Mozart, Radio, Hard Times, & the “Jupiter” Symphony

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This is why I love radio.  Radio is random, throwing unexpected and often unfamiliar music at me, and it educates me when radio DJs (who are called “hosts” on Classical stations) give me bits of historical background on composers and compositions. 

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I try to listen to streaming radio whenever possible, and the Classical station from MPR (Minnesota Public Radio) is one of my favorites as background when trying to think, read, and write.  Tonight (my Monday evening) I’m listening to MPR’s Monday morning show from their 7:00AM hour.  I’m 12 hours ahead of them. 

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Are you familiar with Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony (No.41)?  Its first movement has hints of struggles but it cannot help breaking out into rousing triumphal glory.  It makes you want to just stand up and cheer, twist and shout.  Such strength, joy, and optimism! 

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The MPR host introduced the above movement from Mozart’s “Jupiter” by telling us how bleak Mozart’s personal world was at the time he composed it.  Austria was at war with the Ottomans, and no one was attending theaters for any operas or concerts.  Mozart and his wife had just lost a daughter who died before reaching one year of age, and they were too poor to pay the undertaker.  He couldn’t make money composing, and he could barely manage by teaching untalented students, an endeavor that always depressed him.  Hard times. 

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Yet somehow during this depressing period of Mozart’s life, he produced the wonderful “Jupiter” Symphony. 

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-Zenwind.

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Monsoon Turnover

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The rainy monsoon winds from the Indian Ocean are almost ending, and the dry monsoon winds from mainland Asia are beginning.  I felt it today when out walking.  The direct sun was hot, but the air had a different feel – drier. 

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On my walk to the store and back, half of the way was in shade and half in sun.  A truck came by hosing down the streets with water.  The street surfaces had been in the hot sun, and I crossed an intersection immediately after it had been dowsed with water.  The dense humidity that we are normally used to, from the rising steam, hit me with surprise, because the air elsewhere today was much drier.  But after crossing this area of humidity I entered a shady walkway, and the relief was striking.  

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Looking forward to our all-too-brief Cool season. 

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-Zenwind.

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Before the Rain ...

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My projects are half-completed
yet done so with great satisfaction,
by the time my back starts hurting,
terribly and inevitably.
So, it's time to call it a day,
because a big storm is rolling in. 

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I put my chair in the shade
where the best breezes flow,
and I pour cold beer over ice,
waiting for the cooler breezes,
and I open a book. 

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Winds rise, skies darken, thunder rumbles,
and the world scrambles in fear:
Pinkie the Cat runs in a
desperate comical low-crawl dash
to some outside retreat.
Silly Willy loses his nerve and goes inside. 

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Then the Black Dog, a fat old soi dog
with gray whiskers who often shows
up for food, waddles by.

He is afraid of me - though not
afraid of gentle Tuk when she's here.
I wave, say "Hi," and talk to him in friendly

nonsense phrases while I slowly push some tuna
that the cats didn't eat
through the fence for him.
I back off to give him space and courage to eat.

He eats it up; I approach again,

give him tuna, and again back off; he eats;

we repeat this dance until the

tuna is gone and he is happy. 

As he turns to go, we part as friends.

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Cosmic bodhisattva Black Dog,

thank you for enlightening my world. 

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-Zenwind.

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… Rain at Last

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Holding down the home fort in the
outside courtyard on a Buddha Day,
through the hot afternoon right through
to the rain before dark.
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I'm glad my phone is waterproof,
because I'm getting drizzled on
mightily by the blowing rain and spray
here under the meager eaves as I type this.
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The coolness of this downpour
is such a radical drop in temp
that I can hardly contain my joy. 
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Blessed Coolness. Zen Delight.
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-Zenwind. 
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Pain

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Chronic physical pain.  Acute, agonizing, excruciating, chronic, and intensely brutal continuing physical pain.  Pain that saps the very life right out of you.  My back hurts so bad that it hurts to even breathe.  Hell on earth. 

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It drives me down into the depths and makes me empathize with old Sisyphus as he goes through the endless and hopeless cyclical motions of his ancient curse.  (See Albert Camus’s essay on The Myth of Sisyphus to encounter what is actually a rather “cheerful” account of such existential predicaments.) 

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 It’s far worse if one’s painful condition is not uniformly recognized by the medical “establishment.”  Some doctors sympathize, but most just don’t understand how much it hurts.  Or give a shit.  They won’t give you legal (but controlled) pain relief medication that might help.  I most often see that very lack of remedy to be a despicable failing of the medical community.  Lack of caring (“for poor suffering creatures everywhere” – Jack Kerouac). 

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Here I am – feeling sorry for myself.  Poor, poor, pitiful me.  I get unbelievably ugly when I’m hurting.  Not a nice guy. 

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I admit that I don’t entirely know what medications would help relieve my acute pain.  I suppose that morphine or other narcotic pain-relievers would work in the short term, but how dangerous and addictive is that?  Sounds like bad complications.  Alcohol is the only legal short-term relief, but that’s an ancient one with its own complications. 

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I hurt my back in the early 1970s while doing farm work.  But really, I must ask:  is it a coincidence that my major acute FMS pain started its present intensity in early 1982 after I had stopped smoking the great cannabis herb (on New Year’s Day 1980) and also had become stupidly enmeshed within the most super-stressful relationship of my entire life shortly after that?  Worst decade of my entire life.  I cannot prove any of it, but I do know for sure that my physical agony started then, along with total mental anguish.  Self-sacrifice is so primitively brutal and self-destroying. 

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Dukkha happens.  That’s the way of it.  We are born; we live; we suffer; and we die.  But – importantly, intriguingly – in between those gates of pain we do have instances of grasping the precious gem and really living.  And we are (sometimes) rational animals who pilot our courses in astonishingly interesting directions.  That’s our glory.  We climb mountains and discover new worlds.  We have a poetic tradition of hope. 

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I don’t know what else to say.  The pain is still reverberating deep throughout my very bones, and my mind is completely exhausted. 

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-Zenwind.

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Monsoon

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Alone at noon in the courtyard shade.
Heretically, I'm "facing wine" on a Buddha Day.
I read the poetry of Han Shan and Shih te, 

contemplating the Taoist and Ch'an/Zen mountain traditions.
Silly Willy the Cat and I listen to birdsongs in wonder, 

and the occasional breeze is so unexpectedly fresh.

Then the rain.
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-Zenwind. 

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Finally, Justice for Khmer Rouge Leaders

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A Cambodian court, the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (backed by the UN) has convicted two former Khmer Rouge leaders, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan, of crimes against humanity and sentenced them to life in prison.  A bit late, but better than nothing. 

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The Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot and his communist intellectual henchmen killed around two million Cambodians in their late-1970s attempt to engineer utopia.  The deaths were caused by a combination of starvation and disease, caused by insane economic and social engineering schemes, and outright execution of most educated Cambodians as well as those put on a hit list by someone’s whim.  Over 20,000 mass graves have been found, aka the Killing Fields, with evidence of nearly one-and-a-half million executions.  It was madness. 

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Nuon Chea studied in Bangkok.  He was known during the height of Khmer Rouge power as Brother Number Two (to Pol Pot’s position as Brother Number One).  I wrote about him a few years ago in a review of the movie “Enemies of the People” (2009), in which he was featured. 

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Khieu Samphan studied in Paris with Pol Pot and other Cambodian communist intellectuals in the 1950s, getting his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Paris in 1959.  During the red terror he was Cambodia’s head of state, yet under Pol Pot’s ultimate control. 

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Both men are in their 80s, so their lives in prison will not be long ones.  (Pol Pot died in 1998, never seeing trial.)  They both face an additional charge of genocide.  Stay tuned. 

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-Zenwind.

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August: Lammas Day/ Lughnasadh

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The first of August, the festival of the First Harvest.  Sometimes I really do miss those seasonal changes in the cold north and the wild blackberries of August.  Here the rainy monsoon season provides occasional cooler weather, but it alternates with muggy heat at unexpected times. 

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A note on my blog posting:  I have a bit of writer’s block and am not writing much these days.  I have been reading like mad but have not been able to keep up with review writing.  I have several book and movie reviews in draft, but they don’t seem to want to finish themselves. 

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-Zenwind.

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The Impermanence of Life

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My wife, Tuk, and I have no children and we are quite the isolated hermits socially, so our animal pets are especially dear to us.  They die and leave us too soon.  Our beloved cats are falling sick now.  Life is impermanent (“anicca,” in Pali Buddhist lingo). It will not last.  

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Thai people do not believe in euthanasia for suffering animals, and I think their belief is cruel.  However, I can do nothing about it since the veterinarians here refuse to put them down.  This belief is an aspect of their karma beliefs, and my own differ on this. 

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Since I moved to Thailand, Tuk’s three dogs have died.  One died suddenly – and my father-in-law suggested that it was bitten by a deadly pit viper within our small compound.  (Indeed, one day while sitting out in the shade of our tiny courtyard I followed the intense gaze of one of our cats up to the tin kitchen roof overhead – a beautiful green snake was winding amongst the trees and layers of roofing right over me.  I looked it up in my reference books, and it was undoubtedly such a lethal pit viper.) 

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Another dog of Tuk’s was a nasty cuss who never liked me, a mangy, pitiful but robust canine.  He got terribly sick suddenly – I’m sure it was from eating a chicken bone – and he lay down out back moaning and crying out for over a couple of days and nights.  I would get up in the night and sit with him on a little stool, talking to him and touching him until he quieted down a bit.  I remember one night nodding off a bit while sitting with him, and he woke me by tensing up his ears.  I looked behind us, and in my flashlight’s beam I caught the undulating movement of a huge reptilian tail (of a monitor lizard) disappearing down into a hole in the ground.  Spooky.  The dog finally died, but not before we had reconciled our differences a bit and made peace. 

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The last dog, Macky, was a wonderful, goofy, stinky old mutt.  He lived in the house, and he thought I was nuts because I talked to him all the time in a strange tongue.  I think his heart gave out in the end.  He had been failing, and he went back to the toilet area to lie down.  I was the only one home, and I stayed with him.  I couldn’t help but think of Jack Kerouac’s genuine compassion for “poor suffering creatures everywhere.”  I told Macky that he was a good dog and that if Buddhist rebirth is true (which I do not actually believe), then he would build upon his virtue in this life to find better opportunity for achieving virtue in the next one.  Without breaking eye contact with me, Macky soon had his final seizure and expired.  We miss the old guy. 

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Now our cats are sick and dying.  Mommy Kitty has disappeared outside for three days now, and in her emaciated condition she cannot survive the hard rains that hit us daily.  I have searched everywhere for her, but she hid herself well.  I was her favorite (after her kittens had all grown up), and she slept at my feet.  I still roll over carefully in the night out of habit, so as not to disturb her.  I think she is gone, and I regret that I did not get to spend time with her in her last hours.  I will write a full tribute to her at another time. 

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Silly Willy (who really adores Tuk and can never stay away from her) is ravaged by a virus that the vet said is chronic, fatal, and incurable.  We have thought he was on the threshold of death many times, but he is a stubborn guy and won’t go out without a fight.  He is skeleton-thin and struggling, and we assure him that we are in his corner. 

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“Poor suffering creatures everywhere.”

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-Zenwind.

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The Rock Pub: Bangkok’s House of Rock

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Back again!  The curfew has finally been lifted, so nightlife in Bangkok is slowly getting back on its feet.  I hadn’t been to the Rock Pub in a long, long time, and finally got my chance. 

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I had taken the express boat into town at noon and soon had a rucksack packed full of books, making my back ache badly.  I then met with good friends in Bangkok for dinner conversation, the high point of every month for me.  But, as everybody was going to leave for home early, I made quick plans for an alternate location to get a taxi home.  I took the Skytrain straight to the Rock Pub, which is on the way home with good taxi spots. 

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I walked into the Rock Pub at 23:00 hours sharp, and the band had just ended a number.  Only a half dozen people in the whole place.  I went to an empty front table, put down my heavy pack, stretched my hurting back, and ordered a beer.  I was horribly thirsty and in great need of pain relief. 

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The band was Munson and they immediately started the next number:  “Smoke on the Water” (“fire in the sky”).  I knew that I had found the right spot.  Then it was AC/DC’s thundering “Highway to Hell,” and I knew I was on that old familiar road.  The beer was cold and went down well. 

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Munson are masters of Rock.  Long hair right out of the 70s, they looked like they were tough veterans of the Rock and Roll wars with years under their belts.  I walked into a perfect time warp.  Without missing a note or a beat, they pounded out great covers of 70s and 80s Rock.  The sound was a torrent of thoracic-thumping, Heavy Metal thunder, shaking right through to my core.  It was a beautiful night. 

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I don’t know all the details of Heavy Metal songs or bands, because I wasn’t collecting albums in those days.  I only heard the songs on car radio while on the road.  So I can name only a few bands or tunes covered from Munson’s set:  Metallica.  “Iron Man.” “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” (by Bob Dylan, but a Guns N Roses cover).  AC/DC.  “Sweet Child of Mine.”  Guns N Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle.”  And on and on with great Heavy Metal covers until 01:00 closing time. 

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Rock lives on! The Rock Pub endures!  

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-Zenwind.

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