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taliesin's log (voices of women)
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dimanche 23 avril 2006
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Most of this is a "guest column".
Amendments like putting Tia Knight where she belongs on this front page, as Dom quite rightly requests in a forceful post-script, can probably wait since this is supposedly a day of rest.
I didn't plan to log anything soon after yesterday's huge Fugue in the Old Style in the Orchard, but the "music" in this just knocked me out ... nicely so.
I'd like to share Dom A. because he put much ghost-writing into doing this for me before taking off for the Mediterranean part of France. Some things I find too private to log and I translate a paragraph or three that arrived in Dom's mother tongue:
'Werd' ich entschweben...'?†
"Thank you for calling me a kinder pal, Nick. You'd think I know the meaning of 'pal', but it was a new word since I picked up English neither in your native country nor in America.
"I rejoice to find you heard me out and made a return to the writing genre you renounced last year. Perhaps you should occasionally do this again, no? Save that equally I understood the image you've given of recovering a whole aspect of your life you once believed 'fallen like an eroded cliff into the sea' of your destiny. Then it may be that the music Log remains your way ever forward [...] like when I met you on Friday last.
"I miss Monsieur [Tony] Brock.* It was strange to learn first from your blog of your friendship with a man whom I believed to have kept during his long life in France a humanistic warmth and such qualities of a 'true gentleman' that I'd asked myself could he have retained a manner so 'perfectly English' had his choice not been your own, to leave.
"Then let me be your latest guest contributor, after him [...].
"One day I should ask Marie why she has called you 'British Airways'.**
"Have you understood how appropriate we find this appellation, some of us, when your swift daily stride from your home to the Métro seems often to be that of a man who flies the sidewalk of the street, descending briefly to greet those for whom you are yourself become an entire part of the rich colour of le quartier?
"We find you a mystery. Some say you are gay, those who don't know you with your daughter or never see you, as sometimes I have, with a woman for companion. I hope such details don't trouble you, Nick, in light of the story you've told. [...] For almost three months, I and my wife missed so evident a connection as the one between you and Taliesin's Log, which she started to read in November 2003.
"On Friday I found you a mystery phantom, you seemed so pale and weakened by the day's grand adventures, and was hesitant myself to suggest you start writing of such things again. But you have a strength, a strange strength, and you'll recall that in the novel by Philip K. Dick you drew on last week there is much talk of Faustus. And thus I encourage you!
"Are you yourself a Faustus?
Is this it, the secret of the changes in your Log?
There has been such a change since the summer in your writing that you may tell us you have foresworn abstraction and what in your Orchard you call 'fuckin' filosofy'! But this is a conceit, one I can understand in a man of your country, stung when Napoleon called the English a 'nation of shopkeepers'; the expression, which I learned myself from an Irishman, was no insult on the part of that astute monomaniac [...]
"You've long been under a Faustian spell.
Suzanne [I've not met Dom's wife] last year was surprised when you left Taliesin's Log largely intact on the subject of your malady, now brought fully into the light of day, and also some courageous details regarding your comportment with women. She is without doubt a courageous woman too, this Eleanor with whom you became so obsessed for some months, to permit your freedom of expression. A generous soul!
"You're right, it is soul, a generosity of soul [de l'âme], not merely of mind [de l'esprit] and of heart [du coeur], manifest in your friend, to have enabled her to have let you tell such a story. I would never have left those items in your Orchard if I were a blogger, never without a Suzanne in my heart to remind me how I became so engrossed in that story, a man like yourself who might have taken such a path. Then Eleanor understands also and clearly she was the woman to rid your mind of those abstractions, but if she is as you have sketched her, she's too grounded to play to your Faust!***
"You are too modest, Nick. You may think of yourself as a citizen of all a world, but it's a wearying English trait you've kept for the rest of this planet to be over-modest; it's perhaps acceptable on that island, less so among we French who delight in our scholarship and our learning. The arrogant brashness of Americans, Australians and [ ...there followed a list of other easily acceptable stereotypes only] is so much easier to understand than any fake mannerisms of a class-obsessed society you've yet fully to shake off [...]
"Do this, mon Faustus! For what your Log has become, in your profound understanding of women musicians and the scholarship you try to wear too lightly, leading only to perplexity on occasion, is none other than one man's Faustian quest for the Eternal Feminine, in yourself and now in 'Voices of Women'; it's this, rather than a projection any longer of some archetypal principle on to the women in your life.
 "That pale phantom I met on Friday, shored up almost literally on to his feet by Tia Knight -- you were so engrossed in her music you didn't see me for some minutes, did you? -- has become a teacher.
I understand your reluctance, we read what you say of it, but you must accept your destiny: music truly is magic, you've understood this, you have grasped its powers and something has happened to you and still you hesitate!
"You did write well tonight, again, of our quartier, of people we know, so why hide it? What so compels you still to separate out the music from that "life you are getting" and some of us in it, relegated to your Orchard, and now to find any qualitative difference between the music you write about and that other music in people? It's a false distinction, Nick. You'll fall into your own ancient trap of taking 'fuckin' filosofy' for some feared enemy. You live in a nation where there still remains too much bad philosophy, fake philosophy, pseudo-philosophy, that is true, and sexual philosophy also!
"Keep the spells and charms you have, but lose the false spell, mon ami.
Suzanne says she suspects the practical women you so love and admire have cowed you into submission. Et moi, I suspect Suzanne is right. [As for me, I take the point, but intend to keep having an Orchard. It's an intuitive thing.] You've been writing of the mood swings of depression, such as we know them too, the both of us. Perhaps we too are what you call 'cluster thinkers'.**** Are you afraid now of the networks you really should make?
Have you become so frightened of ideas as abstractions and what these have done in your life you're going to throw out the baby with the bathwater? You strongly risk making another swing, Nick, understand this. You need an intellect and the risk of abstraction sometimes to clarify your insights and your "intuitions". Don't make an intellectual swing now, don't fear your own ideas and their power to reach others.
"If you decide to print my advice, don't put it in The Orchard, I pray you. It's now a chill hour before dawn. We're leaving for Carcasonne [...] soon and won't be back for some weeks. Suzanne is driving, of course! [...] Tony respected you as a teacher, remember that. And I have a story about you, young British Airways: your gift from me, it will surprise you.
"Do you recall a brunette woman with a violin case and using her boyfriend's iPod Mini? You began a conversation with her in the Métro at around a quarter past eight one evening, 10 weeks ago, and she enjoyed it? She was interested in what you call 'Songlines', remember, and asked if you had a few "sunny dreams" ("rêves ensoleillés") as songlines for her. Then you looked at her iPod and you wrote her down a few suggestions, classical and jazz. She laughed and thanked you for those when you got off the train at Duroc station.
"How do I know this? I was sitting right behind the pair of you. You never noticed me, but [...] I told Suzanne they were true, things you sometimes write about meeting people on subway trains. Once you had gone, I slid round where you had been sitting and started talking to the woman myself, about you! If you are surprised already, here's another one, because you didn't ask her name, did you?
"It's Camille, Nick, just like the musician where you left off last month, and we went on talking right to the end of the line, where she was descending. We talked about other musical people as well, but she called you a "sort of magician". [...] You didn't tell her about your log, but I'd divine that now she reads it. I told her about it and her English is good. [...] That was when you had begun writing about the Dreamtime and I told Camille about this because you seem to understand what the Dreamtime really is, somehow.
"'I have several threads to pick up on this log for sure,' you wrote last Tuesday.
That's one of them, the Dreamtime; you still haven't put those pieces back in your puzzle after you lost a few articles. But you gave this the air of a duty! How very English of you for a good citizen of nowhere and everywhere. It's no duty. You're a convalescent today. You are still striving hard to pull out of a very, very difficult time. [...] Camille understood the Dreamtime too because she has lived in Australia and knows the aboriginal sense of the expression, and she told me, 'A dreamer is necessary to know the Dreamtime. Your friend Nick must be a very good dreamer."
"Dreaming is a sort of magic, Nick, a magic that heals, a white magic, and your Log is going there as well. Then go with your Log, ride the music. It's not just a compass you need. You love flying. Have you ever practised equitation?***** For Suzanne, there is a symphony by Shostakovich, his last [number 15, one with a few musical jokes in, a short one too] she hears like a "good horsewoman". She's reading over my shoulder now.
Nick, learn from the animals we are if you want to teach them as you must. Your Log isn't a duty. A river it may be, like our lives, a whole number of rivers even. 'Subterranean and on the surface,' Suzanne suggests. 'It's all in Nick's flow, when he brings what is under the surface up into the light of day and tells us stories about who we are. Remind him of what he quoted from Eliot a long time ago.'
[In publishing this, just like I when read Dom's words this morning, Suzanne's saying that sends a shiver down my spine and brings tears welling just behind my eyes, because it's such an important reminder. Touche!:]
"Yet with these April sunsets, that somehow recall
My buried life, and Paris in the Spring,
I feel immeasurably at peace, and find the world
To be wonderful and youthful, after all."
[borrowed in 'Of homicide and heart's ease, May 2004' and -- this time I want to pinch rather more than what once I did in The Orchard, as reminded, the italicised part:]
'We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always -
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.******
"Nick, to hear the music in animals, you can't pick up the reins by forcing the flow. It frightens people when you're scared, you've said so yourself often enough. To teach, learn to be at one with the horse, it's alive, and horses can swim.
"We must go very soon now. You've got your music back.
Take your own counsel: go with the flow, let the music steer you [...]
"Je t'embrasse, mon cher cavalier!
"'Moi aussi, très fort," echoes Suzanne.
"Dom A.
"p.s. If you don't put Tia Knight on the front page, you nincompoop, you'll pick up the pissed-off vibes all the way from Perpignan!"
________
Well, "orders is orders."
Tia Knight comes out of The Orchard.
Because there's thunder in the air and magic around, I bet Eliot -- who's so good at giving me spine shivers that one day I may dare publish the whole of my 'Gaïa's Complaint' poem tribute to him in the The Orchard, more than 40 pages of it -- didn't need geographical flow-charts to know that our "rivers" and other waterways all come from the same place and go back there in the end...
†That cheeky bit of German means I think a bit of Mahler's 8th might be in order; plenty of women in the 'Symphony of a Thousand'. It's a line from Goethe's 'Faust', as I finally recall, when he takes off:
"With wings that I have earned
In the struggle of love
I shall fly upwards
To the light no eye has reached!"
Now those footnotes:
*It was from one stop further north of the Duroc M station Dom mentions that I gave you a little of Tony's music when he died, in A morning chez St François-Xavier.
**Marielle didn't invent this local monicker for me. Hugues the barman did, but she uses it even more. As do others.
***Hmm. If Ellie had actually read what I sometimes wrote when that Orchard was her secret place, though it was never about her private life, I wonder about this. But not for long. Because she's not the only person I know with what Dom calls "generosity of soul", a distinction I'd happily make myself and do.
****'Cluster thinking' is a term I've borrowed again.
It's amazing, how many different ways of thinking people have, every one of us, while a superb encyclopaedia, 'The Oxford Companion to the Mind,' edited by Richard L. Gregory (1987, 1998 for my own edition) holds that we "human animals" function with more than half a dozen differently measured kinds of "intelligence".
There's fun in this, because some of my buddies know I've got an abnormal IQ, rather high and rising as I get older, which isn't supposed to happen. In me, this only makes any sense if I posit an SQ of which I've told them. [(Intelligence Quotient of 147] - [SQ (Stupidity Quotient of 149)] = NLIQ (Natural or Normal Life Intelligence Quotient) of -2. This is why NB, B.A.†† flies below the radar. I need to work on that...
††'British Airways,' not bachelor of anything!
*****My experience of riding horses was never as successful as swimming. But at least I wasn't quite as unfortunate as a beloved cousin who as a wild youth was preening himself uneasily on horseback in front of some Girl Scouts when some bastard suddenly kicked his beast into a gallop. The same only happened to me with a dromedary in a part of the Sahara that was good for soft landings.
******The real shiver here is how I'm reminded of this just after choosing the icons for two partitions on my Mac while it's still undergoing an overhaul. The symbol for my side is now a lightning bolt, or fire, while the one for the other side, unsurprisingly now named "lilith" and wide open for the Kid or any friends who wish to use the machine is ... a rose.
Oh and speaking of roses, it is Saint George's Day (Wikipedia). Painting courtesy of them, by Raphael, not to be muddled up with the hero of the recently mentioned 'Lamb Lies Down on Broadway'.
6:43:53 PM 
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samedi 22 avril 2006
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Real luck came my way when I lugged the regular Saturday shopping into Le Bouquet, put down the bags with a gasp, took out the music plugs and found bright, fast-talking barman Hugues already chastising me for having failed to shake hands and say "Hi" in the first second of arrival.
He's okay. It suffices to lift two fingers in his direction and he understands that to be an order for a double crème as well as the other thing. The first big cup of frothy coffee landed unnoticed while I was welcomed straight into talk with wide-ranging stage and cinema artist, Carlos, who is also an old hand in the ways of the gang wars that have marked our part of town since before Al Capone was running his own in the States.
Carlos, however, was in such bubbly mood all to himself that I was able largely to ignore with good humour his multi-lingual post-birthday discourse about "the Queen Mum", whom he seemed to have adopted for the afternoon, and instead say "Too long no see!" to Jan, his conversation partner up to that point. Jan, a retired Sorbonne professor, is among the most remarkable men I've ever met, from his infancy in a Vietnam where his father was a French district administrator until the boy was three. That year he was taken hostage by the Japanese, his dad was tortured to death for aiding and abetting the Vietcong and his mother went mad.
Part of the rest of Jan's life story I got in brief almost two weeks back when first we found out how much we had in common on topics as different as music studies in Asian culture and what the more excitable journalists in France's media then had begun to dub "Mars '06" as once their elders had written of "Mai '68".
We found, Jan and me, that our own perspective on the upheaval among students before the unions jumped on the bandwagon was a little too distanced for the taste of those in either rival camp.
Why I stayed out of Le Bouquet, a corner bar and restaurant just a few metres from my building's front door, until last year escapes me now! I used to drop in for the music they had on annually from around this time in the spring; but I never made the time to discover that the place run by a lively couple of women, just opposite another bar where the street killing I witnessed and wrote up two years ago, is a watering hole for very talented people.
The music often consisted of fine trad' jazz bands until boorish locals intent on their tellies moaned and had it banned as too noisy. The bar itself has almost magically, in spite of some attempts Carlos once told me about, evaded becoming any part of the local turf wars that led to that murder and some further bloodshed last year. Last summer when the Chinese moved in to join the fun, buying their way up the street, I can only guess they found Marielle and Francine so "far out" of their preoccupation with money-laundering and forged residency permit rackets, they simply gave up on Le Bouquet!
Yup, this stuff is true.
I rarely write about it because this is a music log, but the street I love living in, like many people from a multitude of backgrounds and nationalities, has retained some kind of legendary quality along with three or four others in the immediate neighbourhood for more than a century. The knife killing I witnessed and reported in May 2003, with some pictures of the honours paid the dead, is among affairs still being investigated by the French equivalent of Scotland Yard.
The reason I've logged little since, as well as ignoring mails from people purporting to be relatives or friends of the kid who was stabbed, is that you might well find this interesting, but I'm still a sworn witness to murder and have no more to put in print that could be sub judice. Some of the mail seems to be in good faith and it's no secret to say the victim happened to be in the car of the intended target, so I'll simply state I know no more about poor Karim than I did the day he died at my feet.
To go on about the turf wars and the gradual local transition in the past three decades from prostitution to drugs dealing, an occasional firearms trade and other crimes I've mentioned above, is to give a false impression that my district isn't one where it's safe for women and children to walk the streets on their own or late at night. It is, perfectly safe. Several bars and cultural centres round here close well after midnight and at this time of year, now the windows can at last remain wide open again, the noise of a lone lass's clacking heels on the pavement far below my bedroom window is a frequent and undisturbed one! The thugs in the area have eyes only for one another and the real yobs and bloody nuisances in my own ears are often Brits and other "foreigners" who come and stay for a soccer or rugby weekend in the hotels of the street and get pissed out of their tiny minds but usually manage to be avoid violence except accidentally to themselves.
I'm doing this particular entry as an in memoriam, if you like, for Karim and very simply as a piece of my "music" posted with love and regard for people like Jan, Carlos, Sam at "the Canteen" (though I've only had one meal at the Pizzeria Pernety so far this year, being until now low on funds), Baudier the Literary Lion who has just published another two-volume tome some of us hope will be rather less gloomy and abstruse and obscure than one of his others.
Last weekend André went to the FNAC cultural megastore at Montparnasse to find out how his new book was doing, only to suspect it wasn't even there since he didn't bother to look on top of the piles of the most prominent stuff, where it duly lay. Once he did discover it, he inquired where they would "classify" it and was told they didn't know -- they couldn't yet. I liked that and hope Baudier also took it for the kind of compliment I'd pay many women musicians here, who hate being labelled.
I have also been rediscovering the district and far too many people I much like in it to stick in a log column while off sick from work and unable to go far from anywhere without a bed where I'm able to lie down suddenly if needed. There will be no book from me about a remarkable area, still one of the four or five genuine "villages" left in Paris, but this week I realised my arrival here to live rather than be an occasional to a close friend or two was more than a dozen years ago!
Still there are people who imagine me moving one day, but they are wrong until the stairs are too much. I didn't wake up today until 10 minutes into the appointment I'd made for a haircut, which is par for more than a week's sleeping through at least two alarm clocks since my new drug to treat a bipolar mental disorder kicked in. So once I'd used a further hour or so until 1:30 pm to wake out of other yuk side-effects and then taken advantage of glorious sunshine to finish cleaning up winter's mess in the flat as best I can, apologies were made to the hairdresser, along with a safer mid-afternoon appointment next week.
Those side-effects. Before getting back to gossip I began writing last night along with some first tidings of the musician who sustained me through Friday, I'll just let you know that before going to bed, I did something silly and found the medicine -- which I shan't name, since nobody needs encouragement -- has a whole web site of its own, with an alarming "Click here" alert.
I did, like an idiot, and scared myself almost back to bipolar mania on reading that the:
"most common side effects that may occur [...] are: sleepiness, muscle stiffness, restlessness, tremor, indigestion, nausea, abnormal vision, muscle aches, dizziness, runny nose, diarrhea, increased saliva, stomach pain, and urinary incontinence [...]
"You may have heard the term 'tardive dyskinesia' [which I'd escaped until then]. These are potentially irreversible, uncontrollable, slow or jerky facial or body movements that can be caused by all medications of this type."
In the first paragraph there, I find four of those effects fortunately absent in my case, but not sleepiness and muscular aches and pains. Last Saturday, by the time I'd got the shopping up four flights of stairs -- 81 in all, I've long known -- my body told me: "Never make me do that again!"
However, I had to bestir my limbs this weekend and still went to a supermarket that is by no means the nearest, since it's the cheapest and biggest. Without Le Bouquet to stop off in for a chat session and to "refuel British Airways" and if I didn't know it was partly the medication, I'd be freaked out by now, since the months I'm getting over are a further excuse not to pack in the cigarettes quite yet. Jan said since Hugues is such a lovely guy bound to service, he would lug my bags the rest of the way in exchange for indescribable favours not up my street, but Hugues even denied that last week I'd offered him 1,000 euros!
Since the shopping was a typical, average load, while putting it all away this time I weighed it, using a pocket calculator. I was impressed myself! The total was 23.03 kilograms, not counting containers of plastic and sometimes glass. If any heathens aren't reading this, that makes 50.77 US pounds -- what is a US pound, as opposed to a British one, which my heathen Mac didn't mention?
Yes. There is a musician in all this.
 No heathen is she, but a self-professed pagan born on the Mississippi about a year after Mai '68. Her name is Tia Knight.
Before getting to her, though -- you can skip away freely -- I'd like to complete a rare "Dear diary" episode with some of yesterday's events and a comment or two on that French upheaval of the past couple of months, a few words for a software genius ... and something I know some of you wish to know about: what I think of France's new copyright laws.
Out of that order, the software wizard is a fellow "pan-European", so he feels: Eric Böhnisch-Volkmann. I've already written here and elsewhere of his work and achievement without naming the man, since if you are a researcher, writer, reporter or even the usual odd mixture of all kinds of skills requiring a lot of data processing and you've got a Mac, chances are you need Eric's help.
My Mac having been as out of order as my brain became, this is an ideal time for me to upgrade some Devon Technologies products I've found increasingly useful with the log and in other parts of my life.
Really, check that stuff out.
My respect for DEVONThink and DEVONAgent grew with the ability of these applications (or software programmes) to conjoin in carrying out their own "intelligent processing" of data research among every kind of file you will have on your Mac or stored in other computer-handy forms and on the Net itself as a superb search engine. Eric is the brains behind Devon Technologies and runs a small firm straddling an ocean and several borders.
I'd been hoping to end my first day with a real sortie around town and working also at home in more than a fortnight by calling Devon Tech about the company's brand-new updates to these key products and their web site. Unfortunately, the day's work still proved far from over, but I didn't expect for one moment that a quick phone call to Germany would lead to a 20-minute chat with the great man himself.
We found plenty in common in views about how Apple operates -- or rather only too malfunctions arrogantly and badly -- but these apart, the talk was a relaxing one for me with a nice, convivial man who is unusually helpful and has a splendid sense of humour.
Bravo, Eric, for all of it -- I like your "music"! There's no point in rewriting what I have already, especially given the new Devon Technologies web site, but some readers will remember how here and elsewhere when I was into Mac journalism and a help site, I always had very warm words for the people behind the scenes like this man, superb software developers.
Of course if I wrote up what we make of Apple sometimes -- while I'm too tired at the moment and interested in other things to pursue my own skirmishes with Cupertino -- I'd probably get Eric banned from further dealings with Job's outfit! And if I meant that, it would be terrible.
This "plug" is here to remind people that for both this log -- when I'm on my usual ground -- and in other aspects of my life with a computer, it's superb to have technology that throws up harmonious links and connections for me and you I'd not have always have sussed out for myself.
There's been plenty here recently about cognition and intuition. Certainly I wouldn't say these main achievements of Devon Tech are first signs of artificial intelligence, but sometimes when used with skill they come very close to "intuitive processing" of the data they find, classify, network and store.
I'm much looking forward to entering the log and music-related things, together with links to scores of gigabytes of music itself, into the latest versions, since I can do it a whole lot better than I did, and already the two programmes have very occasionally
behaved like my "iPod finger", knowing just what to tell me! If Eric wishes to deny -- as I probably would -- there is any "ghost in the machine", he's welcome to put in a disclaimer comment to that effect...
Such flip remarks also take me on to genuinely weird territory again soon and a musician to suit. To get there, I shall cut out details of how yesterday's travels to the Factory and my local social security offices were rendered painful, in the first case, by getting jammed between floors by an AFP lift as if the damned building itself was refusing to let me go before I'm altogether ready for Africa again, and in the second, by very nearly passing out!
I simply had to lie down at the "Sécu", where eventually people proved reasonably understanding as I drifted off. There was even an "Is this man suffering, should we get the doctor?" that woke me out of it, but I didn't wish to sit up and feel too horrible straight away and decided it would be better not to make even more of a spectacle of myself by complaining that their otherwise comfortable waiting seats are not body-shaped! I suppose it might have been an idea to curl myself round the curvy bend on the bench, but then I could have been locked in for the night.
The best bits of yesterday included finding a market stall-holder just outside AFP who filled in 13 gaps in my collection with some of the first recorded music by women at prices that would be too good to be true, except they were. The owner, better still, is apparently now a regular feature twice a week at Place de la Bourse, and she has a lovely smile and a knowledge of her field like Eric's of his. Things like a fantastic Billie Holliday find at two or three euros a shot are remarkable! When I do go back to work, I think Tuesdays and Fridays will require either a straitjacket or leaving all possible means of spending money at home.
Inside the Factory, I found wonderful confirmation the work committee's CD lending library now considers me a prime purchasing counsellor on the strength of this site. Wow!! Could this be, as I reflected in a mail to a friend when everything seemed set, since the library happens to be run by women?
Yes. I did promise. Copyright.
That piece of legislation was overshadowed, however, by a row about first job contracts and education. On the latter, to cut a long story better told by others short, I found sense on both sides and couldn't consider the protesters all "spoiled young idiots" -- like some of my favourite people did -- but I saw the mistake made by Dominique de Villepin...
The prime minister is a diplomat, a first-rate one. I've reminded a few people how the speech he gave at the United Nations to disrupt the headlong insane rush into the second Gulf War -- one reason this log started as an outlet for what I can't say in my paid work -- was not just brilliant. Read it today. It was premonitory. Much of the world may hate France for it, but Villepin said, "I warn you now, it will happen like this," and it all has!
But he isn't a politician. Like some of the people who run the US, he's never known an electoral fight in his life. Never mind the rights and wrongs of the contract affair. His government effectively said with no effective prior consultation, "Hey, France, it is tough shit but this is hard reality! You like it or you lump it. If you lump it, emigrate, get lost. We serve bosses who will give the jobs you turn down to countries where labour is a damned sight cheaper and open to much easier exploitation. Okay?"
In France, that's the kind of practice that starts a National Ritual! And it did. And this one interested me since no "democratic government" should ever forget one thing: whatever it actually does, however sensible even sometimes, it does not turn round on a people, especially the French, and say: "Right, folks, grow up. Dreams are banned!
"Oui, messieurs ... 'dames, mesdemoiselles, you heard right. Dreaming is against the law."
Okay, that's strong, but that's pretty much how the measure was understood by many -- remember, people phoned me last year asking "Are you all right? Is Paris burning?" on the strength of another gulf war, the gulf with no bridge between the nation's rulers and the alienated, hopeless youth of its suburbs. Tell kids like that to grow up and stop dreaming ... well, it happened, didn't it?
Last week the wise Kathryn Petro posted a quote about dreams I love myself, especially since her entry was called 'Safely Insane' (A Mindful Life). So you can see why a veteran social anthropologist like Jan thought my point of view after half my life in this country was worth half the story of his own, much of that in places with carpet bombs and napalm falling on them. But my career began as a social anthropology student and would-be ethnomusicologist -- as you'll be tired of being told -- so you can imagine a professor who was one might enjoy how I hear France.
To hear a lot more French music and that of everywhere else, the new law -- so far -- is rare proof of intelligent if very political life at the top. Last night I double-checked to be sure Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres is still culture minister, since such men and women do tend to come and go a lot over a quarter of a century unnoticed by me if they fail to do anything that's either very smart or unsafe insanity!
I've really kept a bunch of you waiting on my first thoughts about the enlightened approach this country has taken to copyright that led brain-dusting New Yorker Cindy to send me a "Have you seen 'France May Force ITunes Open' kind of mail last month. I've had a bucketload now of mails, comments, questions.
You have my answer in one word. It is "enlightened".
I couldn't give a monkey's toss what Steve Jobs and the record industry majors make of it, since they're into "production" and "consumption", which are market terms. A bit like Villepin with that UN speech, Donnedieu de Vabres really got my ear with an interview he's given about culture. The man is no fool, he understands the financial needs of both we the "consumer" and we the creative artist "producer".
He and his sidekicks are doing their level best to reconcile these needs and see them from a cultural perspective as well as getting ahead of today's technology. I'm giving no long spiel since they've not even started yet. Music first, then maybe the outrageous French value added tax on "culture" of almost 20 percent comes down, then -- to put it dramatically - they plan to take on Hollywood!
So, you can see. I'm on to this one like the wolf I must remember to be, sniffing out every turn and scenting prey in the greedy, short-sighted and selfish. I won't go into it all too deeply in any one column, but I fully understand the issues here and from time to time, I'll keep you abreast of what is going on behind the news you read on other sites.
This isn't a hard news site. It's an insight site. It's a site where I find it a pity that to give you an idea of where my own listening and reading is going, I have to resort to a place called how it is. It's a decent site, though far too weighted to just one nation, like so many things on the Net. It's a real pain in the ass to have to put items there myself if they're not at Amazon US.
Have the people who run it failed utterly to realise -- much like Jobs fails to notice when he's the wrong side of foreign law -- that people elsewhere in the world have Amazon stores that work the same way but don't feed their different "markets" the same fine and crap things? Amazon aren't that stupid! Any more than I am anti-American. I'm just a "snotty-nosed Brit" who thinks he's a citizen of nowhere but one planet and hates arrogance.
If I had a say in it All Consuming, would be called "All Sharing dot org" or something. Do you realise the concept of "all sharing" is so alien to global society that at the time of posting this the domain name is still out there, unused? People who tell me what idiots the French are, as many do -- some Americans rather pathetically forming a sizeable majority apart from the locals themselves -- land on unsympathetic ears.
I'm sure you'll agree that's enough of this kind of music, and thus I'll end with a mention of a woman who's another lovely American and a southerner to boot. My Friday in Le Bouquet began with a guy called Jean-Luc. He's the kind of company I like to keep when walking in the minefields or skirting the quicksand of "weird stuff".
Witchcraft, for instance.
With Jean-Luc, I rambled dangerously, from Sumer (Wikipedia) and its people's ways on the Old Path to Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' -- which once I even read while working in a reference library -- and an article on a part of our DNA at Belgium-based site Karmapolis (Fr).
Even Joseph of Arimathea came into it, so you can imagine how we were slicing Occam's razor and snipping at the sorts of razor wire woolly and weak-minded New Agers tend to get caught on if they're careless. Hmm ... I wonder if Eric's technology will be able one day to sift fact from fancy or make the even subtler kinds of leaps into clarity Dick's robot did in my last column, closing the Great Depression.
 Is the Devil always as black as he's painted? In some traditions, no, not if you start thinking "Lucifer" and understanding how darkness sheds light. Was it predictable I'd turn an ear to the way 'Pagan Presence Presents The Music of Tia Knight, a little surprised to find her available for widespread "consumption" without having to put her there myself?
Truth to tell, while Knight's 'Blackwood' is safe enough, the 'Homequest' I engaged on anew was a source of one tip-off to Apple that their iTMS France has a very bad version, including electronic crackling noises that aren't Tia's. The store mailed me back with a refund and a note saying that of the two available releases staff would further check out what I told them and remove the duff copy.
They asked me to wait until they had. So I did. But they haven't. One of the two versions, as you can hear should you want, remains there for now with horrible extras as a warning always to listen before you download from the iTMS -- just no words telling you this...
Witch music? I followed a hunch, firmed up by Tia Knight herself at Blackwood Manor Music based on my admiration for quirky and stubborn classical musicians Glenn Gould and Scott Ross, both now deceased, when I could hear their ways in this woman. Ross was sometimes a harpsichord player. He was at home with J.S. Bach, G.F. Händel and Antonio Soler (as in this 'Récital de clavecin') and with the music of royal courts such as French ones.
They usually had so little time for "witches" the poor women got toasted. On her second album, Tia makes a 2003 'Homequest' return to such centuries-old origins -- the simple, song-like and short keyboard piece 'Jester's Folly' does this beautifully -- while also using her woodwinds and electronics.
Tia accepts the pagan etiquette and gets filed under New Age too at the intriguing and varied Weed Music download site. Now I'd really like to get to know a third album, 'Smoke and Mirrors' she announces as "swirling with sexy".
'Homequest' can have the same near hypnotic effect as high-flying mediaeval music, using repetitive forms and tonalities still widely thought alien to our modern ears until we simply listen to the music around before any renowned Bach family and a well-tempered clavier. It is an uplifting but laid-back album, you could even say "easy listening" for music so subtle. Some of the tones Tia borrows are almost outside time, like monastic Gregorian chant, a kind of "forever" music, coming and going as from nowhere yet simply being, here and now.
The origins could be traced way back in part to the African heartbeat pulse at one level and a Greek philosophical kinship between musical and perceived universal harmonies. But that's a pretty academic approach -- again the ethnomusicologist in me at work -- while Tia's is magically inviting and warm. It's playfully deceptive, so the title of the upcoming album doesn't surprise me.
The smoke and mirrors will be sounds and how she plays with them. She offers an introduction to her range on a Tia Knight music page, with no fewer than half a dozen pieces to download. The six songs are the kind of high-quality generosity and sharing I've come almost dangerously to expect from so many of the women about whom I write.
They are gifts. I found myself listening two or three times to 'Perfect Love', a track where the opening toll of seemingly vast ancient bells leading into an electronic drone -- very much a "dark age" and mediaeval thing, "drones" -- and overlaid departure lounge-type announcements make for motion amid stillness that can be conveyed only in music, not words of mine.
In coming months, if you're still dreaming with me, I believe we're going to learn quite a lot about Lilith...
11:04:18 PM
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mardi 18 avril 2006
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"Just wanted to say that I am still around and still really enjoying your blog," commented Francesca the other day.
Francesca?
"Depression has twisted and distorted my life for many years. These blogs, Pushing an Elephant (blogrolled here) and Diet Coke are my attempt to make sense of the past and of the present. The first is [or was] a more or less daily journal of my thoughts, opinions, visited web sites etc. The second, Diet Coke, focuses on mental health issues, both my experience of depression and more general writing on the subject. I have also included a link to my poetry and art website, Scarlet Nails."
Still around one way or another -- if nowhere online I've yet quite pinned down pending actually asking! -- Francesca puts that very well. Her work is worth anyone's time.
"Nick, I haven't been over here for a while and am sorry to hear you've been vacationing in Hades, the one place the tourist guides don't tell you about. I hope you'll never set foot there again and that your next holiday is to Eden, and I mean a literal one here on this planet, not the one beyond the stars. Thanks for putting my pic among your mates, I hadn't seen that. It's great to be seen as music," Natalie added.
I've reconsidered a reply, because I think it goes for us all:
Well, you people are music. I've come to the conclusion that this, in its way, goes for everybody. The Kid reckons I simply happen to have two sets of ears: one for music and the other for "music". What on earth do we mean?
The latter -- "music" as metaphor -- is for me what lies behind what people do and express, sometimes by the direct practice of the former (with words or without), often in different creative ways of their own and always by being who they are.
I don't plan to write a discourse on the 'Big L', but like my friend BJ's definition of it, still in The Orchard here, where he holds that "love is the Higgs-Boson particle of human relationships". There's real wit, a touch of humour that makes the deepest sense to those both with an understanding of quantum physics and latter-day Holy Grail aspirants!
If you're neither, never mind.
You see, what BJ meant the day he said that is just something that binds, a force that has to be there though nobody's yet found it, since if it isn't, our known universe amounts to nothing and doesn't "work". The inspired genius in his remark was to apply abstract theory of the unknown to the daily practice of relationships we do know!
So I relish it and have often thought about it.
When it comes to the disbanded Bikini Kill of the '90s, their kind of music and the relationships we all have, one thread I look forward to picking up here in its time is a particularly poisonous piece of nonsense.
"Eden?" Natalie, to take the Genesis legends and then the Easter tale itself as millennial perennials of a paternalistic priesthood is to perpetuate, right here on this earth of ours, a notion of a "Redeeming 'Big L'," by a Real Man, isn't it? "Redemption" from what?
This was a well-nigh subconscious topic of my morning "meditations" for some time, before the Hades vacation itself turned some of those sessions into little more than a tiresome battle to keep Thanatos (let's simply say the draw of death in us all) in check. Francesca, a sweetie who is still around, is very bound to know know manic depression distorts thought, paralyses our deeds and perverts our relationship bonds with others, when its moods take charge.
Elsewhere, I've explored and shared a learning of knowing redemption from self and from others we love. It's part of a recovery process in different forms of depression and part of a strategy people need to be of the world and in it as ourselves, not patients locked into a purely clinical and thus exclusive type of treatment. It's wickedly exclusive, in making of all those who aren't fellow sufferers from disorders such as mine and Francesca's and the therapists who help us "outsiders" to our insides.
Such anapproach, though occasionally it may very sadly be necessary, puts the patients in clinics and it casts family and our mates in every sense, along with co-workers and friend, in the roles of actors on the outside.
This is a very wrong approach, unless it really must be for a spell. It alienates the so-called "nutcase", "loony" or whatever from the callers, visitors, well-wishers, bearers of grapes and "I'm sorry for you" people who -- with better understanding -- are by far the best placed, each in their way, to keep us in a real world they consider "normal" where we supposedly aren't.
Otherwise, there's perversity that takes some beating! Therapy helps, medication helps. But the saving grace a depressive needs as much as anybody else -- for what the "hell" or "heaven" or on earth is "normality" and natural behaviour -- comes in a form of "redemption" from deep within themselves and through all kinds of others close to them.
I have several threads to pick up on this log for sure, slowly, each in its time, but there's something even more perverse and indeed truly poisonous than a disease with which some of us have to learn to live.
Pulling through the last cycle that leaves me still called for something truly unexpected and for some unanticipated help in an understanding of what "redemption" really means. How I do hate, here in France or any nation with a very deep Roman Catholic tradition, potentially beautiful places of worship where all hangs on grotesque, often lurid imagery in statues and in windows of that Real Man, the Redeemer, forever nailed to a crucifix, the dying blood streaming down, the pain distorted into an act of glory, with a place on the side for his poor old mum, a woman -- and a Virgin, but of course!
I can imagine no more entertaining way than a randy and rebellious "rock" musician or two, along with some true poets among women singers, to deal a death-blow to a very pernicious notion put around about women by an all-male clergy and about one legendary Eve especially.
 That evil notion is Original Sin.
I think this needs tackling head on. For me, it's a lie, a huge Lie, ingrained in hearts and minds and toxic to our souls down century after century. While I've said and shown with examples in music from Bach to the band Hem that I've no lack of respect for simple Christianity simply practised, if rarely in far too many a church, the social scientist in me has known for most of my life how that legend, the Christ one, long predates a one Bible and its story.
I'm not sure about the "next holiday". I think we have to use every one of our senses to boot each other right back into Eden. Along with a little of what I'd much rather just call the 'Big L'.
Maybe Kathleen* of her Bikini Kill days will give me a hand, angry, sexy and ... a funny woman. I'll certainly count on a number of women -- including Lilith Fair types -- and on a fellow or two, dis-eased sometimes maybe, but not brain-washed by some smug sense of supremacy, to nail this vicious myth right on the head.
Easter eggs?
For now -- since I'll have other topics to take up first -- I'll do here what I've done in a real exchange or two elsewhere, including lessons learned about three core values evoked here and raised with a wise church-going man. It was intriguing to find that my own father had come down in the practice of life to the same essential values as me. He sees no service in saying "Thanks, mate, no woman could have done that for me," to a mysterious man who's perpetually nailed and held by some of disconcerting sureness never to have been laid.
My dad's seen far beyond that. And so did another fellow I've written about in a few "Thank you" mails lately, the late Philip K. Dick. I'm not sure my dad would like Dick or Bikini Kill, but I do know people who take pity on him for a few ailments of ageing give him the willies.
Before I shut down, let me tell you also what Dick wrote in a little novel called 'Galactic Pot-Healer' about another computer, a robot by the name of Willis. I'll quote in full, especially wrapped as I am in no shroud but a deliciously misheard "strategy":
"Little tragedy of life," the robot said. "Billions of them, unnoticed, every day. Except that God notices, at least according to my pamphlet."
"But I see what you mean," Joe said. "About worry. Concern; that's closer to it. I felt it concerned me. It did concern me. Caritas. Or in the Greek—" He could not remember the word.
"Can we go below, now?" Mali asked.
"Yes," Joe said. Obviously she did not understand. But, oddly, the robot did. Strange, Joe thought. Why does it understand when she doesn't? Maybe caritas is a factor of intelligence, he reflected. Maybe we've always been wrong: caritas is not a feeling but a high form of cerebral activity, an ability to perceive something in the environment—to notice and, as the robot had put it, to worry. Cognition, he realised; that's what it is. It isn't a case of feeling versus thinking: cognition is cognition.
Aloud he said, "Can I have a copy of your pamphlet?"
"Ten cents, please," the robot said [...].
Cheap at the price, I'd say ... well, depending which planet you're on; Dick's genius lay in that kind of writing, inviting a little rewriting of my own.
All the Easter tale says to me concerns caritas. However, it's an unwise way to behave when your sense of self-worth may have grown up to discard what others make of you, but still depends on always wanting to be "there for them". That's stupid.
People hate it when I worry about them too much, often subconsciously, but sometimes haven't shown it when it did matter since I've been too damned tired. Exhausted, in part, not by logging here about relationships and a human condition where I find the most widely known four gospels deal rather well in a caritas story, taken to extremes. But by wasting time on vicious cycles causing "bad vibes" among the animals in us all.
You've had three of these pieces now. I'm sure you'll agree that's enough. "All things in moderation," but religion more so than any since when any good story is pushed into extremism by fanatics -- and women fanatics are quite infrequent, aren't they? -- it kills. Nowadays the nails are bullets and bombs.
My expressed vocation, this log, is a vacation from all that, the violence I've never been able to endure in prolonged doses without breaks since what I called my 'Night of Unknowing' and logged it in The Orchard. I wonder what Dick might have made of that? Maybe just the ignition in me of cognition.
That's a reassuring thought before I give the Mac a going-over because it doesn't like borrowed time any more than I do. If we disappear -- me, Mac and log -- for rather longer than I hope it will take to speed the computer up while I go on slowing down, please do a "four-eyed" four-ears a favour.
Don't worry about me!
I shan't be worrying about you with no reason.
It's like I said elsewhere, maybe even here before, but I'll say it again with a further lesson learned, telling me to shift that "centre of gravity" of mine. My cognition is no different from yours. Not in the least. And we're all normal as well, those of us who don't try to stop the flow and just channel it right.
Perhaps I need four ears to do it with, while being different, you'll have your own way of doing it. You know what I call "it", a bit like BJ and Peter Gabriel when he was Genesis (in 'The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway' with its 'Lilywhite Lilith' too). And I've scarcely met a soul without intuition.
How many times have you said it or heard it said to you? "Follow your intuitions." Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands, maybe? Has anybody been wrong in saying it? Have you ever heard anyone say, "Oh, I wish I hadn't followed my intuition"? Because I never have. Including the one that tells me unless I shut up now, it's not Nick who's now headed for a breakdown again. It's his computer.
Hear you soon, huh?
Oh -- and thanks again for lending me an ear of your own.
________
*The pic of Kathleen without Co. comes from Sarah's fan site I linked to in the previous column (aka 'Amethyst Skyz'). I see no sin in that scan!
5:37:43 PM
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lundi 17 avril 2006
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My recently neglected Mac, correspondence apart, must be a convert to an odd idea I have about people and their machines that process data.
Yesterday, feeling it deserved some help with routine upgrades and maintenance, I found Apple had come out with another "security update". No doubt they must inflict these on us, but I hate them. A security update is the task where Mac users need to juggle doing something interesting with keeping an eye on a progress bar that tells you it's "optimising system performance", but notches up the percentage completed scale like a snail on Kilimanjaro.
I did find something interesting.
ReBeL GrrLs.
 You could very soon be in The Lilith Library: "Art, information, history, music, everything you could possibly want to know about Lilith, the first succubus, the first wife of Adam, the Greek Goddess of the Black Moon." It's a big jump from Queen Boadicea to Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, Africa's first elected woman president who took charge of Liberia this year, but that doesn't daunt Olivia Ward on 'Women of Power' -- and with a leg up from Bikini Kill!
However, each topic in its time.
It was notably in taking in "bust" iPods for repair I first made an irrational jump of my own, observing that the difficulty of the task on my desk often seemed to correlate with the state of mind of the distant owner of the music box. I've mentioned this coincidence: how, for instance, one iPod was almost fixed when it decided to behave badly again so suddenly I even asked the friend to whom it belongs if perchance she had blown a fuse about anything around 5:19 pm! She had, almost precisely then.
The standard Mac checks that followed the security update came up with such alarming and irreparable results in tests this'll be my penultimate log entry before a big chunk of computer gets zero-wiped and I reinstall one of the operating systems from scratch. If you don't wish to hear what "/sbin/fsck -f" means doing in Mac maintenance, you're well out of where I subsequently found myself, full of "invalid nodes" and other terms bearing a striking similarity to some neurochemistry ones I've had to swallow in the past week and more.
In sum the Mac has lost its bearings. Putting it right amounts to much the same thing as setting me straight, using a plan I've had to implement since the last column on a bad case of bipolar disorder. If you were to argue there's nothing odd about this "people-data processor empathy" that causes computing devices to put up such a show of solidarity, in light of what we might ourselves be doing to the things when we're "not ourselves", I'd be hard put to prove anything. Still, I've drawn up a big list of more clear-cut "weird stuff" over the years and it sure ain't all me!
zzz
I'm slowly on the mend, though you wouldn't believe it to have heard assessments made this weekend by family and friends who've not seen me or the mess my flat's in since I vanished and then wrote that last column. Once this lot is done, I won't say too much, since a music site will be less than ever about me and increasingly about you as the weeks go by: that's for a very good reason.
The story cut short -- and then a taster of ReBeL GrrLs of the kind Sarah likes (do make sure your pop-up killer is on if you click on a link to a Tripod-hosted fan site!) part of my agenda -- I've declined a long rest in a clinic on the grounds "the cat wouldn't like it and nobody's going to want the cat!"; but more seriously I'm now being helped through a very steep learning curve.
Until a little over a year ago, this was occasionally a blog that apparently was of some use to others in writing as honest as I could then make it about a series of physical and mental ailments I'd never quite put together the way I absolutely must now. It boils down to two things: there's a genetic disease -- the "cyclothymia" McMan's Depression and Bipolar Web sums up pretty well -- and behavioural analysis I've needed to understand myself and my relationships better. By the end of 2004, people thought the latter was over, but last year I failed to remember the reason I was in therapy with the Shaman-Shrinkess I used to mention in the first place lay in the "downers".
By the time I was in the pits of my previous entry, with uncontrollable mood-swings that considerably distorted my perceptions and stopped the music and any logging, while also exhausted way beyond my understanding, I was nearly done for by the latest of what appear to be seven-month cycles and way past cyclothymia too. It's a good job I did stop logging while I was clinically "manic".
The worst thing for me, by far, has been that exhaustion. There's no point in telling you anything unless it's very honest. Everyone I knew well has for ages recommended I "get a life"! Meaning more of one. I even wholeheartedly agreed with them, but the trouble with getting a life -- socialising after work, going to as many concerts as I'd like and easing into a good long-term relationship -- was this had become something others did, and I could neither muster the emotional and physical energy for it nor understand why. Oh yes, manic-depressives are pretty stupid with money too (as you know from me).
It took an astute log reader in the United States, a therapist herself who asks not to be named beyond say KP Sauce, to read between lines here where I've been hinting I'd reached a point where I no longer had the words for what I hear in the music I write about overtly and then network this to my other "music": the music of people's lives, ways and relationships.
It's up to KP Sauce, if she likes, to use our combined skills in her therapeutic practice. Being a journalist, it's my job to sum things up where others would write books full of jargon -- though I do know many would say my columns are book chapters! -- and her job is to treat the kinds of depression I sent her a few pages about, a sort of Dummy's Guide.
Doing that was a very bad idea since it drained the last of my resources, but I did since I'm fed up with reading bullshit and you'll maybe have gathered I am aware of the ultimately self-destructive behaviour people like me adopt to make it very difficult for "normal" ones to help us. Those vicious cycles in ourselves end up causing others just as harmful in relationships we'd rather nurture and enjoy.
Between us and with some professional help here in France, we worked out a plan for me -- and I was delighted when a friend asked: "Your tragedy?!"
Ellie misheard, the word was "strategy". Writing this before I get back to the ladies is part of it. Even a general practitioner as good -- and with as many patients -- as the friend my own has become is too bombarded with data from the pharmaceutical companies about all kinds of new "molecules" to keep up completely.
It wasn't until he headed me off to seek help from a new therapist here, since the Shaman-Shrinkess last year retired, that I met a man both willing to give the strategy a go and able to tell me that a mild drug I've been taking since 1997 to regulate a key neurotransmitter, serotonin, had "backfired". Sometime last year.
Those daily pills have for a while been doing me much more harm than good, but the actual symptoms of the previous two seven-month cycles we also then figured out took such different forms when I hit breakdown point weren't similar enough to see the pattern.
Upshot of this? On Wednesday, I started with a new "molecule" and dropped the other from one day to the next -- and with reluctance since the new little green pill has so many nasty side-effects it sounded suspiciously like a sledgehammer, my term for Prozac and the like. It isn't, it's a screwdriver, my mood-swings are manageable, I try to shut up when I know I'm being irrational -- and, goodness me, by yesterday evening I'd even realised this is Easter Weekend!
However, during the initial weeks (I've just swallowed tonight's little bugger), some of those side-effects are bloody sledgehammers all the same. If there's a moral to this, it's that analysis may get you a long way, or it did me. It didn't get me far enough, though, to understand the need regularly to check what you're taking with more than a GP.
I really don't want to go on about a "tragedy" that's my own solution and perhaps nobody else's, but my nature is such that without naïvely imagining for one instant a change in neurotransmitter regulators will suffice, the way I am -- combined with the demands of my job -- mean that to an extent I have to treat manic-depression, which is what it could have become, like I did the booze in 1997. There can be no half-measures. The summer of that year, I gave alcohol the boot, forever.
You can't do that with depression, but you can watch your behaviour patterns and see all those signals I've mentioned missing in time to develop a stronger immune system and remove the vicious cycles in your relationships. Since I logged on April 8, I've sometimes slept 14 hours a day! Last night I didn't, at all. Tonight I shall. It's really one day at a time.
A week ago, I would have flipped if people had said the things about me I've heard today and ... many times before. Some of them were very "tough love" indeed; the job of the little green pill is to help me take them as such. The rest is between me, such people and the therapist, with a fortnight left for slow adjustments to be fit for work.
I rather like next Sunday being Saint George's Day, not since the man is the beatified patron of a nation to which I said "farewell" more than 25 years ago, but because he's said to have had quite a way with stomping on dragons!
Should a remarkable woman in the US come to birth a book as superb as one I'd have done better to assimilate more deeply many years back -- 'Touched with Fire: Manic Depression and the Artistic Temperament' by Kay Redfield Jamison (whom I did remember, along with John McManamy, on April 28, 2003 -- KP Sauce would likely write, as she's spoken to me, of the need to have the "right centre of gravity".
That's where those "core values" -- love, trust and a sense of humour -- are in us all. She has been exceptionally decent to me in extensive calls before we found the therapist down the road because she saw through this place. It seems I'm your typical counsellor in other people's relationship problems by way of the log and when I listen to your music, who pays far too little attention to his own.
Enough already.
zzz
Now hear this:
"It is also quite possible, given the riot grrrl agenda, that if someone like me enjoys it, then it has not been successful. So how can I come to terms with riot grrrl, which seems to threaten my eardrums as well as my sexuality? It is a problem - I was young once too. There is a tendency, perhaps, on the part of those who lived through the sixties protests and even through punk, to feel that we have been there before and to think that we know where the phenomenon is likely to end up."
The next thing you know, John Potter gets almost as bad as me. Because he really likes Bikini Kill. And he seems to reckon he's ancient. And that comes from 'The Singer, Not the Song: Women Singers as Composer-Poets', in 'Popular Music, Vol 13, No 2. Mellers at 80' (May 1994). And it was a present.
A right-on gift!
It was dropped in from The Scholarly Journal Archive (about JSTOR) by another friend who reads this log and is also good at hearing "the singer, not the song". He thought, in his not-so-ancient wisdom, "Nick ... it may be of interest to you."
 Academically, it's an astonishing piece. And for people taking little green pills with several unmentionable risks inherent in them, I'd like to inform that particular guy that I would love more of that stuff. It's gratifying to report that Julie Ruin hasn't put in an appearance here yet, neither have Bratmobile really, and two Bikini Kills albums were already decisively part of my April budget.
There's more besides, to come.
I'll stick to strategy, which means Mylène still comes first, and you've had your first taste of filthy Peaches, so I think we'd all like to know "where the phenomenon is likely to end up". In bed or out of it.
This column is a pain in a week where Sod's Law has done its thing, since I'm largely confined to quarters while Les Femmes S'en Mêlent (Fr and Eng), an annual concert season "dans toute la France" between April 13 and 24.
It's not that I'm jealous or anything! This is France's 9th Lilith Fair...
Do spare me a thought, but no worries please, while I rip my Mac to bits, take to my couch and wonder whether I'll be allowed by maybe next weekend, to do a bit of mixing myself.
I know they don't have beds in concert venues, usually, though what some of these chicks can get up to while still vertical astounds me. If that chum of mine guessed about little green pills and stuff, then he also divined that the bit about libido is fortunately non-applicable.
"May be interested?"
Heck, even Mylène oozes the stuff. I know I have to slow down and don't want any more literal brain burn from thinking too damned fast. How long did you think a fellow like me could keep sex out of the way I mix things up?
Gravitas! That's what we're after.
1:31:05 AM
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samedi 8 avril 2006
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Where have I been?
He's been on vacation, has your friendly neighbourhood subversive guide to the ways of the world and of human relationships, helped by his two favourite ways of having a go at this: music and people, almost invariably women, who love making it.
Smart readers have already understood this is my vocation.* What I do on the log is a kind of "calling", say most of my friends so often I'll buy that, especially since it gets slipped in thematically to tales of girls and their songs.
Let's not mix up vocation and vacation.
My holiday was nearly a total surprise one. I received final tickets and full details of the destination on March 14. How nice -- a whole fortnight off somewhere hot!
Was in it Africa (many kinds of great music)? Australia (wow, some interesting new musicians)? Brazil (plenty of passion thrown in there, part of Ritmo Latino)?
Can't have been Canada, can it? The Canadian musical scene's become so exciting today that it too is worth a long, regular podcast, CBC radio3. But at this time of year...?
No more messing; where I've been there was no music whatsoever, it was enough to keep any woman well out of the way, the company was extremely unpleasant, the service slow to come since proposed circuits are varied but Vicious Cycles. They're such roller-coasters it's very hard to ask for any assistance and the local colour is so wildly imaginative I'd long forgotten how extraordinary such trips are.
There's no sneaking this out back into The Orchard.
I have thoroughly redone the Grand Tour of Hell.
It was quite a refresher course in clinical depression.
I've not been there since 1997 and that journey was tepid in comparison. The music had to stop, random radio shows were scary, even the iPod became risky when CDs on it I love and know very well turned almost overnight into emotional minefields. The sort of song lyrics that suit shattered hearts, since sorrowing people can empathise with singers who know what it's like and help them through it, and the kinds of words that work wonders set to sounds that succour starved souls are one thing. They're fine, usually.
Very few are blues even extremely musical ears can use to rescue the hopelessly mixed-up brain between them when an accumulation of trivial troubles combined with a nasty surprise or three triggers off a latent, long-ignored clinical depression in anyone arrogant enough to believe it could never happen again and without the wits to have spotted small warning signs when the lights only flashed occasionally.
That was me, a long-known and very well-treated bipolar personality, by around mid-March. The last column posted had already felt like maybe a penultimate piece, beyond which I could go no further without going off the rails.
I knew only that I'd all but reached the limit of words applicable to an artform whose essence lies way beyond them, though most of the musicians whose stories both in sound and in real life fascinate me are lyricists, sometimes very gifted poets too.
Thematically, you may have seen it yourselves, read between my lines. With some subjects at least I'd had enough therapy in the past to know just when to stop and wait for a while, needing to learn more.
However, I misled myself so successfully that nearly nobody among even those who see me very frequently, still usually light-hearted and zapping out decent wisecracks, knew of the mostly subconscious lightning wars being fought in my innermost self.
I certainly had little idea of the intensity of these conflicts. That's the trouble with first-rate therapy when we're lucky enough to get it, which I did until the end of 2004 when a wise woman said: "That's it, we're done. You are healed and entire. Get out of here and have a whole lot of fun in the real world."
So I did, best I could.
Reality's a remarkable place, all the more so when strange stuff happens and quite stubbornly makes sense. We can make sense of it when we're lucky enough to have a few people around, which I do, wise to the weirdest of ways, who lend a hand to learners. I've indeed put some of that in The Orchard, where it will stay; there's no reason to undo a harmonious song.
What undid me -- and the stupidity of it was the same thing happened last summer, had I realised -- was mostly the small fry. It was things trivial and tiresome, rather like black little leeches in life's river. I sometimes found them draining on my resources, felt fatigued, laid off logging and bitched about being exhausted. That's always a bore for me and everyone else, so shutting up and getting on with stuff seemed the best and also the easiest thing to do.
The therapy I've had previously took intriguing turns too. I learned lots about myself, which is simply who and what I am, a man generally so little different from most people that the choice to write what I usually do now instead of my private life, friends and the rest, was an easy one. Others do that and very well. I merely forgot, completely, why I went for treatment in the first place: chronic, clinical depression.
Well, now I know.
That's to say, I got one Hell of a reminder! The word is the only one to describe it; I hope few people reading this know, the way I needed reminding, exactly how the disease takes charge of us once it's really got its teeth in and the utter havoc it wreaks not just with our emotions but with our perceptions. It is terrifying because the very first things to go are what I'd now call the three "core values" in our lives and in people: a good sense of humour, trust and love.
There's hot and there's hot. That means, for people who say "Not before before Hell freezes over", the place does. It's so darned cold, your emotions eventually frost icy, your blood doesn't warm you, and your racing thoughts get slower and madder. Next stop? Paralysis.
This isn't just a column on depression, which takes many forms and has a number of more or less known causes. It's an entry in a log about music. The music I tend to write about and the lyrics that are part of it often overtly concern all nature of ways with love and trust, served up by some musicians with great humour.
Occasionally I shall write about depression or depressing things in the future as I have before. When women tackle them -- men too of course -- the outcome can be marvellous music to be shared, sometimes from people worth getting to know much more widely than they are.
So what did me in was no single thing, but I let a little heap of them grow and grow while my immune system against such an appalling downer got weaker and weaker. That's my life, now I'm getting some more help; the part played by those I love is indispensable andgreatly appreciated.
On depression itself, there are many books and much information already out on the Net, some wise and some less helpful, being full of jargon and lacking in insight. But that goes for many subjects on the World Wide Web, doesn't it, notably music? We're all different in our qualities, strengths and weaknesses and especially in our tastes.
I would first add -- having had no choice but to begin learning a lot more than I already knew and with other people to help me recall everything I'd found out -- simply that it is indeed a disease some of live with. It's one I'd describe as a "cancer of the soul", leaving the last word for you to define in terms of your own beliefs, not mine. Depression is never who we are, unless we're stupid enough to let it define us.
Secondly, I've needed to remember less that it's also stupid to let others define who we are, because that's something learned a long time ago and while being valued by those we love is important and it's good occasionally to be told about it, what matters most is the love, trust and sense of humour we've got for ourselves. They're essential, tempered and adjusted with experience. During the period from which I'm emerging, those qualities regarding myself went straight out of the window before anything else. That's how it is with such a disease.
To those who know for themselves what I'm on about, but who are more terrified and much less practiced travellers than I've been and became again -- there's always a first time if you are prone to it -- I say a third and last thing tonight. The nature of that "dis-ease" you fear you might have since you don't know what's happening to you is profoundly irrational! It can often ensure you most hurt, or maybe just think you do, then obsessively so, the very people you'd least want to harm. That's why there are vicious cycles, working in both you and your relationships with others.
Some may get hurt, for real, not just in your head. Many who tell you to "pull out of it" by yourself are not being unkind or uncaring. They've simply never had the luck to make such astonishing journeys, but it's a bad idea to expect them to envy you as much as you do them. You should never blame them for saying what they do. A few who might insist, with genuine conviction, "You can do it, just grow up," are almost as alarmed as you are. They also happen to be wrong; your feeling you'll never make it on your own is the right one. You can't. You won't! Don't make it worse. I never thought to write this despite but also on the strength of years of experience behind those words.
But there are people who know what to do. You may feel very weak -- physically, emotionally and mentally -- but there's no weakness of values when yours are all skewed in asking, then trying to help them to help you. Doing so not only also helps break the main Vicious Cycle, so you begin to feel better and they do as well. It even starts to restore the sense of meaning and purpose you've lost; you haven't completely "lost it", that's just how it feels.
It feels so much nicer when the new cycle takes effect, a Life Cycle, life-enhancing experience you can learn more from. It sometimes feels like a well-kept secret, but while of course nobody likes being put under pressure or finding you demanding, most people like helping once they know how.
Losing the music again for a while really scared me. A lot of things did, I shan't take you there; but there's a line across the top of this place. It's there for a good reason. It's true! Among parts of my life, the voices of women are wonderful "since their songlines help me stay on track and in tune".
A few women, as well as their voices, along with a fellow or two, gave me a hand, held on tight and brought me from March 14 to the date I get to publish this, April 8. For a chunk of that time I was still working, and hard, but something was very badly wrong once the music stopped. Any singing that at first I could bear and then really enjoy became a huge pleasure again no more than long enough ago to start recovering my strength and now tell you that Taliesin is also back.
Don't forget, that's one of my real names, in wherever Britain now keeps records of such things. I'll shoot anybody who comments, phones or sends me a mail that says, "Nicholas, you've been writing increasingly and ever better about music and sex, so if you mislaid your music along with your wits, that's because you're quite obviously not getting enough!"
No, you'd be a dummy to have got to the bottom of this bit and think you've got to the bottom of that too! Part of being here to say this is I know what's been written is pretty good not because I tell you so, but since other people have told me it is and so far I got it right.
In Hell, however, I got it as wrong as I could and irrationally convinced myself what was "quite obviously" true but was very twisted. The truth was still out there, where others live, nowhere near me. I very seriously need to relax! I've also had another huge kick up the ass.
What I now plan to do about it since finally I can afford doing so without also worrying about money -- that stress got mentioned here and I must say, with a sigh of relief, now it's over I don't want it back -- includes adjustments in a number of ways to make as sure as possible there'll be no more Grand Tours of Hell. To go there again would kill me.
When people tell me that, I listen up!
Many singers who come up here and shall in the future are so attached to the idea both Hell and Heaven are inside us, you'd almost believe it's something they really know for themselves, since if they didn't they wouldn't put body, heart and soul into telling us about it, usually for a living, would they now?
Guess what? As a powerful act of faith I find practical, I really believe these girls, chicks, lasses, ladies...
Somehow, I didn't quite lose that and I imagine this has been clear for a long time. My past few weeks have been chastening and salutary. If you don't know what it's like to be right "out of it" on a surprise holiday you think might last forever, we're bound to meet a woman or two who says it far better than I could.
Even if I could, I wouldn't do it, without reality firmly grasped in one hand and the other being equally strongly held by somebody else. You know what one of my wise friends told me recently? "Take a holiday!" That's what she said and she was right. I shall.
I'm going to take a very long holiday indeed, but I'll send you postcards whenever I learn something during the changes from the one I've just had. If that's all right with you. What of my vocation? It would be silly to end such a marathon without telling you the name of the woman I found my ears pricking back up to with a warm glow inside me after I began to come in from the cold.
As usual, it was by accident, while I was doing the sensible thing, staring at walls other than my own, since I grabbed the chance to inspect other people's whenever I could. A woman in one place had a great CD on, which I knew well. It's called 'Anamorphosée' (1993), there's a song on it called 'Vertige' and another that's been a long-lasting hit called 'L'Instant X'. I must have had mine by then, my "X instant" of being out of it so far that I was back in it again.
You may not agree with what I think about "accidents that aren't", like Ms Farmer being on. On that album, yet another title says 'Mylène s'en fout', which is sometimes the sort of thing she likes to say. Life would wall us tight between a rock and a hard place if we never learned to sing, like Mylène, "I don't give a ...".
We've briefly heard on previous occasions that Mylène Farmer does actually. She has a new album out where she proves it again.
I left off with a French one. I'm picking up soon with one of my favourite Québecois. If this disconcerts too many English-speakers, shame on you. Go to more concerts, like I shall. Because if you want me back in this real world of ours, I find touring that much more fun than what you now know. In two weeks, I'll back at work, a place that even has clocks in it.
There's a lot of it about, time.
Ms Farmer knows that as well as anyone because she plays tricks and games with it, like with words. But I was right out of that too, simply stuck. Our clocks changed to summer time Sunday before last. I didn't even realise they had until rather late on the Tuesday, which by even my standards is a record. If you'd like more records with music on them -- and Mylène among others -- I've learning a new game with time. Her 'Tomber 7 fois...' is wordplay too.
Never mind what it means yet. They say cats have nine lives. I'm not one, but might have had seven. You take Mylène like I am. I've put good stuff by her in private 'Songlines' for others: slow down and chill out music. Now she's in my very own, that's enough for one column. The next comes when I'm ready.
But it sure is good to be back.
Heaven? If you want to know about that, ask a gifted musician.
________
*Until tonight, with the last one posted, I didn't know this would be a set of three pieces. So be it. Writing them has helped me and if my words help anyone else as well, then you are very welcome to them. Depression is such a hard thing for many people to talk about or understand, for very understandable reasons, that I believe I'm fortunate to be able to do this without guilt, shame or a stain on my career.
It'll be a month and more before we -- yes, a "we" there, with gratitude -- think I'll be well past this and safer against it happening again. That's no reason, however, for anyone who needs a bit of guidance such as I've had in my time to steer clear. The log "postbox" is all yours.
1:53:28 AM
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© Copyright
2007
taliesin.
Last update:
21/09/07; 22:24:18. |
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