Dale Barrigar

The Sky to Talk About by Dale Barrigar

(All images by Dale Barrigar)

“You’re soft as glass / and I’m a gentleman / and we’ve got the sky to talk about / and the world to lie upon.” – Townes Van Zandt

Getting back to nature is not what most people think it is and this MISUNDERSTANDING causes too many people to not get back to nature when getting back to nature is probably the single most important thing many of us could ever do right now.

Too many people believe that “getting back to nature” equals what Ubiquitous Advertising (and now social media in all its octopus-like tentacles and forms) has told them it is.

In order to get back to nature, you do not need to purchase expensive hiking boots and a new backpack and the right clothes and the right walking stick so that you look like you are a nature buff.

You do not need to climb Mount Everest or fly on one of “their” toxic airplanes to a “nature” destination that is filled with tourists just like you.

You do not need to swim to the bottom of the sea nor hike back into the literal wilderness so far so that you do not see any other humans for forty days or more and end up dying of starvation.

You do not need to purchase a mountain bike; do not need to buy rock-climbing equipment; do not need to buy expensive guns in order to slaughter animals with, or a boat so you can hunt down fish; nor do you need to purchase a jeep; a surf board; or a tent and camping gear, in order to get back to nature.

If you are outside right now, glance up into the sky and really notice it and what it’s doing right now; then step to the nearest green thing around you (even if it’s been made that way by humans) and notice how this green plant grows and interacts with its environment, giving back good and taking bad out (you can FEEL this around a plant if you want to). We wouldn’t be here at all without them.

If you are inside, move to the nearest window somehow and open it if you can. If you can’t, it’s okay. Study what is happening in and through the window, whether it be sun, clouds, night, moonlight or starlight or whatever the light (from the sky) is doing.

Even if you couldn’t open the window, you have gotten back to nature when you noticed (and engaged with) the natural light (or its opposite, darkness); and the natural light is always there, even when it’s combined with a human-caused light, which is, after all, also part of nature, because humans are part of nature.

If you can’t move right now, turn away from what they call “the world” and enter so deeply into yourself that the world falls away and there is nothing but self, so much so that “the self” disappears – and you realize that you have been here all along and always will be even after whatever else happens happens. (And it is going to happen anyway whether you like it or not. This is part of what they mean when they say, “Let it be.”)

Nietzsche famously wrote, “Stare into the abyss long enough and the abyss will stare back into you.”

Most people misunderstand that quotation and think it’s a negative, and terrifying, thing.

It’s actually the most positive thing one could ever hope to imagine.

Dale Barrigar

Fail Better by Dale Barrigar

Samuel Johnson said: “I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works.”

This is true only up to a certain point in the life of an artist.

After a certain point, it is no longer true, because the real and true artist stops caring (eventually) what the public reaction is, or is not, to his, her or “their” works.

But that is not true either. The real artist never really stops caring. (When I say “artist” here, I intend “literary artist,” but any kind of artist can also be substituted, including an artist of life.)

The artist does stop caring about the reaction to their works in the sense that she or he, after a certain point, is going to keep right on doing it anyway with immense rewards to none other than The Self no matter what the public does, or does not, say. And the real artist always has her or his eye on the future far more than the present, because the real artist is creating the next step in human artistic evolution and he or she has no choice but to aim for the future in order to do what she or he needs to do. “Fail again. Fail better,” said Samuel Beckett, regarding the “success” and inevitable failure of such near-superhuman trials and endeavors that can be envisioned by internally picturing the statue of David by Michelangelo. It all sounds grandiose and ridiculous to the average modern ear (which is most writers) and that is why real artists now are so often seen as some kind of holy fools by the rest of society. (See The Idiot by Dostoevsky, especially the first hundred pages.)

The artist does not stop caring in the sense that there always needs to be some sort of living dialogue going on to create the work.

In other words, ONE Good Reader is far more valuable than a trillion shallow, crap readers who don’t understand, can’t understand, won’t understand, will never understand, and what’s more, don’t want to understand!

The first one will feed your art (and therefore your soul), while the second category will turn you into one of THEM (or worse) (if worse is possible).

Because all of this is also about the Soul of the Individual Human vs. The Machine, which is the most important World War of our time. (Everything else important falls under this category.)

And it begins NOW.

Everything before this was only preparation.

Dale Barrigar (Images by Dale Barrigar)

And a cool tune…

Ramblin’ Man by Dale Barrigar

“I love you, baby / but you gotta understand, / when the Lord made me / he made a ramblin’ man.” – Hank Williams

The song “Ramblin’ Man,” written and sung by Hank Williams, ends with these words:

“And when I’m gone /

And at my grave you stand /

Just say God’s called home your ramblin’ man.”

Hank was 29 when he expired in the back of a car being driven by a college kid he’d hired on the way to another gig in the middle of America.

Exhaustion, chloral hydrate, morphine, alcohol, amphetamines, nicotine, caffeine, probably a few other drugs, and very, very little food for a very, very long time can be said to be the direct cause/s of his death, i.e. his sudden heart failure in the middle of the night in the back of a car blasting across the American heartland.

Neil Young, who’s 80 now (the age Dolly Parton was when she passed on), and who had his own big-time drug and alcohol problems, and who is a direct descendant of Hank Williams, like Dolly, Leonard Cohen, and Bob Dylan, once said in a song, “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.”

Machine Gun Kelly (MGK) says in his song “27,” “They say I need to slow down, but I don’t know how.”

Those twelve words strike me as being one of the best explanations for the 27 Club I’ve ever heard.

The best singers do not sing only about themselves, just as the best writers do not write only about themselves – they sing and write about all of us, very often when it looks like (on the surface) they are writing or singing mostly about themselves, like Hank in “Ramblin’ Man.”

AND IT’S UP TO US TO MAKE THAT IMAGINATIVE CONNECTION, INSTEAD OF SITTING BACK IN OUR COMFY CHAIR WITH OUR EXTRA-LARGE BAG OF BUTTERED POPCORN AND TOSSING SPITBALLS AT THE ONE WHO IS TRYING SO MUCH HARDER THAN WE ARE.

And some real artists (everything in our world is either real or fake), when they live long enough, learn how to slow down – at least enough, for a while.

(The song “Ramblin’ Man,” as performed by Hank, is very close to a spoken word poem, which is probably why Sam Shepard loved the song so much and used it so often.)

In honor of these departed kids and others of their ilk, whether “famous” or not, HERE is a list of twelve members of the 27 Club. They weren’t all 27 exactly (at their passing). Some were 29, like Hank, or 26, like Mac Miller and Nick Drake, or 25, like Tupac Shakur. (8 of 12 were exactly 27.)

Hank Williams. Robert Johnson. Mac Miller. Tupac Shakur. Janis Joplin. Amy Winehouse. Brian Jones. Jimi Hendrix. Jim Morrison. “Pigpen” McKernan. Nick Drake. Kurt Cobain.

Dale Barrigar (Images by Dale Barrigar)

I Saw the Light by Dale Barrigar

“…like a stranger in the night…” – Hank Williams

This week Saragun Springs celebrates the spirit of Dolly Parton through a celebration of the music of Hank Williams, because DP loved Hank Williams and because Hank Williams is the William Shakespeare of American country music.

Bill Maher said a lot of obnoxious, hypocritical things about Dolly when she died. His comments show that he, like everyone who laughed along with him that night, judges life through the material lens of the Golden Calf ($) only.

Dolly, I do believe, was different.

As a cultural figure in American life, she was the counterpart, in many ways, of Willie Nelson. Both artists cross boundaries almost like no one else.

Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen are literary geniuses, but it cannot be said that either one of them reach “all” audiences in the way Dolly Parton or Willie Nelson do.

In their ability to be popular with (almost) everyone, Dolly and Willie are more akin to Elvis and Johnny Cash than to Dylan and Cohen.

There are many people who do not like Bob Dylan for a huge variety of reasons and, before he died, there were many, many more people who did not like Leonard Cohen either.

They thought Cohen was BORING and gloomy and confusing, IF they thought of him at all, which they rarely did.

(Cohen’s status changed radically with his comeback tour in 2008 – 2013 and then after his death.)

One of Dolly Parton’s favorite songs by Hank Williams is called “I Saw the Light.”

She performed it many, many times.

As with Robert Johnson, Hank’s music sounds old-fashioned at first; IF one is not listening carefully.

“I Saw the Light” is not just a Gospel song, and you do not need to “believe” in Jesus, or even God, to get a lot out of this song.

This song is about a privileged moment.

A privileged moment here does not mean what “privileged” means in the currently politically correct sense.

It means an epiphany, which is an intense, life-giving realization that doesn’t last forever but has strong echoes and reverberations.

Being “in the zone” is another way to put this in modern terms.

Wordsworth called all this and all these: “spots of time.”

They do not last.

But they leave a lingering resonance.

True and real artists cannot, and would not, ever, create anything at all, without privileged moments, epiphanies, being in the zone, having spots of time.

You can choose to take these spots of time to the next level and believe in life after death, like Dolly and Hank did and Bob Dylan does.

Where the white people live/d Jesus is depicted as a white guy and where the black people live/d Jesus is depicted as a black guy and in Japan he’s depicted as a Japanese guy and in India he’s depicted as an Indian guy and in Mexico a Mexican and for Native Americans he’s a Native American, and so forth. He’s the greatest shapeshifter who ever lived or ever will live. That’s just one reason why there are four canonical accounts (four perspectives) on his life none of which agree on all the details.

Michael Jackson, Elvis, The Beatles, Donald Trump, are NOT the most famous humans on the Planet and have never been the most famous persons on the Planet and never will be the most famous persons on the Planet, and not even close, although there are many (who are in the wrong on this) who have said they are the most famous persons on the Planet.

Jesus is the most famous person on the Planet. And he has been so for at least 1,500 years. His spirit was alive among humans long before he actually put feet on Planet Earth.

Sometimes I wonder why that is.

There’s something deeper going on here.

And just because we cannot see it doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

Dale Barrigar

And how about some bonus Hank from some of country’s Big Names

One Writer’s Life (Lately) by Dale Barrigar (Images by Dale Barrigar)

“The earth’s proper scripture could be carried on a three-by-five card if we weren’t drunk on our own blood.” – Jim Harrison, from After Ikkyu

INTRO NOTE: This little article about five photographs appears to jump around a lot; but that is only because it is an EXPERIMENT in attempting to capture the process/es of one writer’s mind during a mini-siege of controlled thinking.

I repeat: THIS IS AN EXPERIMENT. In the same way that scientists do experiments is this. (We know as little about the mind as we do about the entire universe which is just one reason why I believe Mind Experiments are productive.)

Henry David Thoreau once said: If I knew anyone better than I know myself, I would write about them (instead of writing about myself.)

Second Intro: These five pictures are called “One Writer’s Life” for six simple reasons.

ONE: I write in my car (a small, fuel-efficient vehicle), a lot, by hand, while roaming around, or ferrying my kids around, from work to school and back again, sometimes while actually driving.

I can drive like Paul Newman or Steve McQueen. There are a trillion things in this world I’m no good at, at all (even unto the point of being mentally deficient at some level, at least by this society’s standards), but driving is not one of them. (Writing an essay about all the things I’m not good at is on the agenda.)

TWO: I spend a lot of time in the northeastern Illinois fields roaming around with and sometimes without my three dogs, and writing, by hand, on paper, with multicolored pens, in all four seasons, which I love equally well. (Every time I try to pick my favorite month, I remember that all the other months are equally good for different reasons.)

I use many-colored pens because I like many colors (it makes the page/s look alive and vibrant, and reminds me of my heroes, Van Gogh and Walt Whitman), and because it helps me tell what the hell is going on in the packed page/s later (if and when the pages don’t fall out of my pockets for someone else to find, or not find, later).

THREE: I watch a lot of documentaries about writers in my down time, when I’m too tired to read or think on my own.

(I have (almost) no regular furniture in my small, fuel-efficient apartment, and if I did have it, I wouldn’t use it (which is why I don’t have it).)

FOUR: I write outside, as stated previously, a lot, including at night. I rarely use an umbrella even in the rain because my uncle, who was a Marine sniper in the Vietnam War with two tours of duty (and later regretted his actions but felt he was serving his country at the time), told me that Marines never use umbrellas unless it’s holding one over someone else, and I admire that kind of humble, dutiful, rock-solid toughness; but I still find umbrellas beautiful for some reason, I think because of my fondness for Asian culture and some of the beautiful paintings I’ve seen.

The lonely plant here, reaching toward the stars (not touching the stars: reaching toward them) is a symbol of the real (and HUMAN, all-too-human!) writer.

The stars are not of this world; and at the same time, they are the only thing that’s truly important in this world at all.

FIVE: In the mode of William S. Burroughs, that great Kansas aristo-cat who always wore an Army jacket and baseball cap in his later years, I sometimes toss together half-assed collages of writers when I’m not writing.

At the present moment (I counted) I have 103 pictures of various writers (and a few other artists, especially Van Gogh (who was also one of the greatest writers of all time, just pick up his letters and dive in anywhere), Picasso, Leonardo da Vinci, Marilyn Monroe, and Joan Crawford, one of whom reminds me of my mother and another of whom reminds me of a few someone/s I won’t talk about right now) up all over in my apartment.

Many of the pictures are small, like postcard-sized and so forth.

I see them much more than I see any other humans these days except strangers on the street and my kids, and sometimes their friends, etc.

SIX: Real writers are more introspective and self-conscious, and less publicly performative and pushy, than all other kinds of artists (in general, or mostly) and many of them definitely fit into the category of “neurodivergent,” and many of them in many more ways than one, too. And many of them are always dodging and disappearing around corners, like Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson, were both equally wont to do, on a regular basis.

Hurray for the Human Writer, the Outsider Observer who cares (and struggles and strives) and can get it all down in words!

They call/ed Jesus “The Word” because they knew he is the greatest writer who ever lived, bar none.

Paul first spread The Word’s teachings through the word. (Open his letters anywhere and dive right in; Kurt Vonnegut repeatedly called himself a “Christ-loving atheist”; Charles Bukowski said, “Jesus had style.”)

Literature is the deepest, most profound, most complex, and longest-lasting Art form (without any doubt whatsoever at all).

Almost all of the greatest military generals in the history of Planet Earth (from Alexander the Great to Napolean to Ulysses S. Grant) have known and acknowledged this fact.

Michelangelo, and Picasso, and Rodin, all also acknowledged this fact.

They were all obsessive readers of Literature, and either were, or wanted to be, Writers.

Dale Barrigar (Words and Photos)

Goodbye Everybody and Hello by Dale Barrigar

(The images by Dale Barrigar)

“The Dream Songs have given me more pleasure than any other poems I have ever read.” – Nick Cave

The American poet John Berryman (1914 – 1972), author of The Dream Songs, once famously said that he wished to be given cancer because it would test him.

In the context of the full quotation, one can tell that he was probably being metaphorical and even ironic.

But he was also not kidding. Because that’s the kind of guy he was.

Berryman, who was a severe, chain-smoking alcoholic with a bad case of Bipolar Disorder (known as Manic Depression while he lived), was a badass.

Too many people in our global society today, as in far, far, far too many millions or even billions of people, are far too soft. They are far too soft, too enormously large, too enormously corpulent, gigantic, obese, overflowing, slow, flaccid, slow-moving, slow-thinking, spreading, steady, useless, entitled people.

If they were all attacked by a single samurai warrior they would be toast.

Not all heavy, or even enormously fat, people are lazy, despite all the stereotyping that goes on. John Belushi, John Candy, Chris Farley, Harold Bloom, Marlon Brando, Elvis Presley, Orson Welles, Madame Blavatsky, Shakespeare’s Falstaff, all were or became enormously fat folks.

And they had energy; they had life; they had spark; they had liveliness; they had chutzpa; they had attitude; they possessed what one needs to be and become (a process that never stops) who one is.

But too many enormously overweight people have let themselves go, are addicted to poison food and sugary beverages, and they don’t move enough, and what’s more, they don’t want to move – ever. Or barely.

John Berryman leapt to his death from a bridge over the Mississippi River in Minnesota at the age of 57 years. He was massively, manically depressed, totally intoxicated, utterly drunk, woefully strung out, completely burned out, and totally done when he did so.

Hart Crane, the American poet (born on the SAME DAY as Hemingway, July 21, 1899, exactly one-hundred-and-twenty-seven years and two days ago from today) leapt from a ship into the Gulf of Mexico at the age of thirty-two and was never heard from again.

Right before he did so, he happily shouted out to a bunch of travelers, “Goodbye everybody!” They all knew who he was and some of them weren’t even surprised.

He too, at the time of his death, was manically depressed, intoxicated, drunk, strung out, burned out, and done. He went out with a bang, not a whimper – like Berryman, Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Hunter S. Thompson, Vincent Van Gogh, Kurt Cobain, Chris Cornell, Anthony Bourdain, and many other artists, near-artists, and sensitive souls in the world’s history. Having been suicidal myself in the past, I know it’s almost always what should really be called a kind of accident. (And I believe that God catches these people when they fall for the final time, NOT sends them to hell.)

Berryman’s famous magnum opus The Dream Songs helped establish and create what was and is called “confessional poetry,” which is both a good and a bad name for what it tries to describe.

Berryman’s book is oftentimes awfully overwritten. Frequently, one can tell that Berryman was, without doubt, blasted out of his mind when he wrote this stuff, like William Faulkner when William Faulkner wrote much of his (later) stuff. Gabriel Garcia Marquez once pointed out (from personal experience) that it was really good to write while you were drinking because it freed the mind and inspired the writer – but only up to a certain point. Once a person is too blasted on anything (whether it be benzos, weed, booze, cocaine, all of the above, or whatever), the writing is sure to suffer, and sometimes it will take a dive straight into the toilet, depending on how blasted the writer is.

Sometimes, when Berryman wrote, he was far too blasted, on booze and pills; and it’s obvious.

But the highly flawed Dream Songs is still a landmark in twentieth century American poetry. It’s one of those often-unreadable books that everyone should have on a shelf. See Dream Song #107 for a wonderful poem about a drunk writer’s encounter with the wonderful animal called the raccoon, which deeply characterizes not just the raccoons but the writer.

And Berryman (though he could very, very often be seen just lying around, at least half the time) was not a lazy, soft, snarky, sarcastic, useless, entitled person.

He was a badass!

Crucial End NOTE: The term “badass,” like the word “cool,” both originated in their current form/s within the African American jazz culture of the 1940s. Those folks were badass/es; and they were totally cool.

John Berryman, like Hart Crane before him, was hugely influenced by jazz and blues. Berryman’s book The Dream Songs could not, and would not, have been written without his love of jazz and blues, which inspired the form/s, the spirit/s, and the meaning/s of his poems, as he himself so often admitted and said, and preached and talked about.

Dale Barrigar