Thread Drift

I was going to write a different column, one that was going to be a song by song analysis of SCI's NYE run - from the drek that was the ironically titled "Inspiration" on the 29th, to the amazing peak of the "Round the Wheel -> Indian Creek" on the 30th, to my struggle to just not walk out on the show on the 31st - but I had second thoughts. Who wants to read a long column that boils down to, "Despite being with great people, I would have been just as happy staying home this New Years?"

Not only would a column like that annoy my readers, this isn't a thought that I want to dwell on. I'm reminded of a scene in Kurt Busiek's Astro City. KBAC is a comic book that uses the conceit of assuming that all of the weirdness that takes place in the comic book reality were happening in a real world. It then proceeds to ask the question of what it would like to live there. How does a reporter cover the insanity that happens there? What would it be like to live in constant danger from super villains? What do the superheroes do on their night off? To answer the last question, there's an issue that is a date between their Superman (Samaritan) and Wonder Woman (Winged Victory). The date starts out in their civilian ids. While for the Samaritan, looking like a normal person is just like putting on a costume, for Winged Victory, she actually physically changes into a non-powered person. Samaritan asks her why she doesn't spend any time in that ID (she was using the apartment of a coworker because she didn't have her own) and she said that every time she changed back, she was terrified that she would never be able to have the power again. That's how a bad show affects me. When I look around and see people grooving, while I just stand there wishing I had a book (and find myself singing Suzanne Vega's "Solitude Standing":

And she takes my wrist, I feel her imprint of fear
And I say "I've never thought of finding you here"

I turn to the crowd as they're watching
They're sitting all together in the dark in the warm
I wanted to be in there among them
I see how their eyes are gathered into one

) and I worry if the last 13 years have been a lie, if this entire power through music thing is just a myth that I have made up, and it will never work for me again.

If the band were dropping chords left and right and forgetting words and acting like Jerry in 1995, that would be one thing. Not enjoying it would make sense. When the band seems to be playing well - based on the reaction of other fans - but nothing is happening, where, instead of being catapulted to a world where there is you and there is the music and there is nothing else in the entire universe, you're thinking, "Are we near the setbreak yet? I wonder who else is here that I want to hang out with," that's just very scary and upsetting. Few enough things can get past my logical brain; I don't want there to be one fewer.

So while I don't want to dwell on how boring I found these shows to be, what might be interesting though is to try to figure out what changed. How did the band that I thought was the best touring outfit going in 1998 become a band that is barely tempting me to go to their Seattle shows in 2001? Was it me that changed or was it them? After thinking about it, and talking over it with long time SCI supporter (and Mountain Girl founder) Teresa, I came to a conclusion. While some of it might be me becoming sick of them, String Cheese Incident are clearly a different band now than they were as recently as late 1998.

When I first started seeing them, SCI was a hybrid band. Despite playing mostly other styles, they were still at their heart a bluegrass band. Perhaps a better way of saying it was that they were a mountain band. The poster I got at my first show describes them as "Your All-Weather Mountain Dance Band," and that's what they were. Their songs had a certain form of spiritualism that came from being in touch with nature. Their jams hit that same path. When the darkness of the middle section of "Land's End" resolved into the peak build up jam, it was like the first sunny warm day after a long winter. Even the decorations they used were nature themed; batiks were hung depicting people hula hooping in the mountains. One got the impression of a bunch of people sitting on a porch playing music. They took all of the fun of a band like The Recipe and added amazing musicianship and some signs of dark playing. For a while they were like a dream come true.

It's hard to believe it was only a year ago that the standard complaint about SCI was that they were a little too dependent on speeding up their jams. They've moved so far away from that that I found myself missing the energy. Instead of a hyped up roots based band with jazz influence, SCI are now more of a funk groove band. Don't get me wrong, I know that bands have to evolve or they just get stagnant and bored. I can even accept this musical direction, knowing that they might come out of it (Phish followed up the endless funk that bored me in 97 with the beautiful ambience of 2000). What is actively bothering me though is the change in the style of lyrics. It's almost as though the band is on a mission to save the world. Songs like "Open Wide" and "Make a Joyful Sound" seem forced in their attempts to deliver their message. The change occurred so suddenly that I went looking throught their influences, trying to find someone who would insprire that sort of lyrical shift.

And that leads us to John Dwork. As far as I can tell, Dwork was an amazing person. He worked hard on his spirituality his entire life and learned some things as a result. All he wants to do is to pass on what he has learned to the rest of us. Unfortunately, it's not that easy.

When I was teaching math, I had a dilemma. I'm a slacker. I always hated to do homework. I wished that I could get my students to understand the concepts that I was teach immediately. Unfortunately, math doesn't work that way. No one really understands a mathematical concept until they work with it. The Complete the Square method or the Chain Rule might make sense on the blackboard, but until you've solved 20 or 30 problems with it, it won't really be part of you. I hated to do it, but I ended up being a bit of a slave driver in terms of homework assigned. Well mysticism is the same way. You can wrestle with demons, go through the long dark night of the soul, fight your inner terrors, and have moments of true bliss, that - when you come back to the mundane world - can be expressed in terms of normal words and concepts, but the concepts won't mean as much to anyone unless they put the work in themselves. Trying to teach a lesson like this doesn't involve teaching what you've learned, it involves teaching people to find a way of getting to where you were when you learned it.

There's a koan about a goose. When it was really small, it was forced through the neck of of a bottle and now lives inside the bottle itself. It's too big to go through the neck now. The question is, how do you get the goose out of the bottle without hurting it? The answer is that you don't. You wait for the goose to get to the point where it wants to leave the bottle and it pecks its way out. [1]. You can't force your teachings onto someone. At best, you can talk to people who have discovered similar things on their own. More normally, you talk to people who are just bored with what you're saying and don't get it [2]. In the worst case though, you can actually cause harm.

If there's one thing to remind yourself over and over again, it's that the map is not the territory. Two different people can encounter the same pre-rational truth, but express it in completely different ways. The problem comes when they argue over the differences in the models that they have. When you teach in plain words the enlightenment you found, you're not teaching enlightenment, you're teaching indoctrination. You can point the way, you can gesture really emphatically, but when you speak without using vague metaphors, you usually are doing more harm than good.

Epilogue: I went out to see Rockin' Teenage Combo on my birthday. I was excited for this; having an early January birthday means that I never get birthday shows. This literally was the first time I ever had seen music on my birthday. Almost as soon as they started playing, I found myself moving... and being moved. Winged Victory managed to resume her superhero identity at the end of the story. I shouldn't be surprised that music still is a powerful force for me.

While at the show, I talked to some friends. Nancy put forth a theory that maybe the different style that I didn't like was a playing to the crowd's energy thing. Then she pointed out that Vancouver was her birthday show and she was at my birthday show so... Ok fine. Hey SCI, I'll give you one more chance, but I'm warning you. If you're not good, I'm going to turn you into a goon!

[1] Note: An episode of The Muppet Show presented a different answer to this dilemma. Gonzo - I think it was - was trapped in a barrel. How did they get him out? They used dynamite and blew it up. Said Gonzo afterwards, "It only hurt a little." This is just but one example of the Zen Teachings of Jim Henson.

[2] In Rudy Rucker's classic The Secret of Life, the protagonist wrestles with the fact that you can't bring meaning back into words and have it mean the same thing, "No word can really capture the Secret, practically any phrase will do. All is One, All is One, ALL IS ONE. One what? One of... uh... those... uh...."