Therefore [or in light of all of this], let those also who suffer according to the will of God entrust their souls to a faithful Creator in doing what is right.
Finding The Art Of It
Stylus Magazine’s Top 100 music videos list finishes with this beautiful, moving and fascinating clip from UNKLE/Thom Yorke’s tune “Rabbit In Your Headlights.”
“There is no such thing as a worthless conversation, provided you know what to listen for. And questions are the breath of life for a conversation.”
James Nathan Miller
excellent words from my friend bruce morley in the fall of 2006..
Over a lifetime I’ve played hundreds of different musics, much of it for
money as a professional. It’s been my experience that any music that
abrogates to itself a claim to purity, incorruptibility or metaphysical
significance etc eventually runs headlong into the secular,
hypocrisy-inducing fact that the methods of propagation, distribution, and
attempts to gain widespread acceptance or recognition of said music/s can
differ but little from any employed by “lesser” musics. This has been the
bete noir of the blues, earnest folk music, and new age music, to name but
three. (After several million $, a few Cadillacs, and a few publicity
stunts, can BB King still sing the blues? Nobody seems prepared to admit he
hasn’t made a decent significant album in decades.) In this respect, pop
music is more honest – it simply gets on with a job which is determinedly
ephemeral, where lasting significance is almost accidental, and where
money-grubbing success is regarded as a very worthwhile aim indeed. Can
millions of consumers of this be wrong or deluded ? Actually, in my book,
they can, but that doesn’t alter the hard fact that success on the same
scale for more esoteric musics will require a dance with the Devil, and you
can’t have it both ways. Like religion, the charge of hypocrisy awaits any
music that claims sainthood.
Left Then, What For You?
Only that you are the heart of my heart and the breath of my gasping, the wound of my flesh, the light bouncing off my iris. This one breath, song and dance for you still what does it mean… nothing…
For you would miss it all, eyes cast off in another pallid and dull direction..
Life then, found in these limbs, in this embrace
Truth in these words, my songs alive for your sake
Your strength long sought found in my willingness to lay in your arms
that is strength and truth, that you are strong enough for me..
made by the KillerGoonies.
Inspired By Max
I’ve never reviewed a book here before… and in fact, whilst being an avid reader, I suspect it’s because I’m not a really good reviewer. I can read it, tell you what I think, but I just don’t know if my reviews making inspiring reading. However, Max has inspired me (even his dad is the king of reviews…)
Markus Zusak has written the kind of novel that transcends genre. It’s both historical, highly fictionalised, stylised and character-driven. The narrator, Death, leads you through an interesting, impersonal and yet thoroughly emotive perspective on humanity and death. The motivations of the characters are almost as interesting as wondering why the author chose to include their story, or in fact, why Death remembered each of them. Some of the most fascinating back stories are left thoroughly in the dark.
It’s both poetic, stylistic in construction and deeply moving, yet solidly in novel form, which is very different to House of Letters, that I’m also trying to work my way through.
At times it’s very dark, but never so far that you feel trapped in the awfulness. It’s not a heavy read at all, and consumable over several sittings – the kind of story that wanders at the back of your mind but doesn’t incapacitate you from participating in reality while not reading.
Available in a kids version as well, appropriate given the nature of the main (human) character, I could see teens and adults alike devouring this piece at different levels – there are interesting family dynamics at play that could make for interesting dinnertime conversation.
Transactions In Forgiveness
There is a time when in momentum, you know you are called into tasks than are greater. There are elements of forgiveness that are precisely that – a task, in my life. A chore, requiring effort, with no reward or peace. There is no feeling, just numbness associated with some events of recent times – and whilst I know that to be a normal part of the healing process, I also recognise the voice that hollers to deal with things now.
There are ravenous wolves who long to hear the words “you’re forgiven” because it sates the soul, and I, understanding the depth of their need… selfishly have nothing to offer them. I cannot forgive from the heart, as there is no heart residing in that space currently.
So my forgiveness, I offer from a higher place and a deeper source – a choosing because it is required. This is a transaction of forgiveness – I’m choosing it because it’s necessary and made available to me by the gift first given to me. It is not easy, nor heartfelt with soft emotion. It’s transactional.
Transactional Relationships
There are relationships in life that are entirely transactional. You interact, transact and complete. You exit the relationship, or the relationship remains open but the boundaries are distinct and clear.. you might enquire after the wife and kids, but not necessarily know their names.
There are relationships that start transactionally and become more than that. You learn the kids names, you begin an awareness of the whole person. This is unusual in the corporate world I live in currently, yet remains an expected part of Christian praxis. It’s part of our connectedness to one-another. An intuitive sense at times, that we are more than the sum of our skills. That as people we all have something to offer one another.
But there comes a time, when the transactions that brought forth your ‘friendship’ cease, leaving the question of whether the friendship stands. When it doesn’t, how do you comfortably desist from that interaction? There is a time to acknowledge that seasons have passed and the context within which you sought to offer more of yourself to another has changed. Yes, this also has to do with forgiveness and moving on.
A psychologist recently asked me who I was, to describe myself in three hemispheres – I, We and Work. There have been significant changes in Work, which imply significant changes in We – I have unravelled parts of the network of relationships both transactional and otherwise that have been in my framework for nearly a decade. Relationships cease, hesitate, pause, fixate.
Delete
There is a freedom and breathing space that comes in hitting ‘delete’ and ‘remove’ of some of those nmes and relationships that both with and without pain become defunct and unnecessary. In some places, they simply cease to be productive or interactive relationships.
It closes doors and provides some retreating space to let wounds heal and things that have become numb warm again. I cannot remove those tendrils from all aspects – the hungry & greedy come creeping into my spaces because they cannot help the voyeuristic pleasure of my pain in close encounter. Still there is enough space in ‘delete’ and ‘remove’.. that transactions cease with finite goodness. I breathe.