All Just Passing Through, by Ray Zwarich

To all Caliban’s Really Good Ones, and to all lost and adrift on stormy waters:

A couple of people who participate in discussions on one of the international forums on which writing often appears, wrote to inquire about, or else to challenge, my remarks about treating our tragic bleeding nation’s possibly terminal illness by slathering a palliative (gun control) on its symptoms, like treating a deadly  cancer with aspirin.

My reply:

In response to Ibrahim Soudy, and John Wheat Gibson:

It’s 2:17 AM here in the Quaboag Valley, as I sit down to write. I was half awake for an hour or so before rising. That is my ‘creative’ time. My time of ‘dream-thinking’ (I call it)… not quite awake… but not fully asleep either… Then I rise to write it down…

I read the two men’s notes before I went to bed… I ‘dreamed up’ this reply before I got up… here goes… (we’ll ‘see’ how i do… LOL…)

The Quaboag were one of the great clans of the great Nimpuc tribe. The Nimpuc often gave their daughters in marriage to the Wampanoag tribe whose territory bordered theirs to the east… The Nimpuc took Wampanoag daughters as their wives in return… Since the dawn of Humankind, this is how tribes all over the world forged bonds of alliance and friendship. When different tribes cherish the same children’s future together, familial kinship grows deep roots.

So tribes were born from clans… So nations were born from tribes… And so civilization itself was born from shared bonds of familial love…

Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.

–JFK… American University, 1963

Quacumquasit was a great sachem, a great chief, among the Quaboag clan of the Nimpuc. He surely sometimes shared a pipe with Massasoit himself, the great sachem of the Wampanoag… In the territory where I was born and raised, almost 2000 miles from here, there was a green-bronze statue of Massasoit, at whose feet I sometimes smoked a pipe myself, in reverence of his wisdom. I visited him there often, always touching his moccasin in reverent respect…

In my old age, I have now come to live in the territory of Massachusetts. Massasoit… Massachusetts… The word ‘massa’ meant ‘great’ among those stone age people. Massachusetts was “the land by the great hill”… Mass… How in the world did the same word come to mean more or less the same thing in English?

Not quite the same… ‘Mass’ in English is from the Latin ‘massa’, meaning “kneaded dough, lump, that which adheres together like dough”… The indigenous people of Mexico, descended from the Aztec, call their corn-dough ‘masa’… Language is so fascinating… There is a deep ‘logic’ in how humans formed the primitive guttural sounds we then made into words…

Now here we are, on a random day in late spring, discussing our primitive human responses to ‘mass’ murder, ‘mass’ killing… See?… The history of our now beleaguered species is the very dirt below our feet, and in the air all around us, and in the waters that slake our thirst, and in the language we use… All our long tragic human history can often be found within the very words themselves…

Guns?… ‘Gun’ is a fascinating word, taken from a woman’s name among the Norse Vikings,… A sort of ‘femme fatale‘ logic… Men have always feared women, for the power they wield over us… Even as we have worshipped them for the gifts they bear us, we have feared their power over us.

I have a dear friend, a woman, who lives over on the shores of Quacumquasit Pond, (local folks just call it South Pond, forgetting to honor the great Nimpuc sachem).  She is thinking of buying a gun, to protect herself from her neighbor with whom she has an ongoing feud. He is a vicious ruthless man who is likely a drug dealer, and surely armed. There was recently a ‘big bust’ over that way. Not ‘small bag’ dealers… but big guys… a sort of ‘cartel’… ‘See’?… Capisce?… Even out here in the boondocks of rural Massachusetts, the evils of a dying world have penetrated. It’s so quiet and peaceful here. but some 30 million (or more) humans live within a two hour’s drive from my front door.

Quacumquasit Pond is the landlocked terminus of the Quaboag River, which winds through this valley for miles, but never makes it home to the sea… Like the Caspian Sea is to the great River Volga, in Russia, the Quaboag River ends its disappointed journey in a landlocked body of water. It flows for all those miles, draining this large valley, only to end in the clear deep mysterious waters of Quacumquasit, draining back into the Earth itself, some 70 miles from the sea… Is its spirit crestfallen?…Just as the mighty Volga is disappointed to end in the land-locked Caspian, never to return to the oceans from which its great waters came?…

We all surely know the dirge-like Song of the Volga Boatmen. “Yo-Ho Heave Ho”… The boatmen sang at their labors, pulling barges up and down the mighty. Volga… ‘Volga’ means ‘moisture’/’wetness’ in Slavic languages, even in Macedonian, the language used by the descendants of both Alexander and Cleopatra… In Russian folklore the great river is often called Volga-Matushka, the “mother of moisture”… The Volga is often called “the longest river in Europe”, but it ends in the Caspian, a land-locked sea whose southern shores comprise the northern borders of Iran, once ancient Persia.

These early morning hours are my favorite time of day… Quiet… Uncrowded… A writer spends a lot of time alone… Not in loneliness, however, but rather in solitude… How many know the sweet honey voice of ‘Lady Day’, of Billie Holliday… “In my solitude… you haunt me“, she sang so sweetly, not in the deadly sweet voice of The Sirens that even the great Ulysses feared, but rather in the sweet and genuinely maternal voice of a matushka, the devoted woman, forever faithful, that all men’s souls long for…

Before I rise, in my time of ‘dream-thinking’, I often travel though not just centuries… but through eons… All the dusty cob-webbed stories come alive in my mind… There, in my dreaming thoughts, I meet all the great characters… surprising them as they walk the dark morning hallways on their feet of clay, as they walk in satisfied solitude, after relieving themselves of a burden… after leaving their stink in the bathroom… (LOL… Every newly wed young man is surely surprised when following after his beloved in the morning, eh? Sniff..sniff… She, my princess bride, did that?… LOL)… Even the great Caesar surely greatly enjoyed his time on ‘the throne’.

A great philosopher named Carl Faber, (who also bore the name of Alexander himself), once taught me, “The essence of life is a good meal, a good shit, and a good fuck”…

Yea… well… He failed to mention a ‘good think’… Surely a pleasure far finer than those of the mere bestial senses… I do my best thinking when I’m either half asleep, (dream-thinking), or else sitting on our universal human throne, feeling my close brotherhood with Le Penseur.

Would not Caesar, or Alexander, or Confucius, or Massasoit, likely say the same? That is how I ‘know’ these ‘great characters’ of all the dusty eons… I meet them ‘in living color’, as living, stinking, rutting human beasts, walking on clay feet, but so magnificently gifted by Nature or God, (take your pick), with the magical powers of Reason…

Yea… well… This is how I do… An old ape…  This is naught but my over-long introduction to my replies to Mr. Ibrahim Soudy, and to Mr. John Wheat Gibson…

I’m alone this week-end… Alone on ‘the farm’… alone in the wilderness… In solitude, not in loneliness…

My wife is off to the Hudson Valley to care for our oldest daughter after a recent surgery, and to help her husband cope with the duties of caring for their three children… My youngest daughter and her husband, and their two babes have been living with us while they build a new home in Boston, but they are off to Maine for the weekend, to drop their children off with my middle daughter’s family, while they attend a wedding up that way…

I am here alone… unafraid of who might visit me, though I am well-aware that powerful forces hate me intensely… Let them come… I do not fear them… but I know they fear me…

Our friend Demaris will likely come by. Strong African woman, from Kenya, one among our African immigrant friends who come to slaughter our chickens when their laying careers are done. These proud and noble people greatly savor the gamey tasting meat of the old birds, a much different flavor than the white tender young meat of Supermarket chickens. It likely sounds gruesome, but slaughter time is a happy time of friendship here on the farm. These people work hard… When the work is done we share a happy meal…

We have given over our North Garden to Demaris… The South Garden is plenty enough for us. We once sold our produce on our road-side stand, but now just sell our eggs and honey… There’s just not enough money in small scale produce. Pick a long grow of green beans, and even at an ‘organic’  premium $1.99/lb, They’re 99 cents at the supermarket, it’s still sub-minimum wage work…

It’s such a joy to me to have Demaris share our land… She works like a woman-possessed… She swings a large mattock-pick to turn the soil… I watch her work in utter amazement… Like watching a woman-ancestor from thousands of years past… She wears a broad-brimmed hat against the sun, with a netted shroud against the bugs… She is joyous in her labor… I watch her from afar, (and in my old age I’m a bit hard of hearing), but I imagine her singing happily to herself as she so powerfully strikes the Good Earth with that most ancient tool… She grows these large delicious speckled African Beans, from Kenyan seeds… They’re almost half the size of a golf ball… “I like beans”, she says so happily… She shares some with us of course… They make the most delicious soup anyone could possibly imagine…

We are retired working folk… (me a carpenter by trade)… We make so little income that we are no longer even required to file tax returns… But I am as rich as any man who ever lived… Why me?… Why my children?… Why has all this bounty come to my family?… I ask God in my guilt and shame… Why do I deserve such riches when so many suffer so horribly?… It is a burden I can never lay down…

In her solitude… her lost lover haunted her… so sang Lady Day… In mine, I am haunted by all Humanity… As my own children grow and prosper, they are yet only dimly aware of the deadly danger that awaits us ALL… They may hear the distant pounding hoofbeats of The Four fast approaching… but they are privileged children, so they know nothing of the terrible horrors those demon riders carry toward us…

But I know what those demon riders bring… I am haunted by the sunken eyes of so MANY hungry children… some living far away… thousands of miles from my home… some living in our own nation’s Colonies of Misery, in Roxbury, or on the mean streets of Baltimore… just a few miles from where my children live…

Mr. Ibrahim Soudy asks: “I am curious to know YOUR Formula for fixing the very obviously SCREWED UP American Society.”

Well… I do have a political ‘plan’… The True Democracy Project, I called it, when I first conceived of it almost 15 years ago. (See document attached, if curious)… But alas… our tragic bleeding nation is simply beyond ANY hope of a ‘political’ solution. We have fallen into such a morass of spiritual corruption that we are simply no longer even capable of coherent political thought, let alone political actions…

Only a Spiritual Awakening now offers us any hope at ALL to avoid our likely horrible fate… I ‘see’ rivers of bright scarlet flowing over wet brown leaves in all our cities’ street gutters, the dark red blood beautiful against the deep wet brown… Until the autumn rains will wash it all away… November 2024… Trump in brief triumph… then deadly bloody chaos…

November November we all will remember a time of death and regret… May the story be told, that it never grow old, that never shall we forget.

No political solution has any hope of interceding… Only a Spiritual Awakening can save us from that terrible fate. From the depths into which we’ve fallen, we, in this tragic bleeding nation, are simply not even remotely capable of executing a political ‘plan’, unless or until we first ‘awaken’ into a better spirit…

You once chided me, Mr. Soudy, for the histrionics I sometimes use. Yea… Well… Indeed… I do speak in many voices… many tones I use… trying to be heard… before all these riches, all this wealth, we lose… Will we make this green planet into a cinder?… can our bestial desires we hinder?… Can our resolve awaken and harden… From this deadly jungle can we cultivate a garden?… LOL… word games… eh?… Sometimes fun, other times a deadly heavy burden…

“Now I don’t know but I been told, it’s hard to run with the weight of gold… I don’t know but I heard it said, it’s just as hard with the weight of lead… One way or another, this darkness gots t’ give… Please don’t dominate the rap, jack, if ya got nuthin’ new t’ say, [Mr. Wheat Gibson?]. If you please don’t back up the track, this trains gotta run today… Spent a little time on the mountain, spent a little on the hill, things went down y’all don’t understand, but in time I think you will”

Eh?…

How many remember the words of an American warrior-poet:

Through the travail of the ages
Midst the pomp and toil of war
Have I fought and strove and perished
Countless times upon this star.

I have sinned and I have suffered
Played the hero and the knave
Fought for belly, shame or country
And for each have found a grave.

So as through a glass and darkly
The age long strife I see
Where I fought in many guises,
Many names — but always me.

“Compared to warfare, all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance”, so said the great general to his lieutenant-general… Like Caesar to young Curio…  Few ever understood that 1970 film in full measure… The philosophy of the Eternal Warrior… We he reign yet again, for one LAST time?

I’m much nearer to the end of what has been a long and mysterious journey, than from its beginning so long ago, yet only yesterday. What now, you ask, good citizen? Indeed… What now?… Shall I again mount a donkey?… Shall I again draw a sword?… The gods gave us Caesar… but we murdered him… Then the gods gave us Christ… but we murdered him… “What terrible beast now slouches toward Bethlehem?” Yeats had it wrong, it was not The Second Coming, but rather the third… Otherwise he was ‘dead-on’… He could have written it yesterday…

A donkey… or a war stallion?… Nah…. Been there… Done that… This time I shall sing a song…

There is magic in song… True magic… The music plays on our heart-strings… While the words stimulate our brains… “Words and music, Doc… Words and music”… Is that not what a wise man from Jersey once said?

“The dark side’s callin’ now, nothin’ is real…. She’ll never know just how I feel… From out of the shadows she walks like a dream… Make me feel crazy, make me feel so mean… Ain’t nothin’ gonna save you from the love that’s blind… If you slip to the dark side and cross that line… On the dark side, oh yeah… On the dark side, oh yeah”

Rimbaud? Dylan?… Will the poet who could save us disappear yet again?… No politician can save us… Are we waiting for Aragorn? Or hoping for Gandalf?… A wise queen or king… or her or his counselor?…

I’m building a mahogany guitar in my basement… A standard Fender neck pocket… I have other guitars, of course, but I will play this song on the one I’m building.. Here’s the melody… I have a letter out now to Janis Ian… easily Dylan’s peer, though yet largely unrecognized in her genius… asking her permission to use her beautiful ‘haunting’ melody… I have a ‘bug’ in LittleBobby’s ear as well… I ‘see’ a performance on the nation’s front lawn… LittleBobby played that venue once before, a long time ago… I remember it oh so well…

Here’s the first verse of the song we all will sing together… which becomes the refrain:

Can we walk together hand in hand?
Can we build a new nation on this land?
Will we sing the praises of forgiveness’ grace?
Can we walk together hand in hand?

Here’s the last verse:

Will we fight and struggle ’till freedom wins?
Can we forgive our fathers for their sins?
Can we cherish the good things they gave to us?
Can we build a New Nation on amends?

Well… I’m not much of a poet… I don’t play guitar too well either… And I can hardly carry a tune… I figure I oughta’ do real well… LOL… silly old ape… But I am the ONLY voice in this tragic bleeding nation, the only one I’m aware of anyway, (if anyone knows of another one, please let me know, I am VERY lonely in this), carrying forth this VERY OLD message…

United we will march EASILY to victory. Divided we will labor under this yoke we now bear until we ALL die…

Have ALL our human prophets not said the same?

Caliban

PS: In further response to Mr. Wheat Gibson, who apparently has “nothing new to say”, but stands so proudly astride the track, as if he can stop This Train, (bound for glory), your sarcasm is SO tedious… Things t’ do, John-Wheat… it’s getting late… we’re all on one road… And we’re ALL just Passin’ Through.

I’s at Franklin Roosevelt’s side
On the night before he died
He said “One world must come out of WW2
Yankee, Russian, white, or tan
You know a man is just a man
We’re all on one road
And we’re all just passin’ through”

Shades of JFK, just weeks before he died:

Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.