Yo-yo time | the up and down of life and death

It’s yo-yo time folks. Please pull yours out and think of me. Down, up, down, up… Down.

One day I am in enough abdominal pain (intestines, stomach, liver, kidneys) to want to die, and then I have a day like Wednesday and Thursday last week. I somehow willed myself into our greenhouse to record thirteen new videos using four different guitars. Never felt so alive. I am so grateful to be able to fulfill one more dream of recording many of my newest works ( if I can finish the editing!). Of course, the next day I had to get myself to the chiropractor to fix the damage I did from pushing myself so far. Then I slept most of the next two days, followed by a tired but wonderful afternoon with both of our boys, Gus and Adam.

The special video from these sessions is appropriately Sweet Enigma, which I wrote for an old, old friend who I have not seen in 50 years. Dave Blanchard commissioned me in January to write a memorial for his daughter who tragically died at age 17. Read more here. The title came to me while thinking I could not possibly understand the pain of such an event, and what mood do I try to strike—enigma: a person or thing that is mysterious, puzzling, or difficult to understand. “Death is the ultimate enigma and we’ll never know its secrets.”

So the yo-yo is a little strange in that you have to throw it down. Most things drop. Footballs, basketballs and baseballs all fall after you throw them up. Gravity—we normally don’t pay much attention to it—is always there, pulling us down to Earth. As my legs get weaker, I am more sensitive to very subtle changes of slope. The slightest rise and I struggle. Staircase – forget it. But down is a relief, and that is the direction I’m headed. Into the Earth. Gravity will swallow me and I will be embraced by this grand globe and all the souls who reside there. And I will be relieved.

BTW, I think “passed away” is a terrible euphemism. It symbolizes our culture’s fear of death, and dying. After all, we don’t refer to the “passed away.” We talk about the dead. Even “deceased” is a distancing from the stark, inevitable and totally natural reality. I will die. And my body will go away. But hopefully my spirit will remain in the hearts of those I know and love and those who encounter my legacy of compositions and recordings.

I am pleased to mention that a dear friend of mine asked for permission to use my last blog post, I look west, for the words to a new choral work. I’ll let him do the announcing when it is done. But he mentioned that the words made him recall singing a choral piece by Heinrich Schütz – Selig sind die Toten – as a freshman in college. These are the words:

Selig sind die Toten, die in dem Herren sterben, von nun an.
Ja, der Geist spricht: sie ruhen von ihrer arbeit, und
ihre Werke folgen ihnen nach.  — Revelation 14, v.13

Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth: Yea, saith the Spirit, 
that they may rest from their labours; and their works do follow them.

And finally, a recent poem of mine:

Where I Go

No pencil
No pen
No voice?

No PDFs
No MP3s
No CD, VCR, TV or apps
No .com, .biz, .wav
—Heaven!

No thoughts
No trails
No tears

No fears, fights, or fools
No trials, triads or trills
No practice
No proofs
No Pringles, no jingles

I go to the primordial jungle
the source
where all is created
where all is consumed
where Nothing resides

All is remembered
All is forgotten
Nam myoho renge kyo.*

—FW May 11 2020

* Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō (南無妙法蓮華經; sometimes truncated phonetically as Nam Myōhō Renge Kyō) (English: ”Devotion to the Mystic Law of the Lotus Sutra” / “Glory to the Dharma of the Lotus Sutra”) are religious words chanted within all forms of Nichiren Buddhism.