The Gospel According to FI (Ian Anderson Version)
. . . one by one, I'm replacing the last of my vinyl and tapes with CD or download. Yeah, I know, I'm Flash fucking Gordon with the technology. I recently wrote here about listening to “Hymn 43” on my newly acquired Aqualung album.
I’ve been playing it often in my car, and far from the mid-life wallow in tearful nostalgia I expected, I really, really, Sally-Field-like-it. I must look like such a fool, flying down the roads in My Little Town, or especially in Ojai, Old Hippie Headquarters, top down, blaring Ian Anderson flute, bopping my head. Ringeaux, my Beetle (to those new to my Vast Reading Public: be creative with the spelling; it’s my car) must be blushing in shame. He is anyway, poor half-lame dear. Down the hill there’s a part of the road that washed out during that wet spot of bother here on the Left Coast last winter. Much inconvenience at best, huge losses to others. The Great State of Arnold has worked diligently on it since then, and being subject someday to a state pension, far be it from me to criticize them. However, in August, there still remains a part of the road without barriers. Big deal, right? An unduly narrow stretch of high-speed two-lane, at a downhill cant, around a tight curve, without lights -- in other words, your basic Hitchcock set for “this is where the car loses control and runs off the road to kill Cary Grant” – it scares the shit out of me at night, when my vision is not its best. I was hugging the right side a little too close, hit a pylon, and popped off a wheel cover which promptly disappeared. My perfect car, a year old, has sustained its first injury. I needs must get Ringeaux to ye olde Dealershippe, where we will get Ye Royale Rip-Offe. Grrr.
Back to Aqualung: I forgot the great song "Wind Up" on it, and its relevance to what I was talking about with a friend the other day: the need of traditional religion’s god(s) for continual praise and supplication. He favors the “pull up your own socks” kind of approach, and I can’t say I blame him. Especially starting with God. Hey, Divine One, you shouldn’t need bucking up from sinful, flawed old me, You know You are the Big Dude. (There is a big exception to this rule in the case of middle-aged Goddesses. The higher the pedestal, the better.)
So Aqualung (we were talking about Aqualung, weren’t we?) has this song “Wind Up.” A schoolboy asks God what He wants, what He's about, and God says that "I'm not the kind you have to wind up on Sundays." I always liked that. In fact, the whole album's religious take probably had some role in my own. Ascribing an ego (and a touchy one at that) to true holiness seems silly at best to me. My beliefs have no more validity than anyone else’s, but, spoiler alert: they follow. I’ve gone back and forth about whether there even is such a Thing as holiness and have come down on the side of (yes, the tension mounts amongst all 00.01 of my readers, and I am eating humble pi over the amount of my earlier error) there being a Something, that has a role in the events of the universe, that I’d like to think is based in love, but in any event asks us to act with kindness. I also am a pantheist – every living thing (why stop there, maybe every atom, maybe the vacuum of space) has a spirit, a spark of the Something. When you combine that, it starts looking like that messy back part of the Mobius strip where the smart guys tape together physics and spiritualism with the Unified Theory, and I’m happy to confess ignorance and get on with my life. With respect, I just don't get the gods that not only need to be wound up on Sunday, but have their winders get involved in my life and my beliefs.
But don't get me started.
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