Random synchronicity in blue#

While looking for an old poem of mine, unfortunately kitted up with a generic title, Out of the Blue, which I never found using Blogger’s internal search engine (seems like I like the word blue), I decided to hunt for my poem using the Google search engines. The next thing I knew I was on a Wikipedia page where I discovered in the footnotes, that one of my blog posts had been quoted as source reference. Whoa!

Now the irony is that I was watching a YouTube video on musical theory, listening to Celine Dion belt that E flat finale, All by Myself, that killer note, and then the musician Adam Neely lifted up a heavy tome and quoted W. A. Matthau. Wait? What? I know that person. This was beginning to be a case of random synchronicity in b(lue)#.

Well, I was in the middle of correcting a couple of typos in an old essay I wrote to W. A. Matthau, who goes by Aloudin, also called Out of the Blue. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Do you see where this is going? 

There’s nothing worse than a circular file in blue, which I seem to be caught up in. I still haven’t found the blasted poem. I think maybe my blog has Alzheimer’s. Or, at least the search engine does. On the other hand, it’s somewhat understandable that I have 4500 blog entries.

I know the poem is in my blog, and hopefully Google didn’t destroy it, (it’s done that before), because everyone keeps mistaking my poem for the Simon Armitage 9/11 poem also called Out of the Blue, Well, now, I was on a roll, so I decided to search for my Out of the Blue poem using my blog’s name, Literrata, instead of using my name.

I discovered that not only have I been used as a reference four times within Wikipedia, another blogger had used my photo of William Everson as well. I was less happy to discover that some dude ripped off my rather unique blog name (a Latin word), and used it for his own blog name on Tumblr. Grrrrr! It’s bad enough that Google decided to name one of its fonts literata. And to make matters worse, some of my blog posts have been Pinterested too. Ouch!

It looks like I finally made it into Wikipedia after all, but not quite in the way I had envisioned. But I’ll take it. Four Wikipedia entries have cited me. I’ve become an open source. Better than being an open sore. I still can’t find the blasted poem I was looking for. 

Ironic in that I created this blog in 2007 in order to keep track of my poems as the manuscript binders were impossible—especially when I couldn’t remember the names of my poems. Looks like I’m back to square one. Still no poem in blue in sight.

Out of the Blue, for W. A. Mathieu

Out of the blue, a reknown composer W. A. Mathieu of Cold Mountain Music, from Sonoma County, called and asked if I was the one who wrote the essay, "I, Poet," and then he quoted a line from it, saying he wanted to use it in a book he's writing on music!

Founder of the Sufi Choir, musical director for The Committee Theater, and Chicago's Second City Theater, instructor at San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and Mills College, W. A Mathieu, who goes by Allaudin, was also the arranger for Big Bands including the Stan Kenton, and Duke Ellington orchestras—in those days he was better known as Bill Mathieu. Allaudin is his spiritual name.

The mystic improvisational composer is author of four books and some 20 CDs and casette tape. Pete Seeger once said, "Mathieu has found the words to tell the power of music."

I was of course, stunned, as the essay in question was a decade old (talk about words coming back to haunt you!), but I was even more stunned when he didn't remember who I was. Or meeting me upon several occasions. He had long since lost the connecting threads across the passage of time—which made the phone call all the more amazing as he had to call two people to find my number. Third time's a charm.

Allaudin thought the line was merely from an article he'd saved from 1991. But the real backstory is probably more like this: I was nervous meeting him and I brought something of myself by way of gift to deflect the awkwardness of the moment of first meeting.

That particular moment was an interview for a poem I was about to write. I was collaborating on a project with a brilliant student of Allaudin's, composer-pianist Kirk Whipple of the Unconservatory (formerly of Sonoma County; now located in Miami, with a branch—Cranberry Coast Concert Series, in Onset, MA).

Kirk Whipple was honoring his music teachers and friends with a series of nocturnes entitled Elemental Portraits: Nocturnes for Two Pianos. My job was to listen to Kirk's notes and musical ideas—to freewrite, and then transform it all into drafts. My final job was to meet the subjects and then shape the final poem. I don't normally write poems this way, by interviewing strangers. So it was all a learning curve into the realm of music.

Allaudin's piece was called "Uncle Al's Cloudscape." ( You can listen to a fragment of music.) Sometime in 1991 or 1992—I think it was late winter, or spring, Allaudin and I hiked up to the top of the hill of his back garden located in the outskirts of Sebastopol, and he recounted the day when he saw in the sky a cloud in the shape of a clef note. Pause. Take a breath. Caesura. He took it as a profound sign from the universe. And paid heed.

We were quickly off task: our conversation meandered like a circuitous brook in a vast meadow of possibility. It was an afternoon indelibly etched into my mind. So of course, I was shocked that he didn't remember me.

But he did remember me. Sort of. He just didn't equate that particular me with the me who wrote "I, Poet" so many years ago. Or this present me he was talking to last night on the disembodied ambiguity of the phone. He thought we were all unrelated strangers, but I had the unfair advantage of memory. And then I wondered if there were many lost moments like that where memory and experience are unequally shared among acquaintances.

But the story gets stranger still. Out of the blue, an old college friend, Kathie had just mailed me a "care package' of odds and ends she'd collected over the years. Blame it on the Blue moon.

When Kathie purges her house, she mails the goodies to her friends. In my care package was a xeroxed copy of "I, Poet" folded in amongst trinkets, poetry books and cassette tapes. I was shocked to see the article after all these years. I did not read it, but tucked it away, in the "to do" pile as I'm trying to get much of my work online.

This blog is one vehicle for my old work. Though I am pretty discouraged that the only comments I get these days are spam. Who knew spambots read poetry! (I wish Blogger had a "Captcha' for comments. As the spambots find my open comment links, I have to shut them down. Soon no real people will be able to comment on my work—half the reason why I'm blogging in the first place. But that's fodder for another blogger.)

It was as if that article was waiting to be rediscovered and when I ignored "I, Poet", then the article sent in the heavy artillery. You will read this again. You will own your words. My own words coming back to haunt—or bite me. Clearly, it was a sign from the universe. I haven't written a poem in ages. Mea maxima culpea.

Allaudin wanted provenance for the book he's writing, he wanted the original "I, Poet" article to footnote it, so I hunted it down, scanned, and sent it to him.

I glanced at the line Allaudin wanted to quote: "A poem is like a stone thrown into the pool of our collective unconsciousness. A small splash—concentric ripples spreading out into the conscious dimensions of the larger pool of humanity—can affect change." —Maureen Hurley, from "I, Poet," page 23, The West Sonoma County Paper, June 20 - July 3, 1991.

That exercise gave me the idea to scan in the actual page as a jpg and post it in my blog. I've been bogged down trying to scan bad copies of my articles—reduced to 6 point type. It makes for a lot of slog work.

Is it really worth the effort and time to create these online archives? Who is reading them? Who cares? Besides, I have so few surviving tear sheets, they're rare as hen's teeth. Most of my memorabilia from those days is in storage, but many boxes were destroyed when the shed roof leaked one particularly stormy winter. Unlike Kathie, though we're both childless, I never purged because the published writing is my progeny.

In the beginning, I meticulously saved everything that appeared in print: my doodles, my photos, and my articles. I catalogued the journey of a career in writing. I learned by doing, and working for The Sonoma County Stump with Joe Leary, and then the West Sonoma County Paper with Nick Valentine was a good training ground. Make that a good university of accidental exposure. Right place, right time. And teachers willing to nurture a budding writer.

Allaudin was delighted but not surprised by the circuitous homing pigeon aspect of our connections. Chalked it up to age. The universe works in mysterious ways. Out of the blue, indeed.

I still haven't read "I, Poet" but I've been carefully eyeing it along the edges, cleaning up the margins with Photoshop and I've posted the scan on this site. Maybe it was the last blue moon that triggered this landslide from the past. Instructions from the universe. Have you done your homework?

Soon I will transcribe the piece, but it is readable as is if you double click on it full size. And on the archival front, it also gave me the idea to post the few tear sheets I've scanned in situ along with the transcription as jpgs. I like that.

Maybe I'll write a poem and call it "Out of the Blue."

UNCLE AL’S CLOUDSCAPE

                        —for Allaudin Mathieu

                        Our referee, our Uncle Al.

                                    —Kirk & Marilyn

One day, Uncle Al

Walked up the hill to his studio.

Dreamily, composing, he looked up—

A cloud, and nothing else in a blue sky.

A cloud;            a quarter rest!

He stopped,               took a one-beat rest.

                                          Allowed

                                    in pause

                            & further

               instructions

from the sky.

                 Sighed,

                   took a step,

                    went  on

              with the

         music

    of his

           life.

UNCLE AL’S CLOUDSCAPE

TAKE TWO:

A cat’s cradle of music finger-weaves the sky.

The bright wind lifts us from the depths,

            carries us,

            cradles us in this taught stringing of days.

The clouds know the ocean,

it repeats the rocking motion.

Remember to breathe.

            Each step up,

            each thought takes us toward the summit.

The interior of the heart, of the eye,

is related to the weaving grasses.

We are kites tugging the wind,

our arms, wings of angels.

Tell us, tell us, tell us:

            climb up,

            climb the mountains of the sky.

We are flying to the mountains of the sky.

Take us up,

            push our legs down into earth.

Take us up,

            so that we may grow back down to the ground.

UNCLE AL’S CLOUDSCAPE

TAKE THREE:

Three notes occlude the distance the ear takes

in knowing the melody of night.

Uncle Al referees

 the sky

arranging clouds to fit the composition.

Ask about harmony and structure.

A composer composes the sky

with a beatific hand to the clouds,

orchestrating the rest stops and black notes

and the wings of cherubs wait their cue.

He wears a gioconda smile as clouds direct the score.

Take a one beat rest. Live in the now

for the now is all that there is.