Will There Be Any Stars In My Crown?

[poliphilo]

I've got a birthday coming up. It's not a round figure one, so I'm not making a deal of fuss. Actually, even if it was a round figure one I'd want to keep things low-key. Once you're past 50 the only birthday that's worth jumping up and down about is your 100th.

I used to take my body for granted. Now I'm acutely aware of its frailty.

And its unreality.

So what is it? A column of water stiffened with carbon and calcium and other elements. Or, as Webster put it, "a little crudded milk, fantastical puff-paste."

It ain't me.

(Babe)

It's this thing I'm using while I work my passage through this heavy dimension. It's like a space suit or a diving suit. If I'm lucky it has another 20 or 30 years wear in it.

We'll see. But every birthday brings it closer to systems failure and the awfully big adventure.

Detachment, that's the thing to be working at when you get past 50. I like it here, but I'm hoping they won't have to pry my fingers loose at the end.

I had a flying dream last night. I said, "look, this is how it's done," spread my arms like dicky-bird wings and took off for the ceiling.

Can't do it now, but one day maybe.

Something to look forward to.

Comments

[butterscotch711.livejournal.com]

Have you re-watched Rope yet? To me, Rope is all about dealing with the body, how trippy it is, whether or not it is what we are, what it means. The corpse hidden in the chest is the body, the dinner party going on above it is life. (This also links in with the gay subtext - Brandon and Phillip must never explicitly articulate the truth about the corpse.) Of course the corpse is also a kind of illusion, like the illusion of the movie without cuts - once it is hidden beneath the glimmer of the dinner party, who's to say it is really there? Is it a constant from cut to cut?

A few times I have woken up with a jolt in the night, acutely aware of how strange my body is - an arbitrary machine made of meat, almost unfathamobly weird. For a while I'm confounded by the fact that I inhabit it, before I wake up a little more.

[idahoswede.livejournal.com]

Now you're going to have me singing that song all afternoon. Fortunately, it's one I really like.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

No. I watched Torn Curtain last night- a movie I tried very hard to like, but without much success.
Hitch wanted Shirley Maclaine, but the Studio insisted on Julie Andrews and he gave way- a terrible mistake. Julie's character is supposed to be a passionate pilgrim and she plays it as little Miss Nice.

Paul Newman is pretty dreadful too.

So I will prioritize Rope. It's there on the shelf
along with all the other movies we bought in a frenzy of Hitch-mania. I guess I'm moving it to the head of the queue.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I just went through a stack of CDs to see if we have a recording of it. Apparently not. Rats!

[idahoswede.livejournal.com]

I may have Emmy Lou Harris doing it, but the version I was thinking of was an old bluegrass version by the Seldom Scene.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Ellen Kuschner's Sound and Spirit radio program explored death yesterday. She spent some time on the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

She played part of a moving interpretation of the Book, meant to be read aloud, presumably to the corpse in the moments after death.

"Dear friend, the moment has come, as it must for us all. You are dead. Now you are free to go into the light. Do not allow yourself to be diverted, lest you go to a place where you should not go..."

Many cultures, said Ellen, believe that the soul spends about a year finding its way before it can rest--purification, purgatory--

Ellen, herself a Jew, said that the Jewish religion doesn't rule out reincarnation, either, and she read some references.

She played a wonderful cut from a recording by Laurie Anderson* about a conversation with a ouija board:

In 1978, I spent some time in California in the fall, looking for a quiet place to live. I finally found what seemed to be the perfect apartment. But the night after I moved in I heard a tremendous pounding sound. As it turned out, I had moved in right above a Hawaiian hallow log drum school. Every other night, it was converted into a hula school with a live band of six Hawaiian guitars.
I decided to soundproof my place but I didn't hang the door very well and all the sounds kept drifting in. About this time, like a lot of New Yorkers who find themselves on the West Coast, I got interested in various aspects of California's versions of the occult. We would sit around at night when the Santa Anna winds howled outside, and ask questions to the ouija board. I found out a lot of information on my past 9,361 human lives on this planet. My first life was as a raccoon.

— And then you were a cow. And then you were a bird. And then you were a hat, spelled the ouija.

We said “a hat?” We couldn't figure it out. Finally we guessed that the feathers from the bird had been made into a hat. Is this true?

— Yes, spelled the ouija. Hat counts as half life.

And then?

— Hundreds and hundreds of rave eyes.

Now this is apparently my first life as a woman, which should explain quite a few things. Eventually though, the ouija's written words seemed to take a kind of personality, a kind of a voice. Finally we began to ask the board if the ouija would be willing to appear to us in some other form.

— Forget it, forget it, forget it, forget it, forget it, forget it.

The ouija seemed like it was about to crash. Please, please, what can we do?

*The Ouija Board
Laurie Anderson
Laurie Anderson et al
LAURIE ANDERSON - THE UGLY ONE
WITH THE JEWELS AND OTHER STORIES
- Warner Bros. 45847

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Well, sorry!

First, for printing out that long lyric, and second for not touching it up first.

"Rave Eyes" is "Rabbis."

I drifted right off the subject, caught up in Sound and Spirit.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

WIth me, it's my hands that remind me I inhabit a weird machine.

Fingers are strange.

You said it so well, that we inhabit "an arbitrary machine made of meat." Choprah says something similar, and says that our nerve endings are the way we interact with this realm. He says we wear our bodies.

Teeth, tongues, eyes, noses, hands--God, we're strange. But made to experience and locomote as much as possible here.

(Sagan said we are "festooned DNA," a creepy description. Unsettling.)

I, too, find that I feel most foreign to my body when just waking up. And that's also when I have sudden jolts of interesting scraps of ideas, usually insights. It's like I went away, then had to come back home.

[queen-in-autumn.livejournal.com]

I remember reading somewhere that our physical bodies are like the shells of an egg. They aren't really us, they are the container we exist in while the real us comes to maturity. Like an egg, a body must be 'broken' to allow the being within to emerge in its fullness.

It's not a perfect metaphor, but I find it both striking and comforting, especially as I am watching my parents' bodies beginning their end-of-life decline.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

There's a version by Waterson:Carthy, but it's on the only album of theirs I don't seem to own.

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

(Sagan said we are "festooned DNA," a creepy description. Unsettling.)

this sounds like Sagan, I can almost hear him saying it. Why do you find it creepy? I thing it sounds...accurate. Unsentimental and accurate. Interesting too that often our bodies betray us long before our spirit - or whatever it is that exists within us - is ready to head out. To wherever it goes.

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

Joan Baez. I love her version of it, I de believe I've heard a live version where she imitates Dylan. Accurately. Great song.

Now *I* have an earworm.

[archyena.livejournal.com]

I kind of fear growing old, personally, and hold out hope that we're as close to finding a cure for it as scientists seem to think we are.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

In one of Bishop Pike's books (I think it was) he reports talking through a medium to his dead son. Pike Jnr (who had committed suicide) describes waking up in the next world and being sat down and taken gently through his past life, incident by incident. He makes it sound a lot like being kept in after school.

I suspect Laurie's Ouija board was pulling her leg. How wonderful, though, to be reincarnated as a hat!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Oh dear- I pictured mad people dancing round a bonfire. Not in the least bit rabbinical.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I remember a sermon in which the preacher compared the human being to an onion. That way there's more than the single skin to shed.

But metaphors aside, I'm pretty damn sure that death is not the end.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

I thought it seemed creepy because it appeared to leave out any spiritual component. Also because it made me picture DNA without a body but walking around...

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

But will they also find a cure for the hardening of the mind that comes with old age? To have a population of fabulously aged people, all reminiscing about the good old days and deploring the youth of today (mere striplings of 100 and 150)is a nightmarish prospect.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

I'd forgotten Pike.

Did you ever read Search by his widow, Diane, who had a vision of Pike's death in the desert?

--

An aside: I've been thinking about death lately, feeling fragile myself. And I wrote up as today's blog a dream about "going to Hollywood" this morning, which can, I think, be seen as an answer to my fears--

In the dream, which was on the surface rather silly, had some powerful metaphors--

I lost my way to my people. I was guided by an old woman, up a spiral staircase ("stairway to heaven")--at one point, I lost my purse and all my money, too, but found it intact--all was well, and we continued. I found my family. The old woman took me right to them.

I do think there must be a system in place to make sure we are all right.

We got here safely. Perhaps the cloud of forgetfulness is important--otherwise, how could we bear to be in such a heavy realm? It would drive us mad...

Is there ever an account of people who are born with that door still open?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Our man Holzer gets very cross with Sagan. He says Sagan was a man who clung to materialism the way other people cling to religious dogma,

I had the quotation all lined up, but now I can't find it.

[archyena.livejournal.com]

I would hope they do, otherwise it will be an annoying or at least boring prospect. But I think my generation, and to a lesser extend your generation, are at an advantage that our elders are not: we existed in periods of rapid social and technological change. Your father's father and your father probably were very similar in terms of their workplace environment. The technologies may have changed rapidly with World War II but, in America at least, the social environment would go largely unchanged until the 1960s.

For me, when I was ten, gay people were not to be socialized with. In a couple of years, I was aware that most of the adults around me would have "gay friends." When I could vote, gay marriage or civil unions were unconscionable. Today it's largely that the idea that they are unconscionable is unconscionable. That's a remarkably short span of time and I can point to many others in areas like abortion or the environment. There has been a quickening of social conscience.

I tend to think that its possible that this quicker pace in society and technology would help to prevent the hardening of the mind as surely as the latest drug does the arteries. Many of the elderly now have been left behind, unable to be a vital part of society at all because they held views for 30 years and for 30 years they were acceptable, indeed admirable. I have come to expect to have my views challenged in a significant way daily. I can't help but think that would impart a long term advantage in coping with change.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I believe I read that book. I remember an account of dead Pike stumbling around in the psychic fog, getting very angry because he was a bishop and this shouldn't be happening to him.

I think it would be very confusing if we arrived on earth with all our past-life memories intact.

Kipling has a story (The Finest Story in the World) about a little bank clerk who goes into trances and remembers lives sailing with Odysseus and Eric the Red. Then he falls in love with a tobacconist's assistant and the new emotions wash away his past-life memories.

Kipling as narrator concludes- "Now I understood why the Lords of Life and Death shut the doors so carefully behind us. It is that we may not remember our first and most beautiful wooings. Were this not so, our world would be without inhabitants in a hundred years."

Some people claim to be able to access their past lives. They're usually the same people who were never anything less glamorous than an Egyptian princess or an eye-witness to the crucifixion.

[archyena.livejournal.com]

And by the by, I never got around to saying anything about internet names and this made me think of it for some reason.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Here's an interesting pre-birth story.

[greybeta.livejournal.com]

I've heard that it always comes sooner than you think it will.