"Dig and Be Dug"
Last year I sat with students at the University of California and listened to Langston Hughes, an American poet, reading some of his wonderful poetry. I remember that when I was in high school I didn’t care much for poetry. I could think of a lot better things to do than read or listen to poems. I don’t feel that way anymore.
And even in high school I think I would have enjoyed Mr. Hughes’ poems because they are so straightforward and kind of musical. He puts the wonder of living into his poems and he has been able to put into words some of the rhythm of the blues and of jazz and even be-bop. It is in this language that he gives us his motto:
I play it cool
And dig all jive.
That’s the reason
I stay alive.
My motto,
As I live and learn,
Is:
Dig and Be Dug
In Return.
Now I think “to dig” something is to feel it—to experience it with all that is in us. I think this poem is telling me to wake up to what’s going on around me. Let me experience life fully, let me be open and receptive to the music and the poetry in the events, the objects, and the people in my experience.
Well, some of the music we listen to and some of life will be sad and we will sing the blues. Some of the poetry will speak of failure and fear. But some of it will be happy and some of it will speak of love and we need to be ready for all of these kinds of life experiences.
I think it helps if we start by opening up to all of the little experiences of every day all around us and begin to see how much meaning they have—how some are sad—others are inspiring—others are funny. Let us think of some of these experiences with nature and people.
I think the beauty of the fall season and the leaves changing color and falling and I think of the funny things I have read in Peanuts where the dog talks about the falling leaves, or I think about the football season and the fun of going to the game.
Then there are sad things like a little boy sitting on the street curb in tears, his injured dog at his feet, and his father’s gentle hand on his shoulder.
When we have experiences like these, happy or sad, I think there’s an element of wonder in them.
And how much fun it is to recall funny little experiences we have had in the past. Last year I was riding on a bus down the highway by Malibu beach in Southern California and I looked over on a hill and there was a house at the very top of the hill. It had a sign on it which read in large letters, “TOP.” Then I looked further down the side of the hill and there was another house with a sign on it which read, “HI NUF!”
Or I remember visiting Disneyland. Four of us were sitting on the 2nd floor balcony of a Disneyland restaurant having lunch when a very little boy toddled up the stairs and leaned over the rail and waved to his mother down below. He said, “Hello Mommie. I love you. I’m up here in heaven and you’re down there.”
Then there are times that have deeper meanings for us. Do you ever feel that you’d like to be alone—that there are just too many people around and you’d like to get off by yourself for a while? Such a time came about when I took my family out for a picnic at a public swimming lake high in the hills of Berkeley, California last summer. I’ll try to tell it as if it were happening right now.
We spread the white cloth down for the food and sit on a blanket. The grass is wet and the dampness creeps through the blanket chilling our bodies. I watch an ant on the white cloth, which looks larger and whiter because the ant is there. It crosses over and disappears into its own world of grass and earth and shadows. I think that broad green park must seem like the universe to an ant.
A boy is hitting a soft ball out over the wide green ant’s universe. A little girl in a frilly playsuit sits in the grass and cries. Her father is playing ball. He looks at his daughter and says, “Don’t you want to go and see mommie?” “No,” she shrieks as she runs away on her churning chubby legs. She stops and looks back to see whether or not she had been followed. Her father looks bewildered as he picks her up, her cries now muffled in whimpers.
More and more people arrive. They seem so noisy. I think—I must get away, take a walk—there are too many people.
I start around the lake and up the hill, alone. As I get higher I turn in the path and look down on the lake.
Boys in two boats are water fighting. Over the water comes a voice through the megaphone of authority: “Keep clear of the other boats! No water fighting!”
I grasp a battered root in the path and pull myself up. The root itself seems to struggle up the path, clinging to the hard rocky earth above.
Now I am still higher. The noise of the crowd is fainter. Birds are calling with singular notes. The wind runs fingers through the eucalyptus leaves.
The sun seems warmer, or is it the warmth of my body’s released energy? The oily silver sky hovers overhead, running down at its edges to a tree rimmed horizon.
What am I doing here? Learning again to see and feel?
The odor of eucalyptus fills the air, and the lake looks like it is smiling.
I climb even higher and look down on a rock jutting out over the valley below. A boy in army uniform sits there. He is throwing stones at I know not what. He doesn’t see me and I do not speak. Perhaps he is getting away for the crowd as I am.
I am much higher now having continued to climb. I sit down and stare at the lake and the wide green ant’s universe. The people look as small as that ant did. I watch one person on the green. I wonder what he is thinking, what he hopes for, why he is there today.
He walks across the green and disappears into his world of pavement, parking lot, and the shadows of automobiles.
Now I have passed beyond a stand of trees. The earth continues to rise; the top of the hill is hidden in some more trees. I walk through a field of colors. Green stems give way to my feet and spring back to conceal my path.
On I climb and lose myself in another stand of eucalyptus trees. A Blue Jay cocks his head, shakes his comb, and looks at me. He lifts his feathery body on air and leaves me staring into a maze of branches.
Now, climbing higher, I see far below to my right a golf course. The trees there stand in rows.
The fairways heave gently with the rolling earth. The sand traps, like white droplets of paint on a vast green canvas, are so deliberately placed. I cannot see the golfers. They are too far away.
The very top of the hill is ahead! I can hardly wait to get there. I run the rest of the way.
The top of the hill! A barb wire fence stands there, stretching itself across my path in defiance.
Why must there be a barb wire fence?
I turn around and look out over the eucalyptus trees, over the park so far below, over the Berkeley hills.
I see San Francisco, Oakland, the Bay Bridge, the Golden Gate, Marin County, and the Pacific Ocean. It is beautiful, but I have left all of this behind. I want to reach the top of the hill, I want to see the other side…and a barb wire fence stands in my way!
Beyond the fence some evergreen trees shield the view of the other side of the hill from my eyes.
I recall my childhood, going under barb wire fences. There are always barb wire fences!
I crawl under the fence and walk through some spiky bushes. Their thorns pierce my trousers and scratch my legs. They had looked so beautiful from a distance. At the top of each stem blooms a fuzzy purple flower.
They stand close together like a crowd of jostling people, their flowery bonnets waving this way and that in the wind. The wind slithers through the prickly stems and the thorns scratch against the thorns of their neighbors.
Are people like these bushes?
Do we have to see them from a distance before they appear beautiful? When we approach them do they claw and scratch?
I look down the other side of the hill. A world of color and delight springs up and fills my eyes. The hills stretch as far as I can see and a gray river curls its way through them and out of sight. Such shades and colors! Dark green trees paint the smooth hills. Yellow blooms cut patterns on the earth as if dividing the fields into plots for planting.
Red and browns and greens rise in warm waves from the dimpled earth.
I feel that I can run my hands over these hills, smoothing out their hollows and fanning away the mist from their brows.
I breathe in the strength of this solitude.
Suddenly it no longer seems like solitude—I am part of all I see and feel!
That we exist—that we are here at all is perpetual surprise—it is life.
Now I am anxious to get back down the hill, to people, to my family. Solitude is good but it is even better to return to the life of the world among people.
Hurried steps become leaps. After I crawl back under the fence, I run through the trees and across the field—down down down to all I left behind.
I reach the root which helped me up the path earlier. Its sinuous strength flows down to the sustaining earth below.
There is the lake. There are the boats. There is another water fight, the youths splashing and shouting for joy.
I walk along the lake and I see a teenaged boy and his girl trading seats in one of the boats. The boat rocks slightly and the girl falls into the boy’s arms. He holds her there until the boat no longer rocks.
I am full of gladness for water
And rocking boats
And teenagers.
The wide green ant’s universe fills and overflows in waves of life and sound. Beauty and love dance to its rhythm.
Families are there together—families of three races playing and sunning together on a leisurely Saturday afternoon.
The same boy is playing softball. Some girls are playing now. The ball comes their way—they scream and throw up their hands and a boy darts in to catch the ball—a hero is born.
A young couple are playing “catch” on the side of the green. Her hair is black and long, and her smile is brilliant. Her man is laughing with his head thrown back and his chest out.
There are blankets and bathing suits and portable radios everywhere. A group on an outing is singing beneath the trees on a hill beyond the parking lot. As their song ends their laughter sings a new song across the pavement and the automobiles and the baseball game.
There is the same laughter everywhere. Their laughter is the laughter of all men over our earth.
My daughter runs to me bubbling with talk of the beach. She brought me a bunch of flowers. Such a collections of flowers! They are wilted and ragged, a strange assortment of weeds and buds and clover blossoms. But to me they are beautiful flowers because my daughter picked them. Next time we will pick flowers together.
That’s the way it happened. And I can still see those hills and trees and lake and people and that little bunch of flowers.
That was a very simple kind of experience but it meant a lot to me because I was so conscious of everything that was going on around me. I was conscious of the need to get away and be alone for a while, but then to come back to the human family.
Each of you has these kinds of experiences too and it helps to stop and think about them sometimes. I believe there is something religious about this kind of thinking.
Before I stop I would like to play a record, or part of a record for you. The name of this album is “Jimmy Smith at the Organ.” This isn’t a church organ but a jazz organ. The name of the selection is “All Day Long.”
First I’d like to tell you why I have grown to like this selection so much. I learned about it through a very close friend. A man who is now a Unitarian minister—the reverend Ernest Howard. When Ernie was studying for the ministry he was also working part-time with the California State Employment service in San Francisco. He used to get up at 4:00 o’clock in the morning and drive across the Bay Bridge from Berkeley and Oakland to San Francisco. He would be met at the employment office by scores of men waiting to be sent out to do a day’s work in the fruit orchards of California.
Some of these people were really down and out and I have spent some time with Ernie talking with them. Ernie had a real love for these people, an understanding of their troubles, and a sincere wish to help them. He would feel pretty low himself when there were not enough jobs to go around.
At about 5:45 a.m. he would go across the street to a little beat up restaurant and sit there with a cup of coffee watching and talking with anyone who wished to talk.
Nearly every day the same song was playing in that little beat up restaurant. It was Jimmy Smith and his boys on a record, playing “All Day Long.”
From time to time after that when Ernie and I visited together we pulled out the album and played that same selection. That’s the way I came to like it and to secure it after we moved to Rockville.
Robert Levin, writing about the great jazz artists, and he includes Jimmy Smith as one of the greats, says that they never lose sight of the real origins of jazz—in their music you will find the spirituals and gospel songs and the blues.
At any rate I’d like to play “All Day Long,” and have you listen to it. Don’t feel that you have to get anything special out of it. It may sound like nonsense to you and that’s all right. As you listen, make a mental note of whatever you are thinking about and when it is over we will break up into small groups to talk about it, or ourselves, or how we feel about being together as a group or as small groups. We’ll just use this record to relax and then we’ll get better acquainted.
One more word now. This selection is ten minutes long. So if you get tired of listening why you can begin to move to the rear and set up your smaller groups to begin your buzz sessions, and if there are any who wish to listen all the way through they can stay up front.
You’ll notice that this starts with a drum roll—very softly, then a slow bass—kind of walking along. Then guitar and later saxophone and organ. These fellows wail the blues at some length until finally the tune fades away as the boys make their slow sad retreat and all day long comes to an end.
[The Record]
[Buzz Sessions]
