Tag Archives: revolution

Welcome to the Undertown

Undertown (n): Like the bottom part of the wave that actually moves all the water (and can do all the damage), that beneath the surface pulls you in and gives you an appreciation of the ocean, the undertown is that part of any place that provides a glimpse into its true meaning — beyond the lip service, hypocrisy, glib acceptance speeches and polished recordings. The undertown is where you find the literal and figurative prisons of a place, its dark secrets and hidden longings. You find what a place truly wants to be, and people willing to stand up and do what is necessary to make it happen.

In a musical context, the Undertown is what doesn’t get played on the radio. Music that doesn’t have a face on MTV, VH1 or CMT. It’s music with a connection to personal roots, an absolute absence of disposable music – reverence and relevance where it is due, and iconoclasm where it is required. Bluegrass, folk, Appalachia, Western swing, hillbilly, hick, redneck, rural, Bakersfield, Austin, midwestern, plains, poor, downtrodden, spiritual music. The music that represents the America you don’t see except out your front window, if you bother to look. The America that doesn’t require (or for that matter, appreciate) reality programming.

The Undertown is then, more or less, a battleground. A place where a war is constantly raging; not of flesh and blood, though that too may be consumed in the struggle. No, it is a battleground of the spirit. What is the struggle? In the words of e.e. cummings, “to be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.”

For many years, I have been a citizen of Undertown. That experience has resulted in a number of different poems and songs, like this:

Late at night it slows a little:
that slow burn right down the middle,
turning progress upside down
and into the sad streets of undertown;

Where nothing’s likely brewing,
and the only thing worth doing
is to swim or else you’ll drown
beneath the current in the undertown;

You think I’m joking? Look around.
Welcome again to undertown.

There is no use in speaking
out against the darkness leaking
into everything that’s found
its way here to the heart of undertown,

and no sure way of knowing,
not much of a good thing going
when they shut the sidewalks down
and turn the lights out here in undertown;

It’s hard to find your way around
Here after dark in undertown.

Outside there’s the sound of thunder;
how long will it last, I wonder?
’til the lost have become found
and take the road that leads from undertown

where there’s no light left burning
to prove that the world’s still turning
any way but straight and down
to bury itself here in undertown.

It may sound funny, but I’ve found
just one way out of undertown.

07 FEB 2007

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Rock the Casbah

In one sense, as the Casbah rocks,
it merely sways on concrete blocks
that buried deep beneath the sand
give history its strength to stand;

and its foundations, built of steel
and solid rock, can barely feel
the tremors from such surface noise
cranked out by grown men and young boys

who think to change the world, but fail,
forgetting it takes years for shale
to yield to pressure, making oil
there miles beneath the fertile soil.

In one sense, as the Casbah crowd
believes the hype thats blast so loud
across the endless sea of sand,
it neither will evolve or stand

for anything beyond its press,
just fade to nothing, more or less,
converting substance into style,
then neatly sorted to some file:

the “where are they”, “what happened to”,
brought out of mothballs for their due
at some parade where they are mocked
by those who never knew they rocked.

10 APR 2007

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Outside the Box

The next idea, the one that rocks,
will be born “outside of the box”,
beyond the thinker’s comfort zone,
where daring, they have gone alone
into the dark and scary mists
to reap the untold benefits.

But once they get there, settle in,
I’m sure the process starts again:
the stale taste speech leaves in the mouth,
the sense that the world’s going south,
that notions rise and notions sink
and for true vision, one must think
outside the box that’s larger now;
it seems an endless quest, somehow,
to always walk that extra mile
into the dark, where you now smile
because it’s land you could map blind
by now, at what point do you find
a new idea when your zone
of comfort includes all you’ve known,
and every inch of common ground
has been exhausted and walked ’round?
What good is having visions then,
when everywhere is where you’ve been?

08 SEP 2006

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So You Want to Change the World …

but the World doesn’t want to change.

And so, you insist upon changing it, by doing whatever you think the world needs (but it doesn’t, because if it thought it needed it, it WOULD change – because everyone and everything is where it is because that’s the only place it actually CAN be. Everything is evolved to the level of its own realization, and gets to the next level when it is ready to do so, not because YOU think it’s timetable is too slow).

So now you’ve done it. Changed the world, that is. Haven’t you interfered with the World’s Free Will (by doing something against its will, which was to change out of accordance with its enlightenment timetable)?

Does Free Will matter? That’s a Catch-22. Because if you say it does, then you have no business changing the World (against its will). And if you say it doesn’t matter, then why is what you think (or your freedom to decide what to think or what you think is best to do) important anyway?

Call this Philosophical Dilemma 47A(ii).

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LJ Interests Meme Results

Borrowed from Ed Book. After reading his results, I was intringued, but did not imagine that my own results would prove equally as insightful. I’m really quite surprised at how closely this set of ten selected interests REALLY sums up a good part of who I am.

  1. bukowski:
    Poetry, in a world that discounts art, that praises mediocrity, that devalues beauty by worshipping youth, is not pretty. That to me is the lesson of Bukowski. Combine that with his general philosophy that great writers are born, not made, and I’m hooked.
  2. dictionaries:
    Words, words and more words. For a time, I used to read the dictionary for relaxation. Words have power; to know the name of a thing is to control it. Likewise, to know the origin of a word is to understand your own history. I’ve always been fascinated with learning new words, new ideas, new facts.
  3. gil scott-heron:
    The power of the word to fuel a revolution. The tangible strength of the spoken voice to connect the earth to the sky and rumble the foundations of power. I remember the first time I listened to “Small Talk at 125th and Lenox” all the way through; it was not just the stuff of revolution, it was revelation. This was what poetry, when harnessed to will and a microphone, was capable of doing. This was slam without competition; this was performance.
  4. india:
    Apparently, my first word was “elephant”. I have always been drawn to India: her people, her languages, her diversity, her religions, her extremes, her history.

    Om namah shivaya

  5. lefty frizzell:
    Wow. So far, this interests grabber is right on the money. Lefty Frizzell represents the clarity, phrasing, intelligence, humor and lyricism of traditional country. He is one of my all-time country music idols, and paved the way for many others – Willie, Merle, George Jones, Roger Miller, and me.
  6. perennial philosophy:
    This phrase, used but probably not first coined by Aldous Huxley in his book, sums up my life’s spiritual quest: to find the common threads that run through all religious traditions; to seek the truth that does not fade although its names change from generation to generation; to learn to appreciate the journey spent along the shore communing with the ocean, rather than grasping for a single grain of sand to call the answer.
  7. revolution:
    To change the world by changing oneself; to call for a reinforcement of evolution; to participate in the world at the speed of now, moving with the spheres as they revolve. To constantly challenge the status quo; to resist the urge to stay self-satisfied; to never be satisfied with “because it’s always been that way” or “you can’t fight City Hall” or “no fish ever got caught, ‘cept it opened its mouth”.
  8. sonnets:
    So short, so simple, so compact, those fourteen little lines. Ah, you can take your Milton, Steven Vincent Benet, Longfellow, Poe, Pope and other such longwinded fellows; and give it to me sweet and intricate. To master the sonnet is to understand what it means to call poetry an art form. It is to appreciate the limitations of language, and at the same time, comprehend its infinity. That’s not an easy lesson to learn, absorb or accept.
  9. vedanta:
    Two of the most influential books in my life have been “The Gospel According to Sri Ramakrishna” and “The Complete Writings of Vivekananda”. It’s my understanding that these two sources form the basis for much of what is called “modern” Hinduism. Certainly, this was the form that reached the West, and has influenced so many of the writers and thinkers that I love and respect.
  10. zen:
    The first Eastern religion that I attempted to practice was Zen Buddhism. It represents, to me, cutting through illusion and simply living in each moment; applying the principle of Occam’s Razor to each and every act, each breath, each word.

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What Happens If

What happens if, as a martyr in training,
you learn self-abandonment, lose fear of death,
imagine your sacrifice each waking moment,
practice your from-the-flames speech in the mirror,
give not a thought to your present or future,
trust that your cause will provide and protect you,
turn away mere earthly love and companions,
scorn little day-to-day dreams as unworthy,
then find the required persecution won’t come?

What happens if, as a rebel in waiting,
you learn discipline, self-denial and hate,
imagine your enemies each waking moment,
practice your from-the-front-lines stance for hours,
give not a thought to your present or future,
trust that your cause will provide and protect you,
turn away mere earthly love and companions,
scorn little day-to-day dreams as unworthy,
then find your great revolution won’t come?

29 JUL 2005

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Let Those Who Would Reform

Let those who would reform the world desist
their feeble mewlings at the citadel
that those they choose to fight built to resist
more legions than the gods themselves could quell.

Let others beat to useless, bloody shreds
their fist-clenched hands against that firm defense,
with dreams of victory to fill their heads
in vain attempt to breach its competence.

What good is it to use the self-same tools
that those would enslave have honed so fine?
What use an end achieved, if the same rules
we claim our foes have bent, we break to climb?

Let those who would upset the status quo
seek first to change the sameness found within
that would by smoke and mirrors try to show
a better cause, or one more fair, should win.

Let others claw and scrape that would behold
outside themselves, a world less prone to pain,
where right always prevails, warm comes from cold,
and sunny days require no spells of rain.

What good are dreams that do not change the self,
that would with mere illusions seek to please,
their promise a slight shift in fleeting wealth
or kneeling pads to those still on their knees?

Let those who would reform the world begin
their revolution from a different spot:
instead of struggle to get what you want,
appreciate a bit of what you’ve got.

Let others take the parapets by storm,
their banners bright and bold against the flame;
For me, such revolutions don’t perform.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.

12 APR 2005

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