Take it Up

Sep 12, 2023

Inside: Book night with Hilma, Scandinavian ancestors, good enough for jazz, and a poem about the Milky Way.

Tom Cox said Solvitur ambulando was his favourite Latin phrase. It means ‘it is solved by walking’. Time to go outside and walk every day, noting all the shifts in the air and light, the weather and full sensorium. Cooler mornings, warm afternoons. Sharp nights. Do we put the heat on? Do we turn lights on earlier in the evening? Yes.

In September, I hope to focus — cue audience laugh track — no really now, settle down! I really DO plan to focus in two main directions. One is this Substack for you, dear readers. I want to make it better, richer. The other part is deepening my Plato study. I want to tell you so much about how working with Platonic ideas has changed me. One thing I haven't talked about yet is comparing Platonism and Sufism. They connect in so many fundamental ways - are they different in others? A bit like DNA spirals wrapping around each other, I'm trying to understand where they match and where they diverge. I want to go into more on this in the weeks to come.

Book Night Starts with Hilma

Last year, James and I passed many sweet Sunday evenings in the library at the back of his studio, spending time with the art books. Further into this fall, we might be bringing it back. When it gets darker after dinner, it’s fun to walk over to the studio space and settle in for an hour or two. I bring tea, and our dog, B, comes too, and sleeps beside us.

The library once again will open its doors!

Waiting for us is Hilma af Klint’s Catalogue Raisonné. It arrived just before the summer, and now the time is right to go into it more deeply. She’s become so well-known, and her previously hidden work seems like it is everywhere now, on esoteric book covers, websites, blogs, you name it.

The definitive collection of this remarkable artist’s complete works.

Hey, Ancestors!

Speaking of Sweden, something else is waiting this fall to open up a bit more. Maybe I’ll find out more about my dad’s side of the family - I may get into some Swedish/Norwegian ancestral dark Northern brooding. Last winter, my long ago passed away grandmother and dad came to me just in the liminal time before sleep, or was it a dream? They were emanating so much love, I surrendered and thought, well if this is what dying is like, it is fine.

Divorce had been unusual in my grandmother’s times. But she did it. She even lived a happy second life here on Salt Spring with a new husband, Dave, a retired logger. My dad was her first born, and so was specially loved in the family of 8. Because my mum’s mother, the English Grannie, was “top grandmother”, I didn’t have much of chance to know her well. But through my dad’s love, I felt the presence of her ways.

This history is all inside my own life - how I turn my head to look at something, which side I sleep on, little bits of the unconscious ways just bubble up to the surface unbidden, no need to dig for it at all. How much is me, and how much is this ancestral inheritance? Someone said that whatever we sort out in our own lives here and now not only expands into a more clarified future for our descendants, but also restores and realigns our ancestors. It isn’t exactly time travel but it is “time travel adjacent”! They don’t haunt or live through me - I’m not here to fulfill their life destinies, since I have my own, and it is unique. But I like to think that my pursuit of truth can bring them peace.

Plato points upward to the realm of ideas

Take it Up

Now Merlin AI tells me that jazz musicians and audience share a unique connection, as the former creates and improvises music in the moment, while the latter responds with emotional intensity. The dynamic between them is one of mutual respect and creative exchange, with each influencing the other in a continuous cycle of inspiration and interpretation. Is that happening here, in the loop of this little Substack?

If you think my post is too light, or not saying what it should, join me, jump in and solo. Think like a jazz musician. Take the whole game to the next level, let’s not keep it as one small article or post. This is more than a conversation, it is the effort of all of us to show what we can do.

Use it as inspiration to add to your own Substack and make me better, braver, more open or clear. Disagree? Then show me how you would do it. Agree? then make it even better, take it where you need to take it. Inspired? Let’s really get going here. Time to fly.

Of course, I need the audience to sit and groove, it gives me the reason to write you in the first place. But if you are a player, don’t just sit snapping your fingers, eyes closed and hipster head nodding along. Come up here, sit in, show what you’ve got, surprise me.

And to you writers, here on the bandstand, don’t go off stage for a drink or smoke while I’m left here doing a solo. At least comp, or keep a bare minimum going on here to back me up. I’ll do the same for you.

To the Gods of the Milky Way

I drink your milk like a starving baby,

gulping, sputtering.

Too much too fast

from the hard cold vessel,

iridescence pours

over my mouth and cheeks

down the folds of neck and chin,

following tears’ rivulets at the back of the ears.

Flowing over tight-fisted eyes,

worn sore with nightlong tears.

Nose plugged from crying,

mouth gasps for air.

breathe gulp swallow gulp swallow breathe gulp swallow

Rhythm soon entrains

With each gulp and swallow

the palate flattens

then retracts up a bit,

then flattens again.

Sweet bioluminescence pours in,

peace descends.

The palate’s hidden sequence

opens that secret pathway

to the pineal.

It displays

a floral turn,

expands upward,

ripens to radiant gold,

spins out bliss,

starry ecstasy.

Thanks for stopping by :) Sorry I missed last week’s post, but I assume you were all in the same situation of shifting into September’s demands. Till next week!

I especially appreciate those of you who have kindly stuck with me from the beginning!

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