The View

As I have said in another blog I have my mother to thank for starting me out as a young child taking a real interest in gazing at beautiful views.  Not every child has a platform built into the lower forking of a large tree with steps leading up into it and benches built on the sides where on can sit and take his ease and gaze off over the hills and dales of rural Iowa.  But then not every child is somewhat crippled from a fall and unable to engage in sports, for whom viewing became as they say a spectator sport.  So now we fast forward to this old gent at eighty four sitting in the elaborate garden he has constructed at the house which he and his husband have currently placed on the real estate market in Massachusetts.  He sits on a bench at the edge, holding his coffee, and gazing.  An hour goes by, and he has not moved, has not picked up reading materials.  No, he is simply staring.  Move the locale to Florida and there he is on the third floor of his condo out on the screened in deck gazing across the roofs, through the fronds of a giant palm at the roof of a mall department store and beyond into the blue, blue sky.  He holds his cup of coffee and stares, as maybe an hour again goes by.  I call this meditation although I realize I am not practiced in what I gather are systematic methods of meditation.  I just stare into the view that compels me out of my ego, as I like to think, away from my anxieties, off somewhere.  Not exactly an LSD trip, although slightly reminiscent of one, if I remember rightly the one and only time I participated in an experiment with lysergic acid at Boston Psychopathic Hospital, a paid guinea pig for Timothy Leary.  Looking off into space, you lose yourself.  It is a wonderful exercise for coming to grips with the inevitable delays of modern technological life, the wait on the tarmac, the failure of the signal system on the Red Line, the grid of traffic that delays your luncheon date for forty minutes, the list is endless.  The goal is to move beyond having a book to read, desirable as that is, of course, but no, one wants to surrender to nothingness, to stare into space, whatever the space, make it become blank.  The spring greenery of my garden, the rose bushes laden with impending blossoms, the poppies opening up their redness right now, have to blend into a seamless mass, ditto the sky and the roofs and the palm tree, as one is drawn seductively into the great beyond and the vast pool of serenity.  And yet . . . . and yet, there's disco.  I guess I should say dance, which for me began with the all-intoxicating, mind-obliterating boogie woogie, swing, the lindy hop, of the forties, went on into the twist and god knows what else at the beginning of the sixties and out and out disco in the seventies when I and a one of our female graduate students used to close the disco not far from Boston University night after night, when I was not out dancing at that giant disco which had been made in the space that previously held the Bunny Club, a dance hall where I first saw in a very mixed homosexual/heterosexual setting incredibly good looking males taking off their shirts when they danced with their dates and seemed to be sniffing something again and again off the back of their hands.  Disco, yes, I could have danced all night, and even now when I hear disco music I begin to vibrate all over, want to dance, want to lose myself in the rhythm, that beat, wow, even as I type I feel it.  Watching "The Normal Heart" and listening to the disco music and those gorgeous guys (were there no just plain looking males in the gay movement in Manhattan?  No wonder they could not keep their hands off each other!) I started to twitch in rhythm, much to the disgust of my husband who seriously believes that an eighty-four year old man who has trouble with his balance might move on beyond that.  Hey, I get lost in those rhythms.  It's as good as staring into space.  Just another exercise in the Dionysian.