Willie Nelson and the Nature of the Cosmos

Willie Nelson’s 1973 4th of July Picnic, Dripping Springs. That’s me back there by the trees.

It was hot and a few of us dazed souls decided to cool off in the life-giving waters of Dead Man’s Creek. I’d left my jeans on the creek bank, my paperback copy of Jack Kerouac’s favorite Buddhist text, the Diamond Sutra, tucked inside. When I fetched my pants to head back to the concert, the book was gone. Since the sutra says “words cannot explain the real nature of the cosmos,” I shrugged off the loss.

It was Willie Nelson’s 1973 Fourth of July Picnic near Dripping Springs. On that day I hadn’t yet heard Guy Clark’s song “Desperados Waiting for a Train.” It appeared a few months later on Jerry Jeff Walker’s album, Viva Terlingua, a record that helped ignite Texas’ legendary cosmic cowboy/outlaw country music scene. I’ve been thinking lately about how much I liked the song when I heard it. Clark said it tells a true story of his friendship with his grandmother’s West Texas boyfriend, Jack Prigg.

Back in 1973 it was easy to identify with the young boy of the song. There were a few old Jack’s in my life, too. What I didn’t know then was the lightning-fast nature of lickety-split life. Quick as the click of a conductor’s ticket punch I’ve become old Jack waiting for the train while some youngster is singing, “Come on Jack that son of a bitch is coming.”

Of our youth we like to say, “If I only knew then what I know now.” But that’s a silly thing to say. We are as big a mystery to our older selves as we were to our younger selves. Most of us still don’t know the secret. W.S. Merwin wrote about our blind spot in a poem called “Youth.” Bill Moyers once asked him about the poem and he said, “I can’t see my own face.” He said it was only after he’d first lost himself that he began to recognize himself. He must have read the Diamond Sutra. Merwin ends his poem with this line:

from what we cannot hold the stars are made

The stars are made from what we don’t know about ourselves?  Stars are made by what is missing? Whatever could Merwin mean by that? Scientists tell us it is stars that make us, in fact they make all the beautiful things of the world, from Dead Man’s Creek to Willie Nelson.

"All organic matter containing carbon was produced originally in stars," astronomer Chris Impey says. Years ago, Carl Sagan waxed more poetic: “We are a way for the universe to know itself. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return. And we can, because the cosmos is also within us. We're made of star stuff.”

David Hinton, a scholar and translator of ancient Chinese poetry and philosophy, has some thoughts about all this. He says the ancients already knew about the stars and us.

Let’s walk a bit with Hinton. For those of you who have never been to Terlingua or Luckenbach, who never made it to Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin, let me tell you it’s not such a long walk from Willie’s Fourth of July Picnic to the mountains and rivers of Hinton’s ancient poets. So, stay with us just a little bit further as we see just how short a walk it is from cowboy to cosmic, to the real nature of the Universe. There’s a surprise at the end.

According to a collection of a 2^nd Century BCE essays by Taoist masters, “If you want to know the way of the sky, observe the seasonal cycles. If you want to know the way of the earth, find out what kind of trees grow there.” To hear the connection of that Taoist wisdom to our local heroes, listen to Rodney Crowell and Willie Nelson as they sing a new version of an old Guy Clark song called “Deep in the Heart of Uncertain Texas.” These folks know a thing or two about the ways of earth and sky. They have to.

“The crickets are singing the blue gills are biting
The firefly's are flashing with all of their might
Just forty-odd mile from the Rio Palm Isle
The whole gangs gone fishing on a full moonlit night
We get high on the lake and we float down the river
Get off on the back roads get lost in the woods
Very deep in the heart of Uncertain Texas”

Okay. Hang in. We’re going just to the top of this little hill. How does David Hinton know the ancients of China understood our relation to the stars, sun and moon? He listened to the lyrics of their songs. Check out these old Chinese pictograph elements. The one on the left shows three streams of light coming down from heaven — light from the sun, stars and moon — and it’s the graph for chi’i, or the energy that pervades the universe. On the right is a graph that can mean great, alone, or individual.

Over time, the graph was written like this:

That’s the graph for the Chinese word Ch’an, which we know better as the Japanese word, Zen. I’d been told the book I lost at Dead Man’s Creek was all about Zen. Ultimately, Hinton says, the elements together mean we are the Cosmos, kinda like what Carl Sagan said, except I think it means we don’t have to return. We’re already there.

But what about the real nature of the Universe? Where’s our walk taken us? We’ve got W.S. Merwin telling us that the stars are made of an absence, a space, something missing. And we’ve got modern science and old Eastern philosophers telling us the stars make us. Nothing else to do but turn to composer Claude Debussy for guidance. He said, “Music is the space between the notes.”

Music is the space between the notes. Okay, maybe we give the stars the spaces and the stars give us the notes…

The Universe is a song.

The Universe is the ultimate Roots music.

The Diamond Sutra was right. You can’t read the real nature of the Cosmos. You have to listen for it.