vol. 3:2 part 2

Rendezvous in Muse
by Donny Duke

Drawing by Devan Duke

     As part of my sadhana I do music, write songs which I play on the guitar and sing, but I’m neither a good singer nor an accomplished guitarist.  Neither would my songs please the ear of most anyone that listens to popular music being as there are so many good songs out there, near perfect by our standards at least, and because mine are inner songs, and by that I mean they are written purely by inner voice and vision, so the lyrics are as figurative as dream, disjointed and irrational to the listening mind, the music itself possessing an irregular inner rhythm strange sounding to the light of day, and when you add all that up you come up with music that is very soul-personal that you just want to sing to yourself, to the divine if you can get the heart there, where the music is going if it’s from your soul, but songs are made to be sung, the guitar a social instrument, and so you just have to lay aside the embarrassment of the ego and sing.  Sometimes the performer actually isn’t self-promoting.

     This latest song was written over several months one or two lines at a time in coordination with the ups and downs of my attempts at a full sadhana, which at the best of times is only half that.  A full sadhana means not only maintaining a continual concentration 24/7 on the divine (which doesn’t have to be an image or a name at all) in the mind and heart but also not indulging the vital, not having reactions to things, and being brahmachari even in your heart, which means nothing or no one gets in there but the divine, which means you need something to give that vital so that when it revolts it doesn’t topple the tittering government of your sadhana.  Like I mean, you need something magic.  Music alone helps sooth the savage beast, but slowly writing a song by the seat of your soul you work on everyday whose lines fit your present need, hit the nail right on the head of what you’re going through, one you can pull yourself over and play and sing whenever anger, anxiety, desire, depression, frustration, or that monster boredom, come to call, is just what the doctor ordered, because magic was proscribed, and both psychic contact and divine contact are magic.  It usually doesn’t completely cast out the rowdies, unless the heart really gets into it, but it does smooth and sooth the vital enough it takes the edge of, and that’s all you really need.

     The lines are sung to my inner ear by the Mystery in different genres of music, most often Rock n Roll and Country and Western, the ones I grew up knowing in America, and in different voices, often by famous ones in the American/British music industry, by my own out of tune voice, and sometimes by the voice of an angel. They come with complete musical accompaniment, but also come a cappella, especially when it’s my voice.  There’s no way I can reproduce what I hear and see, that kind of perfection, perfect in ways the world can’t reach, and lines are often sung in a dream or vision, adding other dimensions to it that I can’t possibly capture on my acoustic guitar.  But if I get the melody wrong the line repeats at some point to help me get as close as I can with the lack of talent in my hands and voice.  It doesn’t give me the guitar cords, but when I get a cord wrong it corrects it by naming the replacement cord, often showing it played in a vision.  To correct my new song it simply said E in the night (the one I'm currently working on, not the one as an mp3 bellow), and I knew what it referred to in the snatch of song I’m working on, a chorus it’d given me a couple of weeks before, and I looked E up in my guitar book to see other ways of playing it than the way I knew, something the muse knew I'd do, knowing too what's in that book, knows every little thing in your life, the personal divine it’s called in the Yoga, or Mahasaraswati if you're into names, and with the E cord was introduced the Spanish F and G that led to their barre cords, something it’s time I began to learn, and the ‘lesson’ put the song on track, and just this morning I heard, for the first time while composing a song via the muse, what finger picking to use, saw it played on the guitar in vision, but it’s a 7 note jobber that’ll push my ability beyond what I can play now.  I would imagine that’s the whole point.

     In listening for the lyrics I only accept sung lines, even reject some of those, since, if you are a listener, meaning have opened the inner ear, things are coming anytime you get down inside there to it where you can hear/see (so often it’s also visual), and so you have to be picky about what you choose to keep and what you throw away, though generally speaking sung lines come from the psychic, and so I give a sung line much more credit than a spoken line and am careful when throwing any of those away.  There are many levels of muse, many voices wanting recorded, even many different overmental ones wanting its ideal(s) to line your song (or your poem), so you really have to tune the ear to your soul, since it knows what in the vast of the divine’s storehouse you need to sing about. I also write poetry via the inner voice and vision facility, the creative reflex I call it, and the lines of the current coming song come in the midst of the poems that I’m writing, if I’m writing one at the time, and fit both the poem and at the same time where I’ve left off on the song waiting for new lines, attesting to the multi-dimensional (seeing more than one field at a time) facet of the muse, of divine vision.  An example: http://theatomicreview.blogspot.in/p/blog-page_2449.html

     I grew up around guitar pickers.  My dad didn’t play but a couple of his brothers did, C & W music, one almost making a living at it, and if you know anything about making it in the music business that means when I was around him I was also around the guitar, and I was around him a lot growing up, so the instrument was no stranger to me.  I personally picked up the guitar as a teenager in the Jesus Movement of the mid 70’s, was what was known as a Jesus freak, but we called ourselves a Jesus person, such social juxtapositions part and parcel of my process it seems.  We sat in a circle and clapped and sang a lot, not church hymns but folk and rock songs of the day, but the only song I learned was One Tin Soldier, being particular enamored with that song and Billy Jack and not having the discipline it took to engage the instrument with any seriousness, but the basic strumming and some cords stayed with me, and anytime I was around a guitar I’d pick it up and rehash what little I knew for a couple of minutes, and that kept the thing alive in my physical consciousness, my hands, or so I thought it was that keeping it alive.

     It turned out to be something much deeper.  In early adulthood I began having a lot of lucid dreaming cycles, and sometimes I’d will a guitar to appear, and it would, though I might have to open a closet or something to find it, and I’d play it, though it’s not as cut and dried as that, since things are funny in dreams: the hands go through some primitive motion while the sound that’s produced is guitar’s perfection.  Once, when my hands actually produced the sound, and I just watched them do what no hands on earth could do, producing a rift that was out of this world, more beautiful than anything on earth could be, and you know when you hear it such music’s not possible here, the voice of dream, which I’d later develop into my muse, announced with a resounding dream-crack that there is a heavenly guitar.  Whatever was going on between me and the guitar was not just some boy’s fancy to imitate his uncle, or play the beat of his generation, but it wasn’t until Auroville the 1st time around did I discover the guitar is in my very soul.

*     *     *     *     *

Sunday October 8, 1995

Dome House, Fertile Windmill

Auroville, India

[From my dream journal]

     I was only an observer in the dream and was watching a very talented Black man on the verge of fame.  He sang and played the guitar like from heaven.  More and more people began to notice him, even beyond the small country town in which he lived.  Even Whites were starting to pay him notice and invite him to play in their establishments, something not allowed for a Black person at that time.  Though I was an observer, I felt like I was that man.  His music matched perfectly my poetry I took note of in the dream (I was in a sort of streaming lucidity, not unaware it was a dream).  The attention he was getting attracted the attention of the local KKK.  This was the Old South right after the Civil War.  They weren’t organized KKK with white sheets and all, but they had the purpose of suppressing Blacks.  The musician heard they were coming for him and became afraid and decided to leave immediately, but before he could, they came and burned down his house, and as soon as they did it, it became a burning inferno, scorching even some of them.  I had actually been an observer watching the dream from his perspective, but as the fire approached him, and he heard his wife and children began to scream, who the fire had already overcome somewhere else in the house, my position moved from him to outside the house.  I was now in the driveway watching the scene and wondering if he’d been able to escape or not.  Though his house was a little out of town, many townspeople came to watch the fire, not knowing the full story and thinking it an accident.  I told some children sitting with two women the truth of the matter, that the firemen coming to put out the fire and police there had set the fire to begin with.

     Then the scene flashed to the hills around the house.  I saw many musicians with their guitars.  They all wanted to save the man.  The dream focused on one particular musician high on the ridge on the other side of the valley from the man’s house.  Though all were playing, they were too far away from the house to be heard.  The one musician, after repeated attempts, touched the end of his guitar (the neck end) to a line of energy running along the ridge of the high hill he was on.  It was like a lay line, subtle energy.  He began to vibrate the guitar by moving it very rhythmically, and it became loud enough to be heard all over the valley, resounded like whatever that Black man the dream had originally been about had to give to the world was heard [like he was able to “breathe his sweets” as Savitri would put it], and it was exceedingly, extraordinarily, beautiful.  I realized the musician had just invented the electric guitar.  He was Black as well as White, not a mulatto but an only possible in dream Black/White man.

*     *     *     *     *

     All my life I’ve had dreams of this Black man at various stages of his life, though he wasn’t always a musician.  Sometimes he was a scientist, or a university professor, or an inventor.  Always he was a genius of some sort, and once I began to notice and interpret my dreams I just figured that repeating character was my dream weaver compensating for the image of African Americans I’d been given by my upbringing in the South still rife with racial attitudes.  I can remember seeing an occasional White only sign at a water fountain or restroom, since I was born in ’61 right on the tail end of Jim Crow.  But he was much more personal than that.  When I had this defining dream in Auroville I was making psychic contact and inner contact with the Mother (in my 6 month visit it was a vertical half n half sadhana, meaning 3 months of up and 3 of down, because the higher you go you meet battle), and when you make especially psychic contact other lives surface, since that’s where they are, clustered around the soul.  That Black guitar player was another incarnation of my soul, a past life if you want to look at it linearly, which is not the whole truth of the matter, just a way we can understand it, and his talent on the guitar and predicament in an outcast bubble made a deep impression in my soul’s journey, and here I am in another life in such a bubble, repeating that pattern (probably a pattern in other lifetimes too), but hand in hand with it is what beauty such a bubble can make if you turn it to its soul purpose.  Now, my hands don’t remember how to play the guitar, and my voice doesn’t sound too pretty, but the soul when it sounds is beautiful – just press play.

Rendezvous

a spiritual folk song, sung to the divine like he’s my woman

Verse 1:

I will never

Build my life

Upon you,

This little place.

Somebody can care for you a long ways.

On with this girl?

A decoration a date.

They were seeing what

On all the money little islands?

A supermarket.

There it is.

He walked almost ran

To the date of the clearing.

Eagle peaks

Pulled on his face.

It’s not important to know

What you take God in and go:

Enwrap,

Oh enwrap.

An encounter of one,

An encounter of two,

She casts his shadow.

Lemmie tell you one thing,

Lemmie tell you one.

The image is not what you see in prison.

Here I am inside my heart.

Open doors with such a start.

And you gather round,

And you gather round,

And you come on to school.

You are my sing you see.

You’re all I’m holdin’.

You’re the time that I think of callin’.

Don’t be ashamed of crawlin’,

Come on.

We give our lives down to the heartbeat.

It goes all the way through.

It does.

The ends of the lotus on the tip of your brain.

There’s more there that can understand.

See you were waiting. 3x

Chorus:

Yes love like you.

I’ve never felt this kind love before.

You know my heart belongs to you alone.

By and so,

Body and soul,

We are mountains.

Verse 2:

Somebody can hear for you a long ways.

Others have gone who

Placed their hand on the flag and:

You have to get me.

You want me to write those other stories?:

Around me,

This little place.

Your choice should be free

So come take tomorrow.

Right on the border

I wanna tell you something useful:

In the midst of the light.

It’s a place.

And they can,

With wilderness assist them,

One paperwork,

All the blue light.

I have climbed the sun

And worked in the light of 97 hums,

The light of 97 hums.

Oh I,

This would not be dwelt upon your knees. 2x

We are treasure in the earth.

Our lives,

We’ll deal with that.

I’m a stone, darling,

Comin’ in as I do.

Just one faith

I’m holdin’

All the time:

One is the only.

As witness

Let’s fly this baby.

See a breast of roses pressed upon the ground

Chorus

Verse 3:

What makes worthy:

The human being could see in prison.

Puttin’ it all the way through

I wanna tell you somethin’ useful:

Alone let me lead you

Letter from home.

Heyiya, heyiya,

Heyiya your dreams.

One casts his shadow 2x

In your house.

Now this place

You had to money little islands

In his lap.

Half now.

Around me

Took this little place.

Like a bridge

This makes troubled waters.

Probably

Live together like brothers

Somebody to care for you.

Love is the only.

Everything’s door,

Power to serve.

Got to light you,

Hey, hey, hey, hey,

With this song.

Chorus