Mu Sing


I seem to have caught a time release cold. I get better for a couple of days and then it comes back. I want to get checked for radiation poisoning. This is a Russian neighborhood and they are poisoners because, as Nodar expressed it, "Mother Russia is a big vagina, and America is a big dick." It's a matter of protocol for men to use force, and for women, who find direct confrontation disadvantageous, to use poison.

The title of this blog was from the passing through my head of Steve Martin's saying that " ... the secret of comedy is Ti Ming." I'm feeling well enough today for Mu Sing, but not for thinking too much, so I'll just relate a conversation I had with Arnold the other day when we met for breakfast. I was recalling my Russian shadow.

"I knew I was dealing with my shadow," I said. "I remember being in the kitchen with these guys and knowing that I was raised to distrust Russians because, at that time, they were the 'evil other.' They were who I was supposed to be able to kill, because they wanted to kill us. But of course here they were, and nobody wanted to kill anybody. We just wanted to smoke and drink and tell stories and have fun."

At that time I wanted to make some hypnosis tapes, and put music of some description behind the voicing. Some people use tabla and drums, others, space music, I thought some space guitar would be good, and Nodar was playing down at a local coffee shop, where he also served coffee in the mornings. We began talking, and I asked him about doing some guitar for hypnosis tapes.

We got together to work on that, but the day before, when I was supposed to be writing the hypnosis induction and suggestions, I instead wrote a song. I could not play music but I wrote a song anyway, called "Ray's Blues." When he came over I showed it to him and he quickly said it could easily be played in the key of "E". So in no time it was a song, and I had the bug. I wanted to write some more of them. "Let's write an album," I said. "I've got three days before I have to start working again."

He shook his head. "You have no idea," he said. "To write enough songs for an album takes maybe, six months, at least. Three days is nothing."

"Let's try it."

Three days later we had enough songs for an album. Some of them didn't go on the album and new ones came in, but that was because together, we never got the album done. Nodar began to be concerned with what he expressed as a kind of contempt for mediocrity. He wasn't good enough on the guitar, he decided, and should get a friend of his to play the songs. He would do the drum machine tracks. I couldn't sing the songs because, well, because I can't sing. All of a sudden, the great fun we'd been having writing the songs gave way to the fear of public ridicule.

But it wasn't the surface history of the encounter with Nodar that comprised my story. It was the deeper history. It was my observation that he was instinctual in his approach to getting things from other people, like a gypsy. I was reminded of Milton Erickson's story about watching a child in a railway station, with his mother. He looked at her, and she was reading the paper. He looked over and saw a toy store.

He began to complain and be difficult until she finally asked him if he wanted to go for a walk. He said he did and he led her off in the opposite direction of the toy store, so that by the time they came back around to it, the mood had lightened and she took him in to buy him something.

Nodar saw something he wanted all the time: help in surviving another day. I didn't have that problem, because I am an established citizen. If he heard about a sum of money in the background, he would lay plans to possibly intercept it, by talking about something that was a fleeting opportunity, and which cost just that amount.

I would remind him that as writers, we only had to do the songs well enough that somebody who might buy one of them for a recording artist would be able to tell if it would work for him, or her. "We're recording them so that a producer can hear the songs we're writing."

Eventually I began to get a clear picture of the ego and shadow in play between us. In some ways, it reminded me of the Burroughs piece about the guy who escaped from the Titanic by dressing up as a woman and filching a seat in the lifeboat.

Somewhere in the shadow of the Titanic disaster --still living by the inexplicable grace of God-- slinks a cur in human shape, to-day the most despicable human being in all the world.

In that grim midnight hour, already great in history, he found himself hemmed in by the band of heroes whose watchword and countersign rang out across the deep--"Women and children first!"

What did he do? He scuttled to the stateroom deck, put on a woman's skirt, a woman's hat and a woman's veil, and picking his crafty way back among the brave and chivalric men who guarded the rail of the doomed ship, he filched a seat in one of the lifeboats and saved his skin.

His identity is not yet known, though it will be in good time. So foul an act as that will out like murder.

This man still lives. Surely he was born and saved to set for men a new standard by which to measure infamy and shame.

On the one hand there was the masculine part, of values, taken for granted as personal responsibility, symbolized by Charlton Heston on the mountain, representing the NRA. On the other hand, there was that which grew up from the ground, governed by amoral instinct toward survival and, like water, finding the path of least resistance.

Which was better? Neither one, because they're different systems, each checking the other, like a thermostat that maintains a comfortable temperature.

Illustrative of the two forces which keep losing awareness of each other, there is a Native American woodcut which depicts them as a bird and a fish. The bird has swooped down and has the fish by the tail, trying to pull it out of the water. This fish has grabbed the bird by the tail, and tries to pull it from the air. It's not going to resolve in favor of either of them, and so the only resolution is a duck, which flies, floats and swims, as the occasion demands.




A lot of people can't finish something because it's not good enough. My daughter told me about a painting she was doing, and she worked on it and worked on it, but it was never really right. She took an incomplete rather than turn it in. Nodar was that way. I know the tendency, but I know that it's better to just finish something as best you can and then let it go, so you can start on something else.

Bertrand Russell observed that the difference between creative genius and neurosis is that the neurotic cannot separate himself from what he creates. If its not good enough, he's not good enough. The creative genius separates his ego from his artwork.

For example, this is a rambling and disjointed effort by a sick person, but my ego's not tied to it so you might find it a work of creative genius ...

Or not ...

Posted: Sun - December 10, 2006 at 05:07 PM