Talking To Myself.
Curious Attractions.
I’ve had a front row seat to the strange ties that bind recently, watching and doing my best to speak truth into awkward situations between boys and girls. Loves and attractions that began so innocently and eventually became frail imitations of life-giving love.
How do you tell someone that their friendship is based on a web of lies, deceit, ill mental health and ugliness beneath a smile, turn of head and vivaciousness that catches their attention more than once?
How do you play the pessimist, the realist, the truthteller to the memory’s optimism as heartbreak plays out it’s long slow game? A sure sign of two hearts not in time, when they break at such a different pace, where one is left again breaking in the wake of truth.
What is it that draws one person to another? Curious attractions are these, beyond my understanding and knowledge…
How do you do these things and maintain an awkward intimacy and strange distance? My heart cannot feel or understand the heart of another nearly enough to share or embrace the pain in such a way as to have enough grace or mercy. I simply have to love my friend from the depths of my own self, speak truth from what I know and hope, that I am not breaking, hardening, losing something precious to us in the space and time of it.
Maybe there are some spaces that it’s better not be in the middle of? Maybe in the midst of these curious attractions.. it’s better not to be coloured by my presence here… I would rather be seen with clean eyes, unfiltered with bad taste.
I feel the edge of my tongue is too sharp, the weight of my words too much. I’ve waded into the midst of a pool, too deep, too dark, too murky for me to be here. There’s too much subtext and pain that causes me shivers.
The murkiness of the human character is often still too much for me. The heaviness too much to carry, to hold, to know.
I shouldn’t have been here, in this place for my heart feels too uncomfortable here.
Song Of The Moment : What If I
by Joshua Radin
What if you
Could wish me away
What if you
Spoke those words today
I wonder if you’d miss me
When I’m gone
It’s come to this, release me
I’ll leave before the dawn
But for tonight
I’ll stay here with you
Yes, for tonight
I’ll lay here with you
But when the sun hits your eyes
Through your window
There’ll be nothing you can do
What if you
Could hear this song
What if I
Felt like I belong
I might not be leaving so soon
Began the night believing
I loved you in the moonlight
So, for tonight
I’ll stay here with you
Yes, for tonight
I’ll lay here with you
But when the sun hits your eyes
Through your window
There’ll be nothing you can do
I could’ve treated you better
Better than this
Well, I’m gone, this song’s your letter
Can’t stay in one place
So, for tonight
I’ll stay here with you
Yes, for tonight
I’ll lay here with you
But when the sun hits your eyes
Through your window
There’ll be nothing you can do
What Significance To The Pain Of The Cross?
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.”
Stay (Wasting Time) With You.
“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..
Batman & Robin “Better Days”.
made by the KillerGoonies.
Review: The Book Thief
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.