Sublimity

“Elixir” | Anthony Satori

“Of all that is good, sublimity is supreme. Succeeding is the coming together of all that is beautiful. Perseverance is the foundation of all actions.”

– Lao Tzu

Golden Moon

“Golden Moon” | Anthony Satori

“You may have noticed that everything we do is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round. The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, because theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same, and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle, and so it is with everything where power moves.”

– Black Elk

The Myth of the Rainy Night

“Piano Keys” | Anthony Satori

“I looked. George Shearing. And as always he leaned his blind head on his pale hand, all ears opened like the ears of an elephant. Then they urged him to get up and play. He did. Shearing began to play his chords; they rolled out of the piano in great rich showers, you’d think the man wouldn’t have time to line them up. They rolled and rolled like the sea. He played innumerable choruses with amazing chords that mounted higher and higher till the sweat splashed all over the piano and everybody listened in awe and fright. They led him off the stand after an hour. Shearing rose from the piano, dripping with sweat; these were his great days before he became cool and commercial. He went back to his dark corner, old God Shearing, and the boys said, ‘There ain’t nothing left after that.’ When he was gone, Dean pointed to the empty piano seat. ‘God’s empty chair,’ he said. God was gone; it was the silence of his departure. It was a rainy night. It was the myth of the rainy night.”

– Jack Kerouac

This text is my own compilation of two entirely separate accounts that Jack Kerouac wrote describing a single rainy night when he and “Dean” (Neal Cassady) watched George Shearing play piano at a jazz club. The more I combed through each of the two descriptions, the more I found them to be almost perfectly complimentary to each other. Eventually, it even started to seem as if Kerouac had deliberately structured them this way: consistently presenting certain elements of the experience in one description that he had left out of (or shaded differently in) the other, and vice versa. Being an avid appreciator of Kerouac’s descriptive writing, I became curious to see how the text would feel if I synthesized these two descriptions into one continuous narrative. It started as a creative exercise, but as I proceeded, it almost began to feel as if Jack had quite purposefully left this puzzle to be found and deciphered later by some especially attentive (and lucky) reader, and that I had by pure good fortune stumbled upon this riddle. Whether he did it on purpose or not, I do not know. But the combined story ended up coming together in such a compelling manner, I decided to share it with you here. I hope you enjoy!

Focus and Simplicity

“Place of Meditation” | Anthony Satori

“That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

– Steve Jobs