities' from the Jungle Book. A teenage girl of about 14 played a guitar and sang with such beauty and relaxed ease that it was like seeing a superstar being born. She reminded me of the 1960's English/Indian folk singer, Vashti Bunyan.

I played three songs, Flophouse Blues, Dance the Pain Away, and Skipping Stones, on Ukulele, Harmonica and Koncovka. Hardly aware of the faces of the crowd, I hid inside the music, glancing up briefly to see the entranced smiles of adults and a five year old girl spinning and twisting, dancing alone.

* * *

The next day, Sunday, I played at the Pig and Thistle in exchange for the most delicious poached eggs with smoked salmon and hollandaise sauce I have ever had. While playing, a six year old boy came to watch me, taking a stool right in front of me and staring up with wonder while his family sat outside eating lunch. The boy's name was Darcy, and while I ate my lunch he told me about himself and the things he likes best at school. I helped him tie his schoelaces and let him play my harmonica and ukulele. Living in a country town is great.

　

Admit something.
Everyone you see, you say to them
"Love me."
Of course you do not do this out loud:
Otherwise,
someone would call the cops.
Still, though, think about this,
this great pull in us
to connect.
Why not become the one
who lives with a full moon in each eye
that is always saying,
with that sweet moon
language,
what every other eye in this world
is dying to
hear.
– Hafiz



　

26th June

Recording at LB Studio
Gardy is doing his bass overdubs on 'Street Dance'....it is nothing like I had imagined. He is playing counter-rhythmic melodies across everything. My head is spinning. These half-prepared recording sessions have a divine habit of producing wholly unexpected results, and the powerful melodies that Gardy is playing RIGHT NOW...are like nothing I have ever heard.

Deva struggled with what is a very unusual song with timing changes, tempo changes and unusual rhythms, but the end result is rather beautiful. As he fought to grasp the exact measues of my melodies, he stumbled. When he played the counter rhythm that he felt with his body, when he listened to the pulse of the music, (not the beat) he played the way the song wanted to be played.

The studio is a fascinating alchemical lab, where we as musicians become ourselves through trial and error, through improvisation and experimentation. The rule seems to be, Break the Rules. Only when we really abandon the constraints of convention, assumption....(and now Stompy has showed up. The night carries on....write more later)

Gardy played, and played, played and cursed and played and played again, a hundred takes to get it just right, all the while calling himself an idiot, getting tense, never satsfied with his performance

* * *

(in the morning)
Last night's efforts from Gardy say a lot about him. He said that he was playing a new technique he had never used before, and that since he was on school holidays, he hadn't played an instrument all week. The technique comment says applies to the whole gang of musicians I am working with at the moment...the development of new techniques is the minimum requirement of every single song we write. Every song is an opportunity to develop as musicians, and no opportunity is wasted on easy material. Only through the constant refinement of our craft can we ever hope to succeed as musicians, and it is the only hope any of us has for real happiness, for none of us will ever be satisfied with anything less than mastery, and that is a concept so nebulous as to dissapate into meaninglessnes the closer one gets to it. It is a cycle perpetuated by feelings of inadequacy and alleviated only in the moment of actual improvement. Once the new technique has been grasped and practiced into routine, the feeling of laziness, deficiency and an edgy hunger for more take over and the rooms ring out with the sound a new effort bringing forth a new technique, a new mastery.

The truth is, we are amateurs, striving for a goal forever receeding, yet forever within our grasp. It is the bird in the hand, the two in the bush, three upon the wing and four about to sing.


　

June 29th
I realised today, that the story I am telling you, is the same story every artist tells. Trouble with money, struggling with depression and madness, struggling to find value in art, and to find others willing to value that art.

I slipped beneath the waterline today. Gasping for breath, I counted off my debts against the pennies in my pocket and decided instead, to tell you a different story.

　

　

The Raven and the Buddha

Not so long ago, the Raven had to enter hell. It is not known why, but it is safe to assume that he had no other choice. The gates of hell are guarded, and the keeper asks a price. At the gate stood The Blackness, Despair. The first demon.

"What price now?" The Raven asked.

"The price is for later. One day we will ask for our due, and it will be paid. That is the price."

Having no other choice, the Raven paid the price, and shook hands with The Black.

In Hell, The Raven bore witness to the furthest reaches of life without boundaries, without reserve. Everything in Hell is an extreme of itself, there is no middle ground, no passive stance, no ceasefire. There he met with a demon of Greed who asked him to deliver a message to the Buddha, inviting him to dinner. The Demon sat in a great feasting hall where every extinct species ever known upon the earth had been baked black in ovens too hot for clay, and served upon broken plates. Staring down with compound eyes, listening with compuond ears, and speaking with a compound voice, the Demon spoke to the Raven.


Take this invitation to the Buddha Take this invitation to the Buddha Take this invitation to the Buddha Take this invitation to the Buddha Take this invitation to the Buddha Take this invitation to the Buddha Take this invitation to the Buddha...

The Raven, with eyes averted, took the invitation from the Demon and left. Passsing the gates of Hell again, the keeper nodded and reminded him of his debt.

The Raven delivered the invitation to the Buddha. The Buddha laughed, not touching the paper.

"I dined with him last night, and he invites me to dine again tonight! Ha! He is greedy even for enlightenment. His mouth is full yet he reches for more."

"Will you go?"

"Of course I will."

So the Raven returned to Hell, and was told at the Gate that payment was not required a second time. The feasting hall was thick with the smoke of extinction, an obscuring haze preveted the Raven from having to look upon the Demon a second time. "The Buddha will dine with you tonight."

You may leave Was the reply.

The Raven made to leave the hall, but, obscured by the smoke, he hid himself in the caverous ceiling, and folding himself between two shadows, he lay in wait. The smoke roiled thick from the endlessly burning meat, so thick, that when the Buddha arrrived, the Raven could only see blurry shapes, and hear muffled voices as the Demon and the Saint conversed. Gradually, the smoke began to clear.

The tables and chairs were gone, the wretched, inedible death feast vanished.

Upon the floor sat a solitary man dressed in heavy robes, staring into a mirror.

The Raven left hell.


* * *
I have been writing a novel for about seven years, it is my fourth novel, but the first one I have ever considered to be really worth developing to the very end. The above tale is a story from within that novel. It feels better to share with you a myth from the pantheon in my mind, than to write another word about money.