“Influences”

                                     “To them I’m just the guy

                                                              with the books and the sax --.

                                                                             just figure I can’t afford anything

                                                                                                              more than T-shirts and jeans.” – M. Easton

Let Your Voice Be Heard:

Advice from the Poet in Michael Easton’s “Influences”

Throughout history, there has been an attempt to allow only certain classes of people to have a voice. Initially, of course, only those in the upper classes were taught to read and write. The growth of the commercial class spread, and literacy spread with it. But the custom of literary patronage still limited the voices that were heard to the upper classes.

Theoretically, those limitations have been completely removed. With the advent of the Internet, anyone can go to a public library, sign up for a free page, and publish anything he or she wants. Anyone can go to a stage at a public park and put on a play, sing a song, or play a cheap guitar.

We can raise our voices here on this site.

So why don’t we?

Easton addresses that question in “Influences.” He tells us that “We’re meant to believe/we should go through life/only to cause/the least possible damage./Keepers of the pond,/simply wading/in waters of mediocrity.”

In any society, a leisure class is predicated on the existence of a working class to support it, to clear the pond of the muck and algae that naturally accumulate and interfere with the pleasures of leisure. The workers, of course, are supposed to toil in unobtrusive silence. It is assumed they are incapable of significant thought and, hence, of voice.

Easton points out that when we do have a thought, we have learned to feel threatened because we know that we are moving off the track that has been prescribed for us and are feeling “out of the balance.” But he has a response:

“Well. Fuck That.”

America is supposedly a “classless” society. We were told from birth that any child could grow up to be president. We were fed an “American dream” in which we could all grow up to be wealthy and successful if we worked hard and played by the rules. But those dreams have turned out to be false. “(T)he rules you’ve cherished/have passed with the night.” It seems so difficult to speak out and hope to change the world because one person seems powerless. But Easton tells us “don’t worry about your purpose.” Unlike Ghandi and Martin Luther King who set out with a specific goal to accomplish, we do not need to feel we have a specific goal.

Instead, we are to avoid becoming stale or subtle. Easton advises us to “let go of reason” and lose our minds. He tells us that when we look beyond the darkness which engulfs the world, we will see through what we are told is the truth. At that point, Easton advises us to “let the poet make the gesture on his own.” The poet would be the artist inside of us, that part of us that is divine and eternal. If instead of forcing an intellectual interpretation on our deepest feelings and responses, we “lose our minds” and allow that divine eternal soul within us to express itself naturally on its own, it will express itself in joy, not the gloom that is the world around us. “Just sit back, in the beauty of words/and wait for good dreams.”

Let yourself go. Stop thinking and grab what occurs to you – paints, pencils, crayons, a camera, a word processor. Paint, draw, color, take pictures, sculpt, write. Send us the results and share the joy of the eternal that people like us are not supposed to know or express. You have a voice that should be heard and a divinity whose beauty could encourage others. There is no good or bad. There is only IS.

“People like us . . . Well. Fuck That.”

                                                  -- Deb Okey

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debokeystuff@yahoo.com