Days have passed. When seeing my doctor on August 8 for a routine prescription renewal, a man who's now a friend of a dozen years' standing wasn't blind. He wished to know what had happened, left physical traces.
I kept it straightforward, expecting incredulity.
I'd dared tell very few people of the experience described in the last entry here and long hesitated about writing it up. The doctor did more than believe me; he entered the event and its observed effects on to my medical record, though I didn't want it there.
He was right.
I've edited what I wrote to shorten and clarify it slightly, but eight days later I'm surprised there was almost nothing to alter in what was posted in a state of shock. Maybe I still am.
That's it, all the same, left as it was for what it's worth. Of the rest left on the log, when I'd most seriously considered wiping the lot and making this place nothing but music, there've been changes and may be one or two more, removing entries.
My own occasional turmoil and mistakes since February 2003 don't worry me as a matter of published record, but how I've dragged others in the stories does. What I have left here in serious entries -- unchanged of course since I don't plan to rewrite my life -- remains for just one reason: feedback from people. You.
Some's been negative, far more's been positive: touching, often moving comment and mostly mail from others who said they have identified with actions, thoughts and feelings described and found what I've written helpful in one way or another. Many shared experiences of their own.
So I shall leave most of it, a record, with deep gratitude to friends and acquaintances who might have protested at the exposure, particularly when relationships have scarcely always been easy and I've sometimes been plain wrong about them, full of the wildest ideas.
This part of the log? A week ago, I was too drastic. There's no sense in doing a 180-degree turn. If people do or say something I really want to write about, I shall, but unless they've published it themselves: no names, no details of who they are.
Now the site is wholly given over to musicians, that's all you'll get on the main pages. I've been again reading a two-month-old print of Sarah Fimm's published journal, which she began -- I only noticed that detail today -- on my birthday in 2003, when she said:
Hello Gang - This is the place where I tell you my secrets (Sarah's site). Now let me make this perfectly clear. I intend to speak as I would if you were standing here in front of me. Stream of consciousness. So please forgive my gross impropriety, or don't. I have never done this before, but I will do my best, per usual, to offend, degrade or turn anyone into gelatinous goo. (...)."
She never has, not by name. When we met last month -- an eternity ago -- and she took her place here, there was no need for words about how I first came across her.
A few days later that October, she wrote:
"Music rules all. It is the only thing that can save us from anything in my eyes (...)
Anyway, I must go and begin my consorting with the outside world. In the meantime. Be like water."
I've done little consorting of late. When I have it's usually been wonderful, real sharing, and the rest of the time has been spent sleeping ... or sorting. Trashing!
Thousands of objects, given away if anyone wanted or gone for recycling. Ah! the space...
Projects apart from this?
None left. I've a job, those I love and people I know and that's it, plenty to learn. The vacation hasn't been anything like planned. That was lots of entries about music, women and sex (if the latter arises from what musicians say for themselves and it's worthwhile). When I've not been sleeping, sorting or consorting I've been researching -- doing my homework as I wrote in the last entry out back.
The millennial 'Book of Changes' -- the 'I Ching' (fine Wikipedia introduction) now a very old friend, often logged -- always bemused me on one point: "fortune".
Why? Just luck? Chance?
Many of us seek any other explanation but sheer chance if we can. Logic. Cause and effect. Meaning. Pattern. Where we find these things lacking, we make them and believe them. There'll be no argument from me with the scientists who find religion is built into us, whether we have a God or profess atheism.
Much of the log's been stories about somebody who saw a profound purpose in some of his encounters, considered a few people special to him, sometimes much to their irritation -- they didn't feel this.
"Sometimes a path is made simply by creating absence."
That's what Sarah wrote yesterday.
Is this where I say: "Look, we're talking the same language again, on the same frequency, that's our wavelength..."?
Not now it isn't.
I saw those words -- all for the day -- when I fetched her link, wondered where she is -- and might call it "fortune" though, chance, luck. Good fortune, but that's me; the words "fate" and "destiny" are no longer wanted ones, not for me.
For years, I've stopped thinking of the 'I Ching' as a very wise book to predict anything, but rather a Way, like the Tao, to study a state of being, then another, and a source of help that speaks to me "as if (it) were 'standing' here in front of me."
Some people find the book nothing but "gelatinous goo".
They see strange imagery, lines written and annotated in riddles, the irrelevant product of a long-dead civilisation and culture.
The social references, though infrequent, relate to a heirarchy long since gone from emperor to peasant, but there still can be a poetry in it for people who see no sense but that's part of the key.
The book and some of the notes that followed, by many scholars, don't always address our logical, reasoning faculties, but speak to a different part of us. The images are sometimes clear, lucid answers to the question posed. When less so, they sink deep into us, absorbed like the language of dreams.
Just the once, almost a year ago and the last time I "used" the 'I Ching' for help rather than study, I told you about it: 'Spring, bonfire, lake and leaf fall'.
Back then, this side of the log was a secret and I tried hard to make sure it stayed that way. I got so much wrong in any hasty conclusions I drew from that "reading" of such wise words.
I read far too much into them sometimes on occasion, in "my world", one people kept right on calling "a world of your own", what Nick's brain functioning with five senses and in four dimensions took for signs, lines broken and unbroken to make hexagrams. "If you do this, the outcome is likely to be this": that's what I read.
And I wrote then:
"Nor did I expect the I Ching to be so direct.
I messed it up twice, let ideas get in the way first time round after I'd only thrown the lower trigram. Second time, I didn't get beyond the bottom line. It didn't matter because the third time it flowed as it should after a breathing exercise.
Then I got the very same results for the lower trigram, with every line on the point of change.
It was the same all the way up for the first time I can recall. Not one of the six lines was stable, yin or yang, each was about to 'turn'.
The next surprise came with the clarity of the first hexagram.
My question, remember, was 'What does the wise man do when his dream catches up with his life?'"
That first hexagram was "youthful folly", and the second one, every line changed, a "fire in the lake", one word in all translations: "Revolution".
I left something out just now. In August last year, I identified the dream and gave it a name.
What youthful folly that was. I told you: to everybody who has allowed me to keep their stories here, I'm very grateful.
When I do consult the book (each translation I've seen suggests several methods, some faster than others), it never wants a vague or woolly question. I prepare by relaxing, deep breathing, empty my head of stray ideas and focus on the query, nothing else.
When I feel ready, the process begins and it takes time. I don't interpret as I go, unless the ground is so familiar I start knowing where I am before the hexagrams are done. There's a feeling of "rightness" when it's working, like a hunch or intuition.
The notes come later, once it's done and I switch back to the scholarship, the multitude of references others have found. And those notes sit, perhaps to be understood much later.
For what remains, all that remains, I don't have a name, if anybody does. I'll use value judgements when I return to work in a week and regarding what I write about women and other musicians on the front pages, but as absolutes? I can't!
I've done my best never to confuse "intelligence" with "intellect".
For weeks I've had a deepening respect for people who keep their faith, whatever their creed or their "church", as simple as Sally Ellyson, vocalist in Hem, sings of one sometimes on 'Eveningland'. Yes, Hem is here, but that album released in February is a front-page entry one day.
You may find knowledge about music on the front pages if I get the entries right and remember they're not about me, but musicians.
"Sometimes a path is made simply by creating absence."
Ever to confuse "knowledge" with "wisdom" is a step off that path as sure as naming names you shouldn't and making links where none exist. Sarah has the wisdom to go right on making connections.
Where does she get them?
Is that a question for any of us?
Some books full of knowledge, from myths and faiths everywhere, Africa to the Americas and Far East, I've put in the same place, with Western science I find helpful. They're important in "my" world.
If I network successfully with "your" world after a night never to analyse or explain, then think what you will of it, but I'll never know how I got where I am and I have run up against my limits.
It wouldn't be wise to rule out a purpose and sometimes think about it.
There's not a faith in the world has nothing to say about "right thinking", some people are full of it and too full of themselves for me! But if they're open to change, then who am I to judge?
In Buddhism, Right Thinking is part of a Noble Eightfold Path.
Far too prone to making up milestones in the past, I'm cautious. But to those who contend life is chaos, organised or not, without significance, I'd merely observe I can think of no faith on the planet that lacks paths, ways, journeys, pilgrimages, and signs...
The computer's "known" hours more trashing ... for the second time this year. So much stuff, mostly words now an absence: lots more gigabytes of absence, but that's space, not nothing, and in time, much more of it will be music.
I remember how I felt a year ago, a somebody with no plans to be writing these words today. I'm no longer sure what right thinking is, but if I find out, best for me to put it down to all that remains...
Fortune.
12:37:00 AM 
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