What will the indecipherable future dream? ... Borges (Still missing Etta & Johnny)

Ric Nagualero*

It doesn't feel quite right to move on from the deaths of Etta James and Johnny Otis so soon (my previous post), but their lives and impact are being sung in so many publications, including the L.A. Times and the Guardian, which I regularly read, and beautifully so, in articles, photos, appreciations.

Every so often I'm proud of the human race. We don't have much capacity to identify stupidity, but sometimes we do know genius.

Tonight I'm going to post another selection from Poems of the Night, a gathering of work from several of Jorge Luis Borges' collections. I want, for myself, his easy passage into dream and back, his understanding of depth, process and transparency of the collective unconsciousness, of the momentous occasion of its existence, and a personal access through myth and dream (and good fortune). Borges gives me hope as an artist and as a believer (in many things).

Each sentence below is a meditation.

Someone Will Dream

What will the indecipherable future dream?  A dream that Alonso Quijano can be Don Quixote without leaving his village and his books.  A dream that the eve of Ulysses can be more prodigious than the poem that recounts his hardships. Dreaming human generations that will not recognize the name of Ulysses. Dreaming dreams more precise than today's wakefulness. A dream that we will be able to do miracles and that we won't do them, because it will be more real to imagine them. Dreaming worlds so intense that the voice of one bird could kill you. Dreaming that to forget and to remember can be voluntary actions, not aggressions or gifts of chance. A dream that we shall see with our whole body, as Milton wished from the shadow of those tender orbs, his eyes.  Dreaming a world without machines and without that afflicted machine, the body. Life is not a dream, Novalis writes, but can become a dream.

Suzanne Jill Levine tr.

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Borges, Waiting for the Night, Poems of the Night (Penguin).

*Painting by Ric Nagualero: www.nagualero.com / Facebook.com/nagualero

Great Souls Creating Their Own Proximity: Etta James & Johnny Otis. America's Great Black Musical Triumph. A Poem by Pessoa.

 












A great soul creates its own proximity.  I don't need to have seen or touched Etta James or Johnny Otis to have been touched by them and in some way seen, my raging heart witnessed and deafened, especially by Etta. My life was as, hey, more, enriched by their presence on the planet as by any number of people I've shook hands with, taken classes with, received paychecks from.

As you know they were astonishing soul musicians. Neither had to make the choice to be other than messengers, though for Johnny Otis, a Greek American, there was a transition and it was a bit more conscious than Etta's.  She was black.  He wasn't, but Johnny Otis understood himself to be a musician in the tradition and community of America's great black musical triumph.  He decided to move in that community very early in his career.  Otis was a different kind of beautiful.

Miss James was all kinds of beautiful.

So to honor them I wanted to post a poem about joy and about humility, the true victory. The True Victory. Which is, at least as of 6:30 p.m., 1/20, to have lived and understood the meaning of all this, which is to say the humiliations and sufferings, the rapture of being alive. I don't presume to say they did or didn't understanding what I naively refer to as "the meaning."  Like I do?

I bow to them. 

Courtesy of Fernando Pessoa:

XVIII

If only I were the dust on the road
And the feet of the poor were tromping on me...

If only I were the flowing rivers
And there were washerwomen on my bank...

If only I were the poplars next to the river
And only had the sky above me and the water below me...

If only I were a miller’s donkey
And he beat me and valued me...

Better those than someone going through life
Looking back and feeling sorry about it...
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Pessoa, 1914 (Portugal), from http://alberto-caeiro.blogspot.com/