Dale Williams Barrigar

John Lennon: The Revelator By Dr. Dale Williams Barrigar

“Marley was dead: to begin with.”

– Charles Dickens

John Lennon in his Pickwick glasses is like a character from a Charles Dickens novel, or much like Dickens himself in his concern for social justice and his endless sympathy for the literal, and figurative, orphan, outsider, and underdog.

Lennon can also fruitfully be compared to another English writer of the nineteenth century who rivals Dickens in staying power and popularity. Like Lewis Carroll and his beloved, living Alice, Lennon’s life was all about expanding the mind, and through the mind, the heart.

Lennon was crucified by his own fame in the form of one of his own fans. This early, dramatic death catapulted him to another level in the modern pantheon of heroes and secular saints, just as Van Gogh’s lonely death would eventually elevate him in the same way. Before Lennon was wrenched away from this earth in the literal sense, he created a body of work that yet remains here to be explored in order to uncover its true depth, importance, and hidden meanings. His simple, straightforward, and mysterious writing style will last a very long time, probably at least as long as Dickens and Carroll themselves.

Lennon’s work with Paul McCartney and the Beatles is, of course, a whole other universe unto itself. But perhaps it’s in Lennon’s solo work that we can most fully take the measure of the man and the evolving, never-resting artist (for the artist is working even while dreaming), and the continued meaning of his words and music for the world at large.

Lennon began to move decisively away from McCartney and into his work as a solo songwriter on the brilliant, fragmented, cohesive, novelistic, experimental, James-Joycean double record now known most widely as “The White Album.” In three songs especially from this album, Lennon stakes out his own territory as an emerging, Dylanesque solo artist.

“Happiness is a Warm Gun,” “I’m So Tired” and “Dear Prudence” set the stage for his eventual movement away from the Beatles as the 1960s ended and into his brilliant, solitary decade of the 1970s before the artistic crucifixion in 1980 ended it all at the age of 40 (the exact age when Kafka and Poe, two other short-form writers of worldwide importance who surely influenced Lennon (whether he read them or not), also died).

“Happiness” explodes the tired and worn-out conventions of song-writing. “Tired” laments weariness in general, and weariness with old, worn-out worlds. “Prudence” is an invitation to something new and dear.

In a double or triple-handful of classic songs from the coming decade of the 1970s, the last decade he would have left, Lennon expanded both his writing skills and his persona and stance as a democratic humanitarian, a worker for peace, justice, and love who has few equals in this regard. The writing reinforced the anti-authoritarian persona and personality, and the anti-establishment stance buttressed the writing at all levels. The wonder and the artistic miracle of it is that Lennon also never became an ideologue, a propagandist, or a politician.

He perhaps became a sloganeer at his worst moments. But he always managed to rise above it again to assert the power of pure writing, which made his art for peace that much more effective. It leads us back to Dickens, who in some senses seems to have created John Lennon. Lewis Carroll’s open-minded, exploratory writing also undermined authoritarianism, hatred, greed, and war, in a way that was so pure and effective it was almost invisible at times.

Paradoxically, the invisibility seeps into the culture and effects real change in a way that politics and politicians can only dream of. This is why Percy Bysshe Shelley, another English radical fighting the bad guys, thinking of John Milton, called true poets, “The unacknowledged legislators of the world.” The phenomenon undergoes changes in mode and method of action; but it never goes away. In indigenous cultures, the figure of the shaman, trickster, and medicine person carried and carries much of these responsibilities and burdens.

“Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey” is another song written exclusively by Lennon which appeared on The Beatles’ “The White Album” and was an omen of things to come. A seeming piece of Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear nonsense writing, it’s crucial to note that the greatest nonsense wordsmithing is never about only nonsense, just as the best nursery rhymes are not only for children.

McCartney believed the song was about heroin usage. Lennon’s anti-establishment stance would take many forms in the era of Richard Nixon. One of these forms was Lennon’s belief, and life action, like Sigmund Freud earlier, that the individual should be free to use and explore drugs as s/he saw fit, without the government intruding its heavy, uncaring, impersonal hand. It started when Bob Dylan introduced the Beatles to marijuana in New York City. The sacred weed later led to LSD, and, for Lennon, cocaine and heroin usage. Ironically, in the era of the alcoholic, paranoid, pill-popping Tricky Dick, Lennon’s song was prophetic in very many other ways as well. All members of the Beatles had always been heavy cigarette-smokers and alcohol-drinkers. Their expansion into other drugs was a sign of the times as personal freedoms were skyrocketing.

And it also led to the song that is often cited as John Lennon’s first solo writing performance, completely free of Paul McCartney: “Cold Turkey,” a piece that was supposedly rejected by the band. Like all Lennon’s work, this story about withdrawing from opioid usage has only become more relevant with time as usage of this form of drugs has spread and become far more popular in the general population at large.

“Cold Turkey” introduces a desperate, naked, screaming, wailing, withdrawing Lennon backed by punk-rock guitar long before punk rock existed. Anyone who’s gone through this sort of withdrawal, or witnessed someone else going through it, or both, will instantly recognize the skin-crawling, nightmarish desperation of this personal hell on earth, which Lennon bravely shares in a forum that exposes his weakness for all to see, bringing confessional writing to another level in modern English.

Ralph Waldo Emerson pointed out that writers, musicians, and artists have always loved the buzz, whether it be from caffeine, food, alcohol, nicotine, or other drugs, walking, nature, or love. Teenaged Arthur Rimbaud, who influenced Bob Dylan so heavily, riffing on Charles Baudelaire, father of the cursed poets, codified this buzz-love in one of his “Seer” letters to a personal friend when he said that the purpose was an “intentional derangement of all the senses” (including the sixth sense) that led to higher forms of consciousness.

Charles Dickens’ Opium Sal from “Edwin Drood,” plus Dickens himself, and Carroll’s hookah-smoking caterpillar, also promoted this type of behavior, as did Freud with his endless cigar-smoking and cocaine experimentation and usage, or Beethoven, Goethe, Ben Jonson, and Shakespeare with their alcohol abuse. The flipside is the famous, eternal “27 Club,” almost all of whose members died so tragically young from alcohol, drugs or some combination of the two.

Lennon’s “Cold Turkey” compresses Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas de Quincy, and William S. Burroughs, one of the original three beats, into a song both courageously ahead of its time and backward-looking toward a complex, complicated problem that has always been and always will be with us. This is not pop music as feel-good distraction or toe-tapping laughability. It’s high art that questions, challenges, and provokes, like a poem by Keats, Byron, or Shelley. The language is simple and direct in a modern, or Hemingwayesque, style. The sentiments about sickness are never-ending in this mortal world.

“Gimme Some Truth,” another absolute solo song-writing masterpiece from John, tackles Tricky Dick directly, and by name. Nixon hated Lennon and kept trying to get him thrown out of the United States. John, at a great, paranoid cost to himself and his mental health, refused to leave, as a statement of world-wide personal freedom. He wouldn’t let the biggest bully on the block, at the moment, tell him what to do. It was an act and effort on Lennon’s part that was meant as an example for all bullied people to follow, an act of consolation and encouragement for the world.

Dylan wrote a personal, public letter saying, “Let John and Yoko stay!” In “Gimme Some Truth,” John Lennon stands up for anyone who’s ever felt abused or lied to, which is the same thing, by a hypocritical authority figure, whether it be teacher, preacher, boss, corporate spy, president, parent or other politician. The satiric nonsense writing in this piece is a nursery rhyme turned spiritual sword used against the big, bad eggs in the nest, who have always been there, and still need to be pushed out.

In “Working Class Hero,” a related but also very different song which has had a profound personal meaning for millions of people, including many of the people I know personally, Lennon continues the theme but switches tone and mode. “As soon as you’re born they make you feel small,” has got to be one of the most devastating first lines ever penned in song, poem, or story. Lennon’s voice is somehow both monotonous and emotive at the same time as he continues to detail and outline the way society, and individuals, crush one another in this life for no real reason at all, unless it be for mere spite and general selfish nastiness.

Something of the savage misanthropy of Dr. Jonathan Swift for the way we do business these days, in the modern world, is embodied in this song. “Working Class Hero” eviscerates what people do to one another, adding up to one of the most tragic, heartbroken, angry, rebellious songs in the cannon. You wonder how it can be so very consoling in its utter despair, but it somehow is; no one but Lennon could have written this piece or any other of his idiosyncratic, idiomatic, universal laments or anthems to peace, love, and justice.

Because Lennon, like Dickens, Carroll, and Shakespeare himself, is the master of many more than one mode, and many of his songs from the 1970s have a whole-hearted, positive, and even religious quality, and vibe, that has endeared them and him to many more millions of people all around the globe, and continues to do so.

“Mind Games” is one of the very best and most iconic of these pieces. “Pushing the barrier, planting seed,” captures, in five words, Lennon’s lifelong project. “Soul power” says where and how Lennon wants to move the world. The “mind guerillas” are the rebels, the thinkers, the spiritual warriors, the people who refuse to go along with the mob, the crowd, and the herd, because what you don’t do is just as crucial and important as what you do, as Henry David Thoreau pointed out in both his life and work, moving to a cabin to live alone and penning “Civil Disobedience,” which massively influenced Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr.. The grail, the veil, and the Druid Dude in the song bring East, West, and indigenous together, today, tomorrow, and yesterday.

“Love is the answer, and you know that for sure,” Lennon sings and speaks, beautifully talking to the world. “I want you to make love, not war.” Like James Joyce’s Molly and Leopold Bloom, Lennon says that “yes is surrender.”

“Why is art beautiful?” asked Fernando Pessoa. “Because it’s useless. Why is life ugly? Because it’s all aims, objectives, and intentions.” In “Mind Games,” Lennon, like Pessoa, in a few extremely potent words and images, argues for the beauty of uselessness.

The upbeat and popular “Instant Karma! (We All Shine On)” is a gorgeous companion piece to “Mind Games.” A memento mori, or death-reminder, piece, this song is also a global manifesto that infuses the religious point of view, and religion itself, with new and lively meanings for people everywhere. “Better recognize your brothers,” Lennon says, like Jesus. “Everyone you meet.” It also bemoans the derisive laughter which the mob mentality always throws out at “fools like me.”

“Power to the People” and “Give Peace a Chance” create, or reinforce, great phrases that have entered the language in the manner of Shakespeare or Robert Burns, poet and ballad-collector. The progressive, anarchistic, half-Marxian nature of these manifesto pieces which call for enduring change have endeared Lennon to many in the public sphere, helping to shape and create his status as vast humanitarian, a friend to working people and the lower orders of the social hierarchy everywhere, much like Percy Bysshe Shelley.

In “Mother,” “My Mummy’s Dead,” and “Julia” (another solo song-writing effort from “The White Album”), Lennon leaves the public sphere and delves and dives, like Freud and Jung, deep within the subconscious nature of every individual human. The Dickensian status of the orphan is explored as we are all exposed as orphans in these songs. Julia haunts the hearer by her absence, as do the mother and father in “Mother.” Lennon said this piece was about “all the parents, alive or half dead.” John Donne’s tolling bells begin the best version of this song. “Father, you left me, but I never left you” is one of Lennon’s most heartbreaking lines. “So I, I just got to tell you, goodbye. Goodbye.”

“My Mummy’s Dead” is a partial adaptation of “Three Blind Mice,” the English nursery rhyme and musical round. This song is so deeply, profoundly child-like, its uniqueness is starling, if not shocking, as in some of the poetry of Lewis Carroll. This song is so personal it’s almost embarrassing, which makes it about as brave a piece of writing as there can be. Popular music has once again broken through to another level in Lennon’s hands in the simplest, widest, most universal terms.

In “God,” Lennon tells his listeners what he truly believes in as he also consoles his audience for the loss of the Beatles and the end of the dream in the 1960s. In “Watching the Wheels,” from a decade later, John explains his Thoreau-like, Emily Dickinson-like, monkish retreat from the world and all its aims, objectives, and intentions.

“Happy Xmas (War is Over),” co-written with his genius wife and life collaborator, Yoko Ono, is one of the most beautiful and serious Christmas songs ever penned. It somehow leads directly into “Imagine,” Lennon’s most famous song, inspired by Yoko, and also inspired by the gift of a Christian prayer book from a friend. This song is part of the reason Lennon is the most recorded song writer of all time, surpassing his nearest rival, Paul McCartney. It famously calls for a peaceful world without materialism, religion and God, but Lennon explains that it “means this thing about my God is bigger than your God.” This song is such a well-known, world-wide anthem that it makes the case for Lennon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, if this award were given posthumously. Bob Marley, with “Redemption Song,” is a similar figure.

All the songs discussed in this essay, from around fifty years ago, more or less, sound exactly like they could have been made yesterday, or tomorrow. And almost all the songs talked about in this short paper are short. One of them is under one minute long. In 54 seconds, it manages to do more than a whole shelf full of albums by many another musical artist. The Mona Lisa, most famous painting in the world, focuses on a single, plainly dressed, unfamous woman, and it doesn’t even show her whole body. This kind of minimalism is a key (and a secret) to Lennon’s art.

According to a Wikipedia entry, the “tortured genius character” in fiction is characterized by “the burden of superior intelligence, arrogance, eccentricities, addiction, awkwardness, mental health issues, lack of social skills, isolation, other insecurities, and regular existential crises.” As a tortured genius character in real life, Lennon experienced and lived all of the above. To be a genius is to be misunderstood, said Ralph Waldo Emerson, who Harold Bloom called “the mind of America.”

After his mother’s sudden death when he was a teenager, Lennon drank and brawled for two years. He was later kicked out of college for these activities and other defiant behaviors. But Thomas Carlyle also pointed out that the true poet, thinker, and/or artist “can recognize how every object has a divine beauty.” Lennon lived, and expressed for all the world, this truth as well. In forty short, and long, years, he was able to give enough of himself so that if you know his work well, it’s like knowing a real person well: a best friend, forever.

Sam Shepard, on a level with Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill, said (reflecting on himself) that the true artists are largely boring, or useless, to the average individual or the general population on the social level because the artist is always silently working within herself, and doing nothing else as much as possible, even in a room full of people.

Baudelaire said, “The true artist never emerges from himself.” What he creates is a different matter. Lennon’s songs emerged from himself, as in “Mind Games,” to enter our world and literally change it for the better, inspiring countless numbers of thinkers, artists, and rebels all over the globe, and permanently challenging the status quo until the world he envisioned in “Imagine” becomes a reality.

End note: The title of this essay was inspired by the a cappela Son House version of the classic folk/gospel song, “John the Revelator.” Just as I obviously recommend listening to and studying all of the Lennon songs discussed in this essay as an accompaniment to this reading, I recommend listening to, absorbing, and internalizing “John the Revelator” by Son House.

End note: I was informed of the passing on of Kris Kristofferson, another musical rebel at Lennon’s spiritual and artistic level, while writing the last paragraph of this essay on Sunday, September 29, 2024. Accordingly, my next work will be an essay exploring the life, work, and genius of Kristofferson.

Bob Dylan: Bard of the Old School by Dr. Dale Williams Barrigar

(Ed. Note: This week we are pleased to present works first published by our esteemed co-editor Dr. Dale Williams Barrigar in Literally Stories UK. The theme of the week is music. All through the weekend too. Dale has a wonderful way of injecting his passion and fresh insights into his work. I think you will agree–Leila)

“I’m Nobody! Who are you?” – Emily D.

“I is another.” – Rimbaud

Bob Dylan is a bard of the old school, and also of the school that never gets old.

Long after every single Hollywood movie ever made will be penned by androids, computers, zombies, vampires, and “AI,” scattered humans everywhere will still be searching out the work of Bob Dylan, whether to read or listen to it.

When Dylan released “Murder Most Foul,” his longest song, in the middle of the Covid Pandemic, he confirmed that he deserves a Nobel Prize.

With a terrifying title from Shakespeare, this long song and short fiction is a mini-novel about the Kennedy assassination. And all assassinations, and all murders ever committed, now and in the future. Almost as if to prove that he’s a poet and story-teller more than a musician, Dylan doesn’t even sing this song. He speaks it. He tells the tale like an ancient bard, maybe even going as far back as Homer.

Dylan is often compared to Shakespeare, and for good reason. It could be that a more apt comparison is with the older writer. Homer, like Bob, spent his life traveling from town to town and speak-singing his story-songs to the accompaniment of a stringed instrument. This image of Homer has been accepted for so long that it’s become a fact of fiction that tells the truth, as real as any other Greek mythology, from Zeus to Athena.

Dylan has always cited literary writers as some of his most important, if not his most important, influences. He claimed that “Blood on the Tracks” was inspired by Anton Chekhov’s short stories. He listed his two favorite writers as Emily Dickinson and Arthur Rimbaud. He read T.S. Eliot and James Joyce in high school. He resurrected Charles Baudelaire in “Idiot Wind.” He said that all writers and artists should read John Keats and Herman Melville.

He acknowledged Walt Whitman’s genius. He went to the grave of Jack Kerouac and read Kerouac’s poetry aloud with Allen Ginsberg. He wrote his songs on a typewriter. He created an absurdist book of prose poems, and he composed a memoir that isn’t his best work but is highly readable, filled with signs of the times, then and now.

Someone once compared Bob Dylan to Ernest Hemingway, another writer for whom Dylan has expressed his approval. Both writers diagnosed their times, and fought the wars of their times. While Hemingway went to Italy as an ambulance driver, Dylan went to Mississippi as a liberal Jew who stood out in an open field and sang Civil Rights protest anthems, surely as dangerous as Hemingway heading to the front as a non-combatant who wanted to help injured soldiers.

Bob Dylan has already entered the ranks of great American authors. When we look back at history, we see that there are millions of authors who did not deserve a Nobel Prize, and many authors who did deserve it who didn’t receive it. Harold Bloom, Flannery O’Connor, Ralph Ellison, Jorge Luis Borges, James Joyce, and Leo Tolstoy are a famous half dozen of these. A hundred years from now (yes we will still be here), Dylan will be seen as a writer who deserved such a prize, and then some. His humanity, and his ways of expressing it in English story-language that never gets old-fashioned, will last a very long time, even, or especially, as the rest of the mainstream world continues to become more robotic, inhuman and tyrannical.

Leonard Cohen on the Phone by Dale Williams Barrigar

(Image of Berwyn, Illinois, U.S.A. provided by DWB)

“Show me the place where the word became a man.”

– Leonard Cohen, “Show Me the Place”

Poetry can create

and does create

urban

affection, the tiny,

brief

reaching

out

to one’s fellow

humans

that us city

folks (the vast

majority

of the planet

now) need to

indulge in so we

can remain

connected

to one another,

our fellow

humanity,

in a real way,

however strange or

however much

a stranger. Whenever

people compliment

one of my beautiful

animals (Siberian Huskies

or pit bulls), I take it

personally

and return

the favor.

Walking across

the parking lot,

I resolved

that I

would continue

to do so. And I turned

the Leonard Cohen

song way up

on my phone

and placed it

near my ear

one more

time

for now.

Dr. Dale Williams Barrigar is a poet whose own poetry transformed his own life: suddenly, and then gradually. It’s good enough for him.

Porcupine Spirit by Dale Williams Barrigar

(Image of DWB provided by DWB)

Porcupine Spirit

For Montmorency County, Michigan,

USA

In a cedar swamp

one time, I saw

a gigantic

porcupine

standing up

on his hind legs

like a miniature

human. He was three

feet tall, and looked

like something out of

Star Wars with his incredible,

innumerable

quills

sticking out every which

way and his arms dangling

in front of him as he

stood there, his small face

unafraid of me and his whole

self refusing to move

off the path

which he

was blocking.

And indeed

he continued

to block the path

and watch me walk

away after I

gingerly

stepped

around him.

The forests up here

allow for many

moments like these –

vast, indigenous,

Germanic, huge,

mysterious, with little

to no

human habitations

for gigantic wild

stretches and nothing but

dirt roads. If you want

to be independent

on foot and wander

in a pine wilderness

like Johnny Appleseed

with a wolf,

you can choose

any direction

to do that

here

in the middle

of a place

that makes you

free.

Dr. Dale Williams Barrigar is a poet whose own poetry transformed his own life: suddenly, and then gradually. It’s good enough for him.

For the First Time by Dale Williams Barrigar

(image provided by DWB)

Through it all,

and during it all,

the vast collection

of poetry

he’d created

in the last

ten years

had turned into

a monster

like Grendel

that was now devouring

my life. William Carlos

Williams said:

since the imagination is

nothing, nothing

comes

of it. This lesson

was weighing

heavily. But Jack

Spicer

also said: the poet gets

messages

for her or his life right

from the act

of writing poetry. This

makes poetry

worth doing daily

in its own right,

regardless

of any outward

consequences, or

non-consequences,

that can be

immediately seen. I remembered

I was a person born

with a humble sense

of mystic vision

(since day one). Since day

one

I’d felt

the correspondences

in the world

and had

a certain sense that we

are all here

for a reason, or for

many reasons

and meanings, which we

can feel (sometimes), but not

clearly

see

or say (most of the time).

An ambiguous

mystical

seeing, since

the dawning

of consciousness:

the first memory:

opening the eyes

outside of her body

for the first time.

Dr. Dale Williams Barrigar is a poet whose own poetry transformed his own life: suddenly, and then gradually. It’s good enough for him.

Elephant by Dale Williams Barrigar

(Image provided by DWB)

“A poet is a time mechanic.” – Jack Spicer

The poem sat

in the corner

staring at

his eyes

and heart

with the eyes

of a cat

and the body

of a lone

wolf.

Then it changed,

the poem, into

a dolphin,

trout,

gorilla,

shark,

monkey,

wild boar.

A horse,

then a camel.

A hawk,

peacock,

osprey,

owl,

sparrow,

eagle,

crow,

dove,

pigeon,

thrush,

another nightingale,

and now

an elephant.

It is undoubtedly the

(invisible)

elephant within

the room.

I can neither leave it

there

alone

nor take it with me;

the door

isn’t big enough.

Yet, I’m

in charge

of this elephant.

However, nobody

is really in charge

of this unseen

animal,

who is, truly, a creature

never really seen.

Its intelligence

and will-power

are incredible,

like a real

elephant.

But it remains

invisible, like my blue

butterfly, the one that

travels with me

everywhere,

hovering over

my shoulder.

And so

I toil, struggle, wrestle,

labor, study, save, caress,

create, rest, and renew,

daily. Daily life is

a struggle with It,

capital I, but I

struggling with the power

and the breath

in this way

am truly

my own reward,

every day and

every way.

William Carlos Williams

and Jack Spicer, the great

Jack Spicer,

were right.

A poet

is a mechanic

of time.

Dr. Dale Williams Barrigar is a poet whose own poetry transformed his own life: suddenly, and then gradually. It’s good enough for him.

Saragun Springs Proudly Presents: The Last of the Mohicans Still Exists by the Drifter

(Images “Last Mohican” and “Water Boo” provided by by Drifter)

Water Boo

“The most manifest sign of wisdom is a constant happiness.”

– Montaigne

In Russia there was a television program about an enigmatic drifter named Fenimore who visited a summer camp to tell the children tall tales: about Native Americans, but also about extraterrestrials visiting Planet Earth.

The unusual name, Fenimore, was so well-known in Russia that even children recognized it.

Fenimore was the middle name of James Fenimore Cooper, an early American novelist, creator of The Last of the Mohicans, who was so well known in Russia that “everyone” knew who he was (and he was especially well known by his unusual middle name).

Cooper is less well known in Russia now than he was a few decades ago. But he’s still far better known in Russia than he ever was in his native land of the USA. And at one point, he was very well known in his native land, one of the best-known writers in America.

The Mohicans believed that the purest and best creature on Planet Earth, among all the uncountable creatures here, was the white dog. For the Mohicans, a dog of purely white fur ruled over all other creatures because of its beauty, goodness, loyalty, and spiritual intelligence.

Modern city folk would be horrified by what the Mohicans did with the white dog in turn, because they believed it was the purest creature created by the Great Spirit: they sacrificed it.

What modern people don’t realize is that: one: the animal was sacrificed quickly and without pain; and two: the Mohicans believed the animal was instantly passing over into a world exactly like this one, except without the pain, as soon as it died.

The Mohicans believed the white dog was leaving this world of pain and going to another world exactly like this one except far more perfect than this one ever has been or ever will be.

This is a challenging paradox, even a contradiction: that there could be a world exactly like this one, except without the pain.

No more physical hardship, no more fear, no more boredom, no more sense of betrayal. No more endless feelings of injustice, no more nonstop struggle for existence and survival (mental, physical, and spiritual), no more loneliness, isolation and alienation, no more feeling of being abandoned by the Creator of the universe.

But the beauty we see, hear, feel, smell and taste here will still exist.

The sun on your head, the wind in your hair, the ground beneath your feet, the green, breathing beauty of the plants all around you would still nurture your soul, except more so.

The grizzly bear will still be there, but he will no longer tear your head off and devour you; instead he will roll around with you peacefully and playfully in the grass.

The fear of death, the one multi-pronged, many-leveled, myriad-layered primal emotion that perhaps generates all other emotions here in this world, even our sense of beauty, or especially our sense of beauty, will be gone there. But the sense of beauty will still exist. It will simply be increased, heightened to a level we can’t even imagine yet, here on Planet Earth.

I went camping this week with my kids and dogs, at Warren Dunes State Park in Michigan, ninety miles from where we live outside Chicago.

It’s only ninety miles away from Chicago around the bottom of Lake Michigan, but it feels like a different world where the raccoons outnumber the people ten to one.

There are a lot of raccoons in Chicago and environs but they still feel vastly outnumbered. Not so in the Dunes.

In the Dunes, I felt closer (or closer in a different way) to the sun, the wind, the ground, the green, the blue of the vast freshwater sea and the sky above it, the yellow sand, the raccoons, fish, and birds, and so was reminded of my own Native American heritage.

I have never had my blood tested. But as a child I was told over and over that I am part Native American. So for me, in spirit, no matter what the genetic testing would or wouldn’t say, I am indeed part Native American. Nothing could take that away from me now, not even science.

And since I’m also a lover of Russian literature, including a few of the great Russians who were nature lovers, like Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Turgenev, I have a love for the Russian love of Native Americans, the Russian love of nature, and the Russian love of James Fenimore Cooper.

Drifting along on an empty trail walk among wooded dune hills with my two Siberian Huskies and one pit bull, I was feeling the feeling of free discovery that can still be found, somewhere, in all fifty states of the USA, if you look in the right way and in the right places.

And I realized that the Indians really are still alive inside me, because I worship their worship of, and their belief in, the white dog.

And their dream of a heaven that is like home.

10 Questions Dale

(Header image provided by the Drifter)

Good morning Readers

Today we are debuting a new feature that yet has a name, but is part interview, part word association. I have presented Editor Dale Williams Barrigar with ten words (nine actually, the tenth is his choice). What follows are his replies. We hope that this might catch on and other lists will be given to other people in the future.

Leila

Ten Words

“The Drifter” (aka Dale Williams Barrigar, Doctor of Philosophy) has made these definitions as short as he could, knowing that brevity is the soul of wit.

Any statements he makes about “God” and so forth should be taken with a large grain of salt: because he’s not smart enough to pretend he knows what the Creator of the Universe is really up to – or why.

One: FEAR.

In many ways fear is the basis for everything in this world.

When we climbed down out of the trees, it was partly from fear (with a large mixture of curiosity).

And when we started running away over the ground trying to escape the Sabre-toothed Tiger, it was certainly from fear. (*See below.)

Hemingway called it “grace under pressure,” a paraphrase of which might be “not being a chickenshit.”

How one handles one’s fear/s is such a large part of “who you are” that it’s frightening.

ANXIETY, the much used modern word, is another term for fear.

Jesus nailed to the cross is such a universal image (even for “other people” on the other side of the world who aren’t “Christians”) because it’s based on fear (as well as compassion); and if you don’t know yet that we all get crucified in this life, one way or another, and usually many times, you’ve got a rude awakening in store. (Some of us know this as soon as we know anything.)

Fear of failure can be good, or bad, depending!!

(*The first time we escaped the Sabre-toothed Tiger on foot we realized we could escape, and almost felt free for the first time. And the first time we escaped must’ve had a large mixture of trickery involved, as well, since there’s no way we could’ve beaten the beast on speed alone, with only our feet. Call it: tricking the beast. And it’s just as important now as it ever was; usually, now, for different reasons.)

Two: HOPE.

Whales, wolves, and humans can all sing, but only birds can both sing, and fly. (I mean fly in reality, not in dreams or with mechanical assistance.) Perhaps some day “they” will create a drone that can both sing, and fly; but it will be an at least partially hideous thing; like Frankenstein with wings and tender vocal chords.

Emily Dickinson has forever made me think of a bird whenever I think of the word “hope” (“hope is the thing with feathers…that perches in the soul”) and without hope, the world wouldn’t be worth living in. Period.

Three: ART.

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (wildly, he always denied he was German and claimed to be Polish instead, which would be, in 2025, like an American denying he was American and claiming to be Mexican, instead, or Bob Dylan claiming to be an orphan cowboy from New Mexico instead of a comfortable Jewish kid from small-town Minnesota) said: “These earnest ones may be informed of my conviction that art is the highest task and the proper metaphysical activity of this life.” Another great German, Arthur Schopenhauer, agreed with him (before Nietzsche said so himself). So did Jim Morrison, one of Nietzsche’s most famous disciples.

We all know who “the earnest ones” are, if we think about it. They take themselves all too seriously, have CONSUMERISM as their religion, and are great at passing judgement on anyone just a little bit different from themselves; they appear in the White House, the halls of Congress, the pulpits of churches, the lecterns of all the colleges and universities, and even, or especially, in the book clubs and writing groups of all small, large, or midsized American cities.

REAL ART IS SOMETHING YOU HAVE TO BE WILLING TO DIE FOR. You don’t have to die for it; but you have to be willing to.

Four: LUCK.

“Luck” is all the good things that happen to us which we don’t deserve that help to turn us into better people – not monetarily richer, more fakely famous, or more “powerful” – but better. Often, with the best luck of all, we don’t even know about it until long after the fact. Maybe this means that we’re always lucky; or at least more lucky than we think we are, most of the time.

Five: FAITH.

Faith is the thing without which, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, said, he wouldn’t be able to eat his dinner. Because without faith, he wouldn’t have an appetite. He would be too full of fear, and it would make him not hungry. When I start losing faith in life, I know I’ve grown too tired again. For me, a lack of faith in life is the biggest sin there is.

It has nothing to do with believing we know just what God is up to. It has everything to do with believing there is always a reason to go on – even when we don’t know what it is. There is always someone watching you and cheering you on – even when you don’t know it. Don’t let them down. (If you don’t have a choice any more it’s a different story.)

Six: FUTURE.

The Future is everything. This is where, without doubt, all the most exciting things happen. Sometimes we forget that the Creator of the Universe has a plan, and it involves US. Our best moments in the present are lived in the future, if we’re doing it correctly. It’s not about escaping the present, it’s about intensifying it.

Like everything else it touches, modern American (hedonistic, nihilistic) CONSUMERISM, the religion of the United States, which has also devoured large chunks of the (human) globe elsewhere, both East and West, bastardizes the concept of the future.

It has nothing to do with what they’re trying to sell us yet again.

It has everything to do with what Art itself (at the highest levels, which are everywhere, even under your sandals) is all about.

Without the future, there is no Art, because as you work at creation, you’re always anticipating one or many moments in the future, near or far. Or you are unaware of what you’re doing, which isn’t art.

Seven: TRUST.

There have been people in this life I’ve trusted the second I met them – and I continued to trust them, even after they left me for dead in the dust.

There has been one person I’ve trusted the moment I started reading her fiction and her online commentary – and still do and always will trust, and even would and do trust with my life’s work: even though I’ve never met her in person. She’s that good of a good writer. And to be a good writer, you have to be good. Not perfect (because none of us are), but good. Zero exceptions.

Trust you to take it seriously is just one form of trust.

Eight: FAMILY.

Not all family members are blood related, though they’ve probably spilled the same kind of blood – of their own, I mean (mostly).

Nine: OBSESSION.

Obsession can lead to a compulsive disorder, or to the perfection of the Mona Lisa, depending on what one does with it.

Sensual/sexual romantic obsession is, by far, best for the artist when it’s sublimated. Leonardo and Michelangelo spent zero time scrolling through dating app’s while remaining obsessed with romantic beauty.

Ten: CREATIVITY.

It’s Everything (all around us), and it’s everything (worth fighting for).

Your life has to be your first art, even when (or especially when) you pour everything else into your art.

And when we do this, we’re imitating (in a good way, and possibly without knowing it) the Creator of the Universe.

Solitude Equals Freedom by Dale Williams Barrigar

(image provided by DWB)

Solitude Equals Freedom

Harold Bloom, my spiritual mentor (if I had to choose, at gun point, just one, other than Jesus), rightly opined, over and over and over again (in the good way), that an American never feels free unless she or he is alone. Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and Johnny Appleseed all agreed with him; as did Chief Joseph, Crazy Horse, and Geronimo.

The following poem, about my beloved Christina, is the result of that unnerving, wonderful, and true formulation.

Fleeing with the Geese

“Sometimes she is a child within mine arms…” – Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Tedium alternating with

Ecstatic balloonings which

Collapse

So suddenly

Equals this

Teenaged life

(for a few more months)

Of mine…

But then again

There comes

A sudden feeling, seeing

These geese exploding with power in their

Winged

Freeness

Like Bucephalus

The young war horse

Terrified

Of his own

Shadow in Plutarch

Until

Alexander

Understands

Him and now he’s

Becoming fearless

Over cottonwood

Trees

And power lines

Of the Ragged Prairie

Land

In the ghosts

Of the geese.

The UFO

Filled with marvelous mystery

Monsters

Is

Coming down

Now

And the

Mastodon Bone Museum

Is unleashing its feverish

Dancing

Creatures

And there’s

One bar

Open

On the edge

Of the

Railroad tracks in this

Dying American town!

And I’ll

Be back

On the highways and

Byways tomorrow,

She intoned,

At the end

Of the

Summer,

In 1991, to

Her Homeric

Soul,

Her heart

Humming,

Her hair blown

So wild

And so free,

Shaking the dust

Off her feet, in

America

ALONE.

Dale Williams Barrigar is an American artist who loves to be alone.

The Drifter: One Holy Reason to Love

One Holy Reason to Love

(Image provided by The Drifter)

“Kerouac could write everything because he never forgot

anything.” – Bob Dylan

“I saw you this morning…in my secret life.” – Leonard Cohen

Scholars of literature always call Edgar Allan Poe the first writer in America who ever tried to make a living using nothing other than his own pen. And that is very far from true, very, very far from true.

Poe never tried to make a living in America using nothing other than his own pen. He always knew he would need another job, whether that was in the U.S. Army or as a low-wage wage slave working for other peoples’ publications where much of what he did as a “job” had absolutely nothing to do with his own creative writing, on the surface at least.

What Poe did try to do, and what he can be called “the first” at doing in many ways in America, was to try and live a truly literary life at every level, no matter what else he also needed to do in the meantime.

Every demeaning task, every humbling action, every humiliating circumstance in his life, and there were many millions of all the above, Poe tried to convert into something sacred that could be seen as serving the literary life he always made himself live for his own pride, even when it seemed impossible.

Poe never let himself forget he was a writer. He elevated it above everything else, above politics, above religion, above family, even; or rather he made it so much a part of his life that everything else, politics, religion, family, all grew out of his starting point, which was his commitment to writing as an art.

This profound innovation, which is more relevant now than it was 200 years ago when Poe made it, has had an endless series of influences on all the arts, not just writing, all over the globe, not just in the USA.

It probably caught fire in France first, when Charles Baudelaire, the first true poet of the modern city, took up the call that Poe had issued to the writers of the world.

Baudelaire identified so strongly with Poe that it’s said he would pray to Poe nightly, as if Poe were a saint. When we consider Charles Baudelaire’s Catholic background, this doesn’t seem nearly so crazy as it might appear at first glance to many of us.

In the religion Baudelaire was raised in, praying to saints was not only not frowned upon, it was encouraged. Baudelaire’s move, which was to make the Art-for-art’s-sake Edgar Allan Poe into his own private literary saint, was really only moving the material he was given at birth an inch or two to the right or left. It was the higher ideal of the truthful and imaginative writing life that Baudelaire was really placing on the pedestal, in the manner of his hero, and saint, Edgar Allan Poe.

Baudelaire wrote in the shadow of Victor Hugo, a writer as massive, deep and wide as Charles Dickens, but it is now Baudelaire, in his Paris Spleen, Flowers of Evil, and Artificial Paradises (hashish, laudanum, absinthe, and literature), who generally seems more modern to most poetry lovers.

Hugo the realist, as great as ever still, was of his own time. Baudelaire, following in the footsteps of Edgar Allan Poe, was for the future. Like Poe, he foresaw, and even lived in, the age when humans would become ghosts of themselves (for good and ill), the time when the new rule would be (and is): turn your own life into an art, or die, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and even literally.

The life-as-art, art-as-life, consequences-be-damned credo and way of living was elevated perhaps even higher by Vincent Van Gogh, especially in his self portraits, or in Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler, whose laser-like, scientific focus on artful truth-telling rises straight from the beautiful and terrifying mists of Poe’s profound innovation, where the responsibility for everything is placed squarely on your own doorstep, even, or especially, if you are a starving artist.

Here are four ways any and all of us can instantly start turning our lives into an art and an art form almost immediately. If you’re already doing these things, and I have no doubt that some of you are: then bravo for you. Keep it up, and spread the word!

ONE: Texting

Do not become the mental slave of your own (what I like to call) texting device. Never send a text that has been written for you by a robot, AI or other computer; and never send an emoji that has not been specifically selected by you to be extremely pertinent to the exact circumstances at hand.

If use emojis you must, feel free to do so: but be creative. Go deeper. Look for the ones that say what you really mean to say. And be sure you know what it is that you really mean to say. If you don’t really mean to say it, don’t just say it, blindly. This is you putting yourself out there into the world, and this is the inevitable way people communicate now, at this moment in history, for a million different reasons.

Texting is too easy to do, but it doesn’t have to be. Take the time to say what you really mean: or don’t say it at all. And when you choose silence, choose it for a very definite reason; know what that reason is; know why you are choosing to exercise your own silence; don’t just ghost people because you are bored – or lazy.

If the time has come for you to be quiet, know why you are doing it.

TWO: Emails

Be creative when you compose emails. Even be creative when composing emails if it’s in a situation where you are not supposed to be creative, or maybe especially then. If being creative will get you frowned upon and called onto the carpet, be as creative as you can possibly be, even unto the point of being shown the door by the robot-humans in charge eventually. Don’t dumb down your own language too much in order to be “safe” or in order to please your masters, and make sure your own individual personality-stamp goes out with every single communication you ever send. Even if you’re just telling someone you need them to do something for you by Tuesday. Or maybe especially then.

THREE: The “Comments” Section

Be very, very, very selective about what kinds of “Comments” sections you choose to engage with. And when you do find a good one and have chosen to engage with it, go all the way. Doing anything in life in a half-assed way is nothing more than a half-assed way of doing things. Make sure you’re not just shouting into the void by repeating the exact same things a million other people are also saying.

Choose wisely, and be selective, and make a full commitment; let your opinions shine forth only if they are genuine, original, dyed-in-the-wool personal opinions based on the reality of the world, not just group-speak mind-control thought-police regurgitations of the exact same thing everyone else is also saying ad infinitum.

Another way of putting it is this: be original. Always be original. If you can’t be original here, it’s OK: choose silence, and be original in a different venue where you feel like you’re on more solid ground.

Regarding size of audience, Jesus himself said this: “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the middle of them.”

There was a reason why he emphasized the tiny numbers two or three, just as he limited his personal disciples to another tiny number, twelve. Jesus was the strongest advocate for individuality this Planet has ever known, which is why he is, by far, the most famous person who has ever lived, or ever will live. And he spent a lot more time walking away from the churches and marketplaces of his day than he did walking into them.

FOUR: Pictures of You

Do not use the camera on your phone to celebrate the American Religion, CONSUMERISM. Do not use the camera on your phone to advertise the dead animals or the vegan delights you are about to sink your teeth into (everyone needs to eat and digest) unless you can really make it artistic. Also, do not use your camera as a way to provide just another screen between you and the reality of the world. Instead, use the camera on your phone for the following three reasons.

One: To try and capture moments of beauty which are beautiful, or to create beauty by making something beautiful which people don’t usually think of as “beautiful.”

Two: To relate yourself to the real world around you by showing yourself and others “It” from new, original, and different perspectives. (This is called “Imagination.”)

Three: Use the camera on your phone as a form of SELF exploration.

Do not take selfies. Make self portraits. Even if the only one who ever studies them is you, this will make you an endlessly deeper and more original person in everything else you do and do not do (what we DO NOT do is just as important as what we do), IF you do this in the right way, which is to do it the way Socrates said to use the mirror: Look for yourself, and study the endless changes which are “you,” with fascination. (This is something Shakespeare did in his Sonnets.)

Most people are only terrified of death when they never really live/d first. Always start with yourself first. Move outward from there.

A NOTE on reading from The Drifter: What you take into yourself is just as important as what you put out into the world, and what you put out into the world will, inevitably, be massively influenced by whatever you have spent your time taking into yourself.

Watching a truly great movie is a much more artistic experience than reading a truly bad book.

But the act of personally reading good things will strengthen the mind (and hence the personality) in a more powerful way than anything else on Planet Earth. This has been true for thousands of years, and will remain true now until “the end” (whenever it comes).

Alexander the Great’s most prized personal possession was his copy of The Iliad. Abraham Lincoln spent more time reading Shakespeare and the Bible than he did studying war plans or political suggestions. Martin Luther King, Jr., was always reading good things. He never would’ve been able to write or think so well otherwise: and he knew it.

The poet William Blake was not joking when he said he wrote mostly for “children and angels.” Personally, my conception of Heaven also includes forms of reading. If I’m wrong about this, it’s highly doubtful I will be aware of it; so I’m going with this for now. (It’s also probably true that by “angels” Blake meant both literal angels, and saintly humans.)

If one fills one’s mind with trash, nothing but trash, and more trash, eventually (or sooner) the mind itself will become a trash dump. Right about then is when real and deep ignorance, cynicism, scorn for the good of the world, and nihilism begin to set in. (Many of these people are walking around and looking like respectable members of society, too; even as we speak.)