Love, Frozen in Varykino

“They loved each other, not driven by necessity, by the “blaze of passion” often falsely ascribed to love. They loved each other because everything around them willed it, the trees and the clouds and the sky over their heads and the earth under their feet. Perhaps their surrounding world, the strangers they met in the street, the wide expanses they saw on their walks, the rooms in which they lived or met, took more delight in their love than they themselves did.” 

― Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
Credits and citations
Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak, 1957, Pantheon Books

Love. Countless writers across the millennia have sought to pen some truth upon this thing around which most lives pivot. The indescribable truth that will effect lives even yet to be lived.

All the poetry ever penned, all the stories every spoken, all the guesses ever given, are not adequate at defining its nature. They cannot describe it.

Boris Pasternak, of Dr. Zhivago fame, took his turn.

This is what Pasternak said about it, in a literary description of the love between the Zhivago characters Yuri and Lara. They were having an affair, with Lara in an unhappy marriage and Yuri with an expectant wife. He writes:

“They loved each other greatly. Most people experience love, without noticing that there is anything remarkable about it.  To them - and this made them unusual - the moments when passion visited their doomed human existence like a breath of timelessness were moments of revelation, of even greater understanding of life and of themselves.” 

Pasternak's works, in the style of the Epic Russian tradition, helped him win the Nobel Prize in 1958, which the Russian authorities forced him to decline. His parents were talented artists. His father was a painter and illustrator of Tolstoy’s works and his mother a concert pianist.

In the epic Nobel Laureate prose, he said it well - it's like a revelation. "Of even greater understanding of life and of themselves."

The moments of revelation, and the feelings, are like those of a lucid dream. Real and not real. The sense of being part of a thing greater than who we are - out there in the everything of the universe.

It's the thing for which many are willing to sacrifice everything. Even if its means stepping outside everything they are to find it. Escaping the known; fleeing to find it - no matter the ending.

In Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago, Yuri, on his way to see Lara, is conscripted by the Red Army. With woolen coats, they both flee to Varykino, to the Ice Palace. To a place of final refuge from those who would seek to end their love.

The Ice Palace is breathtaking. It's cast in cold blue hues and surrounded by desolation. It has a bitter, stark, and singular type of beauty. Stunningly dream-like.

Perhaps lucid.

Ironically, its grandeur is barely visible beneath the many layers of ice. Dangerous-looking icicles scythe from the curved ceiling, hanging over their heads like the army that seeks them.


Pasternak's story, a complex, fictional masterpiece is, in the end, a story of a thing that never changes. The thing that, over time and eternity, will always endure.

It will endure even throughout war and revolution, like the winter of the Russian revolt.

Even in the coldest and most desolate of places in the world, like Varykino. There, in the frozen Northern Passages, it can found - beneath the layer upon layer of ice.

In the ice-entombed palace, Yuri and Lara show the world, through Pasternak's eyes, the precious, rare and universal moments that are worth the peril and escape.

There, they find their moments: "...moments when passion visited their doomed human existence like a breath of timelessness... moments of revelation, of even greater understanding of life and of themselves.”

It never changes. And it never will. Nor will the attempts to describe it.

No doubt another Nobel Prize awaits the attempt.

Mr. Freeze takes Chicago

With Mr. Freeze freezing buildings,
he wrapped us in ice
And all over Chi-Gotham
he fired his North Pole device,
At the crusaders he let loose;
a great jet of water

At Batman and Robin,
an icicle slaughter

It’s less than 15,
out at O’Hare
Said Skilling on GN,
in his long underwear
Hey Florida, Australia –
how can you play tennis?
When here in Chicago

We’re a North Pole apprentice…

I wrote this, during the last polar vortex. And guess who liked it?

The word, the poet, and the tattoo

If I was a sculptor, but, but then again, no
Or a woman who makes potions on a traveling show
I know it's not much, but it's the best I can do
My gift is my song, and this one's for you

Elton John's "Your Song" explains a lot.

To express our deepest feelings, and do it well, it always comes back to understanding who we are.

Our gifts of expression.

Like sculpting a statue, mixing a gypsy potion, or writing a love song.

But before we can master it the way Elton did - or the way Michelangelo did - we need to tap into who we are.

We need to find the piano. The chisels and brushes and pigments. The words.

Without the tools we've each been gifted, we're just amateurs. Accidentally meaningful expressions, off-key melodies, meaningless words, or chipped blocks of marble.

Call it what you will... The soul. The potential that lies within us. The who we are that emerges during our best, brightest, moments. Cosmic gifts. Our superpowers.

They're revealed in the flash of lightening when we discover our goodness.

But the discovery is akin to safe-cracking.

The soul tells us, "You want the code? Come find it." Until we do, it stays locked.

It's sneaky. It offers options. Hallways filled with doors. Pick one.

Ask any writer. Any artist. Any poet or performer. Their best works of creativity and expression cannot happen without tapping into that special part of the mind. Often, they describe it as a connection to a higher level of consciousness.

From an UltraCulture article, we learn that "Throughout history, shamans, yogis, psychonauts and magicians have sought to map the levels of consciousness that it’s possible for human beings to access. This is where we’ve inherited incredible models like the chakras and the Sephira of the Tree of Life..."

Timothy Leary also believed in it. Inspired by the Hindu chakra system, he created a map of "Eight Circuits" of consciousness. And he postulates that some can only be accessed with substances that help us unlock doors on the highest circuits. Scientific neural research have recently proved Leary to be exactly right.

The highest circuits are mastered by shamans and monks. And perhaps people like Tesla, Da Vinci, Einstein, van Gogh, Mozart. Mathematicians Carl Gauss and Alan Turing.

When the writer feels connected to his inner self, his deepest emotions, the words flow from soul to page. The 13th century Persian poet, Rumi, is a good example. His words of love are simple, true, and philosophical.

Not every poet needs affirmation. Not every artist or writer needs critical acclaim. Their works are usually the expression of their cosmic selves. Their expressions of goodness attract like-minded souls.



Some express themselves in simple ways. Like a tattoo - perhaps a heart, an infinity symbol, or a lion. Or a personal symbol of memory or inspiration. And that's beautiful too.

We are all imperfect. But within ourselves, if we look hard enough, we can unlock doors behind which are amazing gifts. Gifts of the soul.

Once found, our expression is the word, the poem, the tattoo, the sculpture. The love.

Or the song.

Your Song.

Citations:
Your Song
Released 26 October 1970
Recorded January 1970
Studio Trident Studios
(London, England)
Length 4:03
Label UniDJM
Songwriter(s)
Elton JohnBernie Taupin
Producer(s) Gus Dudgeon

Somewhere only we know

And if you have a minute, why don't we go
Talk about it somewhere only we know?
This could be the end of everything
So…

Credit citation - Artist: Keane
Album: Hopes and Fears
Released: 2004
Songwriter(s): Tim Rice-Oxley, Tom Chaplin, Richard Hughes
Recorded: Late 2003

These lyrics are from Tom Chaplin and Tim Rice-Oxley from the English group, Keane. They were a group of friends having attended prep school together in East Sussex, England. They had pulled their little band together after scattering for college.

Before they were Keane, they were "The Lotus Eaters." They traveled the small circuit roads, playing in pubs, trying to get noticed, trying to survive. Even copying their self-made recordings on blank CD's, to be sold after their gigs.

At one point, Chris Martin, in the early days of Coldplay, asked Tim Rice-Oxley to join his band as the keyboard/pianist. He declined, saying that Keane was just starting to come together.

Years later,  Keane was struggling to record just a few singles, with no label. While Coldplay was early into becoming a legend.

Discouraged and with little financial support, they kept playing pubs and small gigs. Finally, they stopped performing and recording altogether in 2002.

Then, at some point later in 2002, they gathered to play a gig in London. It was attended, by chance, by the same man who discovered Coldplay. He offered to produce and release the first commercial single by the band, "Everything is Changing."

And it was. And it did.

Hopes and Fears, was released on in 2004. It debuted at number one in the UK went on to become the second best-selling British album of the year. This from a group that started by singing Beatles covers in their early days.

The group's name, "Keane," is a shortened version of Cherry Keane, a friend of Tom Chaplin's mother, and a woman who often cared for Tom and Tim Rice-Oxley when they were young. Chaplin remembers her telling them not to give up. When she died of cancer, she left money to the family, which ultimately helped the group persevere through their darker days.

They didn't give up.

And thus we have this track. These words: "Somewhere only we know." This song, like most of their early work, was largely about heartbreak and loss. Though many consider it a pop track to be buried in the boneyards of the commercially overplayed, it's philosophically worthy.

Strip away the hook, listen to the words. And you'll find something.

We are who we've been. Who we've become. And we will become what we live. 

I believe that our souls yearn for special moments in time. Our lives are circuits of time when things happen. Unfolding sets of experiences.

Most things that unfold may seem mundane or even routine. But some transcend into the extraordinary. For they are the times when we've made a conscious connection to another soul.

It's a connection that two people share during a moment in time. In a place, yes. But in that moment, the atmosphere blurs. We know where we are, but the world becomes a small bubble of two souls. A sphere of consonance, of harmony. A place where a soul becomes married to its purpose.

It's a place, a moment in time, that only two people can know. Can understand.

And the thing is, these places are sacred. They should be remembered and cherished.

For they are the things that shape who we are. Who we will become. And what we will take with us into the great everything that is beyond.

And that's why this simple track is so worthy. Why I love it.

No matter what happens, two souls will always have a place - or places - that only they know.

And if you have a minute, why don't we go
Talk about it somewhere only we know?
This could be the end of everything
So…

Let's go. Somewhere only we know.

Paul McCartney's silly love song

And in the end
The love you take
Is equal to 
the love
you make

When asked about the line Paul McCartney wrote in the very last verse - of the very last song - the four Beatles would ever record together, John Lennon said:

"That's Paul again ... He had a line in it, 'And in the end, the love you get is equal to the love you give,' which is a very cosmic, philosophical line. Which again proves that if he wants to, he can think."

Lennon got the actual lyrics wrong.  But the essence of it - he understood perfectly... The love you get is equal to the love you give.

Perhaps McCartney was being cosmic - connecting to another writer across time and space. Another "thinking" man, using quill and parchment and not piano and left-hand guitar.

He was Thomas Aquinas, writing in the 13th century, about the same thing. But in far greater depth. In his theological treatise, "Summa Theologiae," Thomas tells us about the need for poverty - that it would cause a kind of humble awareness of the world around us. That it would result in an existential goodness. That we'd become part of something greater than ourselves.

Aquinas believed that if we would only strip away the things that clouded our lives, that suppressed our souls, that altered and influenced our reality, we'd discover goodness - and the truly supernatural in ourselves. And that it was an even greater perfection in the eyes of God that we shared that goodness with others.

That we are called to cause goodness in others.

Aquinas writes, "…Now it is a greater perfection for a thing to be good in itself and also the cause of goodness in others, than only to be good in itself."  Summa Theologiae, I.103.6

Reflecting on how Aquinas's teachings changed her life, Maria Grizetti writes: "...it may follow from this also that one of the purposes of religion is instruction; instruction not simply on truths of belief and faith, but instruction relating to the human, the real, the natural in us, and leading us to discover the supernatural about us." http://bit.ly/1Tux0ML

In the West, many religions and Orders practice Aquinas's teachings today. In the East, we see the essence of the same concepts in practice, espoused by monks and priests from Malaysia to India to the mountains of Tibet.

And, while Aquinas's teachings were intended to be practiced in a very literal sense, they are difficult to follow today - living in a modern technological world. Despite that, their precepts illuminate the path to a profound insight: that within each of us is the supernatural soul - a soul that has a purpose.

Those that cannot part the clouds; cannot see to the core of their being; they will only receive the goodness that they can manage to share with others.

Those who have found this goodness, this supernatural self, have warm reflections on their life, "I'm blessed by the love of my children. By my friends. My family." They are content.

In my own life, each day I feel closer to that goodness. More surrounded by love.

But I'm also increasingly saddened by the pain I see among those who have failed to follow Aquinas's 13th century theological map to happiness; his profound insight into the potential of goodness.

Yes, it's the same insight that Paul McCartney shared in that final verse. A punctuation to their final
song; their final act.

Just like a final punctuation in life.

Oh Paul, you and your silly love songs. Who said the world has had enough of them?

And in the end

The love you take

Is equal to 

the love

You make

Citations:

"The End"
Song by the Beatles
from the album Abbey Road
Released 26 September 1969
Recorded 23 July–18 August 1969
Label Apple
Songwriter(s) Lennon–McCartney

Producer(s) George Martin

Off the chain, into Parts Unknown

"Dad, I love Bourdain. He's his own man, and his show is about way more than food."

Matt and I were watching Anthony Bourdain's "Parts Unknown" from our place on the peaceful peninsula just off the beach in St. Petersburg, Florida. It was the time in our lives when we could hear the waves crashing into the surf just past our balcony.

Despite the tranquility of our little stretch of paradise, it was Bourdain that brought us to places where we felt alive. Places like Barcelona, Paris, New York City, Montreal, and even Montana's wide open and breathtaking cowboy frontier.

There, in Montana, he spoke about the breathtaking beauty in art, forged from the hardships of the frontier and the vast solace of wide open space. He spoke of life - perhaps more than in any other episode.

In a moving CNN essay piece, he then wrote about it. From Parts Unknown Montana he penned, "We show you a lot of beautiful spaces and very nice people in this episode, but its beating heart, and the principal reason I've always come to Montana, is Jim Harrison -- poet, author and great American and a hero of mine and millions of others around the world.


Shortly after the filming of this episode, Jim passed away, only a few months after the death of his beloved wife of many years, Linda.

It is very likely that this is the last footage taken of him.

To the very end, he ate like a champion, smoked like a chimney, lusted (at least in his heart) after nearly every woman he saw, drank wine in quantities that would be considered injudicious in a man half his age, and most importantly, got up and wrote each and every day -- brilliant, incisive, thrilling sentences and verses that will live forever."

Yes, Matt, the man was was about so much more than food. You could feel something different in that episode, a transformative shift in the man. Bourdain was emotionally stirred by his time with Jim Harrison. In the picture above, you can see him, staring off into the big-sky distance, thinking about life and art and his place in the everything of it.

Bourdain, oddly, would also write, how he spent time with Joe Rogan on that trip, who flipped him on his back (while wrestling) and he found himself wrestled into looking at the wide Montana sky.

I wonder if this man's soul was destined for so much more than celebrity television. He'd often seem as if he longed to transpose his lives for theirs; to experience what it was like to live through them. At times, he seemed almost embarrassed that he was intruding on their nostalgic perfection.

I think it was especially true there, in Montana. When he seemed existentially thoughtful and poetic. Sad, even. Wistful.

In his writings about the episode, Bourdain finished with this:

"There were none like him while he lived. There will be none like him now that he's gone.
He was a hero to me, an inspiration, a man I was honored and grateful to have known and spent time with. And I am proud that we were able to capture his voice, his words, for you.

I leave you with a poem Jim wrote. We use it in the episode, but I want to reprint it here. It seems kind of perfect now that Jim's finally slipped his chain."

BARKING
The moon comes up.
The moon goes down.
This is to inform you
that I didn't die young.
Age swept past me
but I caught up.
Spring has begun here and each day
brings new birds up from Mexico.
Yesterday I got a call from the outside
world but I said no in thunder.
I was a dog on a short chain
and now there's no chain.

Bourdain, however, did die young. Perhaps his was a soul that longed to be off the short chain.

The one Harrison wrote about.

Off the chain, into Parts Unknown.

Hiding Love Songs

I wrote once, about secrets. Ones that we keep close, hidden in our souls. And looking back, I had known, then, only the barest of their truths.

In The Power of Secrets I said that a woman sharing her secrets is "an irresistible gesture of kindness, tenderness and a shared longing."

I've come to believe that, understand that, more than ever. They're the greatest of gifts.

For our secrets are the essence of who we are - underneath. Private thoughts that swim among our dreams and hopes and regrets. They're bereft of value, though, if surmised or stolen by another.

Some secrets are what we fear. Desperation, abandonment, loneliness - and loss.

Our wishes and fears. Silly and stupid and revealing. What we hope we can become. What we thought we'd be.

And the deep, powerful, secrets of our life's longing for love. The love for which our souls endlessly search.

And that's why they're so important - when revealed. Not as confessions, but as tokens of trust. For without the secrets of the soul, our human expressions, no matter how sincere, are mere notes and chords.

What we hide - what we secretly feel and dream - can create beautiful harmonies when shared.

When these layered harmonies emerge, they do so in the most unlikely places. They're whispered in the night. Choked through tears. Shivered in the pending loneliness of goodbyes.

In a tender moment at the end of the recent "A Star is Born" movie, Ally finds Jack's handwritten love song, hidden in the pages of a book.

She leans over and asks him, "Were you hiding this?"

They were his feelings for her, written as lyrics, a torn sheet hidden within the book's pages.

He plays it for her, the way he hears it in his mind. The simple song gives the movie layers of meaning and harmony. Jack's secrets, shared.

And that scene, the ending scene with Bradley and Gaga, it reminded me of her. So I penned a a gift of lyrics for her, which I thought worthy of sharing here.

Because I've learned a lot since that first post on secrets - so long ago.

I know how special it is that someone can recognize this concept as I do. Someone who even keeps a mental spiral-bound notebook of the lyrics and stanzas that are the melodies of her soul. She remembers every word. Not everyone can.

And of these works, few will be told. To her, they're expensive treasures.

Sharing secrets - trusting someone we love with our deepest feelings - can create beautiful music.

And it's a secret way to build a beautiful love.