Life | Health | Entertainment

We Don’t Need Another Nero

How Tina Turner, Fiona Apple, John Lennon and the Ancient Art of Bibliomancy Showed Me a Way Out of 2020 Hell

For reasons beyond my understanding, the legendary Tina Turner recently appeared on my monitor in a spirited, leggy performance recorded several years ago in Barcelona.

Her delightfully unexpected visit took me down a rabbit hole. Soon I was enjoying “We Don’t Need Another Hero” from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, the third installment of the popular post-apocalyptic film franchise from Australia.

It’s been a while since I last listened to the song. And I heard it differently this time, finding the following lyrics especially significant:

Love and compassion.

That day is coming.

All else is castles in the air.

It didn’t take long to wind up in a spiral of free association. I soon realized that most of the nonfiction I write these days is neither love nor compassion — the only two things that really matter in this life. My nonfiction writing, especially during these hellish days of 2020, often amounts to some form of social criticism, mere castles in the air.

Sometimes I remind myself of Archie Bunker shaking his fist at Meathead. Even though I’m far to the left of his views, an old Buddhist saying comes to mind — “People with opinions just go around bothering each other.”

Most Americans are probably exhausted by the daily onslaught at this point.

While many have been kind enough to read my work and even praise it, I know what James Joyce would say about it. He’d call it didactic. And he’d be right. So I worry. Could it be that scribblings like this only add to the noise surrounding our planet — like in the opening scene from the movie Contact?

To paraphrase T. S. Eliot, that’s not what I intended at all. The last thing I want to do is pile up irrelevant screed.

If you’ve come across my articles before, you may already know that I took myself out of the news business years ago because I’d reached a point where I couldn’t see any value in serving as a messenger of woe. The world is infinitely larger than the tiny frame our headlines constructed for it.

I didn’t want to wind up like the newscaster in Simon & Garfunkel’s “7 O’Clock News/Silent Night.” A man whose monotone recitation of current events gives the world nothing. Except one more thing to be depressed about.

Since that defining moment, I’ve devoted myself to literature. Over the years, I’ve had as much to learn as to unlearn. Journalism is about telling instead of showing. It relies on an inverted pyramid. Art requires an entirely different skill set. Digression, retardation, anticipation, conflict, suspense, and a deep interest in character and motivation, to name just a few.

Nevertheless, some of the things I learned as a working journalist in both print and broadcast media are entrenched. From time to time, those skills have helped put food on the table. They’ve also helped me to create a blog, which many publishers require these days as proof of a writer’s “platform.”

In the meantime, I do what Henry James said novelists and short story writers always do. We work in the dark. We do what we can. We give what we have. But I never intended to reprise the role of negative messenger, the town-crier from hell.

Nero’s Fiddle

By now, most of us know that the story about Nero playing the fiddle while Rome burned is apocryphal. A compelling storyline in the 1951 film Quo Vadis helped fuel that myth. The masterful Peter Ustinov gave us an emperor of Rome we could hate for centuries.

We also know that it’s easy to compare Donald Trump and other “leaders” to that ancient emperor on any number of issues. Climate change, the pandemic, war, pestilence, racial unrest, tyranny — you name it.

But none of these metaphorical arguments seem to make much difference in our individual lives. We’ve dug into our phoned-in bunkers and nobody but nobody will ever change the way we feel. Right?

That sentiment seems a perversion of nothing’s gonna change my world, from “Across the Universe,” by Paul McCartney and John Lennon. But it wouldn’t be the first time. People have often used that song as an excuse to drop out and tune in. Others, as a rationale for getting high on drugs.

I knew of a guy out West who used the song as a mantra. He believed he could change reality through disciplined meditation and thought control. He eventually broke up with his wife, blaming her for his lack of spiritual progress.

Then there’s the explicit, perhaps heavy-handed, commentary in Fiona Apple’s video version of the song with images from the 1998 film Pleasantville. In that story, the inhabitants of a black-and-white 1950s TV-world become violent when color is inevitably introduced. For them, nothing’s gonna change my world means using brute force and violence to hold onto the outdated reality they’ve always known.

These different perspectives on that one song remind me that Art opens the door to interpretation. It acknowledges our desire for freedom and gives each of us an opportunity to find meaning within ourselves.

Art is very different from know-it-all arguments that berate and bemoan today’s so-called leaders. At some point, we just get tired. No doubt most Americans are exhausted by the daily onslaught at this point.

The COVID-19 pandemic is surely our most pressing health concern, but perhaps the political divide, which feeds on emotionally driven, social-media polarization, has become our most pressing mental health issue.

That’s why we don’t need another Nero. It’s also why we don’t need another social critic either. Not even me.

Instead of talking about the things we hate, maybe it’s time to start talking about the things we love. Instead of imagining hell, maybe it’s time to imagine heaven.

The Ancient Art of Bibliomancy

Even though I do most of my reading on an electronic device these days, I keep a lot of books around the house. Every room looks like a miniature library. I love the look, feel, and energy of books, even though I’ll probably never be able to read all the ones I’ve added to my collection over the years.

One of the reasons I keep them around is for bibliomancy. That’s a fancy word that describes the practice of opening a book at random and reading whatever that page has to say. Some people do this for the purpose of divination, to tell the future. Many use the Bible as a fortune-telling device in this way. There’s also the I Ching with its prescient Confucian hexagrams.

But you can do it with any book. And depending upon the book you choose, the results are astonishing. Often, the words on a randomly opened page seem to speak directly to an issue or circumstance in my life.

The deeper and more profound the book, the greater the wisdom revealed in any blindly selected passage. I have no idea how or why this works. But it fascinates me.

Biblio, by the way, hails from the Greek word for book. Mancy is from the Greek word meaning “divination by means of.”

A New Way of Seeing

While these thoughts about Nero, Tina Turner, social criticism, and my blog were rolling around in my head, I opened a book at random and read these words:

I see the planet healed and whole, with everyone fed, clothed, housed and happy.

Say what? The section goes on to suggest thinking in terms of positive solutions for the highest good of all concerned. Not just our immediate family and loved ones. But everyone.

When I was growing up, we called this prayer. Sometimes we did it in Latin. Sometimes in song. Either way, it felt good to envision, even for a moment, a world that is whole, healthy, and healed — three words that all come from the same root, from which the word holy also derives.

Each of these words can be traced back to the Old English word hālig an adjective derived from hāl (‘whole’), which meant uninjured, sound, healthy, entire, complete.

A Confession

Speaking of prayer — that lifting of the mind and heart to God — I might as well confess that there are some people on the world stage today that I’ve been tempted to hate. It’s been difficult for me to include them in my prayers. Or even to see them as my brother, a child of the Universe like myself.

It was easy to pray for Barack Obama because he was personally likable. I didn’t always agree with his policies. But I admired the way he handled the presidency, the way he “represented” African Americans and all Americans.

Despite many disagreements with the policies of George W. Bush, who lost the popular vote in 2000 and started an unnecessary war in Iraq, I also prayed for him, especially after September 11.

But it’s been difficult — very difficult — to pray for Donald Trump.

Here’s the thing: that’s not Trump’s problem. It’s my problem. And it’s my failure for not choosing to rise above my feelings about his behavior and his politics. It’s my failure for not being able to ask that he be made whole, healed of whatever it is that makes him act the way he does. Do I want him to be president of the United States again? Of course not. But I should be able to pray for his salvation.

Imagine

When John Lennon was still on the planet, he wrote a beautiful song called “Imagine,” which is probably my favorite of all his works. He would have been 80 years old this year. And even though he left us much too soon, that song continues to serve as both an anthem and a call to action.

The passage I discovered through bibliomancy is saying the same thing Lennon said in that song.

Think of what might happen if we simply took time to imagine a better world. Instead of wasting time being upset about the one we’ve got.

That’s what I’m going to do on these pages as much as possible — from now on.

As we get closer to Election Day in the United States, it’s easy to descend the staircase into a hell of bitterness, anger and fear. It’s easy to vilify people who think differently from the way we think. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

The poet John Milton tells us in “Paradise Lost,” The mind is its own place, and in it self can make a Heav’n of Hell, or a Hell of Heav’n.

There are bad actors currently yapping and parading on TV who would like nothing better than for us to be at each other’s throats. It’s in their interest to foster discord and to foment violence. They want to use the perceived threat of anarchy as an excuse for authoritarianism.

We’ve all heard the term “divide and conquer.” But we don’t have to let them get away with it.

As it has been said by many a sage from Eleanor Roosevelt to John Kennedy to good old Charlie Brown in Peanuts — ”It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.”

Now seems like a very good time to do just that. And also vote as if the whole world depended on it. Because it does.

Originally published at https://www.jazprose.com on October 11, 2020.

Thanks for reading this piece. If you haven’t already done so, be sure to click on the links to Contact, Simon & Garfunkel’s “7 O’Clock News/Silent Night,” Fiona Apple’s rendition of “Across the Universe,” and “Imagine,” covered by Herbie Hancock, Seal, P!NK, India.Arie, Jeff Beck, Konono N°1, & Oumou Sangare. It’s a beautiful, inspiring piece.

If you found anything of interest in this article, you might want to check out my other recent pieces. Thanks again!