ART, MUSIC, & THE NINE BILLION NAMES OF GOD WE USE TO SURVIVE…

This was written by Gabe, one of our summer interns. The opinions expressed herein do not reflect those of Civitas other than respect for the value of open dialogue.

i met a man with a typewriter in the middle of the street & he had a little stool & a little table where his old remington filled with five by seven sheets of thin paper sat & he was offering poems on any subject you would request & so i introduced myself & asked for a poem about saint louis because it is the city that birthed me & i am in love with him & i have to leave him for college which frightens me the same way any major change will frighten folks: in waves & i had recently been thinking about that change so when i needed a subject really there was no other option & we talked a little because he wanted to be sure my poem was good & when asked what my major was i told him english & he chuckled in that way you do when you have made the same mistake you can see someone else get ready to make but he seemed happy with his english degree & street poetry & if he was not happy he definitely seemed like he was at least flourishing ( which is more important if we are not lying to ourselves ) & when he had enough information he asked for five to ten minutes to piece something together & on royal street it is not hard to find ways to pass the time & i walked maybe twenty feet to a scattered bazaar of artists demonstrating their craft & working to survive like the rest of us & i bought a small plaque so that i can affix it to the wall because i do not want to forget new orleans & because dorms can feel like prisons without any life pumped onto the walls & i admired it as my new poet friend clicked away & when he was done we talked about poetry & we talked about art & we talked about english & that was all out loud because in the poem he wrote about moving on & not wanting to & he wrote about love & it is the type of love for a place that is true no matter what place you may come from / where sometimes it does not feel like love at all & sometimes you do not love it all but it is still your most important love & hate it as you may nothing can change your relationship & deep down we do not want that relationship to end & it is one of the reasons i am coming back to saint louis after college but this is not an essay about coming home or where you are from this is an essay about survival & love & there is not any singular way to love / which is phenomenal news for a universe as vast as our own & what is love is an irrelevant distinction / because what love entails is quite normally the same ( albeit with different lenses ) 

& i create & though i may say i create for numerous reasons / it all stems truthfully from love & this is true of most all creation & it was certainly true of the second hand string band which was on royal street as well & they were playing down by the riverside ( study war no more ) which i had listened to a couple of times on the car ride south into new orleans & i like that song not only because i like pete seeger but because i like what is being sung – I am gonna lay down my sword & shield / down by the riverside / study war no more – it is a call for peace but it is also a rejection of the world we live in & our history is marked by war & violence & we have entire spaces dedicated to the antebellum or the post war / which is all well & good but where do we exist outside of warfare? & the world we live in unfortunately does not give us many options & down by the riverside is a prayer for a world that can be / not the world as it is 

& i got a tarot card reading outside the front façade of saint louis cathedral & the whole time i wondered how jesus felt or if he even cared that i was doing this in front of a space built for him / but i’m a religious pluralist & all faiths are valid & so jesus can disagree if he so pleases & ( hypocritically i suppose ) i sometimes doubt the validity of tarot & it was only fitting i suppose for the cards i pulled to be weirdly accurate ( more so than just randomness ought to allow ) but even if it was random / even if the woman who told me how to interpret the cards was making everything up / there is absolutely something valid in the underlying message she was telling me: this too shall pass & peace is on its way & success will come but it may not be so easy to achieve which is a thread that can be found in effectively every religion from hinduism to satanism & arthur c clarke wrote a short story with a group of monks who wanted to record every possible name of god & they estimated roughly nine billion names 

& i like to agree with those fictitious monks because how wonderful a thing to have that is so all encompassing you need nine billion names for it & i have had a weird relationship with god / as have most of the people i know & some of them reconciled & some did not & it is not my place to comment on their journeys but i am entitled to reflect & comment on my own & we live in a world that wants to be very specific / to use precise language for imprecise phenomena & there is a tendency to separate truths of the universe & of the earth & of ourselves which makes sense but there is something more there & we live in a world made of a hyperconnected web of life & why do we try to fight our dependency on it? & there is no line between art / religion / science & all are to be aesthetically pure / ritually powerful / based on practical truth to enhance human life & there is a moral here somewhere i am sure of it & growing up i never foresaw myself being a religious person & that was because i did not understand what god really meant & this is not a man floating in space judging us / god is art / music / nine billion other names we use to survive & thrive 

& there is a hindu term: namaste & it means the reflection of god in me honors & respects the reflection of god in you & a lot of people use that only for people which makes sense though i challenge you to apply it to the other facets of your life / to search for god living in all things of this universe. 

namaste.