Dark Side @ 50
I don’t remember the first time I listened to Pink Floyd’s, Dark Side of the Moon, but it still provides a relevant perspective for this 21st century “earthbound misfit, I.” From heartbeat to heartbeat it invites me, still, to forty-three minutes of candle lit soundscape that helps me be not be afraid to care. If, life is all I touch and all I see, it is no less mystical, and that may be good enough. Turn it up to eleven and tear off the knob. As I’m growing older but not up, (hat tip Jimmy Buffett), I’m ever aware how the bands I’m in are playing different tunes.
Bands need to play different tunes, but I want to believe there is something about the spirit, the melodies of what drew bandmates together, that don’t change. When it does change, and it does, it is often money, power struggle, creative difference, or a growing loathing of having spent so much time together and still misunderstood. And unlike 22 minute sitcoms, friends or family don’t make up easily. Staying in relationship, when one’s life depends on the other or not, creates the sad saxophone that leads to “Us and Them.”
Stories change with the passage of time. Narratives need to be challenged for accuracy as new facts are uncovered and society matures, so that we can separate truth from mythical truth because myth, like parable or fable, are meant to teach, to help one glimpse truth though not factually true themselves. When myth becomes the only truth, it is even harder to manage the “brain damage” of our own opinions, facts, and perspectives that are part of the 21st century. We are more judgmental than curious. More siloed, divide, unable to be in tune, and recognize that the sun is eclipsed by the moon. We seem caught in that spiral that Lin-Manuel Miranda put into Alexander Hamilton’s lyric, “Or will the blood we shed begin an endless cycle of vengeance and death with no defendants?”
The bands I’m in are playing different tunes. I don’t think that makes me more conservative than when I was younger. I’m as liberal now, more so really, than I was in my younger years. That liberalism isn’t reactionary like it was then. There are fewer places this old GenX’er seems welcome if siloed religion, politics, virtue signaling, or economics aren’t your thing. Everyone is triggered these days. It seems like this Nation, and in someways the world, are caught in a loop of this scene from a Monty Python film, “Life of Brian.”
You don’t have to be “PC”, “woke,” or “right wing” to recognize that no matter where you turn these days, you are either the complainers or the Romans. Liberators, colonizers, or some other kind of freedom fighter.
Politics: (local, State, and National)
Religion: De-Churched, Evangelical, Mainline, Catholic, Interfaith, my denomination too.
Economic
Race and Ethnicity
Sexism, Identities, DEI programs, oh my!
Dark Side of the Moon reminds me that finding practitioners of good will and good faith across the divide is one of the things that matters most, to me. One breath. One person. One story at a time.
And if the cloud bursts, thunder in your ear
Roger Waters, “Brain Damage.” Dark Side of the Moon, EMI London, March 1973.
You shout and no one seems to hear.
And if the band you’re in starts playing different tunes
I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.