June 2022 - Dr. Dougie's Dangerous Delight
About the feature -
Dr. Douglas Bishop's dissertation was on the development of poetic identity, a task he has been working on for more than forty years. Todd Brunel is at home in the world of classical music, but also in jazz, playing clarinet, saxophone and flute in a wide variety of settings. Ken Paynter is a stand-up bassist with a knack for improvisation. Don Bishop is a drummer who will bang on anything to keep the beat changeable and has been doing that for decades as a professional musician. Together, they are dangerous because they will challenge your assumptions about both poetry and music; they are also delightful because they celebrate the convergence of words with the beat and the melody.
Featured Work -
THE WORD IN THE BEGINNING (First Riff)
Begin at the beginning: the word was void, without meaning, before there were ears to
hear or mouths to speak or spirits to soar or fall, everything was nothing (nothing was
everything).
And then the word (hallelujah) was born, and we rose together, opening shells to the
dawn and the sea, to the sweet singing of the seraphim and the high echoes of the
cherubim -- all the angels of earth and sky and water singing, and the long noon of the
word free was ready to stretch out forever burning, a river of lava spreading furiously
over the hard ground of being. For there was no light before insight; no witness before
understanding.
O you might have heard a melody, you might have felt the pulsating rhythm of skin on
skin, touched the strings just so and heard angels’ high overtones humming, but it would
not have been any more than music alone, without words.
If you are like me, you have always wanted to sing, to enter into glory with your mind
open, freeing the feeling with the vibrant instrument of your whole body, praise and
thanksgiving continuously soaring in your mouth.
But if you are like me, you’ve also let your voice be buried under 60 years of complacent
waiting, as if the world owed you some signal to say it was safe to come out, as if you
should be something other than what you already are, as if you should have given
something more than you possibly give.
Because the word was not born to be like that. In the beginning the word was with God,
and the word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. And the singing that
rose up was more than we can speak, more than we can hear, more than we can bear.
That’s why we need to cherish it, hold it close and breathe with it, like a sleeping baby or
an exhausted lover cradled in the deep of the night.
Only then will it show us things great and mighty, precious and beautiful. The word
exists as a body walking, incarnate presence, undeniable seed, but we can also use it as a
tool to break thru the false walls of being embodied in time.
We need not be only the hand on the drum, only the breath in the flute, only a frog
croaking in his little bog -- because we have a potential that neither the angels, nor the
stones, nor the Almighty presence, quiescent in a bed of celestial perfection, can imitate.
The word is a subtle, sacred, jade knife made to cut a window into the tyranny of
existence -- to find freedom falling like flowers or feathers singing to us a new song,
singing a new song again.
THE WORD IN THE BEGINNING (Second Riff)
Do you know why the angels envy us --
Us, who have to eat and shit and die?
Why wrath and grace keep descending upon us --
Us, who can’t even remember where we left our car keys in the morning?
It begins with music:
the root of commonality for the whales and wolves and songbirds,
as much as for those early humans who learned to drum before they learned to speak,
who never would have painted those bison on the wall,
if they had not first heard their own voices
singing in the sacred darkness.
We carry rhythm within us
in the rise and fall of the breath,
in the pulsing of the blood,
even in the pain of losing --
Give it up, let it go, take it in again --
And in the melody of this movement there’s a heavy weight of joy rising:
Easy enough to bury under a lifetime of convention,
but still necessary, still available to the real arising:
Holy moments like fireflies flashing on a summer night;
deeper revelations like whipoorwills calling again and again in the last hour before dawn.
If we were to swim in joy like an ocean,
be overwhelmed by it, held up by it on every side,
would we learn to hear our music echo back to us as knowledge,
would we grow fins and learn to suckle our young while floating?
Would we learn to hold those moments between being and becoming,
between the empty blue and the honeyed deep?
But anyone who has thought -- be they dolphin or monkey, human or celestial --
already knows the answer,
and that is not the reason for the envy of the angels.
Because music may be the engine of creation
but the word singing free is.
And when the two come together --
breath and presence balancing moment,
uniquely perfect beauty rising and falling,
falling and forming,
like snow crystals in the dark of a winter night --
when the miracle incarnates,
we rise
(hands and feet, eyes and tongue)
singing free the word,
singing the word free.