Green eyes

Jimi’s sexual encounters with anonymous groupies may have made Nancy see (and hear) red (see Groupies), but green was the color of sexual intimacy for her.  Jimi Hendrix, however, was never a solid color for Nancy.  Nor was he an object of sexual desire.  He was “all the colors,” all at once. 

I had always imagined, maybe always knew, there was someone who would radiate full color, and there he was.

However she was, as the previous post reveals (see When words fail, love is the only language left)…….Jimi’s intimate friend, or as one hears today, “a friend with benefits.”  The love she felt for Jimi hung from her words, which spewed from her imagination, not from her vagina.  Thus as she reflected on her love for Jimi Hendrix and wrote these words, probably in her apartment in Manhattan, her eyes were probably NOT turning green.

Jimi’s jingle bells were like a cord that pulled my eyelids up.

As my eyes got accustomed to the day, I saw before me, two sand-suede feet and a hand that was lacing bells-on-moccasins loop-by-loop.

My eyes traveled up to see Jimi
getting dressed to take an early plane to Washington.

He had let me sleep while he packed and got his act together.  What a different man he was from anyone I knew before.  He brought a world of imagination to life.

Who’s to say that imagination isn’t more erotic than intercourse, that one can’t surrender to it’s ethereal sensuality, as much or more than one can surrender to orgasm?

Jimi took no dreams for granted.

He laid down under the weight of nightmares.

And made memories out of clouds, that he knew would drift away.

Who’s to say that music isn’t alchemy?  (Some even say sex isn’t intimacy.)

Jimi took Bob Dylan’s daytime work into the night.

Worked up the weather.
Ripened the fruit.
Deepened the dimension.

The fountain, as structure became the fountain, as water.

Were the intimate feelings mutual, one has to wonder?  Did Jimi’s feelings for Nancy at all resemble hers for him?  Who can say?  Certainly not me, since this blog springs from the intimacy of Nancy’s heart and mind, and not from Jimi’s.  But as Nancy reflects, a certain truth cannot be denied:  Jimi was “a solo kind of guy,” and his guitar was his most intimate partner!

I thought long and hard about Jimi’s breaking up of, and burning, his guitar.

My first reaction was very pragmatic: ‘gee, a lot of kids would give anything to have a guitar to play.’  But I felt sort of naive, rethinking that.

B.B. King named his guitar ‘Lucille’.  That was a partnership kind of thing to do.

Jimi was a solo kind of guy. He was very aware of the positive and negative aspects of life, love and art.

Cruel fate and expendability were often themes of Jimi’s.

People break up furniture and set it on fire, for warmth and survival.

People create funeral pyres, as forms of honoring their loved ones….

Jimi ‘told’ his guitar everything.  Every whimper, every cry, every sigh, every murmur, every secret.

He caressed it. He confessed to it, and talked to it and begged it for mercy.  He wailed in the night, and rocked and cradled and loved it.

He had to, in his mind, at time just destroy the evidence.

Humans are complex.  Take it from an anthropologist (moi!), the cultures we create and that create us are often short on rationality and pragmatism, and long on the intertwined causes and conditions of history.  Culture often lacks rhyme or reason.

One can only imagine Jimi’s reaction if he discovered that his guitar had ended up “in the hands of another man.”  To find out, go here.