like soft rain of late Spring, those afternoons when the sky can't decide who to have over for dinner. Burnt umber in the sky and late day golden sunlight on the grass as rain falls lightly, muting the scent of lilacs. But now I'm sitting in a dark room with curtains drawn, trying to trace the lines between thoughts, to connect the dots in the coloring book of my subconscious. I've been having thougts about a lost life of the mind, and why it suddenly feels like it is returning. Mystic and spiritual writer Teresa of Avila wrote about the Interior Castle that has seven mansions. Avila was writing about the process of the soul becoming perfected through prayer, contemplation, and religious practice. Today my thoughts turned to a different kind of interior castle. In my case the castle is more of a heap of scattered rubble of what was once an unfinished edifice gracing some hillside where the aqueducts perhaps dried up and the tribe had to move on. But it almost feels like I came across it today. I place long since uninhabited, but newly discovered, like a tourist might discover an ancient ruin. I have some sense today's attentiveness, ideas, and articulation thereof has to do with engaging a text this weekend. Karla asked me to speak at her weekend retreat at Big Bear. Part of the experience I am drawing on now it seems is earnest engagement with a text. Today I'm thinking about the role of art in society in general and my own life in particular and the way in which some of my old values have become bastardized or rendered trivial or faded completely. The necessity of giving a kind of sermon to 20 some odd college students forced me to get into a text and wrestle with it, to make some order of it, give it some structure in my own mind, and then communicate that structure. This act, of engaging, organizing, and communicating may be called the essence of internalizing. You learn best what you teach most thoroughly. I'm sitting in a moment of grace right now, reconnecting to a part of myself internally, a lost life of the mind, and literally, listening to Red River Shore by Bob Dylan, an unreleased track from his Time Out of Mind album which may have been the most necessary album I've ever owned. Ironically, I spoke half heartedly to a college group about the possibility for transformation when you enter into Christ's presence this weekend, when you present yourself fully, in humility (which I rarely, if ever, do), with no part left out (a phrase I hijacked from a zen poem). I also spoke to a small group of young men and urged them not to be discouraged if they felt nothing palpable, took away nothing tangible from the time. They had submitted themselves to process, I said. They might realize the benefit much later. Here it is, three days later and I am enjoying the secondary effects of having engaged a text. It's like an archeological expedition has uncovered a corner of the Babylonian gardens. I'm remembering what it was like to have an internal castle, an internal edifice, built through the spiritual act of reading, following word upon word like brick upon brick of the castle. After school today I went to Borders (!) and flipped among Dylan's Chronicles, intellectual devotional bathroom books, history books, looking for something on Albrecht Durer, Dylan's new release, which I purchased, along with a copy of the Economist. At the same time, I was reawakening the pleasure of pursuing truth. Walking around, flipping through the music magazines, National Geographic and Parabola, I realized the strange dynamic of my life now. With more money, more means to engage the contemporary world, I feel less connected than ever perhaps. Buying into the superficial dross, playing video games, watching netflix, desiring more video games, more netflix, I become completely disconnected to underlying truth, ultimate reality. Building wisdom is the antidote for being carried away in the tepid, opiate-laced waters of contemporary culture. I remembered the reason I loved art in the first place. It serves as a mediator between us and truth. Contemplating art, like good worship, builds an interior castle. Ceasing to contemplate, to direct attention both internally and externally is to desert the castle and leave it to be ravaged by the elements, to fall into ruin. The small sense of dread I have today is that time, responsibility, circumstance, work, relationships, pull me in a thousand directions, and direct my attention away from what I hold to be essential: attending to art (primarily the literary) as a means of pursuing truth and actively seeking artistic expression as a means of organizing and reflecting on experience and relating to the world. It is a means of becoming oriented. In recent years I have been decidedly disoriented. This has to do with obvious things like increased demands on time. Mammon must be appeased. As an aside, I have a worn and tired anti-capitalist question: can we serve art and Mammon? In LA at least this is not much a question on anyone's lips. The draw for prestige, the lure of fame, of an external castle somewhere in the Hills, that's the promise, even the Silver Lake people want success in the conventional sense of recognition, it seems to me. What of art as a means of deepening the soul, articulating a communal vision, and expanding that vision? This gets at the heart of the less obvious corrosion that has taken place, the acid rain that has eaten away at the cornerstones of my interior castle: The Red Eyes. I was in a band that had, at core, desire for commercial success, at least some moderate form of it, this orientation greatly influenced songwriting decisions, choices in listening preferences, choices in dress and attire, musical direction, etc. On a far smaller scale, some early recordings I made with my brother were shown to my parents and their response was "that's great! what are you going to do with it?" The implication being, it had to be popularized to make it successful. It had to be affirmed by the totalizing monolith of the market. It was not critiqued on its merits in communicating some truth, or whether it expressed emotion in some unique way, only whether it could "succeed" as a commercial product. This is the assumed complicity between business and artistic expression that has overtaken the American psyche. As Lee Siegel suggests in Falling Upwards "Making art now often serves as a means to advancement; the artists - or the people presenting themselves as artists - seem more like ambitious entrepenuers who have turned the self into a small business." (Siegel xvi). Pop culture comes to mind, mostly musicians, but also writers, who label themselves "artists," but are really shrink-wrapped brands, well marketed, broadly distributed. This most clearly articulates the process I underwnet internally in abandoning the interior castle for the echoing laughter in the forest. Thus unmoored I found myself awash, completely disoriented. Now there are two things to say at this point. The first is that my wife is often seen as a primary reason for this shift. Some of the ways I build the bricks for the castle are tedious to her; she sees no beauty in them. I listen to music. I listen to new music. I listen to music I used to know. I immerse myself in it, in reading, in solitude, ideally for hours, such is the tortoise pace of my capacity for organizing these thoughts, of reconnecting. I might need to watch Apocalypse Now for the 100th time, in pursuit of some thought, some essential thought. I may need to watch, even re-watch Rosselini's Flowers of Saint Francis. This is not connective for her. The first thing to say is that there is a balancing act here. The partner at the center of my life will not be pulled for long into this interior space. She resists its impracticality, its inefficiency, its murkiness, and its internal focus. She is far more stream-lined, both at work and at leisure activities. For me, building the bricks for the castle can be a kind of alchemical process with a variety of obscure ingredients and associations thrown together, and out of the morass emerges something valuable, some kind of gold, some truth. Another truth is that I have been poor at setting boundaries to protect my personal space, setting aside regular time regardless of external pushings and pullings, some kind of Sabbath space, whether spiritual or intellectual (can they be split?). The result is susceptibility to all manner of desire. The third thing to say is that I am realizing the extent to which I have forfeited responsibility for this space, letting the direction of the band corrode it, allowing my occupation to corrode it, and blaming the relational dynamics with my wife for it. Hers is a different kind of interor castle. Its rocks are hewn of different stuff. She will not, at 33, begin devouring Shakespeare and Chekhov, but this need not ruin my relationship with Shakespeare, Chekhov, or even Jack Kerouac for that matter. The emphasis here is a kind of intellectual (if not moral) conservatism. Conserving a space, staying anchored, being in pursuit of truth, not as an idea, but as an act, as a commitment. The absence of this act, this commitment, put in the most concise term, is disorientation. The daunting news is that, it seems to me, you are either building the castle, shaping the bricks, laying them in place, constructing, or you are buried beneath it, or at least wandering, like Dante, alone through a dark wood. May we stay in the castle.
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