KELBY IS GRADUATING SIXTH GRADE
May, 2005
Sometimes in my dreams Kelby,
I am high up in the clouds,
trying to find you,
wherever you are.
Down below,
the earth looks like
a tiny, blue white marble.
But I can still see you.
Sometimes you are sleeping
like a cat, all curled up,
not moving a whisker.
And sometimes,
you are all alone
on a green field, tossing a ball
up and down, testing your arm,
trying to see how strong you are.
I’ve always liked
the color of your eyes, Kelby.
They are as kind as a kitten’s.
No one has them but you.
No one.
I love you.
Grandpa
The second poem was written eleven years later upon Kelby’s graduation in 2016 from Oberlin College. As I am fond of reminding Kelby, he is the sole carrier of my genes into the future, so I keep a grandfather’s keen, loving eye on his progress.
MAYBE I SHOULDN’T BE TELLING YOU THIS
For my Grandson, Kelby Spring
Graduation Day, Oberlin College, May 23, 2016
Maybe I shouldn’t be telling you this, Kelby,
but I skipped my own graduation. I spent the day
drinking at the West End Bar.
I’d had enough of school.
I‘d had enough of teachers telling me
what was important, what was true.
Not that I really knew
what was true or important.
All I had was a vague feeling
that I had another life.
That feeling came and went for years,
and then, one day, something inside me
opened so quietly the sound of it
seemed centuries away.
Right then, the world stopped.
I knew the time had come
to let go of the life I was living
and surrender to the one
trying to rise up inside me.
I can’t really tell you how that happened.
All I can tell you is that somewhere deep inside me,
far beyond the reaches of my mind, I changed.
I became who I truly was.
Kelby, I have no idea
what the future holds for you.
But I do know this: there is a part of me in you
and there always will be. And I also know this:
every time you look in the mirror,
a deeper part of you is always
looking back at you.
You have to remember that.
You have to pay attention.
Love
Grandpa
Once I stepped through the looking glass and began speaking, my life and art changed in unexpected and major ways. One thing I was completely unprepared for was that I began to write prose, something I had little interest in for much of my life. I was simply consumed by poetry, and even though I was a very good poet, I was not a very good writer of prose.
When I was a young man I had a job writing a book on data communications and hired a friend of mine who was an editor at a national magazine to edit my prose. As he perused my manuscript, I remember him saying that he didn’t understand how my prose could be so horrible when my poetry was so good, to which I replied I didn’t write my poems, they pretty much wrote themselves.
Initially, my turn toward prose came from a desire to create a non-fiction book on speaking, which I eventually called SOULSPEAK: The Outward Journey of the Soul. It was published in 2002. If it weren’t for the incredible talent and efforts of copy editor Jan Dorsett I never would have completed it. She has edited all my prose since that time, so much so that I have internalized most of her dictums. Yet even today I am sometimes so unsure of my prose that I usually don’t let anything major out of the house without her imprimatur.
I thought that would be about it for prose, but it didn’t turn out that way. During the years 2000-2007, as I mentioned earlier, I was assailed by a series of psychic visitations that almost unseated me mentally, and they would have if it hadn’t been for the arrival of still another visitor, Alice Hickey, an extraordinary psychic who helped me understand what they were all about. As to why they happened in the first place, I’ve come to the conclusion that once I began to speak, the path to my unconscious widened and deepened enough to allow my unconscious to easily rise up and visit me whenever it wanted to do so.
That troubling period is the subject of a memoir I published in 2011 called ALICE HICKEY: Between Worlds (I also published the first edition of Mirrors the same year.)
One of the psychic events that occurred during 2000-2001 was my speaking (along with ADORA and Scylla) of a creation myth I called The Witnesses Log. It came from somewhere deep in the collective unconscious and threw me completely off balance. I knew it was true but I also knew it had no roots in what I knew as me. If SOULPEAK changed all my ideas about poetry, The Witnesses Log changed them even more.
Let me give you a brief summary of the myth and then the myth itself. You can judge for yourself.
The myth’s primary contention is that we became human not when our skeletal structure changed, or we began to use fire, or tools, or logic, but when we began to create stories. When we became witnesses to creation.
The myth implies that all the things we have come to see as particularly human: tool-making, belief in God, knowledge of good and evil, logic, language, came out of this inexplicable and unprecedented change in our previously animal consciousness.
This change has never occurred again in any of the thousands of animal species we are aware of. We are the only animals that can say: This happened, or more spectacularly, Once upon a time.
Although we hold stories in small regard today, preferring the logic of science, the myth is very clear that it is our ability to witness—to observe, and to report—that distinguishes us from the animals, indeed from the very animals we evolved from. This change from animal to human consciousness, according to the myth, occurred when we became aware of the Listeners, an invisible, unapproachable, felt presence we sensed as having an unknowable interest in our feelings.
The myth is very elusive, as a good myth should be, about the exact nature of our relationship with the Listeners. But it is very clear that it was our awareness of the Listeners’ existence that brought about our sudden change in consciousness, a change that has absolutely no counterpart in all of evolutionary history. Everything else, including the change from fins to fingers, is small potatoes.
The myth goes on to say that once we became Witnesses, we also became aware of a second metaphysical presence: the Visitors. Unlike the passive, unknowable Listeners, whom we might think of as the truly unknowable, or the Gods before there were Gods, or perhaps our previous animal consciousness, the myth portrays the Visitors as continually coming into time: think of spirits, visions, angels, demons, aliens, poems, prophecies, intuitions.
The myth then goes on to say that the appearance of the Visitors caused a further development in the consciousness of some of the Witnesses: they became Dreamers, which is the myth’s term for those capable of directly witnessing the psychic world. Think of Black Elk, Buddha.
Early human consciousness was one in which all of these intelligences were in free interplay within our conscious and unconscious minds, if we can use Jungian terminology for a moment.
You might say if you took off the top of the head of very early man, these are the players that would be inside. Essentially, these intelligences were in free float, constantly influencing one another.
That free-float was what allowed us to know the world by feeling it rather than logically explaining it as we do today. That ability is no longer with us, at least in the ancient sense.
Rather it is buried beneath our current modern consciousness, where it has been receding since the advent of writing and all of its stepchildren.
The myth, The Witnesses Log, follows. It is in twelve sections. This is the written version which I transcribed from the oral version. You can hear that oral version as well as see an animated version of it by Googling: justin spring books guide to alice hickey
The Witnesses Log
I
In the beginning,
there was nothing.
Only the sound
of darkness.
And us.
We were like moss
clinging
to the mountainside.
We were waiting
to be remembered.
We were
waiting
for the sun.