The decline and fall

 

T

Ec-stasy: to stand outside of oneself. The centre doesn't hold; let it go, let it go. This time, right here. Now. 

 

Ich ruf zu Dir Herr, Jesu Christ, BWV 639, J. S. Bach from Lalentituddelosgramófonos on Vimeo.

Time will make you..or it won't. You find yourself in fallen, failing light. All the mystery is in the here and now. This cloth, woven from green and red, gold and green. Each thing has its season. And now is winter. 

The days of our lives

 

 There isn't much to say any more, I guess. 

In this last year it seems as if a hundred years have passed by in a flash. What is left of my old life seems like an inscrutable mystery to me. And now the shadows have lengthened and become more distinct I find myself wondering if there are only these islands of the heart that remain...

You find yourself more alone than you could have imagined. So much time has flowed under the bridge..the old stone bridge itself, Tu Fu might say, is nothing but a dazzling moment under the eye of heaven, a dim reflection of some other place and time that we witness darkly. The days of our lives like the days of the world now...

And so now your relationship is to one of absences. The past has not disappeared but changed shape and lives within you now in a different way... 

Loss: the point becomes a circle, the line a square; what grows in me day by day is my own diminishment. A part of me wants to cling on to the idol of the old days since the path that has now opened up before me leads who knows where? And who would this "you" be then? I have become a question to myself...

I need to weave fragments of texts, sentences that spontaneously emerge, into my thoughts as a way of establishing some kind of continuity; either that or face the prospect of silence, of coming to terms with the lack of words for the way I'm feeling. What kind of place is this...

There's that scene from Offshore where the tide turns and objects slide, move about, swap positions. Nothing's steady anymore against these interruptions that weave their way into a life. Thinking understands the limits of thinking and ceases to be 'thinking'. Like Drummer Hodge you're now a northerner living under a strange southern star. Or maybe that star, north by northwest, continues to flow glistening darkly like the Roding in its season of despair. How to find a sense of being at home in your homelessness...

This song reminds you so much of a time of your life that is so distant and yet, weirdly, all the more real for existing on the borders of your consciousness. You can't name it but it drifts your way...

You've been drifting for so long. Perhaps you need to be truer to this de-centering before "the drift find the drifter"?

When told by the doctors that nothing more could be done the swami, citing Knulp, said: "The desire to sleep overcomes all other desires." Only she could have said that, half wanting to communicate her feelings and half wanting to remain a mystery. 

One of those 'strange reversals' (Rumi). For so long you'd asked not to become religious and now you find yourself willing but unable! Taste and see!, said the poet. And yet the words of poets and novelists mean much less to me, strangely superficial..a shallow form of intelligence. Was I the only one who didn't grow up? 

These lines by Hadot deeply affected me: Cut out everything; welcome everything. Familiar -at one level-to any Muslim. The question, as always, at what level?

Too try and grow into simplicity. To be less, to speak less in the time that remains. But to speak is to allow stilled time to flow again. 'Allow' suggests too much agency when you know it's otherwise. Does it make any sense now to ask where?

There is just one thing I can say- and maybe it's all I've got left:

Nothing lasts forever

But I will always love you.

From a long time ago

K K

I don't know why you loved this song so much but I do as well.

The music, like everything else, all seems like from such a very long time ago now. Life is a strange and mysterious dream. You would say, of course, that it's also a beautiful dream. But right now it doesn't feel like that, Ubo.

the other shore

K k

I am silent here, even here, on this other shore. The drift of the world is within me and I am within the drift of the world. 

Offshore..the moon moves an inch, the tides turn, the flow of life is reversed. The things once loved now pass me by; what was inconsequential now seems everything. Formed by so many grey skies and ghosts from old cities, your face reflected on the train window, shimmering in its ephemeral moment under a dying winter afternoon. Am I only walking in a dream under this pale light? And who am I then?

Black Sun

Time is a river..

Winter:north

Winter is out for a lot this year

the beach already is stiff

all will be one will be one this year

wings and ice will be one in the world

all will be changed in the world:

the boat will hear its steps on the ice

the war will hear its war on the ice

the woman will hear her hour on the ice

the hour of birth in the ice of death

winter is out for a lot.

Out for the houses the cities

out for the forests the clouds

the mountains the valleys fear

the heart the children peace.

Winter is out for a lot this year

the hand already is stiff

the crying of children is heard in the house

one will we be one life

I hear my house slip with the world..

--I. Christensen

.. .. .... .. .. ..

Some white people talk a lot of shit about black music and rap and nihilism; or they want to harp on about how Dylan is deep or about how classical music is profound, the pinnacle of civilisation. 

What they never want to talk about is how soulful black music is. And that's because they've never truly understood that music isn't tribal. 

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K-punk

k kkkkkk 

Love this little clip...

Let

Let your self go, man. You been perched up there a long time, bro'
Let England shake, I don't give a damn.
Every white artist that dies is a genius, a lyrical, misunderstood prophet against his age. 

Let go and let equilibrium be restored. 
When night comes it's just me & you.
The prison walls fall.

The black sun shines,
but you can't see it.
Loss holds us in circles
-- broken.

The story of an artist

 Lend me a dime and I'll tell you a story. One you probably know, but I'll throw in some feelings this time.   

C3 B4

 The end of summer..

The end of summer was like no other day. There was no time for farewells, no space to give time to what the heart had stored. The main door was left open, the gate flung back; indecision and haste wrapped around you. The moment which you breeze through without a proper accounting for-as if there ever could be one!

Through the porthole, back to this inner chamber. The light flickers, falters, and then fails. The great summer sun of your days in the open are over. All that remains are eyes that are narrower, less reliable, and hands that have darkened with time.   

nobody knows no-one

Nobody knew

End of term blues

The term has come to an abrupt end. Look back not in anger but in bewilderment. Was that time passing, not passing? Enter the marks. Do the needful, as they say around here, and be gone. You weren't really here anyway.  

I don't know, each year of your life becomes more unreal. 

Vanishing Heart

Fall

Fall [
..
][
[.

[why.

[don't

..]

[you]

Antique Sound

Antique Sound

There was an age where you played records
with ordinary steel needles which grew blunt

and damaged the grooves or with more expensive
stylus tips said to be tungsten or diamond
which wore down the records and the music receded
but a friend and I had it on persuasive authority
that the best thing was a dry thorn of the right kind
and I knew where to find those off to the left
of the Kingston Pike in the shallow swale
that once had been forest and had grown back
into a scrubby wilderness alive with
an earthly choir of crickets blackbirds finches
crows jays the breathing of voles raccoons
rabbits foxes the breeze in the thickets
the thorn bushes humming a high polyphony
all long gone since to improvement but while
that fine dissonance was in tune we rode out
on bicycles to break off dry thorn branches
picking the thorns and we took back the harvest
and listened to Beethoven’s Rassoumoffsky
quartets echoed from the end of a thorn.

--- W.S. Merwin.

via Pli

k

Well, if you haven't gone to Bob's wonderful blog (link: "a music box" on my main page, what on earth have you been doing?!)  

Not all things musical but an outstanding source of the weird and the wonderful. What strikes one about his blog is just how open he is to differences (I'd say the mysterious). Anyway, here's another of his recommendations.

Same old, same old.

No new ways to be new, as Frost said. I think that’s a reasonably good statement. There’s nothing new under the sun, sayeth the preacher. All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full. I think more circularly than linearly. I don’t think there are beginnings and destinations so much as circles that end by closing and starting over again.

--Stegner, Paris Review.