The Three Pillars

When thinking about my next book to write, the question I ask is “What can I write that no one else can?” Nothing to do with talent and style, but looking at the unique configurations of my life that are wholly distinct from others. And I think I can say with some confidence that the  blend of three disciplines—Orff, Jazz and Zen— that has characterized my life is pretty much one-of-a-kind. I haven’t met any Orff teachers that play jazz and practice Zen, no Zen monks that teach Orff and play jazz, no jazz musicians that teach Orff and practice Zen. They may be out there, but even so, each of us would have our own unique blend and our own take on what it means to our life and what it might mean to all lives. 

 

And so the idea of looking at all three as a Venn diagram and seeing how they overlap and how they share certain values, practices, disciplines and ideals that could refresh our troubled world. I set off to write a prologue to a possible book  and though writers concerned about plagiarism would think I’m crazy to make it public so early in the process, I’m not particularly worried. So here is a first-draft beginning, part 1 of a longer story that really kicks off around 1973.

 

If anyone asks me if I had a happy childhood, I surprise them with my answer. “Yes, I believe I did.” Of course, I had my share of skinned knees and bruised elbows, times when I was bullied or (please forgive me) bullied others and I always, always got in trouble at school. I envied my friends whose parents let them drink Coke and eat white bread and wondered if my bi-polar Mom was two different people, either lying in bed for days on end with her migraines or manically embarrassing me by being the over-the-top life of the party. I wished my Dad would play catch with me more and stop telling me I did a lousy job mowing the lawn. 

 

But all in all, I was quite happy inside the house rigging up ways to open doors with ropes, conducting Beethoven played on my folks 78’s record collection from the staircase, mastering Trudy Treble and Bobby Bass on my way to Bach on our Hammond organ. And outside the house, joy of all joys, was a 200 acre park and a parenting ethos (it was the 1950’s and 60’s) that amounted to “Get out of the house and play! Just be home for supper. Alive.” And so my friends and I wandered endlessly, making up hide-and-seek games, playing football and baseball without an adult in sight, skipping stones on the lake, catching Fall leaves whirling down into the field. My experience of the world was one of safety, food, shelter and endless delight as we kids played our way slowly to adulthood. 

 

While the actual landscape of the park lifted me up into some sense of adventure, security and happiness, I also was held in a mythological landscape. While kids halfway around the world in India were growing up with the stories of Rama and Sita and Krishna and more in the great Hindu Epics, kids in Europe walked the storied landscape of the Bible in company with Lazarus and Noah and Moses and a kind and benevolent Jesus (so different from the one who unleashed the Inquisition and beyond), Aboriginal children in Australia learned their ABC’s of the Dreamtime, my mythological countryside was peopled with folks like Beaver Cleaver, Andy Griffith, Donna Reed, Dick Van Dyke and Laura. A homogeneous white-populated land where no ism ever popped up its head— except through the back door of perpetuating the Tonto, Tarzan, Amos and Andy, Jose Jimenez stereotypes. 

 

These images streaming in through our small living room TV set depicted a world  where all problems were bite-size, usually solved by a sincere talk with Aunt Bee, Ward and June or Ozzie and Harriet. Kids went fishing, spit off of bridges, played baseball and respected their school teachers. Chewing gum in class was the big transgression and the meanest kid they might ever meet was Eddie Haskell, so benign by today’s standards. And all of this accompanied by a jazz-influenced soundtrack. Life was sweet. 

 

But then the real world started to leak in. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, when I was 11-years-old, I remember a friend shouting to me down the street, “Hey, World War III is about to start!” The next year, I was in school when someone entered the class and announced, “The President has been shot.” And so it continued, as Walter Cronkite’s calm voice wasn’t quite enough to soothe us as images of the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights, Movement, the Democratic Convention of ’68 and more came into our living rooms. The sense of the world as secure and the future as something to count on was slowly eroding. 

 

How was a 16-year-old to make sense of this all? It turns out that “ a little help from my friends” was just the ticket. But not my buddies Bruce or Billie or Ricky. My friends were the authors of the books—Henry, Claude, Malcolm, Alan and more— that opened my narrow world just a little bit wider to reveal something quite different from the Leave It to Beaver suburbs. Thoreau revealed an alternative to “lives of quiet desperation” and beckoned me to a real landscape (Walden Pond) where one could fall in love with a shrub oak and live in constant awe of a benevolent natural world. My park-wandering intuitions were given a voice and a beckoning invitation to walk further down that path.

 

At the other end of the real world were the ghettoes of Harlem, revealed through Claude Brown’s Manchild in a Promised Landand Malcolm X’s autobiography. After 12 years of never venturing 12 blocks away in my working class New Jersey suburb, a friendship with Bill “Lump” Blackshear founded on basketball got me into the 98% black neighborhood of my town and the beginning of understanding why it existed and, with the help of Claude and Malcolm and later countless more, why it never should have. 

 

Worlds revealed through words brought me into another territory as A.S. Neal, John Holt, Jonathan Kozol and more helped me understand why I never loved school and gave me the beginning tools to re-imagine new ones. And then there was stumbling into D.T. Suzuki, Alan Watts and Phillip Kapleau’s books on Zen Buddhism  giving a home for my spiritual impulse that never felt welcomed in the Christian or Jewish theologies. 

 

Alongside worlds uncovered through reading were yet more made known through music, both the sounds coming from the radio and record players and those my own fingers could make on organs and pianos. Bach, Beethoven and later Debussy were my childhood companions and as the teen years began, there was the Beatles, Beach Boys and James Brown, the Temptations, the Four Seasons, the Coasters. And then Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell and Simon and Garfunkel and Led Zeppelin and… well, it was a rich, rich time in popular music and the list is simply too long. And side-by-side was Dave Brubeck leading me to another long list of extraordinary artists— Louis, Duke, Ella, Billie, Miles, Monk, Trane and on and on. 

 

By the time I entered Antioch College in 1969, my mythological territories continued to expand, spoken through poetry by Walt Whitman, e.e.cummings, Gary Snyder, through music by The Incredible String Band, the Nonesuch Series of Music from Around the World, Scott Joplin and Cecil Taylor (who later taught at Antioch), through the grand literature of the time— Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, Ken Kesey and more. I was ripe for some way to begin to join them into a unified vision and discipline.

 

That time came in 1973, my last year at school and first year of my post-college adult life.

Four (and more) serendipitous events that would echo 50 years into the future— and are still resonating.