Read Part 1 here
Read Part 2 here

This is the third and final installment of our lengthy interview with musician and visual artist, Michael Garfield.

Many thanks to Michael for providing us with such an insightful and entertaining interview!

09.    Pick one of your favorite pieces (your art or music) and give us the backstory.

“It Hurts So We’re Not Dead” is probably the most profound break-up song in the universe.  I say that with my tongue in cheek, but for a song that came out of the grief of a trial separation, it is quite a primer on The Four Noble Truths.  I enjoy paradox, playing with it…a paradox is, of course, something completely sensible but seen without the missing piece, from the wrong angle, or from not enough angles.  And human existence is like that, because it’s always bigger than you are so you can’t ever get a full figure on it.

So “Hurts” is my attempt to deal with my suffering at lost love by reminding myself that because I’m suffering, I’m still alive – there’s still a quickening, an impulse, a potential, the seed of joy in there, and actually I’m noticing it because I’m in pain.  That intense suffering and intense bliss are really the same door swinging both ways.  On one level, writing that song was just me coping by escaping into heady philosophical abstractions…exactly the opposite of the dive into feeling and depth that I kind of prescribe in the lyrics.  But in the last verse, I tease even my own desensitized wish for deeper and more intense suffering by reminding that even disconnectedness and angst are powerful emotions.

Plus, I wrote this ambiguous happy-song-about-sad-things on the ukulele, which is supposed to be this happy instrument, and I actually got an email one time from an audience member after who disapproved of my using the ukulele to explore emotionally complex concepts…but I had to laugh, because of course that’s the whole point of what I do.  I try to capture the majesty and the misery in one stroke, the mixed blessing of human experience.

10.    Anything else you want to mention?

I’ve been doing a lot of research into the relationships between the human body-mind and the magnetic activity of the Earth and Sun, and learning a lot of amazing stuff.  A lot of people have written off the whole 2012 “thing” as unsubstantiated premodern prophecy nonsense.  But having been trained first as a scientist and then as a multi-methodological philosopher, I can tell you that there is strong evidence from numerous disciplines that paints a very compelling portrait of massive changes for our species and planet in the next few years.  I’ve written about it a little bit on IntegralLife.com, which is a very well-educated community where I was hoping to spark a bit of controversy, but so far no good rebuttals.  The idea is either praised or dismissed…none of the orthodoxy will even “waste their time on it,” even though something of this magnitude bears a certain moral and ethical imperative with it, that if it’s even possibly true it demands serious attention.  There are a few links to research embedded in my brief rundown on this stuff:

http://integrallife.com/member/michael-garfield/blog/2012s-very-real-geomagnetic-strangeness-its-potential-effect-human-cons

I encourage everyone to investigate these things on their own, to come to their own conclusions, but to really go into it with attentiveness to the massive scientific effort behind all of this evidence and a willingness to have our conventional beliefs about our place in the universe challenged to their core.

http://www.divinecosmos.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=102&Itemid=36

To make a long story short, we’re talking about quite possibly losing our entire electronic infrastructure at around the same time that there is a significant spike in volcanic and seismic activity, and that the Earth’s magnetic fluctuations become so intense that it actually catapults everyone on the planet into some kind of altered state, from which we might never completely return.  If these things are true, as they certainly seem to me to be after as thorough an investigation as I can muster, we have to learn as much as we can about these things, and prepare ourselves accordingly – by reinvesting in local energy and food production, as well as the cultivation of that deeper part of ourselves that is not identified with our transient social egos.

That’s some heavy stuff, right there.  But from where I’m standing, it’s more exciting than scary.  The Irish have a toast:  “May you live at the end of the world!”  Of course, the world doesn’t actually end.  It just dramatically and suddenly changes shape.