Feeding One's Head...

http://althouse.blogspot.com/

...The admirable and beauteous Prof. Althouse has drawn my attention to the present doings of dear Grace Slick. Shame on you if you're not aware she was the singer for Jefferson Airplane and later Starship, via briefly Spaceship. "Let me tell you about a man I knew who rode the breadth and the depth of China..." Now that was some ride!

Our Gracie is, it would seem, stuck in a kind of time-warp forever re-visiting the self-same White Rabbit that made her and her band so famous, if not actually infamous. I'm not really sure I wish to learn that my rock heroine has come to selling her paintings in a shopping mall, though any remembrance of that great time is good enough for my emotional synaptic purposes.

There was the Boy, some several months into his University life, tripping big time on acid and not entirely convinced he would survive the day. Salvation was found in the jukebox of the campus coffee-bar, where a nugatory coin or two delivered seven back-to-back renditions of 'White Rabbit.' Being not a slow learner, by the fourth time of instruction he was happily in touch with Grace's firm admonition to 'feed your head.' He was safe and he was secure. Life was good.

Then there was the Man some twenty years later, driving like the wind to visit a glorious dear friend who was dying of the very cancer that he had survived. For hour upon hour of that desperate drive he listened to nothing but the same 'White Rabbit'. He was not safe, he was not secure, but life and death were both good.

"Sin is behovely, but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well." Not Grace Slick but Julian of Norwich. There is a connection though, of that I'm sure.