The Great Book of Bob eBook

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What It’s About

This is a book about me. So what?

It’s also a book about you. Now do I have your attention?

Okay, the you part is pretty much up to you to come up with. What I’ve done here is dignify certain descriptors of my individuality as being worthy of ink and, hence, I have justified the ego of each of us. Shameless in our conceit? Perhaps. But, the fact is, all any of us has that separates us from the swarm is our own story, our own perceptions, our own life-earned identity.

However, this work is not entitled The Great Book of Everyman (Person). It is named for one of the alter egos I claim: Bob. I am not the least bit normal, nor do I aspire to be so. Sometimes it seems I am a strange, perhaps even alien life-form dwelling among a population of Muzak-sedated dull people. Sometimes it seems I’m but a clueless fool mumbling along behind the rest of the rabble who blithely sing all the words and have the whole matter of existence figured out.

Perhaps you know what I mean.

But, in any case, I am nothing like you.

It’s not that I’m claiming to be more interesting than you or your circle of buds. Well... this is a possibility. The fact that so many of you consider reality TV enthralling and ice hockey emotionally fulfilling, I have to wonder if you’ve lived at all. I’m not a boastful sort, but I have done some traveling off the main roads, some reading off the bestseller list, some laughing off the laugh track. Yeah, I just might be more interesting than you—at least as of today.

And if you don’t believe me then prove it. Write your own book— and, by the Muses, it better be a good book filled with the profundity of gut-splitting humor, tear-wrenching sorrow, and tales that tell a rich journey from womb to now. If you don’t have such a book to write or song to sing or picture to paint or tale to tell your world, your children, yourself; then just what the hell have you been doing with all these years?

But wait. Don’t despair. As I wrote in my novel, God of the Poets, life is a series of phases through which we pass. Unless you are within moments of the Big Transition, or chronically rigid, or an Enlightened One just hanging around the Earthly plane for compassionate laughs, there is always the next stage of your life that will be starting any day now.

It’s not too late. Take this quick quiz and we’ll determine the status of your personal evolution as of today.

Ėlan-a-gram: A Test of Joie de Vivre

When was the last time you:

1. Goosed anybody?

2. Wept with the aching beauty of a sunset sky?

3. Laughed so hard you didn’t worry about snorting?

4. Touched the shoulder of someone who was lost?

5. Gargled a great song?

6. Relished an afternoon of love?

7. Quit a job?

8. Woke up in the morning excited to be alive?

If you answered most of these items with, Jeez, Mr. Bob. I don’t remember, then you’d better call the Mayo Brothers and have them check you out for vital signs, you might be dead.

See what I mean. I really like people and think, rather than the mythic epics of kings, conquerors, holy zealots and other murderers, our every- day stories are what should pack the cornerstone of humanity’s purpose. I believe in the marvel of human potential at the core of each of us. It saddens, enrages, irks the holy hives out of me when that potential is wasted in the creation of a mean, a common denominator of media- benumbed banality.

So I’ll take a few pages and tell my story. If your story is worth telling then you need to do so. If it isn’t worth telling, then it’s time to make some changes. Wake up! You’re a human being and if you fit the bimbo demographic so crassly targeted by the advertising industry (i.e. if you are a 24-year-old male you are consumed by a scream-and-drum driven primal urge to hop into a $40,000 car and make it skid; if you are a 55-year-old male when you are not gripped by indigestion, constipation or stiff joints, you are fixated on dashing around the house swinging your chemically-induced, all-day boner; and if you are a woman of any age, when not chronically depressed, all you care about is being skinny and serving your kids the best brand of frozen French fries—To hell with you, Mom, I’m gunna eat at the Bizbee’s tonight. They’re havin’ Stove Top Stuffin’!), then the Gods ought to sweep down with their magic wands and turn you into koala bears so you can spend your lives sucking the drugs out of eucalyptus leaves and sleeping away the precious gift of sentient time.

I am nothing like you. I’m not a school teacher or a truck driver or a Maytag Man—though, proudly, I have been a school teacher, a truck driver, and a Maytag Man. What I really am at the heart of it all is a poet. You know—roses are red, violets are blue; I’ve got a cuter tushy than you. A poet. I am a man of Art and words.

And, if you give a rat’s hiney about life or the Earth or the people who love you, respect you, and rely upon you for their sense of worth, then you’ll figure out the riddle of your times and realize you are an artist, too. You’ll let Art flow and—beyond the paintings, songs, poems, crafts, vocations of your chosen mode of expression (it’s all art—even flipping burgers or digging sewer trenches—when you put your heart into it), you’ll become the promise of your species. You’ll become an actualized human being.

And, just like me, you’ll be nothing like anyone else. Bless us all, we are sacred in the gifts of mind and soul that make us unique.

NOTE: On public radio, I heard Terry Gross doing an interview with a lady who is a writer for NBC’s Saturday Night Live. Commenting on the skits she creates for this show, which for decades has been the epitome of media cynicism, hubris, and bad taste, she said she writes to ... harangue Americans for their ignorance...

Such condescension. Man, does that pull my rare hairs out by the roots. I might berate you, bludgeon you with playful assaults of sarcasm and mock scorn, but I do so as a caring friend—you know, an equal—not some down-the-nose, New York know-it-all font of arrogance.

(I find it interesting that for generations now, media has been the aristocracy’s most effective tool in dimming the blessings of mind and awareness in our civilization by battering our unblinking attention with a plethora of mediocrity currently culminating in such stellar gems of entertainment and enlightenment as Jerry Springer and thirteen weeks’ worth of Who’s Gonna Marry Homely Ted?: a reality series about a dull-witted, overweight, butt-ugly couch potato guy and a mansion filled with lusty young gold-digger wenches. And then, when they aren’t parading ‘America’s Funniest Fools’ across the tube, they are wickedly patting one another’s backsides and high-fiving over the marvel of their masterful parodies of ‘the ignorant.’ And ‘why?’ you might ask, do the Big Guys who run the world have a vested interest in dumbing down the masses? Easy. Wielders of wealth and might are terrified by free-thinking, loose-cannon citizens—you know who you are, you’ve got original thoughts, creative ideas, a memory... a real threat to those who profit from mass gimmickry and blind allegiance to whatever greed-driven path they prescribe—and prefer armies of worker ants to do their dirty toil for them.)

On some level, art must respect its audience—otherwise it is but self-righteous mockery.

The jokesters at Saturday Night Live think we’re a bunch of stupid people and get their jollies out of making fun of us. Be careful, while you’re gathered about the TV on a Saturday night with your fellow spuds and spudesses and you think the buffoons and airheads they satirize are the lowly other folks. Think again, Dude. Like wow, Girl. The awesome truth of the whole matter is they’re talking about you.

So, as I head toward the fringes of geezer-dom, having for the most part avoided the smugness of youth and the apathy of middle age, let me not falter in my optimism and joy to become a bitter old man—with neither love nor respect for his world.

I’ll do my part. How about you?

Terms

I tend to apply a rather broad sweep to the words art and poet. I’d better clarify this right now before I lose readers who, like myself, think of art connoisseurs as a bunch of arrogant, East Coast jerks; and poets as a bunch of self-absorbed, cryptic whiners.

I am a poet and, as such, I am a practitioner of art. What does this say about me? Am I a self-confessed, whimpering twit?

NO!

It’s all a matter of definition.

Art: exceptional communication.

Poet: an exceptional communicator.

If someone has to tell you it’s art, then it is not art.

I love poetry but rarely find a poem I like. I love that which is lyrical or ironic or surreally beautiful in the random imagery of being. I don’t appreciate being excluded from some inside joke of a poem.

I call myself a poet.

I live poetry, speak poetry, inject poetry into the paragraphs of prosaic existence.

And yet, I write few poems. It’s a way of life with me, not simply a literary genre.

It’s art.

And art... Art is as inclusive as we are able to grasp. If art were a mansion its doors would be swung wide open for all to enter but its passages would be labyrinthine. If art were a joke it would make a million people laugh right out of their seats and cause a dozen to re-think their entire worlds. If art were a sandwich it would feed a million and nourish less than a score. If art were a sad song, it would make a million people weep openly and drive two or maybe three to slit their own throats. If art were a religion a million worshipers would crowd into its vast cathedral and a half dozen would find God. Art is deadly powerful. Dangerous.

Wonderful.

It goes as deep as the deepest among us.

Art has no secrets but is fraught with mystery.

And poets? People like me. Well, it turns out that we all are poets striving to speak somewhere along a continuum commencing with, Cripes, Marge, we’re out of toilet paper in here, to Dylan Thomas raging against death, to Shakespeare’s summer love, to Ben Johnson’s dead child, to Jewel’s lost loves, to the intimacy of each secret whispered across a bed pillow, to the silence of impossible truth. What makes me a quote / unquote poet and you a quote / unquote doctor or lawyer or Indian chief is the degree to which I have committed my life to the art of communication as opposed to medicine, law, or casino management. It’s my one really big deal.

And if I start whining, just slap me up the side of my head and I’ll cut it out.

Why All This Talk about Art?

Usage note: I tend to use the terms God and Gods interchangeably. This is neither careless typing nor ambivalent theology. It’s the way I sense the Ultimate. There are nuances of need and exaltation appropriate to both singular and plural concepts of the Infinite somewhere in a spectrum from a-theism to mono-theism to poly-theism. It’s all just ‘ism’ anyway. Don’t worry about it.

Before I set you off on the longer journey of this work, I’d better explain why the Arts and the Gods and matters of spirit and soul are so often recurrent in the babble of this Bob.

The answer: all else is naught but for the depth of the Arts, the Gods and matters of spirit and soul.

Okay, so you’re a God-is-dead existentialist or a diehard pragmatist or a bah-humbug atheist. Hey, that’s fine with me. I’m not here to preach you to salvation or damn you to hell. I’d be the last to be so presumptuous as to butt into your matters theological—you’ll see. Read the book.

The following is an essay / lecture I delivered to Lary Kleeman’s 6th period creative writing class at Arapahoe High School in Littleton, Colorado, on May 17, 2005. The class consisted of a delightful bunch of seniors just a week from graduation. What a joy it was to rattle their nimble brains with the best of my nonsense. What fun we had—I even played my banjo. Maybe when this book comes out on CD I’ll plunk a tune or two for you.

Anyway, here it is:

ART!

I’ve traveled a long way to come to this class today—it’s taken me over sixty years to get here.

During the past few months in this creative writing class, Mr. Klee- man, with tools of the craft and inspiration for the art, has endeavored to show you the way.

Today, perhaps, I may help show you the reason.

I’m going to talk about art.

Art: as in poems, songs, images, you know—the whole soul-speaking swath of expression, the marvel and mess of humanity’s craving reach for communication. I’m not talking about the commerce of galleries (I love your work, really... but could you do something in a mauve?) or the gimmick-and-scandal publishing houses or the hum-rattle hate chant, waltz-my-granny, opus dope-us grab-bag of the tune-me-in mega-mass conspiracy of Radio Un-free America. Not the silly filth or the guts-and-murder, film-(and bubbly banter)-at-eleven babble and insult of the Great Tube.

No. I couldn’t tell you much about the business of selling one’s soul. I’m not so good at it. Maybe it is big A Art I’m talking about. Or not. I don’t need to know. Whatever it is, I’ve dedicated my entire life to its moody madness, God-glimpsing wonder, and mind-wrenching frustration. I’ll tell you about it.

Take this with you and all else is optional:

Art is not a hobby!

It’s like trying to keep a thousand-pound fire dragon in a bird cage. You don’t trivialize the creative force of the universe—you can get hurt.

You take a class in creative writing or water colors or pottery. You buy an oboe. You get season tickets to the symphony. You blow a couple hundred bucks on bad seats for the Toe Jam Johnnie concert. You smile-nod to the Muses and then get on with your quest for an MBA and its promise of the American dream.

Whoopee.

Wrong-o, my friends. You don’t get off so easily.

Deny the true depths of art: the whack-your-ear-off sunflowers, Ode to Joy shout for glory, the rage, rage against the dying of the light truths of life and death and lust and the electric-sweet, tickle-silly poems of thrilling love and oh-so-sad songs of grief—Dylan Thomas, Bob Dylan, 9-0-2-1-whatever Dylan regressions from raging streams to the mumbling marshes; once you lose Steinbeck’s Pearl or Pearl Bailey or Pearl Jam or even Minnie Pearl, you may just end up drool-muttering the nursing home knit-and-purl natter of the empty flesh—deny the true depths of art and you deny your own soul.

So... one more absolute:

Art is not optional; Art is required!

Art may well be the only element of human existence

that has a shot at saving our culture

from being taken over by stupid people.

Think about it. Art requires focus. Casual listening makes elevator music of Rachmaninoff; at a glance, what could be duller than a bunch of Monet’s water lilies; at a skim, e.e. cummings’ poems are but hodgepodge nonsense. Art requires passionate attention, intelligence, and openness. People attuned to such a degree of heightened awareness are less likely to be duped by the sound bite, bumper-sticker mentality of mass culture. No wonder the big guys are taking the arts out of public education—easier to rule a bunch of stump-dumb, media-lobotomized fools than an enlightened society of wild-minded creative dynamos. Right?

You are here, you are alive, you have amazing potential. Anything less than art-deep involvement is a terrible waste of fleeting and precious time.

The Levels

I’d better tell you about The Levels—four of them anyway. There are at least six but #’s 5 and 6 are out there on the wind-swept steppes of my Spirit Walkabout and... believe me, 1 - 4 will suffice for today.

In meditation of chant and breath, I visit Levels of being each day. It’s just my system of finding some place and purpose in the Universe. The first three are so obvious that we tend to assume they operate like the autonomic nervous system in the body—heartbeat, breath, etc.—on their merry own. Perhaps, but to take this spark of life we live and heat it up until we have a shot at lighting the fuse of any kind of a cosmic firecracker, we need to begin by consciously focusing on the mundane.

Infinity rests upon the soles of your feet!

Level 1:

Say your name out loud. That’s it. In sound and intonation, filtered through the years of your experience, you have just uttered the utterly unique moniker of your grinning, scowling, fumbling mug-of-self-identity. Sure, there are thousands of people with the same name, but saying your name makes it yours alone. This summer I’m going to have a huge gathering of a thousand Bobs—not like the Bob Festival at Avon, Colorado, where real Bobs converge from around the globe to celebrate blatant Bob-ness. No, this is a much more select group. Not just any Bobs, you know. Only ones hovering in potentiality about the core of yours truly. It’s a Heisenberg thing. Yes, this grand gala will be held at the front corner window table at Einstein’s Bagels on South Broadway. A thousand-and-one Bobs—we’ll have a cup of coffee.

Level 2:

How do we ennoble this sack of slosh and vapor, undulating tube and flexing pump, he-who-smelt-it-dealt-it flesh and bone and blood and bile that is the earthly host of our identity? Easy. Just ignore the biological engine and move on to the greater physical realm of which you are intricately a part. Garner your stature from the great mountains, your respiration from the rhythmic pounding surf, your strength from the rage and blessing of storms. Breathe through your heart all manner of earth and sky. Be flesh, be strong, be real.

Level 3:

Deeply inhale the teasing dance, the whispered truth, the Energy of the subtle Universe through your eyes—in and out, in and out. Feel the air as it encircles your brain. Realize there is nothing there.

Nothing.

Doesn’t that just crack you up?

Nothing but the elusive concept of mind. Wow.

Exhale the giddy truth of that and be smart—really smart. Smart like homing pigeons and particle physicists and poets who don’t drink them- selves to death. Smart like your best teacher and like your mother and smart like the impossible complexity of Earth’s Deluxe-sized chemistry set. Smart like the journey of starlight that arcs the eons and twinkles in the night-sky-beauty affixed in the gaze of your pupil-straining orbs. Become smart.

Okay, you’ve got identity, flesh, and mind, now for the leap to soul—the Land of Art.

Level 4:

What is it about Van Gogh’s sunflowers, Beethoven’s tunes, Elvis’ pelvis that shrugs the dust-to-Dustbuster futility of the cycle of flesh, and lights and lilts and excites the centuries?

That would be, ‘What is soul?’ Alex.

You don’t need a theological basis to recognize that you have a soul. It doesn’t hurt, but all believers and non-believers and duh-you-got-me dudes are welcome at this tent meeting. Come on in.

The soul is that part of self that transcends dirt and sings on beyond your three score and ten.

Let me give you a bit of an example.

And I’ll tell you, this is not easy—it shudders clear to the core of me—but if art doesn’t ruin you a bit, you’re just dabbling. Right?

My mother died nineteen years ago.

I was out at Quantico National Cemetery a few weeks ago just standing there as the sun rose and smeared through the mist and wooded acres beyond. At my feet lay a flat slab that said:

Hattie M.

wife of

CWO Robert Nichols

Almost crying. Not just sad that she was gone, but still empty for the loss of her, and at the same time, nearly tearful at the vibrant art of her love that yet enriches my days. Just a big hairy sixty-year-old boy out there alone in the spring-bird sacred and holy maudlin parkland of the dead. Almost weeping the complex grief and joy, when she and I both realized my fly was open.

Hey, I was upset. After a ten-day visit, my skinny old dad and I had shared a manly hug and I was heading out across the continent from Virginia back to Colorado. In the 5:30 A.M. rush to escape my Dad’s house that morning before real sorrow hit—he’s 90 years old and any good-bye could easily become the last—I didn’t quite complete all the operations requisite to properly addressing the day.

Ever happen to you?

Robert, her sweet and humor-edged voice spoke to my mind, Don’t just stand there moping, zip up your pants, son.

I did the old pirouette, dip-and-zip and was back facing sunrise in a flash, and, then—and this was no psycho-foolish delusion—beyond her senility, the congestive heart failure, and beyond the screws of a coffin lid; beyond the smother of dirt and facade of grass, beyond the box of brittle bones below, we laughed!

We hooted!

We bah-ha’d to the heavens with our souls, Mom and I did.

See? Get it? Souls!

The Source

The Greeks came up with the concept of the Music of the Spheres. They imagined, emanating from the vast array of celestial bodies be-doming the deep black Peloponnesian sky, an exquisite and inaudible hum of energy. The Buddhists call it Om. The physicists call it the Zero Point Field. The Scots may well call it God’s Bloody Bagpipe.

I don’t call it anything. I just harmonize with it.

It started years ago when I heard a group of Tibetan Monks chanting their bi- and tri- tonal prayers for peace and compassion. I’ve been a humming fool ever since. I started in the shower, then in the car on long journeys, and, of late, I do my ditties with the Infinite during muted commercial breaks from Miami Guts or Las Vegas Guts or, ‘Clank!’ any of a dozen spins of Law and Order.

Or, as my lovely wife puts it, If you don’t stop that damned buzzing, I’m going to bed.

Here’s the point: The Energy is here for you—more ubiquitous than the Internet, more subtle than a nun’s giggle, more mighty than Governor Terminator on steroids. As one who aspires to live artfully, the Powers await you, the trick is to connect.

There are moments in my music (crude and simplistic by the standards of big guys, but as sincere as you will ever hear) when I’m not singing alone. It’s my simple chords and strums and words and a chorus of a thousand Om’s.

With my carving, there are encounters with ancient wood and form and the grace of grain where the un-sounding song sings its might and beauty through my motions.

And the poetry... hey, I’m doing my best here.

Just Old Bob and my ancient guitar, my carving tools, my laptop computer, and, of course, my soul. Just the aggregate struggle of self, flesh, mind, the humbling promise of the Immortal... and the Great Hum. The Energy. The Om.

See what I mean? The Energy is here. It is through soulful endeavors of art that we may connect.

Soul, art, connection.

Expression (Art)

Big time art—immortal of soul, precise and powerful of expression, and connected across the ages to any who will hear or see or read—the works proven by centuries or hyped by the moment, can become a culture-wide source of common yet profound experience. Art enables any of us with open mind and heart to laugh, cry, Guernica ache, Munch scream, Bach bedazzle—you’re on the road again with Willie, in your Born in the U.S.A. face with Bruce, you are enraptured by Shakespeare’s summer love and really doing your damnedest to scrub away the damned spots of your own sorry self.

See?

And of the intimate art of individual touch—if you are not just a dabbler, a hobbyist... if you had been there with me that mortal morning on the dew-damp grass of the graveyard, you could have laughed with us. Out there teary-eyed with mirth, just heads back and howling with the Gods—you and I and my mother’s blessed, beautiful, transcended soul.

Now that, my friends, is the stuff of Art.

* * * *

The bell rang and as Lary’s students shuffled past, many of them stopping to shake my hand or just say thanks—I told the lot of them and each to their bright and young faces, Bless you! Now take your wonderful minds and souls and energies and get out there and fix this world before it’s too late.

I delivered this essay about two months after I finished the first full draft of The Great Book of Bob. Keep reading and you’ll encounter some of these ideas again... and again... and—trust me, it’s not that the ideas are complex or difficult. My thoughts are not perplexing; they’re just big.

You’ll see.

And you, dear reader, with the wonder of your mind, the marvel of your soul, and focus of your energy—get out there and fix this world before it’s too late!

God of the Wood (detail)

RN 2004

PART ONE:

Some Foundations

Welcome to Now

Time may well be a birth-to-death, Big Bang-to-the-fringes-of-Ever, steady-stream sequence of linear development leading from Creation to this Wednesday morning in November;