“History, religion, civilization, the conquest of the universe by man, his pathetic creation of God, all this is nothing but poetry—….”—Elie Faure, The Spirit Of The Forms

Picked up the guitar again a couple months ago and haven’t put it down.

Not reading much either. Don’t feel the need, which is a nice place to be. No fear, the words will come again when the time comes. Perhaps even slower than they have in the past. Or, perhaps in tune with the strumming of a guitar.

But the thing is, whether you realize it or not, music (and Poetry read Musically) has always been at the very heart of what goes on here.

All thoughts, all ideas (but they are not really ideas), need be taken in as if listening to music. The rhythm—the beat—is paramount. Grand notions, world changers, cannot be understood—truly grasped—if they do not touch and harmonize with something deep within ourselves, something beating and stirring rhythmically. It is the essence of Life to have tempo.

Tempo and duration.

Before we had names, before our minds grasped the idea of ourselves, there was music. The marking of rhythm, often to the primal beat—seventy-two beats per second—mommy’s heartbeat—is with us from inception. And it never leaves us—or it does, you might say, at our peril.

***

  We were jamming, Xenon and I, in the back room where I once did an awful lot of reading.

“Of course,” I said, laying the guitar aside for the moment, “I get it now.”

He looked at me and smiled his smile.

Once I asked him why he didn’t write more, use the Cafe as a forum for his teaching. With that in mind I had conceived this blog—with whatever it was we had attained to….

A bell tinkled and a young man stood just inside the door looking around. Xenon began softly plucking the strings of his guitar. I picked up mine and took up the rhythm, adding something of my own to it. The young man moved quietly about. At one point he looked in upon us sitting there with the low table in front of us piled with books and surrounded by more brimming off the shelves that lined the room.

But before we could welcome him in he turned and soon the bell tinkled again and he was gone.

We smiled at one another and continued playing our guitars.