David J Bauman

Host of the In Three Poems Podcast

Tuesday Tunes–Mindfulness and Tina Turner

Jon with the Blue Guitar
Random photo of my son Jonathan with a guitar,

I was writing this last night, while it was still Monday.  Let’s just say it was a very long Monday in my world. Now it’s Tuesday, and too late for the Music Monday post. But I’m a poet, since when do I follow all the rules? What’s love got to do–got to do with it?  Wait. That might not be a related question.  We’ll get to the Tina Turner part in a moment.

It’s been a while since I made a Music Monday post, but usually these differ from the Saturday Song features in having a bit of poetry, or poetic explication to go along with the song. Sadly the word “tune” doesn’t have that same  connotation, or connection to poetry that the word “music” does, but it’s all I’ve got to work with tonight. And personally, I need this post right now, and can’t put it off until next Monday, so Tuesday Tunes it is for today.

The last couple of weeks have been so hard. From the slaughter in Orlando to the killings in the streets of citizens and police officers alike. And one little paragraph, or even ten or twenty won’t be enough to count the sorrows. Bombings in Bagdad and Bangladesh. Brexit, and Trump, and a thousand other worries all over the planet. Many of us have been avoiding social media and the news, and for our mental health that is probably for the best. There is only so much of a load our battered spirits can take on. It’s okay to take a break. But this does not mean that we are, or that we should hide from evil and pain. We need to face it and confront it.

20141204-patreon

I have more than once recently explained why “Black Lives Matter” is not an exclusionary phrase. To make the point I’ve shared this little comic (click the image to go to the original) which the artist wasn’t going to post anywhere but on his patreon page, but it got tweeted and quickly became his most shared cartoon.

A tweet by someone else mentioned that when one talks about breast cancer, there is no need to scream, “But what about testicles!?” It’s a focus group, not an man-hater club. And who has ever burst into a Chinese restaurant screaming, “But what about tacos? Tacos matter!”

While I have made such arguments myself this week, one must be careful trying to take on all of the angry, hostile comments on the internet. Remember what I said about peace of mind and mental health.

There are other ways to confront violence, and opposition though. My niece shared this video from CNN (Please take a couple of minutes to watch it!), in which Black Lives Matter protesters decided to go talk to some counter protesters. It ends with them all hugging and praying, black, white, police officers, all of them. It brings to mind the oft quoted words of Martin Luther King Jr., “Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”

I am not a religious person, but I can get behind this sort of solidarity, this kind of unity. I feel something, call it spiritual, when I walk in the woods and admire what others call creation, as Richard Dawkins might say, the apparent design, the beauty and grace of it. I feel peace while watching the birds from my porch, and I feel connection with other humans through a look, a touch, or a word.  We can call that spiritual, I think. We don’t have to believe the same things to agree on most matters of the heart.

Certainly some beliefs, dogmatically and literally taken, can cause, and absolutely have caused a world of pain and suffering. I contend that one can feel wonder through science, through discovery, through exploring and understanding the real. I am also a big fan, as you know, of poetry and metaphor. For me, that is what religion is, or should be, not a literal dogma to exclude, or to control.

And so a sort of meditation for us all on this Tuesday. I’ll be posting some more poetry readings this week and next, and many of those poems could be called mindfulness poems. I’m all about being mindful, being present, especially if that involves being kind and being good to each other, and taking care of the world we live in.

The following information is from the Tina Turner Blog and the YouTube video description.  More about the practice of the mantra here.
Video clip for the Hindu Mantra recorded by Tina Turner, Regula Curti & Dechen Shak-Dagsay for the album ‘Children Beyond’ released in 2011 and available on Amazon (See links at the bottom).
Clip created with footage from the “Children Beyond” documentary.

Video: Xaver Walser
Music: Regula Curti & Roland Frey (NJP Studio Zurich)
Videoclip Editing: Benjamin Degrèse (TinaTurnerBlog.com)

Origin: Hindhuism
Language: Sanskrit

Om Om Om
Sarvesham Svastir Bhavatu
Sarvesham Shantir Bhavatu
Sarvesham Poornam Bhavatu
Sarvesham Mangalam Bhavatu
Om, Shanti, Shanti, Shanti

Mantra’s Meaning:

May there be happiness in all
May there be peace in all
May there be completeness in all
May there be success in all

GET ‘BEYOND’ (2009): http://goo.gl/uYccFZ
GET ‘CHILDREN BEYOND’ (2011): http://goo.gl/vfrDek
GET “BEYOND ‘LOVE WITHIN’ (2014): http://goo.gl/hiuNOG

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6 responses to “Tuesday Tunes–Mindfulness and Tina Turner”

  1. Brian Dean Powers Avatar
    Brian Dean Powers

    If ever there was a survivor, it’s Tina Turner.

    Perhaps Jonathan has Wallace Stevens’ blue guitar? “A tune upon the blue guitar / Of things exactly as they are.”

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply
    1. David J. Bauman Avatar
      David J. Bauman

      Of course, you and I are in sinc here. I did record “The Man with the Blue Guitar” by Wallace Stevens, and yes, absolutely used this photo.

      Liked by 1 person

    2. David J. Bauman Avatar
      David J. Bauman

      It looks like there’s a broken image (the Picasso), but here’s the post and video from 2012 when I was recording a poem a day for National Poetry Month.

      https://davidjbauman.com/?author=0

      Day 29 – 30 Days, 30 Readings: From Wallace Stevens’ “Man with the Blue Guitar”

       

      Picasso's Old Guitarist
      “The Old Guitarist” by Picasso

      I have thought of my son Jonathan in relation to this poem, ever since he picked out this blue Dean guitar at my brother-in-law’s music shop. We were looking for laptops at the time, for a birthday present, but he said he would be happier to upgrade to a better guitar instead. How could I turn down a request like that?

       

       

      I had some difficulty with the editing, as I wanted to splice in bits of Jonathan’s guitar playing, but the editing software was giving me fits. As it is, the poem is one of the longest in this series, at about five minutes. For the entire poem, you should click here.

      For the abridged version that I bring you in the video, just scroll down as usual. The entire thing is 33 Cantos. I bring you Cantos 1 – 6, 12, 20, 32, and 33. I think that keeps enough continuity without taking up all our data. As for meaning? You are kidding me, right? You want me to explicate this monster after the nightmare of editing I had tonight?

      Well, okay, just this much. The poem was written in 1937, but they say it was inspired by Stevens’ looking at the painting at the top of this post, Picasso’s “Old Guitarist.” I’m not sure I buy it. I mean, in the image, it’s not the guitar but the guitarist himself who seems blue. But I suppose it’s possible. The poem does seem to deal with the struggle between modernism and realism, presented it seems as a tension between art and reality.

      The poem seems to be in at least two voices, but I confess that I get a little lost after a while trying to decide whose voice is whose. But perhaps that is Stevens arguing with himself over these issues? Maybe he is as uncertain as I am.

      I apologize to my friends who think I hate difficult poetry. I don’t have a problem with difficulty, but with bullshit—the kind of poetry that is difficult just so that the poet can sit smugly within the impenetrable armor of his or her ego and leave the readers to cipher it out on their own. In my mind, the best art involves some give and take between the artist and the reader, viewer, listener.

      Instead of being walled off, I feel drawn into this poem. It’s magical and intriguing in its ambiguity. I like a puzzle when it’s one that also delights and interests me. Often it’s been in vogue in recent times for artists to shit something incomprehensible out and leave the reader to dig through the pile, looking for pearls. But ambiguity is not the same as intentional obfuscation. In fact, I think a bit of ambiguity allows the reader to bring something of their own to the work, and that ought to be embraced.

      FROM “THE MAN WITH THE BLUE GUITAR”

      by Wallace Stevens

      I

      The man bent over his guitar,
      A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

      They said, “You have a blue guitar,
      You do not play things as they are.”

      The man replied, “Things as they are
      Are changed upon the blue guitar.”

      And they said then, “But play, you must,
      A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

      A tune upon the blue guitar
      Of things exactly as they are.”

      II

      I cannot bring a world quite round,
      Although I patch it as I can.

      I sing a hero’d head, large eye
      And bearded bronze, but not a man,

      Although I patch him as I can
      And reach through him almost to man.

      If to serenade almost to man
      Is to miss, by that, things as they are,

      Say that it is the serenade
      Of a man that plays a blue guitar.

      III

      Ah, but to play man number one,
      To drive the dagger in his heart,

      To lay his brain upon the board
      And pick the acrid colors out,

      To nail his thought across the door,
      Its wings spread wide to rain and snow,

      To strike his living hi and ho,
      To tick it, tock it, turn it true,

      To bang it from a savage blue,
      Jangling the metal of the strings…

      IV

      So that’s life, then: things are they are?
      It picks its way on the blue guitar.

      A million people on one string?
      And all their manner in the thing,

      And all their manner, right and wrong,
      And all their manner, weak and strong?

      And that’s life, then” things as they are,
      This buzzing of the blue guitar.

      V

      Do not speak to us of the greatness of poetry,
      Of the torches wisping in the underground,

      Of the structure of vaults upon a point of light.
      There are no shadows in our sun,

      Day is desire and night is sleep.
      There are no shadows anywhere.

      The earth, for us, is flat and bare.
      There are no shadows. Poetry

      Exceeding music must take the place
      Of empty heaven and its hymns,

      Ourselves in poetry must take their place,
      Even in the chattering of your guitar.

      VI

      A tune beyond us as we are,
      Yet nothing changed by the blue guitar;

      Ourselves in the tune as if in space,
      Yet nothing changed, except the place

      Of things as they are and only the place
      As you play them, on the blue guitar,

      Placed so, beyond the compass of change,
      Perceived in a final atmosphere;

      For a moment final, in the way
      The thinking of art seems final when

      The thinking of god is smoky dew.
      The tune is space. The blue guitar

      Becomes the place of things as they are,
      A composing of senses of the guitar.

      XII

      Tom-tom, c’est moi. the blue guitar
      And I are one. The orchestra

      Fills the high hall with shuffling men
      High as the hall. The whirling noise

      Of a multitude dwindles, all said,
      To his breath that lies awake at night.

      I know that timid breathing. Where
      Do I begin and end? And where,

      As I strum the thing, do I pick up
      That which momentously declares

      Itself not to be I and yet
      Must be. It could be nothing else.

      XX

      What is there in life except one’s ideas.
      Good air, good friend, what is there in life?

      Is it ideas that I believe?
      Good air, my only friend, believe,

      Believe would be a brother full
      Of love, believe would be a friend

      Friendlier than my only friend,
      Good air. Poor pale, poor pale guitar…

      XXXII

      Throw away the lights, the definitions,
      And say of what you see in the dark

      That it is this or that it is that,
      But do not use the rotted names.

      How should you walk in that space and know
      Nothing of the madness of space,

      Nothing of its jocular procreations?
      Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand

      Between you and the shapes you take
      When the crust of shape has been destroyed.

      You as you are? You are yourself.
      The blue guitar surprises you.

      XXXIII

      That generation’s dream, aviled
      In the mud, in Monday’s dirty light,

      That’s it, the only dream they knew,
      Time in its final block, not time

      To come, a wrangling of two dreams.
      Here is the bread of time to come,

      Here is its actual stone. The bread
      Will be our bread, the stone will be

      Our bed and we shall sleep by night.
      We shall forget by day, except

      The moments when we choose to play
      The imagined pine, the imagined jay.

      April 30, 2012, 5:17 am 0 boosts 0 favorites

      Liked by 1 person

  2. slpmartin Avatar
    slpmartin

    Wow! pretty much covers my feelings about this post and Tina Turner’s video!

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply
  3. Brian Dean Powers Avatar
    Brian Dean Powers

    After watching the video last night, I dreamed I was singing with Tina’s voice while crossing a very high and frightening bridge. Talk about symbolism, eh?

    Liked by 1 person

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  4. Saturday Songs of Hope | The Dad Poet Avatar
    Saturday Songs of Hope | The Dad Poet

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