5 | A Guitar, Bakersfield, and the Ecstatic

Welcome to the Cow Behind the Barn: A podcast exploring humanity, the world, and the divine, as experienced and interpreted by an artist. I’m Kevin Caldwell, a co-finder of the Table Collective.

I am experiencing a growing realization that the question I asked at the outset of Episode 2 is merely a step into a vast mysterious world “Where and When Did I Begin”…it is like a mirror in a mythic novel that a character can walk through and end up in a different universe, or a picture on a wall that suddenly draws a character into its scene, pulling them from a calm sunlit sitting room into a tiny sailboat on a wild and lonely ocean.

 

Space, Time, Consciousness

The question “Where and When Did I Begin” carries within it assumptions about space, time, and consciousness. 

Space: the nature of the physical, observed world, and of places in it.

Time: past present, future.

Consciousness: the self, selves, human and non-human, seen and unseen, divine (?).

Which is fascinating, inspiring, mysterious, daunting and overwhelming, all at the same time (whatever time is). 

It is overwhelming because space, time, and consciousness are huge boxes into which we can pack pretty much everything that artists and philosophers and theologians and religious founders and physicists and astronomers and psychologists, and others have considered, observed, postulated, experienced, imagined…and tried to describe. And they have been going at it for centuries, for millennia.

I am seeing in fresh ways as I create each episode, the way that what I have been calling psychic entanglement connects how I see space, time, and consciousness. To say it as directly as possible:

I am convinced that space, time , and consciousness are all entangled, connected, inseparably linked. It does not mean I claim to fully understand any of those three concepts, but I am convinced the threads of each are woven together into one large tapestry, not three separate ones.

As I was bringing Episode 4 to a close, I commented:

“By embracing our psychic entanglement, I believe we become alive, more aware and awake, and also that in so doing we add something into the entanglement, contributing elements that can heal…heal others, ourselves, perhaps affecting in a healing way the vast entanglement of the cosmos through the tiny winds of our souls.”

I have really only focused on space so far, by looking at the way places connect us…a place being one item packed into the box I have labeled “space.” But along the way I have had to repeatedly say things like “we will come back to that”, whenever something related to time, and the nature of consciousness comes up.

There is a lot more to explore about space, and so about places, and the things in places, and how we are entangled with them and they with us, and so, “us with us,” and so on. And I have not even lifted a corner of the lid on questions about what the universe “is”, how it got here, where it came from, whether there is a “something” that started it, or if a Someone was and is involved, and in what way, or even the difference between a something and a someone. 

I have been paying more attention to the more personal aspects of psychic entanglement. However, at this point I think this episode will be my final autobiographical reflection on entanglements with places and things. I think so…but I haven’t finished drafting the episode, and since I have already been surprised a few times by turns my own creative process has taken me, I can’t be too definitive yet.

 

My Father

I had an intuition that I needed to include something about my birth father, Ralph Caldwell, and it would have been a natural spot in the last episode, except that it didn’t occur to me then, and later when it did, I sensed I was already pushing against my self-imposed 30-minute limit.

I have mentioned that as a teenager my dad and my grandmother found my grandfather dead on the porch one morning. I never met my grandfather, but I have learned that he was an alcoholic, probably suffering from PTSD following World War II, and that my dad sometimes had to pick him up when they released him from the “drunk tank”.

In the final years of my dad’s life, I learned first-hand how much all of that affected him. As a kid all I knew was how my dad affected me. And without going into all the details, I will just say he left quite a mark…not physically, but the psychic bruising ran deep and the muscles and tendons and joints of my soul have never had their full range of motion.

My dad loved music. He was an eclectic listener, and no genre was outside of his range. But he was perhaps most deeply moved by folk music, and from at least the early 1960’s owned a nylon string guitar and was constantly learning songs…right up until his final days. 

There are two precious things I received from my father.

The first was one of those books you can buy for your father to fill out, a book full of questions and prompts about their childhood, and family memories, and early life dreams etc. I bought one for him and he filled it out, then I read it, and on visits to see him during the final years of his life, we talked about the things he wrote in those pages. 

The second was his old guitar. The tuning keys were, and still are, a little wonky, and it doesn’t hold its tuning the way it should, but on the other hand, now that it is about 60 years old it has aged and mellowed. As did my father, though I think in this regard the guitar was ahead of him, maybe trying to lead him by the hand…

There is no way to calculate how many seconds, minutes, hours, that guitar was cradled in his arms, held in his hands, touched by his fingers, vibrating with the sound of his somewhat gravelly voice as he sang the songs of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, John Prine, Johnny Cash, and many more obscure artists.

One day a few years ago, I picked up that guitar on a random whim. I cradled it in my arms, held it in my hands, touched it with my fingers. And to my amazement, the guitar made music. I say it that way on purpose. Yes, I was playing it, I am not claiming I was channeling something…but at the same time, it felt like the guitar was making the music. It just “happened”, “emerged”…and so I immediately got my laptop and did a very quick, single take recording of the basic piece. Later I embellished it with other tracks, but I never redid that first take. And you can hear some mistakes if you listen close, and can feel where my tempo changes here and there because I was just playing, without a clock track or metronome.

I am just going to play it here before I say anything more.

 

My Father’s Guitar

I don’t know what you might have experienced, but what I felt, what I sensed in the music the guitar was making was healing. I can’t prove this, of course, but I experience that song as my psychic entanglement with my father’s healing…a healing I know he did not experience during his life-time, but which I think was happening as he played that guitar, as the music he played on it, and so as the music that played in him, worked its own psychic butterfly effects deep within. I believe that the same effects worked in and through me years later on the day I picked it up and cradled it in my arms. And I believe this was adding to his healing, even after his death. 

And old guitar, like the old truck near Omaha in a prior episode, is a thing. A thing in a place. But things, and places, and people are all entangled. I am aware that not all entanglement heals. But that experience with the guitar did bring healing I think, both for me and for my father. Maybe the music from it offers a healing experience for you…in our entangled connection here.

 

Bakersfield

As part of this final, I think, autobiographical reflection on places, I feel like I have to go to Bakersfield. I moved there in the very early 1960’s when my mother left my father. She got a job, remarried, they had a son who died when he was three years old, they adopted a brother and sister. I left Bakersfield after high school, but have in different seasons of life returned there multiple times to live, in between living in Los Angeles, Ca., and Uganda, and Pittsburgh, Pa., parts of Asia. Raised a family there, at least during the final years of launching my kids out into the wild world.

Bakersfield is entangled with me as an individual, and of course with many other people and events. And I wrote a song about that. When I began the song, I imagined it as a story song, a personal one, about my story. But as the song developed, it told another story too, a more cosmic and entangled story about Bakersfield as a personified place, as a being.

This is a home-made recording though there is a version streaming, and as I write this I am re-recording a new version of it as well, so it is out there. But here it is in my do-it-yourself take. I will add a few comments after the song.

 

Bakersfield

I came here in the 60’s when my family blew apart

Mom found a job and a place to live and made us a new start

I grew up on your burning streets, a splinter in my heart

Bakersfield

 

Looking down from Panorama, oilfields melting in the sun

The fog rolled in so thick sometimes they closed all our schools down

And I played like any other kid, but my soul had come undone

Bakersfield

 

In the Chrysler with the man you gave mom and I to start new lives

The night my baby brother died the only time I saw him cry

We took in two new foster kids and together we were five

Bakersfield

 

I see Colonel Baker standing on the banks along the Kern

He’s waiting there for travelers who disappeared and won’t return

He watches water that ain’t there no more, it flows around a turn

Bakersfield

 

Buck and Merle made music here, the Bakersfield sound

Channeled all the souls born in the dust of the Oklahoma ground

They gave words to the hearts of red necked men when words could not be found

Bakersfield

 

Class of 1976, Bakersfield High

I left for Long Beach city, thought I’d left you all behind

But like everyone I know from here I came back time after time

Bakersfield

 

Sometimes things turn out in ways and for reasons not quite clear

We lived all around the world, but you were always near

Now you’re buried in my daughters’ hearts, though they’re miles way from here

Bakersfield

 

On a clear day I can see the south Sierras standing proud

Calling out to all who live down here to leave behind the crowds

But we’re stuck down here on Rosedale in our shiny metal shrouds

Bakersfield

 

Maybe in your future you’ll turn back to the dust

That blew here from Oklahoma with the oilfields and the rust

And people driving up the ‘5 won’t notice you were lost

Bakersfield

 

Or, maybe all those travelers will line up here again

To drink the mountain water that will flow back to the Kern

And the Colonel and Buck and Merle and all the rest of us return

Bakersfield

 

Seems everyone who leaves you, someday will return

 

When a City Gets Personal

In the song Bakersfield becomes a person, it is the “you” of the song. There are lines like ”the man you gave…” “you were always near” “maybe in your future”…The city of Bakersfield becomes almost a mystical reality…a place connecting Colonel Baker, and Buck Owens, and Merle Haggard, and travelers from the past and possible travelers in the future.

And so, in many ways, my instrumental piece, “Father’s Guitar”, and the song “Bakersfield” both serve to connect the dots of the mystery of space, time, and consciousness. I was not really thinking of all that on purpose, or, you might say I was not conscious of it. But it seems to me that consciousness was at work as I created the songs: was that the subconscious? collective consciousness? divine consciousness? You can probably guess what I am about to say: “we will come back to that later…”! 

But I can repeat that I am convinced there is a psychic entanglement connecting space and time and consciousness. Which prompts me to close this episode with a poem. In the poem I use the terms ecstasy and “ecstatic”. Ecstasy is a state of being, and I use ecstatic here, not descriptively (as in “he was ecstatic”), but substantively, as a noun, and so, “the ecstatic”. In the poem both terms refer to whatever or whoever it is that entangles everything,

 

Touch the Ecstatic

 

Touch the Ecstatic

Inside that sway of grass in wind

This pulse, dull eyes, a dusty rose,

There is something.

Ecstatic.

I cannot say, but I know.

Believe.

 

More honest: I only want to live 

If I can believe, and touch.

 

Ecstasy is chaos dancing

            Electrons, protons 

            Morons, skeletons, put-ons 

            On and on, 

            Colliding on pulsing-universe-mystic-strobe light-floors 

            Loved on

 

Ecstasy is a god’s kiss

            Pressed on the first fleshy mouth

            Divine moist intimate breath through parted lips.

            Eyelids flicker open, embrace the gaze of God,

            Entwined lovers in the after-glow,

            In a raw green world

            Satiated

 

Ecstasy is me beside myself

            Seeing inside myself from outside myself

            Myself as myself.

            My own eyes seeing 

            Me for the first time, 

            Tender

 

Ecstasy is joy unbridled

            Lustrous lust, throbbing unholy godliness

            Walking naked carnal 

            Warm in the glow of Eden

            Wiping juice from giddy lips

            With the back of a wanton hand

            Unashamed

 

Loved on, satiated,

Tender, unashamed,

Joy unbridled, beside myself

A gods’ kiss, chaos dancing.

I touch, am touched.

Ecstatic.

 

As I reflect on this episode, and prior episodes, I can see that I am beginning to touch on whether something, or a Someone, is at work in our pre-history, in psychic history, in the psychic entanglement I refer to. 

I plan to stay in the “space” box, the consideration of the nature of, well, nature. But I am going to leave the autobiographical path (to mix metaphors, I mean boxes don’t have paths). 

It will be a little tricky to talk about space without talking about consciousness, and whether there is a big C at the beginning of that word or not. 

But I will try. So in the next episode I will begin from how some of the great religious heritages have understood the nature of the world and whether it is what we think it is or not.

Until next time…