Steve Reich - Different Trains (1988) - Europe--During the War - Kronos Quartet
On this day more than any other I want to be alone. To be alone is to be complete, she said. But sometimes one finds things, like a flower growing in the cracks of the abstract city, or a mushroom slumbering in the tall grass, lazily, aimlessly dreaming away, running down time and one is amazed that all that is incomplete is so fragile, tender, and precious. At Mile End thirty small children scramble aboard, the crackling of their laughter disturbing the serious world of the adults. They are herded in, though they don't seem to mind this. In other times,on other trains, in other places, there would be no such laughter.
6 comments:
but perhaps there would be such laughter, and eyes who meet, and hands holding.
such a melancholic post on a sunny spring day, b :-)
(i hate those different trains - not the music, which is divine)
Roxana, this was written for the children of Auschwitz. I think I had watched the BBC programme a day before and then on the tube at Mile End-even the name- these small kids got on.
so, wherever there is the world of warmth and laughter there is also a different world,a different train. And what or who decides who is on which train? This is not worth thinking about.
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.
But yes, eyes that would meet (+). This is one of the great charms of city life...the sideways glances at trains that pass you by, at people and lives that brush past your own.
But you're right: it's Friday and not the time for such dark thoughts (hey, what did you expect with a name like black sun!?)
The Auschwitz context puts everything with you wrote here in a different light. but i think that what i wrote still applies, only it becomes a desperate longing.
brrr - have you already finished the 100 c.r. for this week, or can i get one?
hi b :-)
Oh, okay, here's onesorry, couldn't wait. Hope you don't mind sharing?!
Er..100 for the week??? what *are* you talking about, child? I always find it difficult to pick up what you're saying, roxana..it's as if you're having this imaginary conversation or something. hmm and hmmph.
okay, off now.
Cheerio, old bean.
Oh yes, nearly forgot!
hello! :-)
b.
oh - is that how it looks, the famous c.r.????? i had something else in mind - this looks like a cake, not like pastry. HMMMM.
b, i would hate to find you *that* slow :-P
i was merely trying to estimate your weekly input, but i guess i was slightly wrong, 1000 a week would have been better? :-P
cake, pastry? Why make such distinctions, Roxana? Oh, the 'western' mind with its love of classifications and boundaries. And how unlike us orientals the infidels are! :-)
When it is being eaten, then one forgets the name. The name that names least is the name.
How can you estimate what you cannot know? ! Would it not be wiser to say there are some things, people, we cannot know?
a thousand?
You old charmer, you! :-0
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