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innerspace #3 - Making the Cut
by Carol Wade

Living in New York is tough. The people are harsh, conditions and resources are tight, and everything from getting a seat on the subway, to crossing the street, has the potential to become a lot like some bloody drama straight out of a PBS nature show. Survival is hard, but it's even harder with all the tiny decisions that the residents of this little granite block have to make every day.

I've mentioned before the glut of musical choices that one has to partake of every day. This place hums its own tune, if you're into the sort of random noise poetry that accompanies most urban machinations, or construction sites. If you're lucky, around this time of year, you just might catch a quiet moment on a West Side street, when a strong gust of wind tears the leaves from their slowly bristling boughs, dragging them across the pavement in a symphony of breeze-and-crunch. There are some varieties of rhythm we have no choice but to participate in.

This past week, I was faced with the mighty Two Show Conflict. It's a frequent occurrence in the city that doesn't sleep...one which seldom plagues citizens of, say, Las Cruces, NM on any given night. And in this case, it wasn't a clear-cut, genre specific, easy sort of choice. It called into question not only the nature of choice itself, but also the fact that we take for granted that things themselves even *are* "themselves", or have selves, or are "things" to begin with. Am I losing you? Good. Keep reading.

moe., the ever-expanding and unfolding small-town jam-heroes, played the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York City a year ago this month, to an audience that seemed a little small for such an impressive venue. Expectations were riddling the insides of my skull that November 1997; impressions and opinions and consternation jammed my circuits about a band I'd devoted much of the previous two years exploring, discussing and tracking. "Why?" is the question deemed almost completely taboo by denizens of any serious jam-rock band's contingent. Why see so many shows? Why the fixation? They are the kinds of questions manic parents ask, as their foamy-mouthed kid stands at the threshold of the family home, clutching Daddy's gas card, with someone's VW Bus in the driveway, rarin' to go.

"Why ask why? Why ask anything? Just go to the show, man! (and make DAMN sure to get the tapes when you're done)". It was the question I'd avoided pondering...until that point.

For me, the music purely aside, moe. 1997 at Hammerstein was a turning point. It was time to pack it in, give it a rest. The band was changing, my life was changing, everything seemed hazy and frosty in the late Autumn chill. I was just back from a trip to England: the haunting shapes of the Thames-side skyline in mist, the vaulted ceilings of Canterbury Cathedral...all reminded me that, far-flung from the shores of the U.S.A., there was a whole other "scene", with altered sensibilities, different priorities, and a whole other kind of style. Settling into the idea without remorse or anger, I put my moe. tapes aside, and began listening, again, to the likes of the ethereal, mystic emanations of the Cocteau Twins.

A colleague and I had a brief chat recently about bands...liking bands, loving bands, and finally, being addicted to bands. I've always been a bit more than mildly fascinated by the correlation between rock and roll (and more specifically, jam-rock) and drug use. Upon analysis, I don't suppose I'm trying to say that all aficionados of jam-rock are drug addicts...by no means. However, there is a thirst for a particular kind of sensation that often accompanies the itch-riddled desire for another integral "fix" (be it the thump of a bassline, a white-line of coke or smack in the nostril, or merely to be in the sightline of your beloved as he/she walks into the room). Being a queen of obsession myself by unfortunate karmic predilection, I know well the rigors and rigmarole of the multifarious manifestations of craving.

One of the first things I plunged into after taking myself off the ever-revolving trailer wheel of moe., was meditation. Having become interested in Eastern Spirituality and Yoga (after abruptly ending my own college forays into the world of...*ahem*...debauchery), I found myself treading a thin line between self-denial and still-existing indulgences. Finally though, last Winter, I was in a calm and ready enough place to start learning Buddhist meditation. Buddhism is a much-maligned and misunderstood system of understanding in the West, and as time passes, and I learn its virtues more and more, I hope to make it more readily available and knowable for all. I'm still learning, but just beginning was earth-shattering.

Sitting. Just sitting. Not going or doing or dancing, plotting or waiting, dubbing or chatting, not even thinking...just sitting. And listening. Visualizing shapes and colors. Listening to anything that is around, even if it's just a garbage truck or the pigeons out on the window ledge. After a while, the loudest thing is the chatter inside that won't seem to stop.

This is the sort of thing that many people think smacks of the hardcore hippiedom, stuff that any good "head" has gotten into, and fully mastered (which is why they can stand to go to all those shows all the time, and live in stinky vans and stuff). Okay, perhaps this jocularity is a little unfair. There are all sorts of people out there dedicated to all kinds of meditation practices and forms of contemplative quiescence, for a million different reasons. But personally, massaging my own mind into a state of open and spontaneous, incisive, active and spontaneous liberation was (and still is) a terrific challenge. And I often fell into the self-conscious trap..."Am I brainwashing myself?"

For even the most laid-back seeming citizen of Late 20th Century Multinational Earth, a little mental chatter seems all too benign. If it's no worse than Woody Allen, for instance, it can't be that bad. But turn down the ever-present hiss, and quell the furious flurry of sense media we inundate ourselves and the "normal", standard, modern, mindset gets revealed as severely other than "harmless". All aspects of our education, culture, communications, social structure and interactions, upon examination, are revealed to foster a deeply inbred and inistent urge to analyze, criticize, compartmentalize, compare, plan, predict, control and assert...constantly. This is the so-called "Modern Mentality".

Anyhow, getting back to the point, I had a choice to make. Many months and mental mutterings later, I had to choose between seeing moe. (who I love dearly, but have seen many times), and experiencing a tinge of my new taste for Buddhism. Jam-band music, after it lures you in, sometimes sets up a nasty compulsion: miss one show, and risk missing the Best Show Ever (to suffer the ridicule of all your pals, and the dreaded Voice in Your Head).

However, at a church in Downtown Brooklyn, Choying Drolma, a 27 year-old Tibetan Buddhist nun (who now lives in Nepal) and two other of her order-mates, were scheduled to perform a sequence of chants which comprise the nun's "sadhanas" (Sanskrit for "dharma practices", or the things they do in order to move closer, each day, to Ultimate Bliss). Along with the nuns, even more intriguingly, would be Steve Tibbetts, an avant-garde jazz guitarist, and his percussionist, to provide unobtrusive Western-style overlays to the nuns' organic chants.

To avoid having to make this already long piece longer by laying down a dissertation on Buddhism, I'll keep it simple. There are three schools (or "Vehicles") of Buddhism. Look at them as though you have a highway, a destination of sorts, and three types of cars. Theravada (or Hinayana) Buddhism is the traditional school of Buddhism people think of when they think "Siddartha" by Herman Hesse, or Shakyamuni, the Historical Buddha. For them, liberation is reaching Nirvana, and not coming back to dwell amongst humans, fully freed from the trials of difficult reincarnational situations. In the scheme, it's the one most like a normal car, with good mileage, emissions and efficiency. In any case, it's much faster than walking.

Mahayana Buddhism is what arose out of the first school, which shifts the emphasis on personal liberation to the ideal of the Bodhisattva (or "Enlightenment Hero") Path. In this case, one's whole being and existence are mobilized for the sake of educating, serving and, eventually liberating all other living creatures (not only humans). Here, we step into a really excellent space-cruiser, like a probe capable of exploring the depths of space for new species in need of instruction on attaining freedom.

Finally, there is Tantric (or Tibetan Vajrayana) Buddhism. Suffice it to say that liberation for Vajrayana Buddhists does not mean "zoning out"...it means being truly IN the world and not OF the world, released from ALL the things, notions, ideas, expectations and conceptions that leave all creatures wanting and dissatisfied. Meanwhile, one strives to live a life totally engaged with and dedicated to the welfare of all living things. The difference between this and the Mahayana is the methodology...powerful sound-vibrational chants (mantra), gesture (mudra) and visionary meditation (mandala-samadhi) form the basis of practices specifically designed to take one directly off the plane of existence and into a sci-fi realm of abundantly Enlightened equanimity. Enlightenment in one lifetime is akin to having a souped-up, spectacular Einsteinian time-machine, capable of leaping dimensions in the thought of a blink of an eye.

So, needless to say, the Tibetan nuns seemed to me the much more tantalizing option. Their repertoire was the sequence called "Cho", which means "cutting" in Tibetan. By chanting, utilizing ritual implements (drums, bells, hand gestures), and visualizing their deities of instruction and assistance, the nuns displayed, to invoked retinues of holy beings, their perpetual vow. Offered forth in song and symbol, they renewed their promise to dedicate their lives to constantly severing the ties to those mental habits which perpetuate ignorance, selfishness, greed, hatred, pettiness, anger, pride, competition and other points of human evolutionary sluggishness.

I watched the women and listened to their voices ringing out, and thought haplessly of some more horrid manifestations of mob mentality that have come about on the Earth (totalitarianism, racism, and the very injustice being uncoiled on the Tibetans at this moment by Communist China). I was moved to tears by the marriage of a sensitive, optimistic avant garde American musician, offering spacious tonality to edgy, beautifully hollow and expansive vocalizations from a peaceful, transcendent, revolutionary mountain nation. I even got to talk to Choying Drolma after the show. She peered up at me, a foot shorter in my stead, with gem-clear eyes and a countenance of unshakable poise, and conversed penetratingly with me in near-flawless English.

It was 9:30 PM when the show let out, and when I re-entered the clear night air, I had one thought in my mind. I hopped on the Manhattan-bound #3 train, and made my way to the Hammerstein Ballroom, arriving just in time to meet a wall of fans twice the size of last year's crowd, and hear the first opening strains of moe.'s anthem to spontaneous nonsensicality, "Moth"..."She knows nothing at all about life...but she knows everything about living."

In the end, it's all about the music, and something beside, inside, and above the music. Be it the complex vibrational language of mantra, or the meandering, and often monstrous rock-melange of moe., in the end, it's not about choosing, or even about knowing there's a choice to be made. It's about staying open and empty, so that you can be full...totally full of whatever may come. The more empty you are, the more ready the world will be to pile treasures high at your feet (like being able to make both shows in one night!). If you clear your mind, and give all you have to taking the whole of Humankind up one great big, hyperspace notch to the Next Level, then making the choice to hack off the excess and leave some stuff behind will have been (as you'll see) more than well worth it. It's like smiling into a mirror...you feel the smile, and get one back. And by the time you realize your face is gone, you won't even know what you're missing.

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Carol A. Wade is a freelance writer, an artist and a library drone. She also does babysitting and astrological profiles...e-mail: caw39@columbia.edu