July 10, 2006
Metes
Curious, the word “meditation.” I would not have thought it cognate with “mete,” but there it is, no less than my Webster Collegiate is convinced there’s a certain amount of merit in the idea. A meditation is a kind of mete, a focus of thoughts, a reflection, a pondering, indeed, a sense of measuring neatly as in metes and bounds and not all over the place like this is already becoming.
Perhaps a meditation is not unlike a melody shaping itself around and through a progression of chords or an improvisation shaping itself around and through a melody, the chords flowing underneath it all to guide one along within a certain envelope of their sound. Good lyrics can do that. The great jazz tenor sax player Lester Young said a knowledge of the lyrics is essential for good improvisation, musical meditation. [There’s a new book now about Cole Porter’s classy lyrics, by the by.*]
Folk sometimes kindly, I suppose, refer to these OoN pieces as meditations. Though I rarely think of them that way, I reckon it is fair enough to call them that. For me, they make up a kind of journal of my more or less daily measurings, and that, of course, is what a journal or a journey is about.
Perhaps they are too short to be called essays, though I’d like to think there’s no measure to which a piece of writing must adhere in order to be so called. The cyber lexicon for which there seems little mete or bound has put forth the unfortunate term “blog,” standing, I am told, for “web log.” I should roundly dispense with that word if ever I had the opportunity. It is so tacky.
As it is, though, there is for me what some might call a spiritual air [pun unintentionally intended] about a meditation, though I wouldn’t want to go all schmarmy about it. Spiritual, of course, is a vastly misunderstood word, more inclusive than the narrow way some would take it, but a valuable and useful one, especially with its connotation of breath and particularly of wind. I am willing to confess there is a certain windiness about the OoNs, what some might easily and without any objection from me call “hot air,” and perhaps that is not an altogether inappropriate synonymically spiritual suggestion about these occasional easy pieces. Whew.
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*Robert Kimball, ed, “Cole Porter: Selected Lyrics,” American Poets Project/The Library of America, 178 pp, $20. See review in NYTimes Magazine, 9vii06, p 8.