plywood violin

My first memory really of thinking through an idea of identity was in university. I’d imagined this tree, a tree where each branch represented the growth of individual ideas and patterns that i had started or subscribed/ascribed to. The more a given path was followed, the more that particular branch was strengthened the harder it was to change, or, indeed, cut off.

Last week… i found myself walking across a parking lot road. Half sunny late spring day, and the sun had mostly dried the water that was, that morning, spread across the rumbly asphalt. I was caught up in immediate issues, getting to the next step in my day, following the drudge of a Saturday spent catching up on Wednesday and hoping for a late night that might allow for a little more (or less) reflection.

A worm, was lying, still shiny in the middle of a crack in the middle of that rumbly road. It had, i figure, crawled out of whatever hidy hole it had gotten into - chased out by the rain. It had gotten caught though… in the middle of this road, as it had dried… and had retreated to the last vestige of moisture that it could cling to, settling into the dampness of the crack, awaiting the off chance of rain, or a slow dessication.

I walked by. And stopped. And returned and picked him up, tossing him into the grass. The movement, strangely reminiscent of childhood. And I walked passed, weighted by the slow breath of the memory of that tree… and the sawing I’d tried to do, trying to create someone that I could live with in university. And a new critical leap, a simple truth, one of those moments that knits together four threads of thought into a thought that seems so sleek and tidy and obvious looking back that you realize that there’d been a joke you’d been missing all along.

• Buddhist Koans that i read for a year or so… trying to let the nameless, indirect wisdom filter in.
• The good social deed, the good christian, exchanging good deeds for a place in heavenly reward… the strange marketplace of morality, and the inevitable crisis of the need of an ominicient observer that one is left with when one falls victim to a post enlightenment ethic. When one wants still to do good, but doesn’t understand how the marketplace works without something keeping score.
• That tree.
• And my own need to be observed.

I was changed, just a tiny bit in that moment. I’d created another little move towards the peaceful, i was a more merciful me than i was scant seconds earlier. There was no need for an observer in that marketplace of one, I had set this action against others not so printable.

It requires that one sees, I suppose, identity in time, as a random sum, rather than some sort of culmination. A random sum more affected by recent movements, by decisions made and forgotten, but still made. One thing chosen over another that creates a pattern of behaviour that is the only relative judgement of self. A moment, true, that had four or five presents when it happened, but, still, actually driven by a simple desire to spare the creature the inconvenience (pain?) of being scorched in the sun.

A marketplace of one.

photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jiva/123664080/sizes/m/

I’m a ‘fan’ (not that i like the word) of Mr. Cohen’s. I’ve listen to his music for years but had avoided the generation of his music that included the thanks for the monkey and the plywood violin line. This blog is kind of intended to be my plywood violin. I’ve done a bunch of writing over the last three years on my ‘day blog’ davecormier.com/edblog. But i’ve been missing my chance to crystalize thoughts that have been pumping through my brain on a daily basis… ways of looking at things that i may only hold for a couple of days or weeks, but that might be interesting in retrospect.

You, if you are reading this, are effectively secondary… or, if you prefer, primary from a different point of view. I’ll be writing entirely to my own point of view in this blog, primarily in order to call to mind, to bring ideas to bear to bear witness, in effect, that an idea actually happened.

The violin, if it be violin at all, will be entirely wooden. plywood even, little gloss, and straight from my fingers.

looking forward to it.

Needed a new blog with a new sound really… dug deep and found my pal Leonard sitting out there with his strangely prescient words while hanging out with my best girl on the couch. Seven years today.

I practiced every night, now I’m ready.

It’s been a long strange road through a variety of countries and… different episodes. We’ve lived together, lived apart together and lived together apart and find ourselves writing blog posts to each other a little after midnight the night after our seventh anniversary. So goes the postmodern lovestory.

There’s a chirp in my brain that pops up everytime I move towards explaining myself these days… it’s a voice of a person who used to write in little black books, leaning over balconies, with a terribly dramatic look on his face one imagines. That little chirp of a dude who really wanted to craft the words coming out of his mouth, but like his new image, but for different reasons, didn’t devote the time to making them really reflect the sound that was in his mind.

That dude was better suited to explaining what has happened between the two of us over the last dozen or so years that we’ve known each other. To our joy and our detriment, i guess, we’ve become a part of each other, and, like so many things, too often taken for granted. Like breaking into a full sprint, or carefully running the tips of your fingers around the edge of a flower, they are things we can do, beautiful movements we are capable of, but things that too often get overlooked, with too many spaces between them.

I do see her, and she does see me. We are still here and, tonight, though the sprint was too often halted and we lumbered to the finish we found a little chirp of out own. The cigarette swilling wine smoking chair stompers that we once were… where we found each other in the same bar in the same place, night after night, with the same rush of recognition that we were actually going to try and make a go out of combining two people who would like as not slay each other over too much time - though never too much wine.

And so we haven’t. And so I can’t imagine having my life any other way. And, more than anything, look to making better with what i have, and try to stop looking to where we could be, to find less of who we were and more of what we can find of this identity where we are now.

While all i have runs over less time now, it means more when its given.

all.