More on Prince...

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He showed up at the party at about one o'clock...I think. Mitchell Kaplan, T's former English/Writing instructor who now runs the Miami Book Fair, was at the party, and he glimpsed Prince standing behind a pillar at a guest house over to the side. Was he waiting for a sign from the band setting up onstage? It was very strange...just a small, familiar silhouette. I didn't see him make his way to the stage--I was trying to get a Diet Coke for T. Then suddenly the stage exploded with music, and he was playing "Come Together" by the Beatles, I believe. Most of the songs he played were by other artists, but toward the end, he hauled out some of his familiar pieces. I was standing about fifteen feet away from his microphone, but because of the crowd I had to lean sideways a bit to see him.

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This is where you have permission to call me crazy. I've told you guys that I've done a bit of aura reading. Laughter permitted. Even I don't know quite what to make of the phenomenon. Please feel free to consider me deluded. But don't call me a liar--that would be inaccurate. I see something around living things--more around animals than plants, more around plants than, say, chairs. Often it isn't much more than heat-shimmer, like the air above boiling water. Sometimes its kind of like organelles in an amoeba. And other times there are spikes of sharp light. Once, it was a shift in the visual field until I saw something like one of the big heads on Easter Island. Sometimes it's more kinesthetic, or even auditory--hard to explain, but there seems to be a correlation between the visual/kinesthetic/auditory and actual impressions of character and energy. I had no idea what I'd pick up (or hallucinate that I picked up) for Prince. I have extreme respect for him, and consider him to be one of the great artists and entertainers in human history. And what did I see in his aura..?

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Nothing. I mean, nothing. He was lively, his guitar playing was superb, vocals dead on, apparently completely committed to the music (he encouraged us to stop looking at him...to just dance and enjoy ourselves). But there was no one home.

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You know, in a way it reminds me a bit of the first aura I ever saw, Sri Chinmoy's. Before I ever glimpsed it, I watched him get off his plane at LAX, and was wierded out: he walked as if he was a marionette. As if he didn't live in his body. Later study suggests that the outer edge of human awakening (the step prior to Enlightenment) involves similar perspective, the viewing of the body as a temporary sheathe, allowing ease of movement into a state some call "out-of-body".

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Look--I glimpse the edge of this stuff, but don't claim to understand it. But this man can pay a million dollars a month for his West Coast digs. He has written literally thousands of songs, over a hundred of which are damned near standards. He moves perfectly (watched him dance? Listened to Charlie Murphy talking about his basketball skills?) and despite an extremely childlike demeanor, has mastered the physical game enough to turn himself into one of the richest men in the world on the basis of his creativity, and ability to tell major record companies to go fuck themselves. Remember when he turned himself into a symbol? A brilliant revolt against people who thought they could control his name and image.

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The first time I thought there was something different about Prince was when I listened to his song "I would Die 4 U" and realized it was a gospel song. My reaction was: "What the #$@@??" Here's this profane, hypersexual artist, who apparently had an exremely deep Christian belief system. As you know, I believe Christianity to have a deep anti-sexual vein running through it, triggering massive guilt in many people about their basic drives. I'd noted the same thing in a certain extraordinarily talented and prolific horror writer: sexuality and faith pulling in slightly different directions. Or powerfully different directions. Ripping a hole in the very fabric of consciousness. And what lies below is a seething ocean of creative magma.

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Harlan Ellison has a bit of this quality. In fact, most creative people do, to one level or another. But what I had a chance to see, or sense, here, is something phenomenal. It is what Micheal Jackson would have been had he had a chance to develop more naturally. That is a wrenching sadness.

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What is the phenomenon I see? I don't quite have a name for it. Call him a "Mundane Bodhisattva" if you will. My mind is a little blown right now...

And again, I am perfectly aware of how nutzo this sounds. I'm just reporting my experience. Whether or not it gels with your reality is up to you.

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Hillary is conceding tonight. I consider her an old-fashioned politician, and the fiercest fighter I've ever seen. But she was going toe-to-toe, while Obama was bobbing and weaving. I don't like politics precisely BECAUSE it induces people to do some of the things I saw in this race. I never took it personally--not the assassination talk, the comparisons to Jesse Jackson and other subtle and not-so-subtle attempts to racialize him, the insistence that the media and DNC were sexist (even if women) or that Obama had run some kind of hyper-bigoted campaign.

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And I listen to the wounded women, many of whom I have a terrible sense are unhappy in their personal lives, and looked at Hillary's struggles with Bill as representing their own marriages (I've heard the "well, a lot of women have relationships like that..." comment so many times it breaks my heart.) And I've watched, as they become more frantic, how their comments begin to slide into the "a white man doesn't stand a chance"-land of tunnel-perspective.

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And the most sobering thing is my very certain knowledge that if Hillary had been able to pull off some back-room magic and convince the Superdelegates to back her, black people all over the country would have been saying THE EXACT SAME THING. The DNC threw them under the bus. The Clintons ran the most racist campaign in history. Nothing has changed for black people. And threatening to vote for John McCain. Desperation, anger...FEAR. Fear of nothingness. Fear that all the effort, all the hopes and dreams have been for nothing.

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And I would have been talking to my friends and family, and to strangers, trying to get them to understand, to keep hope, to take pride in how far Barack came. Someone had to lose. My personal belief is that he was a hell of a lot smarter than his adversaries realized, for reasons that can be debated. But they are similar to the reasons I think he's going to slaughter McCain: from my perspective, McCain CANNOT see who Obama is. Can't. Too much of Conservative thought is based on the idea that the "playing field" is far more level than I believe it to me. Anyone who thinks race was an advantage for him is suffering the same blinders (from my perspective). Obama has been playing with a massive handicap, and if McCain saw what I see on that level, he'd probably be a Liberal. And he ain't. So chances are very very good that he will make the same mistake Democrats made with George Bush--underestimating his intelligence.

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We'll see. But so far? Wow. Boy's got skills.