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taliesin's log (voices of women)
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lundi 15 mai 2006
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Updated on samedi, May 20, when I moved the last of the bunch of columns about my recent very personal, but certainly not private, physical and spiritual experience off the Voices of Women pages and into the Orchard.
Yes, this is indeed a "music week".
Normally, I take such breaks from my paid job about once a month, but since mid-March I've been fighting what a friend rightly told me was the "battle with your mind". There have been no music weeks between February and this one.
Today, I'm a fortunate convalescent who has lived to tell you the last of that part of the story of that struggle for sanity. I can't say it's the last such battle, for nobody who lives with the manic-depressive illness can afford complacency. However, I can sum up and give you the page links to what's already been written here.
Total honesty is imperative when I know that what I've learned may help others if they live with the same serious yet widely misunderstood disease. Nobody knows better than me that I'm long-winded sometimes, but I also have a gift for making difficult issues clear.
If nothing else, sharing insight I've either strengthened or been given, between a time nobody -- including me -- knew I was depressed and being able to write this, may reach somebody who feels alone in their own inexplicable blues.
Or perhaps you're wondering why you "feel so tired all the time", like I often did as winter drew to a close, though I was eating well, usually sleeping fine and getting the exercise I need.
I'm still a smoker who finds it hard to give up. I thought this bad habit might be the cause of the exhaustion, but the doctor who has known me for many years told me that wasn't it. He is a good general practitioner too, but needed expert help to be sure of what was really up. Medication I was already taking had stopped being good for me.
To say the drug became toxic or a poison, as sometimes I do in shorthand talk, isn't strictly accurate, but those words will do in that this "mild" treatment I had been taking for many years began, at some still unknown time, to poison me by worsening my bipolar state of ups and downs.
I shan't go into the specifics of medication since these treatments, of which many are now on the market, have different effects depending on who we are. The decisions we make about any of them must be made with professional guidance.
Until I was told otherwise, I believed the prescription I was on was fine. So did Luc, my GP (general practitioner), because he had no way to know what was wrong while I occasionally mentioned very different symptoms and he knew I'd already had plenty of therapy, which ended in December 2004.
He may also have been working too hard sometimes, but that's his life. Maybe I never told him enough, since I've been prone to be concerned for other people in ways that don't always help. In part of a trilogy of columns I have, with some help, discussed the nature of caritas...
As an astute physician though -- and a wise man with the sense to stop when he must -- Luc came very close to the mark the day he recommended the right therapist for me, given that my previous one retired last year and once I'd told him about a bout of the blues that suddenly hit me very hard, robbing me of my love of music literally overnight and leaving me too messed up to work.
I have told and can only tell my own story regarding this disease. I'm no expert and to say what applies to me is true for you, should you recognise your symptoms of what might be "bipolar behaviour" in mine, would be absurd. However, to pretend that I'm fundamentally any different from most other people would be just as stupid. This Log, after all, generally tells the stories of women who frequently remind me of everything I have in common with you.
The period between today and next Sunday may be regarded both by my workmates and by France's national health service as a time of "rest and recuperation", which I need, but I'd rather think of it the way I've said, as my first music week in too long.
I've been fiddling with where I put entries on the Log. This means I've picked up my own instruments again and wish to "hold the front page" for the women and related columns -- or chapters -- in which musicianship and matters arising are the main thing, not me, Mr N.T.E. Barrett.
The last time I took a regular week off from the Factory to devote it to what is now far more than a pastime and also seen by others including some of my AFP colleagues as my life's creative "work", there wasn't any music in it!
That was in March.
I couldn't take music because suddenly it hurt too much, yet I felt completely lost without it. As entries I have referenced below describe in more detail, I then also lost my bearings in life and three "core values" seemed gone: truth, a sense of humour and the "Big L" love.
I mislaid them first regarding myself and then as I channel these things towards others, while I had stopped logging too. Soon I was more clinically manic than ever and occasionally prone to such paranoia that, though I knew it was paranoia, it crippled me every time it struck.
Knowing my irrational feelings for what they were helped, since I could avoid acting on them and try to sleep them off. I did usually, but remained exhausted and at the mercy of wild mood-swings for more than a week before new medication kicked in.
I owe more than survival partly to my own actions and partly to the very few people who realised how ill I was, entering the last phase of a potentially fatal cycle of this bipolar disorder much more widely known as "manic-depression."
Nowadays we're apparently supposed to refer to the disease and its various degrees and shades as a "bipolar disorder", because it sounds so much less worrying, but I've joked about the stupidity of doing so. Irrational worrying about self and others can be a symptom of it, but manic-depression is terrifying enough to merit worry!
The illness should, I think, also be known by an alarming name to remind people what they're dealing with as an disease of body and soul.
Though a journalist by trade, I've always been a teacher by vocation, even if I resisted that calling despite numerous kicks from others to get on with it, for most of my 50 years. While I had no inkling early in March I was depressed, "the blues" hit just while my latest seven-month cycle living with the illness entered the manic phase, and at first I blamed my misery on a series of personal upsets and stress particularly about money.
I lost my centre of gravity, self-love, sense of self-confidence and inclination to laugh at myself soon after having a second big spiritual experience, when I was unable to pull the plug on a brain that crashed a bit like a computer when my mind burned out.
Luc the doctor last year told me and I believed him since I saw him typing away in August, but I only saw for myself that my friend had indeed even used the words "massive spiritual experience" when he filed on my national medical record how something similar happened last July.
By around mid-May, I'd slept enough to recuperate from a lot of what I'd only been able to take to clinicians as a constant but incomprehensible state of "exhaustion". Luc had sent me to a therapist ready to help implement my own "strategy for survival", which I devised in extremis.
I had already seen other therapists whom I regarded as a waste of money. They were only doing their jobs in probing my past, but Luc also felt "they weren't being serious" after I told him of my sense of "been there, done that" and despair in finding someone who would listen to what I needed and do something about it fast.
The man right for the job and for me entered my life, after a long preliminary 'phone call, on April 12. I lied sometimes to people about exactly where the strategy came from in me and pretended I'd been given more help with it than I had. I told lies because I was scared enough for myself without wanting other people's worry, but I'd been warned a third such cycle would do me in forever.
This gave me a seven-month deadline, a word with "death" in it. In some entries, I explore the death urge and giving it the boot. Of late, much previously subconscious stuff seems to have become a part of my spiritual awareness.
The deadline was by around my next birthday, early next October, and in any case, they needed me back at the Factory, since it seems nobody else can yet handle Africa's news like I have edited it in English for AFP in many years of a long career. But I wanted my music back in more senses than one!
The deal happily cut with my bosses late last year was to get these music weeks as the best way of dividing up my time off, right out of the news world and its violence for their duration, until I retire.
The strategy has somehow worked.
From therapy I'd had for well over a year, shortly before a woman I called the Shaman-Shrinkess retired, I was equipped with enough tools to start on healing. By dropping the drug that was bad for me the very day we knew about it, I could slowly bought the wild mood swings under control, with a newly prescribed treatment.
I'm still adapting to two new nightly pills, but can work again after being greatly slowed down, and I didn't think changing medication was sufficient. Spiritually, I found other tools I needed very deep in myself, in past reading and in my experience.
I also had what Luc Yang showed me on my medical file, though I still told him he was bonkers to put it there. The insight of the "massive spiritual experience" last summer that took me back to Taoism for help in understanding it, followed by another in March, has been enough. Some might argue using words like "spiritual experience" in medical records is something you can only get away with in a country still deeply impregnated with a monotheistic religious faith as part of its culture, but they would be wrong.
Luc, who is half-Chinese and not a Roman Catholic, told me: "Nick, that's what I wrote down since that is what happened to you." I long ago decided to be open about that story and never to adorn my insight with hypotheses or speculation, to take such experiences as they came and to spend the rest of my days living with the knowledge they've given me, trying to make sense of it and be wise with it.
So I still have nothing to say about God and little about the interweaved destinies we human beings make for ourselves with our decisions and life choices. I "hear" the "music" of people, while I take life and love, just calling the latter the Big L, as great gifts we must learn how to use well and to channel. When we do, I hear the harmonies in the "music" and the Log has become my means of sharing what I know of these things with an ever deeper understanding that life is all about sharing, while teaching is about giving tools to others.
That is how the Log will go on.
Until things have settled down again there's a suggestion I'll temporarily disregard about how much to show on the home page of the Log and the Orchard. This holds, according to my Log hosts, that "it's a convention in Weblog-Land to set this number to seven -- showing readers one week's worth of news (and music writing here) and ideas (the "weird stuff" out back with the fruit trees, grass and streams)."
On the whole, I like my women up front so I'll give you a bit more to keep the balance, returning to "the roolz" once the dust has stilled around me. However, it may be a good idea, though I'd rather never get that lost again myself, to tell you what's moved.
There are some musicians in the Orchard, which began as a double-dose of sheer lunacy! It was a private place for my friend Eleanor once, though she never went there when I was that crazy about her...
Seeing some of those entries, written before I revealed the Orchard publicly, reminds me to consult the 'I Ching' again and try to get the message more quickly this time. I'll leave that said once more in case people wonder what it was about, all the "gardening."
Now, here's a list. Just before and since I became the maddest March hare a man with a wolf for his shamanistic companion can be, you got:
'Complicated people ... or simply music' (about my favourite blogging women and the one on whose account I ended up in France after a slight linguistic muddle in August 1980, to pick up friendship with again this year - March 4th).
I put that one in the list because it reminds me how I did feel -- if frequently to excess in my "ups and downs" -- before I discovered what "normal feelings" must be like!
Then came the first discussions of my disease and of related issues of the mind and the soul. Remember, I don't know what souls are, but I know we've all got one that gives us our deepest spiritual energies and needs feeding, like our bodies do.
Spiritual issues come up a lot in a 'Blues Triptrick', but I've been cautious with tips on the disease and the tricks it entails and double-checked the little clinical content, because real manic-depression is so very hard to understand. It claims thousands of often young lives and damned near killed me.
So you don't mess around when you write about it. The first part of the triptych came before I learned there would be two more by writing them. They are:
'Blues Triptrick (i) Where the Hell has Nick been?' (which told you about a long absence, covered the three core values, and showed how a musician, Mylène Farmer, came to my rescue - April 8);
'Blues Triptrick (ii) Intro to Lilith and getting laid back' (which does talk about Lilith, along with a crashed computer, raunchy RebeL GrrLs in music, the American psychiatrist 'KP Sauce' who is partly a real woman and partly composite character, and says more about the disease, as well as a French festival of women musicians - April 17);
and 'Blues Triptrick (iii): No Sin in being a Dickhead' (which goes the most deeply into religious and spiritual values, comes down hard against the notion of Original Sin, and pays tribute to a late and very great story-teller - April 18).
While recovering further, I wrote:
'In so dense a forest, we'll need a Knight like Tia' (a long but, I'm told, "engrossing return" to my old way of recounting my life and times in one of Paris's most renowned "gang warfare" districts, together with other bits and pieces like a first look at France's new copyright laws - April 22, with Tia Knight);
'Strange flows the Dom: a fanciful Faust' (an extensive mail that "knocked me out" about my own Faustian quest from an astonishing "ghost writer" who taught me how to kill the dragon - April 23);
'Altered egos and normal states' (the "revelation", for those who hadn't yet figured it out, that Dom A., that "ghost writer" who saved a part of my hide, was essentially no other than a bit of myself, whose existence I'd ignored until the healing strategy brought him and his real components also in other men into conscious awareness - May 6);
 'This Book of Lilith* (i): a brand new chapter';
and This Book of Lilith (ii): a page turned on the Thanatos drive' (a two-part entry somehow inspired by Lilith and saying "No!" to a death instinct that's been only too real at times in my life - May 14, with Sarah Fimm for a good soup recipe, Macy Gray and Paulina Rubio).
Those are already quite a mouthful, written not only for me but sweet people who have told me sometimes they like to drop in over a pot of tea, knowing how prolific I can be at my best ... or otherwise.
I've given an account to my current therapist of what I did to beat it for now, being wise enough to know that can never be for ever. My regular doctor, Luc, had understood already. I owe my life to several people, some of whom I've wronged badly at times, and want to name my ex-wife, Catherine, daughter Marianne, father Ronald Barrett and friend Ellie Beardsley again -- she often crops up as being, well ... "truly weird" herself, since it takes somebody who is, in the simplest and most natural of ways, to put up with what she did at times from me, then tell me I can write exactly what I like about her, which is a great deal.
Few people would take such risks with me!
Anyway, Eleanor's role was unusual in that of everyone, she was the most honest about her ignorance of my kind of illness and how much it frightens her in people. Others pretended to know a lot more, but also cast judgement on me and my abilities in ways that are quite understandable but really unhelpful, because they put the boot in when I was already very down.
Since I do understand them and how they were motivated by real concern for me, I'd rather mention this and say it has just been a part of their "music". The harsh criticisms were fine, I acknowledge deserving most, but not when I got them, because the worst thing you can do around such a sick person is to fuel their own fears and insecurity. Avoiding that is just a part of learning life.
In those columns and elsewhere I have named the psychiatrists, American and French -- apart from retired Shaman-Shrinkess France Grisard -- who are also the writers from whom I learned most about a disease it's too easy to blame just on physical causes or your upbringing, when unhealthy and unwise living plays a very large role.
Grisard's place has been taken by a man who seems to let me do things my own way just as long as they make sound sense to him. From experience, I can say that therapists wise enough to trust a smart patient's judgement like he does mine and only intervene if he felt I might get something wrong aren't easy to find.
Outstanding among the authors is Kay, whom I've yet personally to thank for her courage, insight, life's work and writing about a disease she knows from the inside as I do.
Kay Redfield Jamison (a good Wikipedia entry) has inspired me to come clean as a journalist skilled with words because she knows and wrote in her prologue to her own "memoir of moods and madness", 'An Unquiet Mind,' that those who can write like us shouldn't behave:
"as though I have something to hide. One is what one is, and the dishonesty of hiding behind a degree, or a title, or any manner and collection of words, is still that: dishonest. Necessary, perhaps, but dishonest. I continue to have concerns about my decision to be public about my illness, but one of the advantages of having had manic-depressive illness for more than thirty years is that very little seems insurmountably difficult. Much like crossing the Bay Bridge when there is a storm over the Chesapeake, one may be terrified to go forward, but there is no question of going back. I find myself somewhat inevitably taking a certain solace in Robert Lowell's essential question, Yet why not say what happened?"
Since I can't express a fully shared sentiment better myself with feelings I'm now newly learning like a baby and know to be "ordinary" at last, I shan't. Kay said it then, about 10 years ago. I also have been foolish with money and my moods, with the people I love and with those I really don't like but now try to avoid rather than judging them, a right I lost last year.
On this Log, there's been much self-disclosure in the past, but I have hidden things too, deceiving others and myself, and I've tended -- particularly during my big "downers" -- to play down some of the insight and knowledge that is the extraordinary, beneficial aspect of a disease that has its "highs", hence talk of a fine line between genius and madness.
I've begun to write about what some call my ESP, which is real and grew stronger as part of the healing process, but I've declared too -- by way of my understanding of other societies and cultures much closer to nature than me in my inner city apartment -- that these "extra-sensory perceptions" of mine don't single me out. I grant it can be weird, but believe I've simply developed faculties innate to all of us. I have to learn about these too...
If I were very different from others, there would be little point in keeping this Log, since we're all fellow teachers, even people I can't abide for long when I feel they're being selfish and stupid. They may be, but I've become good with mirrors when I see them.
What I like least in anyone is purposeless secrecy, the kind about ourselves we believe shelters us from others but really fails to protect anyone and often works against us in the long run. I gradually learned to give up my own secrets as early as I dared, though I need to try to overdose less the other way!
I love, admire and respect many of the women I write about for doing the same because without them and their music, I truly wouldn't know how just normal and ordinary I really am. I know something else useful too, which we'll learn over and again as we go always with the music, finding how women teach that "no man is an island" and we need never feel alone.
This is a very great truth to know in our solitude.
Perhaps the Lilith I've begun to write about -- who will slowly find her place here among the musicians who have often chosen her for their own heroine, guide and name-giver to their festive fairs -- is that "eternal feminine" Dom, who has become a part of myself, showed one man he is seeking throughout a life marked by a bad habit of projecting her on to real women, the long-suffering creatures!
If, however, it is to be a real music week again and a page has really been turned, I reckon it may well be another quiet one. The best Log entries have often been those that have taken me by surprise! I enjoy the process of discovering what they have to teach me. So I declare a "music week" in line with those orders to "rest and recuperate" before they want to see me at the Factory again.
I apologise, finally, to a -- very small -- number of women who have even offered to help me break a vow I never did take a long time ago, since my life just happened that way. Some rare advances also got me asking the doctor a few weeks back, "Why on earth is it people come for advice with their sex lives to somebody who hasn't had any for around 14 years?"
"What do you tell them?" he asked back, so I told him what I've said since I stopped making a secret of this, and Luc reassured me: "I guess that's why they come to you -- since it isn't all about sex, is it? It's about love and relationships. And you tell them the same things as I do."
This may not be the week for it, but with Lilith firmly implanted in my mind, I plan to take Lady E up on the best advice anyone gave me, which was: "Nick, get a life!" By which wise words of course Eleanor really meant, "Get yourself a woman again!"
It isn't Lilith, but there is someone who is very fair and has become free, but could only take the way I've sometimes behaved "in small doses"! We both seem to want the same things: simplicity, generosity, honesty, music, a natural life, lots of humour and not too much of a rush! I don't know if this will work out, but I sure plan to give it a go.
However it goes, I rather doubt I shall be writing much more about a "flower girl" of whom I'm fond and her "music".
So, to a small handful of other lasses, I can only say, "Thank you, you've been most remarkably kind and I do appreciate such forward and becoming behaviour, but I'm ever so sorry. The very last things I want now are to be multiple again and complications of any kind."
I've managed in life sometimes by presenting myself and others with false problems and using them to solve real ones. But there can be enough real ones as it is. When a friend -- writing out of what I knew to be a feeling of helplessness -- recently said she felt sorry for me and wished me courage in that "battle with your mind", then told me of her confidence. She had no way of knowing a battle was finished, but I'll never be complacent in saying that again.
I felt surer the latest round was over when she and a few others could reassure me: "I understand and I believe you." Those are the last words I want to leave on the subject of the illness some of us live with, when much of the faith that makes it possible for me to write them came from people who helped me to believe in myself again. I haven't named them all.
I'm pretty sure of my intuition about Lilith.
If ever we find her at all, she may indeed be widely seen as a witch with a "Satanic" side but she'll be a white witch too, no feared incarnation of evil, and her place is beside a well, or a spring, deep inside all of us and it's behind a door. We all have that door in ourselves from the day we know to open it and stop being afraid of what we'll find in our souls.
________
*We shall be seeing lots more of Lilith.
The serpentine perspective pictured is by English painter John Collier (1850-1934), who was rather less uptight than some of his contemporaries and clearly liked straight jackets no more than me.
Paul Ripley, who has a web site on his own passion, Victorian Art, quotes Collier's obituary in The Times, which said that in 1920, the painter had these words for critics of his "problem pictures":
"They are nothing of the kind. The ones that have been so-termed merely depict the little tragedies of modern life, and I have always endeavoured to make the meanings perfectly plain. If I ever again paint a picture of modern life, which is doubtful, I shall give it a title a yard long, setting forth the history of the characters, and if necessary their names and addresses."
I think I like Collier! But I shall go on leaving out the addresses myself.
10:41:04 PM 
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dimanche 14 mai 2006
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 Like the musician Sarah Fimm*, whose soup recipe I lifted from her journal to dish out this morning, I'd like to chop up rather a lot of food for thought. I find this ends with a bonfire of my own -- in light of recent and most disconcerting experience -- and in the hope of being clear about it all and where this Log goes from now on.
In alluding in part (i) to the recent musical company of Macy Gray, the album I meant I've been enjoying of late has been a 1999 one, 'On How Life Is', which a French fellow rightly describes as a "breath of oxygen in the feminine landscape of the soul", rather than 'The Id' with its nod to Freud. Macy's style is most refreshing!
Even track titles such as 'I've Committed Murder', 'A Moment to Myself' and 'Why Didn't You Call Me' all had a strong personal resonance in the interweave of my recent life with those of some very loyal people I know. Some of them I've neglected for too long and others were unavoidably too busy for me during several weeks of rather more moments to myself than I wanted.
The iceberg beneath us all
It's likely that Macy Gray (at MySpace) will be back once I've got to know her Id, the term Freud used for our unconscious wellspring of primitive instincts. The Id is pictured in the Wikipedia as part of a pretty iceberg picture of ourselves, in that entry briefly covering also the "ego" and the "super-ego".
 Deep icebergs we sure are, but not always cold ones.
I was never drawn to Freud, though I read some heavy stuff of his when I was really young, and felt that some ideas most associated with the man, like the "Oedipus complex", are cobblers. I've never wittingly wanted to kill my father the better to get at my mum in any sense, but a good analyst today will point out that the Oedipus "avatar" refers to something that happens not with the onset of puberty, as often imagined, but when you're around two months old. That's an age when we're in no state to start messing around with a kitchen knife, let alone at assault rifle.
Still, I guess we still owe Freud some. Like Carl Jung I'm more attuned to what goes on in our spiritual lives and the breakaway disciple's own concept of "archetypes", which are manifest in many ways and cultures, and even music.
Right now, I'm truly convalescing from the almost fatal bout of blues that took me a long way from the Log as it had been heading to give you a triptych of columns on the bipolar disease of manic-depression. There is no doubt either in my own chastened mind or that of my doctors that had I begun another seven-month cycle like the recent ones, by the end of this year I would be very dead indeed!
I mean either really deceased, since I couldn't let a disease give me another brain burnout like those of last August and March, or cut off, dead to the world I love and signed in to some bleak institution for a very long time to come. That's how bad it nearly got before I wrote my description here of a return trip to Hell, until we caught the "manic phase" of my latest cycle and its physical cause -- a backfired drug that had turned toxic -- just in time. But that, I now believe, wasn't the only cause...
Lady Lilith and the 'Weird Stuff'
My profound interest in Lilith, as an archetypal and mythical figure adopted by so many women musicians, is going to be a recurrent feature of this Log, now that I've slowly realised how it's my life's "work" -- a task I said this morning will no longer be the subject of the book for which I've been making notes for many months, but put off to a later date when I retire from my paid job.
I don't have the time for such forward planning now, having been so close to death, and see all the wisdom in that adage about living every day as if it were your last. I've decided too while the Log will remain mostly a journey in the company of many musical women, I plan to be more open about my own life of the past 50 years and those to come than ever, if usually light of heart.
I've had a totally terrifying experience when at times I so nearly wanted just to die. Much of my family and some of my closest friends now know and understand I'm both learning "normal feelings" I never expected to find -- having had nothing with which to compare them in a life of extreme emotions -- and am now sure of allegedly "paranormal" faculties I've acquired.
A 'strategy' for survival and its aftermath
The newly brought out gifts, which I earlier said some consider a kind of ESP, have been apparent before, as in the very strange meeting of minds across an ocean that I recounted with Sarah Fimm, along with an ability often just to know when some of my loved ones are in trouble and need my help, including people I've not seen in ages. If the latter happens, I also know what to do.
Meantime, the therapist found to implement my own "strategy" for survival and healing will still be scratching his head as to how I managed it, getting over the second full-fledged nervous breakdown inside a year in two months. Usually these things take rather longer. One afternoon next week, I'm going to have to try to tell him! I'm dreading trying to sum it up.
It's a long story and I shall never log it all, but music was instrumental. So were women, including the now retired psychiatrist I used to call the Shaman-Shrinkess, with whom I finished therapy in December 2004, believing I was whole, to realise now that she gave me the tools.
In short, my strategy was a dangerous game, consisting in deliberately and knowingly splitting my personality, a bit like I've fixed my Mac since it crashed in what I took for a sort of "silicon sympathy" some weeks back. I partioned myself -- like you might a computer -- to use the good bits to work on healing the bad ones, and let things flow again.
I also created two composite "alter egos" based on a number of people I love who "told" me things I knew all along and his but which needed bringing up into the daylight of conscious awareness. One such semi-fiction is the 'Dom A.' of St George's Day, when I knew I had to lay low a fearsome beast and discovered the Faust in my musical quest. The other, 'KP Sauce', rolled several real psychiatrists and psychotherapists and their teachings into one!
The right centre of gravity
If you are still here, near the end of this new chapter, I don't know where you fit in, but know and have begun to tell others that the kind of company I seek on the last part of my life's journey consists of learned scholars and simple, natural souls, of the kind who have always been my real friends.
Such people have long been pre-eminent in a part of my blogroll and certainly in the Orchard, while my crazy life has seen me lose quite a number of complicated purported "friends" who are no loss at all! I've been surprised at the ease with which those who know me fairly well have accepted both my illness and the strange insight I was really scared of losing, before finding singer-songwriters who know about these things.
One of the nicest, completely real mails I've had lately came from someone who is a mistress of brevity and simply told me, "I understand and I believe you," along with finding others do as well. I've already recommended books in English about the fine line some of us walk between "genius and insanity", and still find it embarrassing to have to reflect on things I've done or perceived myself in the former category -- or close to it -- except when I remember I'm speaking of a gift, not me but something that works through me.
With French friends, I'd share a rather spine-cracked copy of one by a psychiatrist and anthropologist called Philippe Brenot (Wikipedia, Fr), whose 'Le génie et la folie: en peinture, musique et littérature' was published by Plon in 1997 and shouldn't be out of print if now it is.
This is dangerous ground! I learned from Brenot, for instance, that to use my second, chosen name, Taliesin, as a nom de plume is a common pathology among my kind, while any flashes of real and new insight I've had come from a kind of otherness. We prefer what other take for pseudonyms or the alter egos I wrote about in the Orchard recently.
However, I've figured something out.
There's no point in blaming my illness and behaviour and writing it's sometimes produced either on bad circuitry -- duff brain chemistry and wrongly wired neurology -- or on the treatment I had in infancy from a mother who makes no secret of her huge boredom with babies and can be inclined to asks other -- like me -- if they share her desire to see tedious toddlers turn into "interesting people". She won't like me saying that here, but I don't hold it against her.
The mainly American psychiatrists I admire, very wary as they are of expecting miracles of medication, are right. Drugs are no cure. It's not a killer disease that has made me live my life in the "wrong order", as now I often think of it so far, but doing things the wrong way round that has sometimes fed the illness rather than the healing process -- notably with women, who on the whole have had the sense to tell me when it happens!
Women know many things instinctively that I've had to learn, slowly shifting my own centre of gravity to a safer place as a man by pondering, first subconsciously where our minds do all the hard work, and in recent weeks during a conscious process that I've often found more like scaling a jagged cliff than the gentle learning curves of country hills and pastures.
The music in simple harmonies
So now I seek above all simplicity, and certainly when it comes to what I would call the "language of the soul", the simplest explanations seem invariably to be the wisest and right ones. My daughter today lent me one of her favourite novels, where our tastes conjoin in speculative fiction and mythological matters.
I asked her if she could bring 'Les Thanatonautes' by Bernard Werber, one of France's finest science fantasy writers who is also much translated, since I'm certainly in the mood for another brush with Thanatos, just not my own death wish.
The French are good at this kind of thing, as with the Lilith legends we'll explore here. However, I don't believe for an instant the faculties I've developed more fully now and need to learn are in the least bit paranormal really; they have become prominent, along with the "coincidences that aren't" of synchronicity, the more I've consciously been aware of the importance of simplicity and natural ways.
Most of my closest friends talk very little of matters of the soul and I understood this and began deeply to respect it as a key part of their "music" while still very sick, seeing it as a part of their wisdom and aspiring to the same. It's a bit like you won't catch me talking about God when instead I can sometimes simply say the 'Big L' and understand that love is something we all need to learn to channel rather than create.
Music can often be among the most complex of the arts -- as we'll see when I go on writing about classical music sometimes -- but it doesn't take complications to understand it! In the quest for Lilith and at other levels of the Log, I've realised that a good teacher is like a good mother. And sometimes, a good father!
If it's my vocation -- which now I fully accept it is though rather late in my life -- what we do is not only to share in a way that helps bring out the things in others they already partly know, as has happened so much to me of late, but we need to provide others with the tools to go on learning and doing for themselves.
Some have wrongly told me occasionally that I am "obsessed" with music. They are wrong because in music and -- having learned this from Sarah Fimm -- in the ways of water, I'll always find the richest of analogies for life itself, knowing how souls need feeding just like bodies do and finding music exceptionally rich in nourishment. The best way to present it is to let musicians go on telling their own stories.
But I'll no more rush at Lilith than I would any real woman! For life is about sharing to survive in the face of death and entropy, and I feel already that what draws women musicians to Lilith is not the evil some say it is, out of fear, but an understanding of some true mysteries we men can only really know through empathy and in our creative endeavours -- the mysteries of birth and motherhood.
I'm told that "you're really on to something, Nick," with my clouded insight into the very profound kinship between music, sexuality and spiritual experience. Maybe so; it certainly feels that way now. So, this far side of the nearest brush with death I want before I get there, I also believe there's no time like the present to dish out a statement of intent and then get started on learning more and sharing it.
I don't know when I'll die, of course.
But the Kid had a reassuring word for me today, now I'm telling people that a number of unmentionables I keep unhidden in drawers will pay for the cost of a lavishly musical wake before they tip my ashes into the sewers to rejoin the ocean.
She suggested the funeral itself should be a barbecue!
"That's fine by me," I told her, "as someone 'touched with fire'. But of the ways of dying, I fear fire perhaps the worst. So kindly make sure I am dead before you put me on it."
________
*The picture of the Seraphim, which I've tweaked a bit to remove an unduly angelic glow, went up without credit on a British music site and was taken last year, when we met in the flesh during her last-minute European tour with plenty of her 'Nexus' album.
11:06:34 PM
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"Actually," came the afterthought, so I turned on my heels and opened the little green iron gate back into the square to step between semi-stripped office girls sunning themselves on the grass and plonked myself on the bench next to Jan.
"I do have one for a man of your learning, so the shops can wait," I told him. "Who, for you, is Lilith? Or 'Li-leet', as you might pronounce her?"
"Ahh," he said slowly, folding his freshly opened book. "Lilith ... Lilith. She's the feminine aspect of Satan, you know."
"Evil then?"
"Oh yes --"
"Because I'm not so sure, Jan. I don't know that she isn't a force for good..."
"For that, you'd need to go to Beaubourg," the retired social scientist said. "Look in the Jewish mythology. Their, hmm, their --"
"They don't have pantheons!"
"Their circle! Old things. But some say she's certainly evil, we're speaking of the enemies of God. There's a book, you know, but a woman, written in the '60s."
I didn't know but heard him out. This was Friday afternoon in Paris and it was wonderfully hot. The small park, full of spring flowers, where Jan goes to read, at the far end from my own Losserand street of the verdant nearby rue de Thermopyles, is one of many pleasures of a quartier neither of us would leave for all the world.
The 'Lilith file' is scarcely opened -- though we've briefly seen how Cecilia is a strangely chaste "patron saint" for a craft and art as corporal and embodied as music, with a limitedministerial portfolio -- but this Log has changed.
Later that day, a big whack of weekend shopping done, I settled down with Macy Gray, my own windows wide since I could safely assume nobody out back would take exception to lively rhythm'n'blues with cutting-edge lyrics and plenty of street-wise humour thrown in.
Rhythm'n'soul the Gray way
 What to make of Macy's mix? She's like a rap singer when she wants without being one, there's a smart, funny intelligence in her soul music and I hadn't even got to 'The Id', a cheerily black tribute if ever there was to Papa Sigmund Freud. The first track on that album is 'Relating to a psychopath'!
Lilith, she's an "archetype", a symbolic figure, representative of a feminine principle adopted by too many heroines of this Log to ignore. And for Jan, she started "evil", though the further we shot the speculation, the more ambiguous that notion of evil became.
I shall dig out the book he mentioned, since this music log has become a detective story and something of a thriller too far beyond the suspense and sex and the warmth, love and poetry shared by the women on it.
Bopping around with a Border Girl
Before Macy Gray showed up, I spent the iPod part of a trekking day with a very pretty "pin-up", who currently adds a "come hither" look to my Mac desktop in her long black boots and black bikini, Paulina Rubio, the 'Border Girl'. Well, the youngster sure has energy!
Though a chart-topper, it's nothing outstanding, that 2002 album of Paulina's. The border's where you might expect to find it with a name like hers, between the States and Mexico.
The lyrics are banal, they're mostly silly love songs if ever there were, with facile rhymes and supermarket sentiments, but I don't spit on such music. It's disco dance stuff, pretty decent and competent, and Rubio's got the voice to hack it.
 A few tracks in, I thought "Maybe I've had enough", but at last came the Spanish touch and high time too! Even there, Rubio churns out mainstream radio "tubes", as the French call pop songs for some strange reason, but it's refreshing -- and she is, oh wicked word, sometimes ever so profane!
That's what it is with Lilith, the profanity, the raunchy rowdy stuff, the sweaty sex, the Big L enacted in the essential "carnal knowledge" we enjoy: that's what gets the goat of high-minded purists who put Satanic horns on what they find socially risky or even evil.
Reappraising the 'sacred and profane' - the book of Nick!
That's why the Log has changed.
Music -- sacred or profane -- and real or of the metaphorical kind I've reserved for the Orchard, meaning the "music" people make in our relationships, was vital in pulling me out of it and much crucially depended on the "voices of women".
So instead of saying much today about Macy Gray*, a great musician, or the Mexican girl, here is notice that I not only plan to teach here in ways already announced, but the long-conceived book beyond these columns for the day I retire has ceased, as such, to exist.
The Log is that book!
For I'd been wondering, anyhow, how I could write an ordinary book about women musicians on the basis of my own life steeped in music, since that life's "work" would of its nature be bound and static, without interaction.
A warning of 'weird stuff' up front
My friends and colleagues are also getting used to the idea that "Nick's weird stuff" has taken on a new dimension. They've seen it happening and been as surprised as me. During the healing process of recent weeks, I opened a door somewhere in myself.
Mow I have to live with what we're supposed to call "cognitive insight" -- to pick up on a previous piece -- as well as new-found normal feelings like most people, instead of extreme ones. But I've told friends, let's still call it "weird stuff".
You see, I've got ... some kind of ESP.
I know. It sounds funny, even silly, boldly written down like that, but it's true. It has always been there, somewhere on that razor-edge between genial intuition and insanity, but now it is manifest.
I "hear" things in and about people, according to rules that fail to pay much attention to space and time the way we routinely experience them. This will help a lot in the music writing, which has been my calling in life from the start, while my job on Africa at the Factory remains important. I have to do it well, but it takes second place now to the destiny I've carved out.
The Log is my creative way of sharing that deeper destiny.
The feminine to the fore
Soon the Kid will be showing up.
We have music to hear and my fair daughter plans to give me a lesson in Egyptian mythology and civilisation related to the quest for Lilith and her other forms. Why Egypt? Because, as Manou told me yesterday, it was one of the rare ancient cultures that wasn't so patriarchal and paternalistic it put women down.
That chimes with me. That rings true with this place.
For faint hearts, I have reassuring news. What lies behind the doors to our souls is really nothing to fear. And I suspect that in months or years to come, we shall find that Lilith is standing beside a well. She must know a lot about water.
Don't spill the beans, dark Seraphim
So what is Sarah Fimm thinking these days?
Often she comes to mind, in light of experience, when I talk of things that seem to defy the laws of day-to-day physics...
Let's find out. Well, she's around Woodstock, preparing for a new record it would seem, and after a broth like this, she's into both water and what you put in it:
"We are lucky enough to be in this cozy mountain place surrounded by rain. Rain does something to focus the mind on inner activity. I am making soup for everyone at the moment.
Sarah (Fimm) soup (from her journal while we were in the sun)
blend 2 cans white northern beans, 1 cup fresh roasted tomato, vegetable stock
Heat on lowest setting for one hour.
In the meantime roast one garlic bulb in olive oil (10 minutes at 375 degrees [I hope she means on that barbaric scale, Fahrenheit! It's 190 Celcius, that's a bit more like what I know....])
separate garlic cloves and chop in a fine manner.
blend garlic, mushrooms, and one cup of hot clean water in blender.
Add into soup, simmer on low for 30 minutes.
go back to soup, add ample fresh basil, cilantro, a dash of pepper.
Sprinkle on a bit of love and romano cheese
Enjoy with fresh warm bread, and music of your choice.
Bon appetit!"
Thank you, Sarah. Even the French touch, not just for little me I know. But all the same. It's nice being back in the sink.
I mean ... staying back "in synch".
__________
*The Macy Gray shot is a detail from a photo by David LaChapelle on a neat Salzburg gallery site, Artmosphere (Flash), while Paulina's picture came uncredited.
11:59:11 AM
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samedi 6 mai 2006
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Dom, the craftsman of the log's April 23rd "guest column" published while my very bad latest cycle of manic depression began to turn from disease into real healing and now -- I'm glad to report -- convalescence, is a gently "altered ego". For the sake of simplicity and also with a cheery acceptance of the desire some private personalities have to be anonymous when they contribute to the music log, I dosed a long letter with a pinch of other stuff that fit snugly into the context of that arduous time.
It's hard sometimes, in this society and age, to evoke in any way the kind of subject matter raised in one of the cards from loved ones that take a proud place with others on top of one of my CD shelves of music by women. They stay there partly because I'm fond of the pictures, like the one shown on today's "front page", the music Log -- where the day's musician is Lauren Hoffman.
I don't remember which October it was I received the words in this card:
"Dearest Nick,
Across the water the connection,
somewhere, is unbroken between us.
Happy Birthday,
beloved cousin;
albeit fragmented in time and sight
I see you clearly, your beautiful soul
ever striving towards the light.
All love, Ant
xx"
Anthony is less circumspect in his vocabulary than I've been.
The family legend holds that my mother and her sister raced in 1955 to be the first to have the baby inside them that year, and mine beat Molly by 20 days, but my aunt produced a "beloved cousin" indeed and a very creative and humorous man, who is far better at keeping up with correspondence than me!
Now that Anthony -- who is certainly a part of the Dom A. I put on the front page -- has written again, in a blue longhand I've always recognised at once on the envelope, suggesting we compare notes about our lives, and this time I'll be far less rude. He'll get a long letter back.
A composite chorale
Another composite of the Log -- the capital "L" has crept in of late sometimes because of people who have figured me out telling me what this place is about in their own eyes beyond the women musicians -- is 'KP Sauce', the psychiatrist in the United States who was one of a very small handful of people to help me survive what must be my last very extreme seven-month cycle of "the blues".
Very few people could help and some of those I hold dearest were even counter-productive in their attempts, in spite of their love for me. Eleanor, though, a woman who was at the time heavy with child and trying to work while we had lunch together some weeks back, did a wondrous job: very often she has in the two years I've really begun to know her.
There's an irony I like in the way she told me she felt ill-equipped to do anything, since she believed she knew nothing about my disease. Yet, while shovelling back what she could of a light salad and taking several phone calls, she found just the words needed to tell me what I knew somewhere that I must do.
A strange thing happened on Saturday, when the strongest of "hunches" stopped me from sleeping, so I got up and spent that night and Sunday doing something I hadn't for very many months, checking out Ellie's "stars" with a decent astrology programme on my Mac.
This is "weird stuff" indeed, real Orchard material, because the chart I got and studied for hours was full of mother and baby. Later in the week, I had another such intuition about a different friend whom I suddenly knew to be in trouble, not this time in town, but in Africa, and I acted on that hunch too, making contact to find out I was right.
Late in the afternoon of that day, I phoned Ellie. And I learned at once, with some astonishment, she was in the maternity clinic of a sudden, her baby boy having been born during the night and day I'd been delving into her chart last weekend.
So I'm glad she's still the woman to let me recount this kind of story when it happens, because I'd not expected the birth for a week or so yet, but everything I'd seen during my "night watch" made much more sense the instant I knew the truth!
Sharing our skills and crafts
From Sylvie, a friend who does star charts with the kind of real competence I can bring to the 'I Ching' after studying that immensely rich ancient text for very many years, you may recall me noting how I said something on the lines of "I don't think the planets and stars themselves have very much to do with what it is you can do. For you, horoscopes are just your way of 'tapping in' to something."
Sylvie teased me then, along her own lines of "So finally you've worked out that much, but you weren't 'ready' for this before." However, by way of explanation for these allegedly "occult" and esoteric skills, I don't have one, beyond a notion of tuning in to probabilities in the pattern of our lives, like I enjoy reading hard scientific magazines and reviews when the terrain they cover gets alarmingly close for some to a kind of meeting point among energy, matter and consciousness ... or "mind", I'm not sure what.
Now I'm told by therapists that brain burn-outs I've had, some of them terrifying, are for real! They happened, much like the computer with which I compared my brain after the one last summer when I couldn't pull the power plug on it, once it could no longer process data and crashed. But a few clinicians -- and other people -- get very insistent as to what happens to me afterwards, during my "time out" from reality as we usually experience it, with time going just the one way from past to future and so on.
I'm beginning to tell them to stop insisting since I'm somebody who needed treatment, not a wretched guinea-pig. One thing I know I can do is network real people like Dom and KP Sauce with one another for simplicity's sake and consistency in my writing, while the truth is that at the same time, sometimes what you get adds in with their words a part of me, a self that seems to know what's right and fitting for my survival and the healing process.
Doubtless, the professionals have all kinds of names for this (I know a few of them myself), but such terms strike me as irrelevant and unnecessary. Coming out of the manic phase of my last cycle -- after the medication I was taking before "backfired" and became toxic at an undetermined time that pushed me beyond the years of cyclothymia into "full-blown" manic depression -- that part of me did much very hard work itself alongside the professionals to build a strategy for recovery.
So I too have my "altered egos". In this, however, I've come to feel fairly sure that some weird stuff I'm apparently supposed to call "cognitive insight" instead -- or something technical like this that at least sounds scientific -- I can do -- like "reading" the 'I Ching' or tuning in to Ellie and that friend in Africa, is nothing special to me.
Nice to be 'nothing special'
Last year, I was still being told to consider I'm very strongly empathic to people and can bring "psychic powers" to bear at my times of deepest intuition, but I don't believe they are a rare or unique kind of gift. All that is nonsense born of being led to believe for most of my 50 years that I'm somehow "different" -- with "different skills" manifest sometimes on the Log and in the other things I do.
My own variant in childhood on the theme of being "driven" as an achiever, to reach parts socially and intellectually that were purportedly beyond my parents' capacities (however untrue that's sometimes proved), is so banal lots of us go through it. Long gone are the days when I was angry with anyone who put such pressure on me.
This is sensitive personal ground I won't write up much, because as with my very long period of complete abstinence from sex, I've got plenty from it by way of knowledge and understanding I can use on the Log. However, the reasons for such things involve other people with whom I'd not wish to use Ellie's kind "You can write what you like about me" approach. For them, I want more anonymity even than the "altered egos" with which I play sometimes, changing them a little here.
I know Ant my cousin -- a writer himself -- wouldn't mind being logged and, where possible, the journalist in me who likes "hard" sources much prefers to identify his friends and others who teach him stuff. At the Factory, another "Ant" -- a journalist named Anthony Morland (with whom I long enjoyed working like with Lauren Gelfand while they were both in Africa and me one of their "bosses" for years) -- told me on Thursday how these days what I've got is supposed to be called a "bipolar condition" rather than manic depression.
I appreciated the way AFM said this, with his deadpan drawl, as if he were reminding me how civilians killed in military operations aren't murdered men, women and kids but just "collateral damage". But still people do want to know where it is that I get the "cognitive insight" I'm now being encouraged strongly to cultivate. They do persist in asking what "that place" is -- using the name I did myself for it when I hesitantly told Luc my generalist doctor "I've been to that place again" between my last brain-burn in March and the Hell that followed when mania and paranoia set in while this place went quiet.
Well, the answer lies in drawing the above threads together and saying, "I'm not special and never have been, but have learned simply to use a few faculties available to everybody," and "that place" must be both inside each of us and outside us.
It's no "place" at all, in fact, and when I'm there, with no sense of my usual personal identity and "outside time", I come back with an often new knowledge it takes me a very long time to begin to understand and assimilate into my behaviour. There, however, I can resource myself.
I'd say we can all do this now. I know that my own way of "going" there has so far been very dangerous! It is invariably when I've apparently not merely been over-thinking but my brain has been racing away, often subconsciously, "like crazy", literally in the latter phase of each bipolar cycle so that it simply overheats and the fuses blow.
One thing I may have logged here after last July's 'Night of Unknowing' was what I told people instead with words like, "I believe I've seen what Van Gogh tried to paint, but couldn't." It seems now that I probably did, or so say some. On the theme that we can and perhaps should all seek to resource ourselves, I've told you and others how early last year I resumed the practice every morning of meditation.
Plenty of "weird stuff" comes to me then, though now I realise that until now, I've ended at least two cycles with periods of morning meditation that weren't. They felt wrong, anyway, qualitatively different. Instead I was at war, using that time simply to get my head relatively straight and clear, with energy enough to face another day's work.
Safer ways of sensing stuff
Meditation, though, is one very good way of doing it and so is learning from those who tell us to "stop thinking", when what they really mean is stop wasting time on unproductive analysis and worrying about stuff in life and people you can't change.
Music is evidently another, for me at least. Any means of tuning in to your own resources and sense of harmony and cultivating that in a relaxed and relaxing way for others can't be bad.
I'l unable to tell anybody how I know things about people, like Ellie and the baby, friends being in trouble, events that are happening -- but I don't care any more either. What does it matter?
Why does my "magic iPod finger" know who to pick for listening and writing about at given times? What does that matter either? It just does. Maybe one day I shall again be asking this kind of question, like the people who want to probe me! But I don't see the interest really.
Instead, there have been words on "both sides" of this log about what everyone seems to have been thrusting upon me of late. Or "of late" is what I believed at first, before realising, along with the fact that I'm not so very different from anybody else -- and that's a lesson driven daily home by women musicians who sing about our shared experience -- and thus have a role to play in teaching.
That allegedly "beautiful soul" of mine "ever striving towards the light" shouldn't be so different from anyone else's, I believe, and what Dom saw and addressed in me extremely perceptively as the Faustus side is certainly there. I do wonder sometimes if it would be so pronounced had I done the same as most people and enjoyed a normal sex life for the 14 years -- because that's what it is now -- I didn't.
It became that long since for the greater part of that time I had to avoid sexual activity as a part of my loving mainly to ensure the sound and stable development of the Kid -- I might as well say so -- because for reasons to leave out, she would have gone off her own rails had her father done anything else. But once those long years were over, what a mess you've known me make with women and this year, I darned near started over! No thanks. I remembered a few lessons just in time and didn't make the old mistakes, so all is well.
A line many of us walk
One last thing I want to say about manic depression itself concerns those extremes it entails, both the hellish side and the highs of creative activity that can attain genius -- and thus also mean that fine line between genius and insanity that got me last week making Heather Nova my singer of the year 2005.
I hope Heather won't mind, but for friends and other twits who have yet to listen to 'Redbird' I've put a high-quality .mp3 of 'I Miss My Sky' in cyberspace. In so doing, I also accidentally wiped other stuff that should have stayed out there, but never mind since I think most people will have picked up what they need.
Just listen to the song subtitled 'Amelia Earhart's Last Days' (right-click for playback options) and you will be hearing a multi-facetted jewel of a poem which is also about "altered egos". I'm sure Nova knows it's an allegory for the "downers" in the disease and for the reason some writers I've admired on the log have expressed as much fear of the only too common "sledgehammer" drugs like Prozac used to treat it as of the lonely Hell it can induce in us.
Big boys do cry
Don't be alarmed if that song does something to you!
My ego altered last week in a way I've yet to enjoy to the full with the right kind of medical treatment when I heard it and other music again and discovered my tear ducts. Tears, it seems, are big and wet, as I've told people with much surprise. They roll down your cheeks and taste salty in your nose. You feel a lot better after crying them, but at first, when I did weep with sadness and joy and other emotions, I was sure there was something wrong with the medication!
Being much slowed down now, it took a while to dawn on me that I was feeling normal emotions like I hope most readers do, instead of very extreme ones in which I'd long since ruled out anger and jealousy as disallowed. Normal emotions! The "probers", of course, want to know when I last felt emotions like this that made me cry and then feel good afterwards instead of unsatisfied and choked on dry, stony tears.
The answer, yet again, is I don't know, but suspect it could well date back to being little bigger than Eleanor's baby. And again I don't care. I have said, given the various bouts of therapy that have been logged a little before, that this is like having been taken apart and putting back the bits I want and now getting a whole bunch of feelings to go with them that aren't extreme, like Pinocchio.
It's a moot point as to how I've been able to write as well as often I'm told I have about our human condition and the ups and downs in our relationships with one another while experiencing such extremes, but shrug ... that's for amateur analysts among you to work out. I can't. What I've said is simply: "If there is any onion left to peel in Nick, can we please do it now, while I can cry?"
With heartfelt thanks
I'm told the onion-peeling decades are finally over, though henceforth I shall never run the risk again of not having my medication regularly checked by a professional who can spot what a general practitioner can't....
If indeed that time is over, I want to end this entry not with any more "weird stuff" but with deep gratitude, particularly to David, my desk chief at the Factory, other colleagues there who have filled in for me and will for a little while still to come, and to the very few -- but enough -- people who saw me through the last of the worst because, somehow, they did understand.
How such loved ones and friends sometimes managed this I don't know, but the Big L doesn't strike me as strange! There's just been a lot of it about lately for me, channelled through people such as these. Trying to control the Big L too much, or worse to dam it, is immensely destructive: that I do know.
So there will be plenty more of it on the music Log, since love is such a preoccupation of musicians, but for now I shall revising my learning curves and then taking a spell of R & R, which will surely include a little music writing, and then we'll see about casting a few more spells of my own.
We simply have to "touch the ground" sometimes, yet I've been enabled, thanks to some courageous and honest people including a few friends truly worth having, to keep my sky.
5:51:06 PM
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© Copyright
2007
taliesin.
Last update:
21/09/07; 22:24:30. |
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