Here are two unsolicited images that bubbled up to my brain's "surface" early today: the scene in 'Battle of Britain' when air chief marshal and pilots alike wait, ready to scramble again, for the bombers to come but they don't, because it's over.
So it's safe to stand down, take it easy.
Next came a memory of teenage breaks I adored, staying with a fun uncle then a stage and scene designer in "rep theatre" of a kind long found in English provincial towns that changed shows once a week or a fortnight and had very loyal audiences that kept them going until maybe it was telly that put an end to it.
This was so vivid I could see the woodwork shops, smell wet paint and glue, hear the whistling offstage and the hubbub on it. I shan't detail the why of such recollections, but I know all the same. The second has to do with hammers, nails and saws, as well as enjoying mingling with show-people, finding what they were like when not performing. But it was clear my hopes of getting some off-stage preparations for weeks to come and this log arising from them had been dashed for some days.
The first flash was blessed relief because it had felt like a private hell of a blitz, that bout of pain I wrote up emerging from it yesterday. The instant I woke up, still feeling very fragile, there was a nervous wait for wave after wave of renewed pain and the searing, explosive flashes if I dared move.
That's the closest maybe I've got to telling you how unpredictable and strange they can be: the mental pictures, sometimes mini-movies, where smell, touch and sound all play their part during what I've called "morning meditations", the time coming out of sleep and its dream consciousness to gear up for a day that brings its own set to follow those.
This morning's were simply "out of order": more frequently they're about music or things people have said that marked me, need exploration and bringing a bit of thought to bear on them.
If you seek a uniting element between a film whose DVD release I once wrote up ('Of pros and demented deities at work', Aug 21, 2004) and the avuncular sharing of what some found a "bohemian lifestyle", it's pretty obvious.
She's still my screen goddess. Some things never change, I was very lucky to meet Susannah York one day, find she's a lovely person as well ... and to wake up this morning able to contemplate women again though why her I'm not sure and it doesn't matter.
Apart from a few of the words written yesterday about Cass Brown when my own two days of agony proved a rather selfish reason to recall others who've long kept very focussed blogs about matters of sickness and health, I'm sticking that entry in the orchard.
But while I'm glad of Cass's "Fame at Last" note on Cancergiggles as I wrote, he's long had it anyway since that site's become a wealth of direct experience, wise ideas and a host of references for people in need of his brand of courage.
Before all musical progress and any other part of my life came to an abrupt and scary halt with the latest and longest of the savage migraine assaults that occasionally knock me flat, I'd had rather different "deep thoughts" for any October piece in the orchard.
I'd been writing about those, a personal exploration of things about just me that are much clearer now on the strength of slowly ripening insights granted by friends and lots of singers, but today, I feel less ready to write it.
Instead, there can only be hints in yesterday's piece I've shifted, called 'A real pain to rush things...', which should serve as a reminder to me of what it usually costs when I don't listen to myself as well as I should.
You don't need a full front-page entry about a terrifying blitz of brain pain and nausea I almost never get on "normal" working days, just only too often when I stop. But last week all the same, someone else asked to be given back more of the old personal blogging.
Well, it's there, this month's dose, where in both music and reading an underlying theme I've been following has more to it than simply what's particularly poetic, since it includes two other notions hard to write anything about on such a bleak, sunless morning as this.
One is the notion of Utopias.
For that, you'll find I've said a little about how my other lifelong "goddess" (who would rightly hate to be called one) in literature uses those to address the ways of own world, all that's wrong with it. The other is the notion of solitude, where I've given you two quotes that could seem in near total contradiction, about what most of us feel when confronted with our own loneliness.
I believe both to be true, but it took me a long time to get to the point of being open to such "truths" since they take languages other than words to express and above all to reconcile into the kind of sense that's not about "logic".
I don't plan to log much more about knowing I'm through with my own years of solitude, that's been said; today's just too nasty to tell you what I plan to do about it with any lightness or wit. In any event, the half-buried scare I got at the weekend was just one many of us have when sickness suddenly hits us like that and there's nobody around to offer comfort, cold compresses, a big hug and a promise it won't go on forever.
I can't and don't want to live like that any more.
I'm too ancient. In soul, I should add, because that's what some people tell me and when they do, I no longer find it just flattering but true. Most plans I had for this week were about giving anyway, not taking or asking.
My unbounded admiration for the Ursula I approached again yesterday is partly born of knowing, just as she does in book after book, that no society will work harmoniously unless it's one where people find giving is the source of all their real wealth and sharing the only responsible and wise way to behave.
We all find this out sooner or later.
But some just lock away the love they have in themselves so deeply or so hurt they feel that can't do it, it's too risky.
I know what needs to be done this week -- which includes fixing a few iPods as well as reviews yet to be posted -- but right or wrong, take that scare as a warning about announcing or even making plans when I'm too damned tired.
You'll soon, nevertheless, be hearing about Lauren Kendall, who proves to have an original sound in her approach to how we live our lives and especially our loves and our dreams, the most constant of themes for almost every musician featured here.
It's come to me, you see, along with thoughts of Ms. Le Guin and Utopias, that in lyrics -- and without wishing to make pigeon-holes of my own when I can't abide other peoples and nor can the singers -- the innate tensions that keep us listening to and loving superb singer-songwriters lie in their own such Utopias.
I shan't build this into a theme then twist musicians to fit it, but it's hard not to hear how part of the appeal that makes an album timeless rather than the latest and temporarily greatest to write up is in the emotional tension, expressed in words and enriched in music, between what is and what could be.
Unless you're a nihilist, there can be no creativity of the kind that makes for a career and for growth without tension and an acknowledgement always of something a little beyond what you've got still to aim for and achieve. When they cover politics, singers make this pretty explicit and have views of what's wrong. When it's more personal, the tension can be less obvious.
I'm spelling out one of many reasons for feeling a strong disregard for a music listener and especially writer who gets uptight, as some do, if a singer they like "let's them down" by doing something too new for them. For sure, some musicians change more than others, but if you don't like this, why bother with their new work at all? You wouldn't like it if somebody told you, "You know what's so great about you? You never change, you stagnate!"
I'd rather avoid any immediate straight music entries, though this is a week for them, when I feel as unwell as still I did this morning and the images that came to me weren't what I've become more used to in the natural flow of things. Those are harder to describe, since they're fleeting and usually about very recent events, musical or personal, and part of a networking process that keeps me in tune.
Thinking about blitzes and stage-props doesn't make me feel in synch with anything much, so until I've got that back -- and my insides have settled down -- once this is said, I'll start listening again but not writing it before I'm ready.
3:30:31 PM 
|
|
