Basic Instincts

This morning I enjoyed reading a newspaper article about Italian immigrant life on the east side of Buffalo during the 1940s. The writer reminisced about a time when people in the neighborhood did not have telephones, but they used other creative means of communication.

Upstairs and downstairs neighbors banged a spoon on the water pipes as a form of code. One bang meant good morning, two bangs conveyed come up (or down) so we can talk, three bangs screamed emergency--come quick! A simple open window allowed neighbors to shout back-and-forth with ease.

During the late 1970s I lived in a vintage apartment in the mission district of SanFrancisco...dark wood, stained glass, history. Toby and Lauren resided two floors above. Up and down the fire escape stairway out back allowed for frequent visits.

During the 1980s I lived on on the lower east side of New York in a turn of the century tenement building, characterized by the bathtub in the kitchen that I painted pink and five flights of steps up to my top floor unit. There was no intercom. Visitors were required to stand out on Sixth Street and shout my name so I could toss them the key placed inside a sock.

During 2002, I possessed two cell phones and two pagers, a set for each of my two crisis counselor jobs. One position involved on-call shifts during the hours when most people sleep. That job is long gone. Yet, an occasional phantom pager vibration or sound wakes me up. As an amputee sometimes feels pain in the missing limb, I too experience a moment of distress when I hear a particular pager tone ringing in somebody else's life.

In an effort to simplify, I gave up my personal cell phone about a year ago. The other day I stopped by my new landlord's place to pick up keys. He had instructed me to find him working on his back porch. When I did not find him there, I felt a momentary wish to be able to call him on a cell. Returning to basic instincts, I shouted out his name and he immediately appeared from the other side of the house. Simple.

Universal Unconscious, Trends, Collars Up

Evidence of strange collar-up phenomenon (NYC, circa 1982).

Healing Is Low Tech

This sounds like a familiar quote, but the words actually flowed from my fingers the other day. Jane commented that the phrase has bumper sticker potential. The artist, Jenny Holzer, might place such a truism on a billboard, Las Vegas neon sign, stone bench. I was a big fan when she began using words as visual art.

Certain ideas and creative trends seem to bubble up in a multiples...universal unconscious as Carl Jung would say. Healing is low-tech could show up as the slogan for some campaign or commercial without any involvement from me. I have seen evidence of this over-and-over in the world of art and media.

Charlie and I once recorded a really bad little song about this idea. Everybody in the world's got their collar up...Everybody in the world's got their collar up...Must have seen it in a magazine...I don't know...I don't know. Somewhere about 1982 this quirky turned-up-collar phenomenon happened for a few months. Now there are too many trends and media to track them that they all blend together.

I recently noticed a curious comment attached to a blogger's rant...No quoters, please. I agree that quotes have been Hallmarkized to death, but bytes of wisdom are shortcuts to a larger world view. Perhaps our possibility for true wisdom has been reduced to the one-line quote.

I admit to this strange habit. I collect these seeds of truth. Just the other day I found myself telling my sister...You can't stop progress. We hear that all the time, but who said it for the first time? It reminds me of another by Albert Einstein...Nothing happens until something moves.

I understand the anti-quoter's sentiment. Be original. Be creative. Be smart. Is that even possible with so many reference points to borrow from. I believe it is in the collage of found parts that true art emerges. The universal unconscious belongs to us all. Picasso said it best back in the early twentieth century...Good artists borrow--great artists steal.

Healing IS low-tech...Breathe.