Tied

by Rick Bailey

Sometime after I started teaching, I bought a couple ties designed by Jerry Garcia. They were splashy, artsy-looking things (Jerry Garcia was an art student before he became a legendary guitar player). What was fun was to flip them over and show someone the name on the tag. Jerry Garcia, they would say. He makes ties? Then came delight, appreciation. How about that. Which was exactly how I felt.

I’d seen Jerry Garcia the guitar player once, on Sunday, April 4, 1976, in a concert in Page Auditorium at Duke University. If you had asked me at the time, I couldn’t have hummed one tune by Jerry Garcia or the Grateful Dead, but he was already a very big deal. I played some guitar. I thought I ought to hear the man play.

Play he did. Not with The Grateful Dead that night, but with The Jerry Garcia Band, which, besides him, was not much of a band. His playing was fluid and melodic and inventive, not the least bit psychedelic. (He and the Dead were famously from San Francisco, so I had kind of expected it might be.) As I  remember, the concert was actually kind of boring. What was all the fuss about, I wondered.

There’s plenty of fuss still, so much that I recently discovered I could go online and find the set list of the concert I saw that night and also find live recordings online of that exact band, on that exact tour, within a few weeks of the concert that night at Duke. When I clicked to play a few of those recordings, my reaction was much the same: ho-hum. What stands out in my memory that night, in fact, is not Jerry Garcia. It’s the bass player, whose name was John Kahn.  He stood next to Garcia, his right hip cocked, a crook in his left knee, all but motionless the whole night, except every so often he would lift his left foot (he was wearing boots), really heft it, about six inches off the ground, probably accepting a good jolt of musical electricity or putting a juicy touch on his bass line. But what it looked like, why I waited for the move, what it looked like was that he had a wad of gum stuck to his boot, and he kept rocking back and pulling up to see if he could get his foot free to take a walk around.

I was wearing one of my Jerry Garcia ties at a colleague’s funeral many years after that concert when, slipping away to use the restroom, I looked in a mirror and saw, really saw my Jerry Garcia tie, as if for the first time. On what had appeared to be a splashy, artsy-looking thing, something now suddenly came into focus: a penis.

There was a penis on my tie. It was unmistakable. It was a pure Gestalt moment, suddenly seeing an image, in total, for the first time, and being completely unable to unsee it.

#

I first saw the word “Gestalt” in the title of a book Jim Williams was reading. Jim was a pal of Dan Timmons. They lived together the summer of 1972 in a rented house on Flajole Road. Dan was riotous. He drank a lot, he smoked a lot of weed, he laughed his head off, he laughed his whole body off, all the time. No one I knew ever had more fun than Dan.

I had run into him that summer at my pre-induction experience, sponsored by the United States Selective Service System. We had both been drafted. At the break between the mental and physical exams, ever the anti-crat, he suggested we go have a drink. “This is Detroit,” he said. “There must be a place nearby.”

I followed him out of the facility and around the corner to the Bat Lounge, a name that pleased him greatly. It was four years since the Tet offensive, three years since Woodstock. The US was well into its long bloody grind to the conclusion of the war. That year 49,514 men were drafted in the US (a total of 1,857,304 were drafted from August 1964 to February 1973). I ordered a draft beer. He had two whiskies. We talked about our options. I had a doctor’s note: busted femurs full of metal. He had a plan, which was to just say no. He was totally confident.

Those summer nights when I arrived at the place on Flajole Road, Dan always said I had just missed the Flajole Road Marimba band. I don’t remember seeing any musical instruments, unless a bong qualifies as an instrument. Many nights, perched on the end of the sofa, Jim sat reading his book about Gestalt therapy. Dan was hilarious; Jim was serious. Dan was in constant motion; Jim was still. Jim had both light and trouble in his pale blue eyes, and concentrated energy. He turned his gaze inward, concentrating on something–on himself, on enlightenment, on his trouble. Whatever it was, it absorbed him completely, like a black hole.

“What is it?” I asked him one night.

He nodded, like he understood the question and he wanted to ponder it.

I waited.  He sat there shaking his head.

“Gestalt,” I said. “What is it?”

“It’s this thing,” he said, “about unity.”

What unity, I was going to say, but just then Dan started yelling from outside, “Bottle rockets! We got bottle rockets! Let’s blow them all up at once!”

I stood up and ran outside, the only sensible course of action. Jim stayed back, thinking.

#

The man we said goodbye to at that funeral was tall and lanky. He had large hands and a long acquaintance with basketballs. He was an occasional poet, meaning he wrote poetry for occasions. Otherwise, in sensibility, in heart and mind, he was a full-time poet. Years before his death, a stroke robbed him of some language capacity. He would speak, and in his speech, you would hear the man, his pleasure in language, his beautiful deep voice, his infectious laugh, but when you spoke back to him, he would say, first in frustration, then a kind of sorrow, finally with resignation, I can’t hear you. He would shake his head, trying to explain. I just can’t hear you. As years passed, he spent long hours in the backyard, whole summer days polishing Petoskey stones.  Every one is poem, he would say. They were beautiful.

At this funeral, one of the eulogists got up and read Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem, “Dirge Without Music,” a rejection of consolation, a controlled expression of fury at death.

The answers quick & keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,

They are gone. They have gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled

Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.

More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

I sat there wearing a tie with a penis on it. My colleague would have approved.  His eyes would have lit up. Dan Timmons would have laughed his head off. Jim Williams might have managed a mournful smile. And somewhere, musician and fashion designer, Jerry Garcia was playing the guitar and laughing.

Rick Bailey's work has appeared in The Writer's Workshop Review, Skive Magazine, Fear of Monkeys, and The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine.

From the Book of Records:

Script and verse  Symbioses and interspecies collaborations:

Reflections on Pollinators and decomposers.

by Ladislav Hanka

Esoteric traditions speak of an Akashic Record in which all things are recorded and accessible to those who’ve earned the right of entry. Here you see a fanciful entry in that book of records, opened to the page of decomposers and pollinators.

In the great cycle of being, creation and decomposition are but two sides of one coin. Bees pollinate and plants reconfigure the molecules that soil fungi pry loose from the dead and release back into the system. Of course, bees are in trouble and Bee Trees are increasingly rare. Crops are now threatened by a paucity of pollinators. Even the once resilient decomposing side of the cycle is now weakened by pernicious pollutants that have no obvious chinks in their armor and thus are not easily broken down. 

I’d like to do something about all of that, but I am neither scientist nor politician. I am an artist and a beekeeper – thus an active dues-paying member of two ancient esoteric brotherhoods.  So I draw pictures. When I do so, I feel in touch with creation and most fully alive.  When I open a hive, it isn‘t so different. My attention is clearly upon the sound of 30,000 buzzing creatures, each with a venom-filled stinger, getting increasingly disturbed as I reach in and pull out their winter stores. I read the ledger of their lives in frame after frame of brood and honey in order to manage the hive. Since I rarely wear much more than a T-shirt and shorts, I must also be sensitive to their communications or suffer the consequences. In both of these callings, as artist and as keeper of the bees, I am entering Primordial mysterious worlds that are at once alluring, and potentially dangerous. 

You see before you my two interests combined:  The etchings are made in the usual way, but then I insert them into the hive for bees to add the next layer. Sometimes they chew up my artwork and pitch it out of the hive alongside their excrement and dead.  At other times they join forces with me to co-create. If I cover my work with a thin translucent layer of melted bee’s wax, it smells familiar and they tend to accept it. If I attach some burr comb, they seem to like that even better and often initiate work right there – adding to it or recycling it and moving it around.   Let them go long enough and they’ll cover it all with capped honeycomb or perhaps they’ll chew it all up.  Take it out at just the right moment and the results can be an unpredictable collaboration of sublime beauty.

Ladislav Hanka lives in Kalamazoo and shows his prints and drawings internationally. He examines themes of life, death and transfiguration – nature as the crucible in which man finds a reflection of his own life and meaning. See more about Ladislav on our Hours page.