Sunday, March 06, 2005
"Joyful Abandon"
An old friend wrote to me that "joyful abandon" is "An emotion I don't remember you inhabiting." True enough memory, & stated gently & inoffensively, we've known each other for thirty years. Thinking on it, my initial response was to answer that I experienced it doing this & that. But later - I enjoy mulling it over - I concluded I hadn't known her to inhabit joyful abandon either (which is emotion + action, joy causing abandon or abandon causing joy). Although I've never doubted her capacity for it, promise isn't proof
What is joyful abandon? Is it another friend literally falling for someone at a party long ago & dancing so wildly with her that he crashed through a wall? Johnny Walker helped that along. Is it how I felt on the Wildwood boardwalk on an August night in 1998, by myself, having smoked quality pot back at the motel, overwhelmed by the insane beauty of it? - I felt great joy, but the abandon was collectively outside & all around me; I was the eye of the hurricane. Is it being given permission to act upon one's deepest most private sexual desires & then letting go? How often does that happen, or is it a different type of abandon? A room filled with singing, dancing Hassidim? John Coltrane on stage heading into his tenth chorus & the audience disappears? Whirling dervishes? Glossololia? Jackson Pollock when he was "in" his painting. A child left alone with a bowl of ice cream? Allen Ginsberg while he was chanting "Om" for six hours in Lincoln Park, Chicago, 1968? All that we hope for if the soul is immortal? I don't know that I've simultaneously experienced joy AND abandon, or have witnessed it in person. Makes for very pleasant dreams, .... & fantasies.
***
A Birthday:Bob Wills, b. Kosse, Texas, March 6, 1905; d. May 13, 1975
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
What is joyful abandon? Is it another friend literally falling for someone at a party long ago & dancing so wildly with her that he crashed through a wall? Johnny Walker helped that along. Is it how I felt on the Wildwood boardwalk on an August night in 1998, by myself, having smoked quality pot back at the motel, overwhelmed by the insane beauty of it? - I felt great joy, but the abandon was collectively outside & all around me; I was the eye of the hurricane. Is it being given permission to act upon one's deepest most private sexual desires & then letting go? How often does that happen, or is it a different type of abandon? A room filled with singing, dancing Hassidim? John Coltrane on stage heading into his tenth chorus & the audience disappears? Whirling dervishes? Glossololia? Jackson Pollock when he was "in" his painting. A child left alone with a bowl of ice cream? Allen Ginsberg while he was chanting "Om" for six hours in Lincoln Park, Chicago, 1968? All that we hope for if the soul is immortal? I don't know that I've simultaneously experienced joy AND abandon, or have witnessed it in person. Makes for very pleasant dreams, .... & fantasies.
***
A Birthday:Bob Wills, b. Kosse, Texas, March 6, 1905; d. May 13, 1975
