Biographical Fragment #1

I intuited something wrong about the game of life I was growing up into. The perversion of greed and lust on the faces of men and women, the unknown-to-me quality of need, the sorrowful darkness of a life driven to desperation in order to race and achieve purposeless aims At age six, I recall thinking how thick the cloth that man drapes upon himself and his senses with his own twisted thoughts. Also at that time, I was engrossed in understanding the basis of what reality appeared to be against what the raw input of the senses told me. It all seemed incongruous, and Mom and Dad seemed to be sure that life was something that I had completely opposite perceptions of.

I was horrified by life as a youngster, my sensitive eyes opened widely and a deep inner cry took seat in the halls of my own internal Sanhedrin as I looked out from above those eyes at a life filled with what I now know to be the common sickness of lust greed and sloth, those three tests meted out in exacting force by the Holy Master Himself. Later, as I came to understand the sounds that came from my parents bedrooms, the whole picture of life unfurled in front of me like an ancient tent-dwellers hanging scroll, portraying the three poisons of greed, anger and delusion, and how their seeds spiral out of control to produce a fantasy vision of life which all at once struck me as absolutely not the vision for my own future, as I always felt that in the past I had known something more recondite and certainly more interesting.

I remember that, at age eight and above, after class and practice and usually before composing, I used to ride my bicycle to nearby Cunningham park which had a massive green and a backwoods for discovering the old forested regions of a bygone Queens, NY, where I would sit on the grass for hours, cross legged, meditating and extracting the soul from its fragile bonds with the body. How did I learn to do this? None of my youthful friends did this, they often told me I was “weird”, in the language of a bicycle-riding skateboarding gangland of post-post-holocaust Jewish youth. Oftentimes, seagulls would land around me and just stand there in a circle, which I wouldn’t notice until my physical eyes returned. I recall the wonder of that infinity, of traveling the vast expanse of the universe, and riding the breeze of God’s magnificent creation. And especially, I noticed that upon return, I would have no recognition of whom I was, and sometimes it took a few minutes to remember that I was Daniel David Feinsmith, a Jew, a musician, a little kid, and I lived on 173rd street in Flushing, Queens. All of this always came as a shock. Finally I would be able to ride