taliesin's log (voices of women)

mercredi 24 août 2005

Revising my homework
Some weeks into the process, a few words about what's happening here might help.
As in previous entries, you may see the word "Revised" recur: on concluding my last with a singer born in Alaska who apparently came in from the cold as a kid of 12 -- "she convinced her parents to let her 'see more of the world' by spending some time with an aunt in Hawaii" (a smart move noted in some Jewel FAQ compiled by Aaron Walker by 1996) -- I made time for more of her.
It was also apparent the Wikipedia and a quick personal note were best posted separately.
Time is obviously limited, so some entries are likely to grow like this.

So's my budget. Where it reasonably allows me to write up very new releases and discoveries, I shall on the strength of a monthly allowance for this, but for all the latest (last night alone I found three more singers I'd love to hear one day), I'll simply frequently update the blogroll with the best music sites I find among hundreds.
By "best", I mean those closest to criteria I find important: accessible, down-to-earth writing; constructive criticism rather than devastating put-downs; and a broad open-minded attentiveness to the artists themselves rather than the standards and often self-serving aims of the music industry's major labels or even the charts.
No more logging about me and those in my life, I've declared, apart from thoughts occasionally almost invariably tucked away in the orchard. That holds good, but it's evident the musicians I choose to write up at any time have a reason for being there in my own daily experience.
If it shows, there's no point in any pretence at critical "objectivity", which is always nonsense anyway: it doesn't exist, so if there's a good reason, I'll say why.
Moreover, these entries constitute a modest ambition and a counter-point to my "working life", where I'd like to recover ways of sharing the very deep pleasure and sense of adventure that enabled me successfully to make a living for several years writing mainly about music in the '70s.
I then developed an approach I still have, "translating" difficult terminology and breaking down artificial barriers to broaden my own horizon in a way others clearly found appealing -- otherwise I'd have earned no money.

I'll write no more directly about a major turning point in my private life, but it means profound changes in outlook, direction and several aspects of behaviour for me: that's very apparent a month on when I'm still taking it in and know there's much more to come.
Some have called it "religious", I much prefer to avoid such words, unless applied to others who use them, but feel a strong need for the simplest and most natural ways of being in a highly artificial environment: city life and its pressures.
Music is an art of immense richness and often complexity, but also perhaps the most universal and accessible of our human arts and "languages" from the very earliest times. I have a little more to say on this.
Staying focussed and very "real" in a world prone to abstractions and where ideas, our own and those of others, often take us a step off the ground rather than one along any path is not easy.
Neither's music sometimes: it can be as full of paradox as life, but has an advantage over words sometimes; they can't touch it.

For tonight, that'll do, I'm very wary of "over-thinking" now! It's a bit late to go out and stare at the sky, which is clouded anyway.
So I'm going to do something odd with Madonna. Yes, that one, quite a slice of American life...
If she's worth an entry for having done something unusual herself, I'll let you know.

10:41:42 PM    your views? []

mardi 16 août 2005

All that remains...
Days have passed. When seeing my doctor on August 8 for a routine prescription renewal, a man who's now a friend of a dozen years' standing wasn't blind. He wished to know what had happened, left physical traces.
I kept it straightforward, expecting incredulity.
I'd dared tell very few people of the experience described in the last entry here and long hesitated about writing it up. The doctor did more than believe me; he entered the event and its observed effects on to my medical record, though I didn't want it there.
He was right.

I've edited what I wrote to shorten and clarify it slightly, but eight days later I'm surprised there was almost nothing to alter in what was posted in a state of shock. Maybe I still am.
That's it, all the same, left as it was for what it's worth. Of the rest left on the log, when I'd most seriously considered wiping the lot and making this place nothing but music, there've been changes and may be one or two more, removing entries.
My own occasional turmoil and mistakes since February 2003 don't worry me as a matter of published record, but how I've dragged others in the stories does. What I have left here in serious entries -- unchanged of course since I don't plan to rewrite my life -- remains for just one reason: feedback from people. You.

Some's been negative, far more's been positive: touching, often moving comment and mostly mail from others who said they have identified with actions, thoughts and feelings described and found what I've written helpful in one way or another. Many shared experiences of their own.
So I shall leave most of it, a record, with deep gratitude to friends and acquaintances who might have protested at the exposure, particularly when relationships have scarcely always been easy and I've sometimes been plain wrong about them, full of the wildest ideas.

This part of the log? A week ago, I was too drastic. There's no sense in doing a 180-degree turn. If people do or say something I really want to write about, I shall, but unless they've published it themselves: no names, no details of who they are.

Now the site is wholly given over to musicians, that's all you'll get on the main pages. I've been again reading a two-month-old print of Sarah Fimm's published journal, which she began -- I only noticed that detail today -- on my birthday in 2003, when she said:
Hello Gang - This is the place where I tell you my secrets (Sarah's site). Now let me make this perfectly clear. I intend to speak as I would if you were standing here in front of me. Stream of consciousness. So please forgive my gross impropriety, or don't. I have never done this before, but I will do my best, per usual, to offend, degrade or turn anyone into gelatinous goo. (...)."
She never has, not by name. When we met last month -- an eternity ago -- and she took her place here, there was no need for words about how I first came across her.
A few days later that October, she wrote:
"Music rules all. It is the only thing that can save us from anything in my eyes (...)
Anyway, I must go and begin my consorting with the outside world. In the meantime. Be like water."
I've done little consorting of late. When I have it's usually been wonderful, real sharing, and the rest of the time has been spent sleeping ... or sorting. Trashing!
Thousands of objects, given away if anyone wanted or gone for recycling. Ah! the space...
Projects apart from this?
None left. I've a job, those I love and people I know and that's it, plenty to learn. The vacation hasn't been anything like planned. That was lots of entries about music, women and sex (if the latter arises from what musicians say for themselves and it's worthwhile). When I've not been sleeping, sorting or consorting I've been researching -- doing my homework as I wrote in the last entry out back.

The millennial 'Book of Changes' -- the 'I Ching' (fine Wikipedia introduction) now a very old friend, often logged -- always bemused me on one point: "fortune".
Why? Just luck? Chance?

Many of us seek any other explanation but sheer chance if we can. Logic. Cause and effect. Meaning. Pattern. Where we find these things lacking, we make them and believe them. There'll be no argument from me with the scientists who find religion is built into us, whether we have a God or profess atheism.
Much of the log's been stories about somebody who saw a profound purpose in some of his encounters, considered a few people special to him, sometimes much to their irritation -- they didn't feel this.
"Sometimes a path is made simply by creating absence."
That's what Sarah wrote yesterday.

Is this where I say: "Look, we're talking the same language again, on the same frequency, that's our wavelength..."?
Not now it isn't.
I saw those words -- all for the day -- when I fetched her link, wondered where she is -- and might call it "fortune" though, chance, luck. Good fortune, but that's me; the words "fate" and "destiny" are no longer wanted ones, not for me.

For years, I've stopped thinking of the 'I Ching' as a very wise book to predict anything, but rather a Way, like the Tao, to study a state of being, then another, and a source of help that speaks to me "as if (it) were 'standing' here in front of me."
Some people find the book nothing but "gelatinous goo".
They see strange imagery, lines written and annotated in riddles, the irrelevant product of a long-dead civilisation and culture.
The social references, though infrequent, relate to a heirarchy long since gone from emperor to peasant, but there still can be a poetry in it for people who see no sense but that's part of the key.
The book and some of the notes that followed, by many scholars, don't always address our logical, reasoning faculties, but speak to a different part of us. The images are sometimes clear, lucid answers to the question posed. When less so, they sink deep into us, absorbed like the language of dreams.

Just the once, almost a year ago and the last time I "used" the 'I Ching' for help rather than study, I told you about it: 'Spring, bonfire, lake and leaf fall'.
Back then, this side of the log was a secret and I tried hard to make sure it stayed that way. I got so much wrong in any hasty conclusions I drew from that "reading" of such wise words.
I read far too much into them sometimes on occasion, in "my world", one people kept right on calling "a world of your own", what Nick's brain functioning with five senses and in four dimensions took for signs, lines broken and unbroken to make hexagrams. "If you do this, the outcome is likely to be this": that's what I read.
And I wrote then:
"Nor did I expect the I Ching to be so direct.
I messed it up twice, let ideas get in the way first time round after I'd only thrown the lower trigram. Second time, I didn't get beyond the bottom line. It didn't matter because the third time it flowed as it should after a breathing exercise.
Then I got the very same results for the lower trigram, with every line on the point of change.
It was the same all the way up for the first time I can recall. Not one of the six lines was stable, yin or yang, each was about to 'turn'.
The next surprise came with the clarity of the first hexagram.
My question, remember, was 'What does the wise man do when his dream catches up with his life?'"
That first hexagram was "youthful folly", and the second one, every line changed, a "fire in the lake", one word in all translations: "Revolution".

I left something out just now. In August last year, I identified the dream and gave it a name.
What youthful folly that was. I told you: to everybody who has allowed me to keep their stories here, I'm very grateful.
When I do consult the book (each translation I've seen suggests several methods, some faster than others), it never wants a vague or woolly question. I prepare by relaxing, deep breathing, empty my head of stray ideas and focus on the query, nothing else.
When I feel ready, the process begins and it takes time. I don't interpret as I go, unless the ground is so familiar I start knowing where I am before the hexagrams are done. There's a feeling of "rightness" when it's working, like a hunch or intuition.
The notes come later, once it's done and I switch back to the scholarship, the multitude of references others have found. And those notes sit, perhaps to be understood much later.

For what remains, all that remains, I don't have a name, if anybody does. I'll use value judgements when I return to work in a week and regarding what I write about women and other musicians on the front pages, but as absolutes? I can't!
I've done my best never to confuse "intelligence" with "intellect".
For weeks I've had a deepening respect for people who keep their faith, whatever their creed or their "church", as simple as Sally Ellyson, vocalist in Hem, sings of one sometimes on 'Eveningland'. Yes, Hem is here, but that album released in February is a front-page entry one day.
You may find knowledge about music on the front pages if I get the entries right and remember they're not about me, but musicians.
"Sometimes a path is made simply by creating absence."
Ever to confuse "knowledge" with "wisdom" is a step off that path as sure as naming names you shouldn't and making links where none exist. Sarah has the wisdom to go right on making connections.
Where does she get them?
Is that a question for any of us?

Some books full of knowledge, from myths and faiths everywhere, Africa to the Americas and Far East, I've put in the same place, with Western science I find helpful. They're important in "my" world.
If I network successfully with "your" world after a night never to analyse or explain, then think what you will of it, but I'll never know how I got where I am and I have run up against my limits.
It wouldn't be wise to rule out a purpose and sometimes think about it.
There's not a faith in the world has nothing to say about "right thinking", some people are full of it and too full of themselves for me! But if they're open to change, then who am I to judge?
In Buddhism, Right Thinking is part of a Noble Eightfold Path.
Far too prone to making up milestones in the past, I'm cautious. But to those who contend life is chaos, organised or not, without significance, I'd merely observe I can think of no faith on the planet that lacks paths, ways, journeys, pilgrimages, and signs...

The computer's "known" hours more trashing ... for the second time this year. So much stuff, mostly words now an absence: lots more gigabytes of absence, but that's space, not nothing, and in time, much more of it will be music.

I remember how I felt a year ago, a somebody with no plans to be writing these words today. I'm no longer sure what right thinking is, but if I find out, best for me to put it down to all that remains...
Fortune.

12:37:00 AM    your views? []

dimanche 7 août 2005

The night of unknowing

The evening my mind blew, when that's no figure of speech but as close an analogy as I can reach to what happened on July 21-22, must -- if slowly I am to learn from it -- remain almost free of words about the experience itself.
There were none, just a blown, fused brain, which left physical burns on my head, my temples. When I get to that description, I've got to be very careful with the words.
I have since been filled with awe and incomprehension because from the start it took days to take in. For hours, I was "gone" altogether, no sense of identity.
As myself, I ceased to exist. The experience was unexpected and not one I'd care to go through again. If there was any reason, maybe it was starting a vacation in a state of exhaustion, very weary of the world and tired of being told "you live in a world of your own".
I'm now wary too. I don't want to make links where none were. That day, the first of a long-awaited holiday, I did want to be in a world of my own! I'd had seven wonderful but very difficult months.
For doctors, I ended 2004 with a clean bill of health -- mental health -- and felt proud when told I was entitled to be so, as a man who had shown courage.
And I took this for a new beginning, out in the world, in my private life, with other people and here on the log.

I was wrong.
Now I find myself full of uncertainties. It took just a couple of words to blow me to fragments: "London" ... "bombs".
I'd switched off to the news the instant I left work on July 19 and if I'm to give you the story, it must be straight.
Those words devastated me.
They sunk in slowly. I couldn't believe it had happened again, I didn't want to know, I "died to the world" for hours. Looking back to the man I sought out on recovering some sense of identity, I understood what Lao Tzu meant when he wrote 2,500 years ago of being "sick of sickness".
I blame nobody now, certainly not the person who gave me that little too much data to process after months when I did my best to conceal many of my feelings.
For reasons that have no place here, I'd taken risk after risk, trying to do the right things, be whole, be myself, and give all I could to others.
That hasn't changed. It's how I wish to live. I can see no other way to behave. For years I've known the more you give, the richer you are -- it's old wisdom, it's never been otherwise.
In my job, the relentless news itself, but seek to work well and I'm very fond of some fellow journalists and greatly admire their courage in our world full of truly shocking violence, cruelty and greed.

I need to learn to be more detached, while staying as wide open as I sought for so long.
Already this log is full of my views on brutality, inhumanity and the sadness I feel confronted with blind selfishness, along with spirited entries in defence of colleagues in the media accused by the public of manipulating the news and engaging in disinformation.
It was getting to me and I've been bringing my work home, thinking it better to express such things here rather than taking out on my anger and resentment on people who do me no harm.
However, I've also written recent entries that have bewildered people and confused them, got some worried about me, whether I have been as well as professed. I'm ashamed of such writing, I so much want to do something worthwhile.
I think, at last, I have the means, but it's been such a lonely job getting here ... and in a way, I'm not writing this for you. I don't mean to be rude. If you're interested, that's great! But you're reading somebody who just wants it logged. A catharsis. Right out of my system.
I feel it should be here, but not where I first put it.
Out in the orchard instead.
If I can help others, then good. I should like to.
I think I might have gone beyond "depression", by accident, to know where those terrible downers come from, what they are, and thanks to the teachers I'll pay reverence to now, a way to keep my head and my integrity. Some call it the Way.
To each our own.

To be rid of this poison!

I wrote thousands of words, trying to be clear about some unusual experiences, what I began to call "weird stuff", on being told: "Okay, you are psychic, you can do things with your mind others can't, so live with it, stop denying it to please others who refuse to accept it and aren't interested in the science."
Many people said "nonsense, you talk rubbish."
That hurt.

It hurt more than I've been willing to admit and this is equally true of fear. It may be stupid, but I didn't realise the latter until last week, when I had to face the fear that, in spite of a daily professed optimism, I've often felt.
I've had reason to be afraid for myself, but that doesn't matter. It isn't a story for this log: I made hard choices and stuck by them. Some people know, many don't, that's how it must be. I don't regret what I did, I believe it was right. I lost one friend out of stupidity; but I lost many more people I'd believed to be "friends" out of cowardice and self-interest on their part.
That episode is now over.

What I know to be right informs me -- as real knowledge and the very beginnings of wisdom, just a start -- I have no right to judge these people. I can't abide them and don't want to be anywhere near them, but it's not for me to judge them.
Cigarettes are bad, yes. But getting hurt and hurting others, failures of communication, carelessness and thoughtless behaviour, scaring people, misunderstandings, these things have been killing me, a rot in the soul, poison unto death.

One 'what if...' to care about: what revolution?

There's no point in writing more of such troubles, apart from a true acknowledgement of fear, not for myself, but for the world, our children and their children.
After an experience that left me in a state of deep shock right at the outset of a holiday when I had but three desires -- far more fun to write about and I shall -- I've only one theory left that strikes me as being of any importance if I'm right.
With a scientist, I was discussing what I've called for many months the Quiet Revolution, logging my perceptions of the way minds seem to be changing, quietly, and have done throughout my life from the late 1960s.
He said, "Do your homework!"
I started, as he suggested, with memes (Wikipedia) -- "mental viruses" and went on. The science gets hard, but it exists. It's possible I've handed out such viruses. Everybody does. The science is also young, much remains unknown.
I'm highly empathetic, there's no doubt of that and how occasionally I've manifest an odd ability to be "inside people's heads", feeling their feelings if not actually reading their thoughts.
What has gone unsaid before has always been: "If I'm doing this and it's real, I can find myself so aware of how others are feeling, then what might I be leaving behind? Can they not know I'm 'inside' them, do I not leave traces of myself?"
That has to go unanswered.
I can't know, some denied I've understood them, others accept and appreciate it; just one of "Nick's crazy ways," I guess. It seems academic now, I've not been aware of doing it for some weeks.
I suspect I've not just been talking about a revolution, a gentle and long process of "changing minds". There's a high chance the screenplay -- a very start-stop job -- I was doing for nearly a year was about evolution.
I've made notes. Chances are I'll chuck most, I'm really in a mood and have been for days to keep on getting rid of things, empty my head. Nevertheless, if that's right -- the research is worth reading -- that "revolution" is making converts after all.
I was wrong, it's happening fast, took a new direction in the 20th century in highly technological cultures. Our kids and theirs will have to adapt swiftly, many of them. As I understand it, one of the first "technological" innovations that triggered deeper evolutionary changes than many realised was the pill.
Pure and simple. Never mind the ethics, the religious debates, the politics of sexual liberation, the contraceptive pill and subsequent medical advances were and are it: technology moving in, changing us and speeding things up.
Our kids may need all the help they can get. People can be cruel and quite terrifying. Nature is ruthless. People can also be understanding, wise, gentle and kind. We have a choice: we help the children or we don't, we leave them to "nature".
Should this be correct, they will be in for nothing like the onslaught of paradox and contradictions of that night. But we're giving them a planet we're busy wrecking through selfishness; memes are travelling around it and can be very confusing.
We're all teachers and all students, age is irrelevant.
My daughter has a head full of ideas I didn't give her, her mother didn't give them to her and she doesn't know where they come from, but she gets upset when she can't handle them.
It's always been like that. What's new is the nature of such ideas and a qualitative difference, novel ways of thinking. I was going to log this in considerable detail, with examples. I may yet, one day, once I've done more homework, put it somewhere else.
There's also the sheer quantity of data....
If anybody's reading this, well, there I must leave it.
Uncertainties. I can take no more for now. When gloomy, this hypothesis worries me. When cheerful, it fills me with optimism. I think: "Okay, if the children can take it, the world will be much the better and happier for it. People will care to share."

The crash: how I lost it

What happens to a computer when asked to cope with too much?
Even the most powerful deal in logic, can't process excessive input and have a problem with contradictory input. Overload one, especially badly maintained, and it crashes.
If anyone is to "blame" for an excess of data, more than my mind could take, it's me, nobody else. My brain responded rather like my Mac when its core system can't cope, has what's known as a "kernel panic" and hands out an order: "Switch me off this instant!"
Any sense of identity I have disappeared after taking on too much data late one evening.
I recovered myself -- if that's the term, I don't know -- many hours later, as the birds outside stopped singing, the day had begun, a cat was hungry, and my brain began to operate in the usual ways once more and found an awareness of my surroundings.

'To know without knowing is best'

Lao Tzu After saying "Oh God" out loud and feeding the cat, then I grabbed for Lao Tzu's 'Tao Te Ching', with some chance of understanding what a man who died 2,500 years ago had to tell us. I've read it before, but this was different.
My brain insists: Please, pattern, order, people and events in a succession that makes sense of your life! Because my brain, like everybody's, needs that.
The reality is "I don't know".
It could have been anything. You're reading a last story about someone who was amused when told he was so good at writing about nothing, he'd do a really successful film.
To know no thing and no where and non sense.
That's where I "went". Those paradoxes I've always loved playing with? Wham! I got them. Others have written of the blinding, unimaginable light. That terrible darkness. A loss of identity. To be no body and no thing. Pain beyond bearing, yet still I'm here. And the joy. An ecstasy greater than any you've ever known.
There is more and no words for any of it, words are no use.
How "long" it lasted I don't know. There's no notion of time, order... sequence. To write anything else would be to start hypothesising and telling lies.

I shall not do this, I refuse because it's so very wrong. If I build on the raw, direct experience to make links where there aren't any would be a dreadful mistake.
While I never to go through that again, nor do I want to falsify it. Once a person, with an identity, a cat to feed, a dawn broken, I could say somebody is "evil" and talk about "wicked" behaviour, but there can be no talk of "good" and "evil", "truth" or "falsehood", "God" or the absence of God.
I know nothing about such concepts, they are without meaning in an absolute sense.
Without them comes a direct knowledge where Lao Tzu says all you can: "To know without knowing is best."
He and others talk about "right" and "wrong". That I can now grasp. It makes sense.
And such men and women, who know that asking where knowledge like this comes from is a question without an answer, because nobody knows, offer something else. For him, it's a Way.
That Way suits me. If you don't know what is right, best to wait, ask somebody wise and let it come to you.
"Stop thinking" was fine, too, still is. But I'd like to learn more now about what others call "Right thinking". Not mental gymnastics. Taoism, with other wise paths I've already explored but never quite understood, fit a man who would like to move on without gods.

This has done something quite "shocking" to me: I find myself a reverent person. Me? I'm renowned for being stupid and funny and irreverent.
I don't want to lose irreverence or wit. I like teasing people and being teased back, the ruder the better sometimes. But I would rather like to stop being stupid. I'd really like to get things right. In short, I'm stuck with wanting to "wise up".
And I need help. Ursula K. Le Guin (Wikipedia again) is, by light-years, the best story-teller around. I grew up on her knee, she's wise and I think she's the world's greatest living story-teller in English, but of course, it's to each their own.
That the Kid fell in love with her books gives me great joy.
I didn't know until recently that Ursula grew up on Lao Tzu's knee and he was the man I knew could suddenly help me once I got back. Ursula eventually came to write this of the 'Tao Te Ching':
"It is the most loveable of all the great religious texts, funny, keen, kind, modest, indestructibly outrageous, and inexhaustibly refreshing. Of all the deep springs, this is the purest water. To me, it is also the deepest spring."
To me, it is a very deep spring along with a few other books I too find inexhaustible.
But there's the other. It's a river, many rivers, streams, oceans. This log has stayed afloat on these.
Music has saved me from myself and the world where no words could.
That's the story now.

1:09:04 AM    your views? []