taliesin: the orchard

I truly needed some time to myself

Wed, 12 Jul 2006 21:48:57 GMT

My mother was about three years old when Greta Garbo never first said, "I want to be alone," in 'Grand Hotel'. Since I recall the Hollywood star delivering the line she didn't, I was surprised to find I'd associated it with the wrong movie by taking strong images from 'Queen Christina', which I liked better, and displacing the words.
Garbo, whose unforgettable looks and mysterious allure were enhanced by being filmed in black and white, was vexed by the quote. She "reportedly told friends, 'I never said, "I want to be alone." I only said, "I want to be left alone." There is a world of difference'" (Who2?).
So there is, a whole world of difference.

Such plans as I had for the summer of 2006 didn't involve very much time alone. I have few close friends, but intended to see some once holidays began if they were still in town, get out as frequently as a tight budget allows to concerts before the city stops for August, and with great luck, even meet her this year, maybe at a musical event. She is the woman I've occasionally mentioned before, though I know no more than that she is bound to share my love of music.
There's England as well. I didn't go last year and saw my mother just for a day when she was briefly in France, visiting her granddaughter and my former wife. The years have notched up since I last saw my father and I'm ashamed of it. My daughter Marianne has been to York, where my parents live in separate parts of the lovely historical town, far more recently. My parents split up a few years after my arrival in Paris in 1980.
For well over a week now, however, I have spent many, many hours with my parents, with my daughter's mother Catherine and with other family members, seeing almost nothing of anybody else. This has been in my head and on my own. I didn't want to be left alone. I have needed to be alone, a great deal more than when I 've needed solitude each morning for about an hour as long as I can recall.

Today's morning hour began at 2:00 pm. I slept through the alarm clock set for 10:00 am, like I frequently did about three months ago during the initial stage of recovery from the nervous breakdown that became manifest when I plunged into Hell on March 14 and had to stop working when it became too much for me some days later.
In the previous series of Orchard entries about the disease with which I live, I described it as manic-depression. Calling it a bipolar disorder gives an idea of the ups and downs. I set out all I believed useful about a malady that affects many people and claims numerous lives. In pieces written between April 8 and May 14, I included tales from my experience and turned what I found relevant in the work of gifted psychiatrists who have helped me into language accessible to everybody (though most of that work was already done by them).
I stressed the importance of core values manic-depressives find they lose when in trouble, initially with regard to themselves -- love, trust and a sense of humour -- and then distort concerning people close to them, and I wrote about the dire effect this can have on relationships and how paranoia can set in.
My writing also explored ways in which people who have a crippling and dangerous disease tend, nevertheless, to resist help from those best placed to provide it and showed how strong self-destructive factors can be at work, which may add to the great strains in relationships.

The strangest story I told was how, given the seriousness of the last cycle of manic-depression I had, some higher part of me devised a strategy for splitting my personality in a way that enabled me to use healthy elements, including fictitious people who were composites of the best in myself and others I know, to tackle the disease. They gradually restored my self-love -- my sense of self-esteem -- to get me laughing again, at myself and with others. Within a few weeks, I thought I had the resources to go back to work.
This "strategy" I took to be a gift from the woman therapist I saw until December 2004 (known as the Shaman-Shrinkess on the Log because of ideas we shared), combined with the insight of manic-depression patient turned great psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison (whose books I've mentioned), and also from my Inner Shaman.
He put in an appearance when I later wrote of a conviction that we each seem to have a guide inside us to what's good for us and our health of mind, body and soul, if only we know how to listen. This isn't easy. We have addictions. We have behaviour patterns that are deeply ingrained in us, some going way back into childhood. People like some distractions and being taken out of themselves. Many people don't enjoy being alone -- psychiatrists say this becomes easier as we get older and see it as a merciful change given the way families alter as the children leave the home, then death one day steps in to take a partner.

My current therapist went along with the strategy. I went back to work -- for all of two weeks. The truth is that what I've done so far patched me up, gave me sufficent confidence back and courage to go on for a little while longer. But that wasn't nearly enough.
We're already well into July. I quit the Factory again after an initial surge of memories from the past that brought very strong emotions with it, got in the way of my work as a news editor. I should be part of a "production line" of people who bring the events in the world from places where journalists are covering them to you. But I couldn't focus on news from some African nation and concentrate on getting it into shape when what was going on in my head was overwhelming.
I didn't know what was going on in my head.

A nice woman working on the desk would ask if I wanted a coffee. Words like that would drag me back to the present, but it was still was far less about relief workers being denied access to some hot and hopeless refugee camp because a government had decided they were spies than wherever I was in memories. I found myself staring at Google Maps, more interested to see what satellite pictures showed of the houses I had lived in as a child, if they were still standing, than in any story waiting to be done.
Memories. I feared and wanted them. Talking to colleagues, I was agreeably surprised -- more than I should have been -- by the sensitivity they showed about the bout of illness I'd been through and the amount of time it had taken me to get over it, but the work bored me and I began during the second week to lose my confidence again. I found the stories out of Africa dull, but I was slowing down too. I kept telling people that emotionally, I felt like Pinocchio must have done. Mine felt new and subtle, pastel shades with which I needed to familiarise myself rather than the extremes I'd known before.
In fact, I was very confused about emotions.

What I did before returning to work was to make a partial recovery, in which I pulled myself together with help. Drug treatment brought an end to a manic phase in which my thoughts were still racing wildly, while at the same time I felt deep emotional pain and distress. The chemicals levelled out massive mood-swings that at their worst became a sustained period of depression, marked by times of complete hopelessness and helplessness I have mentioned, for which the only remedy I could find was sleep.

What I began to think about a few weeks ago goes beyond recovery: a recovery that is still under way from what I didn't understand at first to have been a full-fledged nervous breakdown. My "strategy" may have restored my sense of humour and self-esteem, but they proved very fragile. So I started to think that something else was wrong to render me so vulnerable and return me so quickly to a state in which I wasn't up to the job. What was really far too fast, however, was my assumption that I could do it. My doctor and therapist let me, but didn't tell me how bad things were for weeks. If they had told me while I was still manic, I wouldn't have taken it in.
It is healing I've been thinking about so hard.
What constitutes healing? How is it set in motion? What's the difference between recovering from a bad bout of illness and engaging on a healing process that could make it less likely to happen again?
I've been really scared that it might happen again. I don't know much of the answers to the questions I've just asked, just that for me music is part of it and so is harmony and so are things that happen in our souls.
Long before I got there, my doctor friend made a qualitative difference between what happened in March and previous depressions I've had, with his warning that the last one was extremely serious and should be treated to avoid a recurrence. Once he felt I was ready, he confirmed some home truths I had worked out for myself during the weekend I all but lost faith in the therapist because of the vile side-effects of a drug he kept me on for too long. I wrote about that in the one entry where I felt entitled to link my own experience together closely with music to which I'd listened: the piece on the Pretenders, a band with staying power that produces superb songs about real life with no pretending.

This entry could head one of two ways now. I shall resist a temptation to go all the way down the first simply because I've already written it and doing so kept me busy in self-chosen solitude for so long. Very old memories have welled up inside me incessantly and when they haven't, I've gone in search of them, back through my 26 years in Paris, back on through the first years I held down a job in England, still back on through my teenage life, and right back all the way into everything I can recall of my childhood. While I have done this, I've kept a record of it all. It made for a long story!
The second way of proceeding is simply to state that something went very wrong with me, the way it does with anybody who ends up needing therapy. It still goes wrong, every day. This is how I think it's going to be for some time to come. The therapist has taken me off work for the rest of this month and he has told me that he will be doing so in August.
It's going to take as long as my doctor said it would.

What might have gone wrong became apparent while I was boring myself with my life story and felt much more inclined to be out in the sun, watching the girls go by, listening to music, doing my musical homework or simply indulging in sexual fantasies. I wanted a love relationship with a woman who is interested in music and likes an uncomplicated life. But if this is to happen, my annual summer dream which doesn't really just have to be a seasonal one, I don't wish to be a complicated person myself and I want some of the mess of the mornings out of the way first.
You can't write about healing manic-depression. You can write about treatment with drugs, which is one thing, and therapy that helps with issues it raises, which is another, and finding ways of living with the disease. My mother has chosen her way of living with depression, which strikes her down for four terrible months or more at a time.
My mother has learned to accept being reduced to a state where she can do little more than survive from one day to the next during those awful months, waiting for them to end and then going up. When she's high, she tries to do as much as she can, seeing people and pursuing interests that are beyond her at other times. She can be exhausting both to herself and others during her highs. My mother knows this and backs off when she's aware of talking too much, warning others to tell her if she's tiring them. In her '70s, she isn't inclined to do what I did and delve into her past.

I have chosen a different approach less out of arrogance, though sometimes I am, than because my past came back to haunt me and I realised that what I'm doing every single morning is the same thing as people sometimes need to do periodically in a different way, when they rebuild their lives.
Every single day, I rebuild myself before I can get on with it. I put myself back together. Until I've done this, I can't face other people. If the telephone rings, I very rarely answer it, but just check out who is making the incoming call. When I know I've got to pick it up, talking is hard. And I'm a junkie.

Forget cereal ads I used to hate in which cheerful families eat cheery cracking food, slopping on the milk and spooning the stuff up into ultra-brite smiles. There is no music either, because I don't want somebody else deciding what to play me. If there's been a coup in Africa during the night that's going to give me a tough day's work, I don't want to learn about it on radio news. I'll do that when I'm ready, on the Net.
I'm ready once the drugs are working, the first cigarettes smoked and the Valium tablets swallowed. This was often a real pain in the butt when on holiday with the Kid. I hated keeping her waiting or suggesting that she head off for her breakfast, where I would join her once the hour was over, but that was the devil or the deep blue sea since if she stayed around she'd turn on the cartoons when there were any on a hotel television. The racket those made would drive me into bathrooms.

Numerous people take Valium for anxiety -- if not always for such prolonged periods as me -- and we get hooked on it. Doctors know this. Getting off it has to be planned. Valium can do something else too, like a load of other drugs prescribed for similar reasons or to treat other problems. During a recent assault on my medicine cabinet, when I inspected the notices of things that have been in it sometimes for years, untouched, each had the same warning on them: memory troubles.
I threw them away and that is where I was able to start thinking about healing, not just recovery. To recover is to get better, like healing, but can mean no more than a return to the physical or mental shape you were in before something got broken. But to heal can be to move on past that mending process to become someone more resilient and strong, less susceptible to life's blows.

My life story includes memories of a series of blows, like everybody else's. That Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders helped take the lid off when she sings so personally about the blows people give and take when love relationships go off the rails is hardly surprising, but the extent to which I'd falsified the reality of how the divorce happened in 1993 and made a monstrous "thief" out of my former wife has astonished me.

I was a fortunate father in our daughter's first four years, with a job that enabled me to play a much bigger part in her upbringing than is the lot of most. I knew what alcohol was doing to me; the marriage seemed unsalvageable and I rationalised myself into accepting it, but I'd done my best to steer clear of the booze when Marianne was up and about before it twisted me. The rupture with the Kid was more than I could face since my sense of failure was complete.
In reality, there was no failure. We went on to develop a strong bond of love like the one that exists between me and my father, who is one of the wisest people I know. If that was strained, as it has been, this occurred relatively recently. I've had amends to make to Marianne for the lesser role I gave her in my life once she was old enough to become independent-minded and build new love relationships of her own. That's no moment to turn off any flow of contact and affection in a child's life, but I did, and as soon as I knew it, I did something about it and still am.

Failures, real or otherwise, are big dents in self-esteem and everyone knows the best way to overcome the damage they do is to try again and succeed. However, doing this can make you feel pretty anxious. I've taken my morning hours to pieces while looking back. What made the least sense to me was the anxiety I feel, for real, hence the Valium, when there is often no reason for it. You can't feel anxious about nothing.
Money, yes. Until a few people, including Catherine, banged a bit sense into my head so hard that it seems to have stuck, I've behaved crazily with money and written about it as well. I can't claim like Kay Jamison did to have wanted 20 "sundry Penguin books because I thought it could be nice if the penguins could form a colony." She's got quite an imagination, both in her brave account of what she thought she was doing during the spending sprees that characterise manic behaviour, and in the wonderful way she brings it to bear in her understanding of the disease in creative people. I don't have so much to show for my irrational spending, but consolidating the debt led to a lot of anxiety.
So do some meetings. So does the imminent prospect of getting rid of a wisdom tooth. But all of them are quite manageable. I've never been a coward, tending rather towards foolhardiness and recklessness, including with women.
No, you can't feel anxious about nothing. But what you can feel is a generalised anxiety that I'd liken, on account of the tangible way I do, to a fish in the depths of my belly swimming around and sometimes wriggling so much that it upsets me. It waits for bait in the shape of some kind of worry and once it leaps on to the hook, I've turned Valium into the club that stuns it.

I didn't find my theory. Anthony Storr did in his work I have been slowly reading about 'Solitude: A Return to the Self'. In this 1988 book, Storr introduces the work of Heinz Kohut, whom he describes as "one of the most original psycho-analysts of recent years" before outlining a number of the man's ideas. Then he states:

"Kohut believes that the deepest anxiety which a person can experience is what he calls 'disintegration anxiety'. The individuals whom he considers liable to this are those who, because of the immaturity of their parents' responses to them in childhood, or because of the absence of empathic parental understanding, have not built up a strong, coherent personality."

That passage leapt off the page at me.

I'd never heard of "disintegration anxiety" before. I turned the words around in my mind for several days, thinking about them, extremely cautious of them, and feeling them. I spent ages, cautiously, just trying them on for size. I wanted to talk about them and what I'd written with my therapist. We decided they fit.
This is to say, I had decided they fit and when I talked about why and how, the man responded in like manner, but he expressed regret when I began going on about wanting a "strategy" again.
I thought I wanted a strategy, but I'm sick of devising them, and when he told me it wasn't a good idea, I felt a wash of relief and said I was glad, because the prospect made me want to shit. It's a vulgar French expression that made him laugh.

Storr cites two reasons given by the late Kohut (Wikipedia), who died in 1981, for the development of disintegration anxiety. I'm not sure that, in reality, my parents showed any great immaturity in bringing me up. I was a first child, they tend to get a lot of love as well as being a bit experimental. The understanding may well have been there too.
But I wasn't very responsive and frequently, especially the older I got, preferred to be out of it, in homes that weren't my own. And I know for sure that I buried any true feelings for most people to respond to a long time ago and have lived a great deal of my life behind facades of different kinds.

Countless times, I was told of my inability to let go of things. I know this to be true enough, less so than it used to be, but it's still one of my faults. Having to let go properly is a desire that was foisted on me this summer, at first as a great hindrance, and then very slowly as a pleasure, by my breakdown, once I understood that I'd had one.
This has left me no option but to operate one day at a time. For days that became weeks, planning was out of the question. I've written of vile weeks, but said nothing of a perfect day. I've had some. One of them began with the realisation that one kindness leads to another and the wish to do one, but not to the same person, got me past a morning failure of courage and out further into Paris than I'd been for a long time.
I took advantage of the excursion to drop some paperwork into AFP, acknowledged my body's request for plenty of exercise and set about walking home, which is a long way but far less smelly and hot than the Métro was that afternoon. When I got to the rue Bonaparte I found that it was open day at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, went inside and spent a good while there letting myself be opened by the works of art on display.
I discovered that it's possible altogether to avoid two long main boulevards I don't like, because of the heavy traffic and what I find dull, heavy architecture, if you follow a nose with a decent sense of direction like mine and take smaller streets where you end up park-hopping. In the Jardins de Luxembourg, which are lovely at this time of year, I saw and heard a uniformed police officer out on patrol with his partner who was singing. He had a fine baritone voice. You don't hear policemen singing on duty every day, but this was a beautiful one for it and he obviously felt the same way.

I do believe I am nearly done. Sometimes I feel that each morning, I'm using drugs in a ritual to get rid of the anxiety and somehow get those core values turned on so I can use them. I've told the therapist that I'd much rather dispense with the drugs and the ritual and become the kind of person who could star in a cereal advertisement.
That's the plan.
But I don't have a strategy. The therapist tells me I'm doing fine and I don't want to write any more about the distinction between recovery and healing, now I've drawn one in this column, because I know that the latter is happening in ways I don't understand and frequently while I'm asleep. I know a bit about what dreams do, in initially helping us file away our memories and then playing a role in sorting us out. I've had a lot of those that have taken me back as far as my writing. Occasionally, I find I can ask to dream about something and I do.
If I were to say any more though, it would be about matters of faith and the soul and about music. There's room for all those on the front pages. I'm about done with the psychology and the psychiatry books, which I've found helpful. But tomorrow I want to come out again and return sometimes to the front pages. I want to be able to tell you how I feel about music and people who make it again. I hope I can get the balance right because this has been all my story. I've lost none of my appetite for different ones as told by musicians whom I've set on one side for a while. I really have needed to be alone.

Sounds good: space, time and music blogs

Tue, 06 Jun 2006 17:18:46 GMT

A makeover for me, my wardrobe and my Mac

Things have generally needed dressing up. It's making for an expensive month, overhauling both my computer and my wardrobe! I had a nasty nausea attack on realising there was no question of putting off a refit for me any longer, since it meant further spending, but the sickness wore off on remembering that my financial woes are a worry of the past if I remain wise. I can be remarkably slow on the uptake when it comes to my own good news. Worse, I've usually left such long intervals between outings to buy clothes that I forgot how when I pluck up the courage to do it, even such shopping can even be fun.
That observation is perhaps for my personal edification since people say noting things down helps you remember them. But here's fact one from my experience: the average survival time of modern clothes before the holes are beyond mending is five and a half years. Fact two: either the intolerable holes appear in everything simultaneously or you see them yourself all at once. The latter might seem marginally more plausible, but there have been regular such intervals.

I've always put buying clothes among things to delay and endure in sprees, but I no longer want to keep it on a list of commended long-term cyclical activities. I can precisely date the last time I went on a shopping bout that set assistants asking polite questions like "Are you getting a new wardrobe?"
It was in the final days of the French franc. After December 2000, I left France to work in South Africa for a few months and on my return, we had euros. This made calculating price increases tricky during my last such expedition, but they haven't risen exponentially in the way that changes in computing have made audioblogs possible and widely popular in less time than I wear out a set of clothes.
Just after my latest adventure, a woman in the newsagent's shop was buying big envelopes and complaining about the customs hassle in posting stuff to the United States inside them. François, the owner, said: "Pas d'anti-américanisme primaire!"
"I'm suffering anti-American side-effects," I chipped in, because I was still miffed at having had to open a new payment card account to be able to benefit from sales prices. Everyone knows the French economy is in a dire state, yet we constantly have plastic cards foisted on us, just like people tell me it's now hard to get by without them in America.

Sizing up a sound box

While I've always been so silly about buying clothes that I can note personal wear-and-tear statistics and guess they're probably much the same for all of us, what gets me down is my dislike of being pushed into consumption. I became aware of that pressure in the hype surrounding my choice of a new Mac and what it can do for me musically.
The biggest partition on the more energetic eMac is called "sound box". This is hardly original, but that's going to be its main job, and part of it includes handling what's on people's audioblogs with greater ease than its predecessor. Just as musicians make up new social rules as they go by mostly having their own websites and being very generous with their work, a lot of audioblogs are a healthy counter-reaction to market forces.

It's hard to stay sane in a very sick society without music and a few of the analogies musicians and listeners like me are drawing from it for life when we hear what's going on around us. I've already posted a pick of "podcasts" and when I get to what's in a handful of audioblogs, that's another occasion to remind uncertain visitors what podcasts are, since they're still quite new.
Quite why Kami Knake, meanwhile, drawls her opening remarks at Bands Under The Radar only to "L.A", where she happens to live, escapes me. Perhaps she doesn't she expect anybody in France to be interested in some of the music she plays, along with nasal ramblings that seem to give her a complex about talking too much?

The power in a podcast

I've asked Kami to turn off the default "play" option on her website, leaving a jokey observation about what it would have taken technically and financially in the 1970s to put two of her at once into the listener's sound box the way she does. Probably I'm not alone in visiting her site to check her music playlists at the same time as I listen.
But I would have have to listen for nine days and nights non-stop to exhaust what's in my podcast selection on the computer, which is tiny compared everything out there. My preferred programmes already take up almost 12 gigabytes of space on an external hard drive.
The recent exponential growth of data storage space bears no relation to prices. It astonishes me and has made possible things we could only fantasise about fewer than six permanent changes of my clothes ago. I'm working on an eMac that has a partition of about 144 GB and one of around four, which is there for some small tasks (with the old "classic" operating system on it). In French, by the way, that word partition isn't just a noun and a verb about dividing rooms or a computer's hard disk into separate bits; it's also the historical term everyone kept for a score, or sheet with musical notation on it.

A mere decade ago, it would have taken more than three of the first beautifully designed iMacs that wooed me into a love-hate relationship with Apple just to hold those digitalised "radio shows" in my podcast library. I dare not imagine how many dozen home computers and external drives I'd have needed for the whole music library.
Back in 1976, huge professional databases were needed to store the amount of music I can keep on my desk. Yet though I remember this and the excitement of working in places with such libraries, it still didn't occur to me that one new eMac would give me so many extra gigabytes on top of what I already had to be able to tell Steve, a fellow at work who asked if I'm going to have enough space: "Yes, and I've got plenty to back up data for my daughter and for friends."

'Tout va vite. Trop vite.'

While this capacity exponentially to pack more and more into less room is, to my mind, one of the most welcome aspects of developing computer technology, I'm hard put to imagine how music files can now get smaller without insufferable quality loss until someone invents a way of doing it. When that happens, how many of us will be able to afford it?
The music CD was a huge industrial investment, with a massive market organisation to sell it. People will long love their compact disks and vinyl like most of us cherish our old books. Still, the power of computers and the personal data space readily available to millions -- and thus already cause for competition among media moguls -- is more than a means of storing music alongside which the older ones will co-exist.
What is becoming increasingly popular in uneasy times is the new way of pooling resources, alongside new incentives to musical creation that overdo the ease of it. A Log chapter in which I sought, via music, to capture the Zeitgeist of this turn of the century may have long, but it's borne out by these phenomena too.
As a former musician, I welcome the apparent ability of this particular Mac to ease me back into making music again. I missed an activity that a few years ago seemed definitively halted by repetitive stress injury, but what needs stressing is the way that minor handicap for life came of trying to do too much at once.

"Aujourd'hui tout va vite. Trop vite*," read, before a word fell off, the collage postcard shown, which was made by my first love, Ghyslaine, in 1980. She was so right, I am no speed freak. In recent years, that timeworn, reglued card has got a place it deserves opposite another gift on my shelf of "soul-food books". The other object is also a collage, with a small mirror in the middle.
I don't know whether this was the intention and the mirror is of minimal practical use, but set amid a brightly coloured patchwork of little bits of sticky paper, it reminds me when I look at it simply to try to be myself in a patchwork world, keeping a harmonious place without too much room for introspection! Hefty music books have meanwhile all drifted into the bedroom-cum-study. Yet I still want to slow down more.

This Mac is my first to come with the Garage Band programme that has given birth to a host of sites on the Net. The rediscovered teenager in me who used to make up big compositions in his head would have been overjoyed at the idea of fitting a symphony orchestra into a cardboard box the size of a thick book.
But here's the freaky side of facility: "Just break open a Jam Pack," the blurb says, "and you’ll find all the talent you need -- hundreds of professional backup musicians and sound engineers at your disposal 24/7."
Many Apple publicity gimmicks include "Just do this" and "Just do that", usually meaning, "Just give us a bit more of your money, and you'll be able to work miracles," but with this constant emphasis on ease.

Nevertheless, the real idea in making music accessible to everyone outweighs what might be a prejudice against facility I've felt and often struggled against since the 1960s. If the Zeitgeist is truly about people searching for the deepest roots they can find, when times haven't been so tough for almost a century (in ways I described at length on May 19), then I shan't mind if Garage Band and more sophisticated programmes take me plenty of time to explore.
I've also contacted Grove Music Online about a trial subscription. The learned Grove Dictionary (Wikipedia) doesn't come cheap in online form. It costs £50 (about 73 euros or 93 dollars a quarter). France adds almost a fifth of the price in the country's value added tax on cultural artefacts. That's a lot of VAT; everyone, including me, gripes about nearly 20 percent extra on anything from a computer to a blank recordable CD.
We really shouldn't moan, though, if the funds thus raised are genuinely used to help pay creative people and new means of spreading their craft around from which anyone can benefit. So I want to give Grove Music Online a three-month trial as a deeper learning tool and resource, partly for me to revise my homework and better understand the women on the Log and partly for the lending library I now work with at the Factory.

Old music by new means

I feel better as a communicative and humanistic animal in decent clothes, there's no doubt of that, but most other recent outlay has been an investment in my creativity and reaping the harvest of those who want to share with us.
All the same, some of the best things still come for free. When made by people who hold our attention, podcasts are a genial use of the exponential growth in space and above all in freedom, both personal and economic.
Nearly all podcasts, which are like radio broadcasts you can keep on your portable music player, do come for free and you can use them for time-travel. If at the computer, I like listening to what's new in podcasts, as I do with the sample CDs that come with magazines while I'm focussed mainly on my own craft, because the musical side of my consciousness yells "Stop and listen properly" if something really good comes along.
While I'm always saying that comparisons are odious, a striking amount of what I hear in podcasts presenting new music reminds me invariably of what musicians were already doing in the 1960s and 1970s, but they then needed resources few could afford without some sort of patronage.

I was working late to some dreamy electronic sounds given the overall title 'File under Insomnia', in the most recent hour-long podcast from Rotterdam's "TC" at Spacemusic. TC says, by the way, that his next, 60th podcast is going to a "best of" before he takes a break from one of the most enterprising shows around. Given his broad beat, I'm expecting quite a trip down memory lane and wonder if TC knows it.
It was odd to hear two tracks from a guy called Recue, or Riku Annala (home) and his 'Between Stations' EP, and realise that what's readily available via the musician's site and on today's "ambient" shelves is much the same kind of sound as was broadcast 30 years ago late at night on the BBC's Radio 3. When I worked there, what was previously called the Third Programme, along with what was considered "Light" (now Radio 2) and the Home Service (Radio 4), were still all we had unless you were a radio ham or young and adventurous. The BBC's popular Radio 1 was the baby of the family and snatched its presenters from pirate radio stations I've mentioned before.

Most people thought that Radio 3 very highbrow, a far cry from what it is today. If you had my luck to work there that was rubbish. Some people were very scholarly as well as bright and a few had the worst kinds of closed minds about music, but most were good fun. If anybody of us knew how much the popular styles of 2006 would echo what was then being broadcast as 'Music in Our Time', I wasn't among them.
We rarely bothered to speculate on the future of music and few who did imagined that the technology would make it possible, let alone popular, for people to produce and disseminate the kinds of noise people loved to hate with their personal computers. Still, the occasional hangovers from our almost nightly drinking bouts could be hell!
People were too involved in the complexity of what they were doing to have an ear to the 21st century. Guests who made music very much like Recue and the others on Spacemusic 59 needed big modern studios or had to be grant students at places like France's highly rated Research Institute in Acoustics and Music. IRCAM's Multimedia Library (English-language entrance) must in 2006 be among the biggest resources of musical info packed into digital space in the world. Those who were into IRCAM in its early days crossed the Channel from England when there was no three-hour train ride but the salt spray was a good remedy for the evenings in the BBC Club.

Ghyslaine gave me her collage including that bit, "Everything goes fast. Too fast," in a year when the pace of things was comparatively still sluggish! Nobody called electronic music "dub" and "ambient" usually meant "surround sound", certainly not easy listening.
I imagine Recue already knows that his audiences in 1980 would have numbered in the hundreds if he was very lucky. Nearly all of them would have been fellow musicians or probably seen by most people, like I was, as eccentric intellectuals.

Yet today Recue and hundreds of thousands like him have a whole planet at their fingertips. If my daughter hadn't seen the sea, maps and aircraft, I don't know what she'd think separates France and England, so she has to go into a tunnel for a good quarter of an hour. And today the Kid and me and you and everyone is, if the law so declares, a pirate. As Apple avoids saying, "Just make me a copy, please."
If you were silly enough to believe Apple's advertisements, we can all be musicians too, provided we "just" did whatever they suggest. The trouble is that if you lack the craft and skills, you can't just do anything of the slightest interest to anyone but yourself: that is inevitably the downside in whatever people try to convince you is new and wonderful.

My kind of culture

My new computer and what it allows me to do prolonged a pause for reflection, aware also that it's been music and a desire for harmony with others and above all in myself that sent me out to buy new clothes. I had no strong external stimulus like a trip to Africa, which was the case the last two times, but maybe that patchwork mirror gave me the same view of my holes as expressed by those who said they mattered.
Hence, too, the changes in the blogroll. There was a section called "my kind of culture". That has gone. Music itself does quite enough with space, time, memory and energy to be my kind of culture. The links worth keeping have moved elsewhere in the list, while the new part will go on doing what it does already, sharing the musical culture of others in all its diversity ... and making more room for the men.
My subject matter obviously doesn't mean leaving my fellow man out of decisions like selecting the kind of audioblogs in which I hear the Zeitgeist at work, especially since if you were to believe some of what you read, it's still men who make most of the big moves when it comes to shaping the defining spirit of our times. That's another rather sad and silly perspective, but Lilith is doing her best to even the balance.

_______

*"Today, everything goes fast. Too fast."
The other line on what's left of Ghyslaine's card reads "Hope rises. Let's respect its fragility." The cartoon is by Wilhelm Schlote.

In a mood for the inner shaman

Wed, 31 May 2006 22:49:01 GMT

The weather has turned chilly, rips appeared in my remaining presentable pairs of trousers, and my Mac crashed so thoroughly and then refused to start up and show any life until the third day of fixing -- more than just a battery replacement -- that I know the computer is on borrowed time.
In sum, I prefer to rejoice in a rare piece of good news, when a far-off friend mailed me to say something I'd done for her was right on the mark but "officially insane", and also I'd like to explain that being "normal" is coming rather hard to me! I think this is an entry about two sides of one coin.
My mood for days has steadily been subdued and one of slight depression, with the rare dose of absurd humour. In my reading, I find most psychiatrists consider a mild depression the state of a human mind best attuned to what is commonly taken for reality: the world as we're able to share our views of it.

A week ago, I published a look back over a first full year when the Log has been devoted to the 'Voices of Women' by name (though this was really only an extension of what had already happened in practice), with an ear to the future. I removed that entry, for my plans seemed premature until I know what is going on in my heart.
Being a man who is held often to be good at listening to the hearts of his friends and enjoys trying to hear everything he can learn of the musicians who come up here, it struck me how rarely I've directly expressed my own mood unless it's been in the Orchard, regarding the big highs and lows of my strong bipolar cycles.
In talking with other people, I've also frequently adopted the style of a sensitive outsider who can empathise with them deeply, draw conclusions and make suggestions if they are troubled from what seems like a detached viewpoint.

Getting out of the emotional heat

Today it appears that, in a way, I have been an outsider!
Strange moods have affected me since I stopped taking a serotonin regulator my therapist contends became counter-productive at some stage in many years of treatment. I had to start adjusting to new medication for my brain chemistry, after in March entering the manic phase of a seven-month cycle just before plunging into the most crippling depression of my life.
I shan't repeat what I've posted about having to learn more and fast about manic-depressive illness and devising a strategy to beat it, on being warned that a third cycle even more extreme than my past two could kill me, possibly literally, but very likely figuratively by putting me away for a long time.

Yet the discovery of what I can only take for normal emotions has been very hard to endure and constantly disconcerts me, combined as often it has been with sporadic surges of mood-tinged memories up into my conscious mind at unexpected moments. These have concerned several periods in my chequered life.
For a couple of nights last week, I couldn't sleep for trying to process this new data and make sense of it, and I feel there's a foot planted now on the lid of a pressurised can that's going to blow off when I let it, which I simply must do next week with the help of a bomb disposal expert.

I have to be prudent in my choices of music, like when coming out of a "downer" in which I couldn't take any music at all. So given my constant tendency to explore what's new in my ever-growing library of mainly women musicians, I'm relieved that the "magic iPod finger" can usually be depended on to pick the right voice. However, my "year-ender" won't appear on the Log, because I know what other people I've been reading lately mean when they say their weblogs seem to become to-do lists.
It's best instead, as Kathryn Petro showed in a typically enjoyable entry on a visit to a wildlife reserve, simply to do or even just to be. She found: "My body felt it could breathe" (A Mindful Life). But I want my mind to be able to breathe easy again. This entails telling my therapist that accepting my strategy for recovery, giving me new medication and advice about that and then saying "Good luck and get on with it!" isn't quite enough.

It takes more than drugs to heal a mind

The new therapist hasn't gone guite this far. But I suspect, all the same, that while his approach has been better than others I first saw but won't name and we get on well, that we're both victims of a trend in "modern society" that Kay Redfield Jamison warned against on just page three of her trailblazing book, 'Touched With Fire' (an Amazon France link this time).
I prefer to be in mutually active relationships of exchange, rather than taking all the initiatives, but therapists do have a tendency to sit back and wait. After a few lines about the "fine madness" and simplistic notions of bipolar disorder in people of an artistic temperament, Kay wrote that:

"labelling as manic-depressive anyone who is unusually creative, accomplished, energetic, intense, moody, or eccentric both diminishes the notion of individuality within the arts and trivializes a very serious, often deadly illness. There are other reasons for such concerns. Excesses of psycho-analytic speculation, along with other abuses of psychobiography, have invited well-deserved ridicule. Due to the extraordinary advances in genetics, neuroscience, and psychopharmacology, much of modern psychiatric thought and practice has moved away from the earlier influences of psychoanalysis and towards a more biological perspective. Some fear that the marked swing from psychoanalysis to psychopharmacology is too much, too soon, and that there exists the risk of a similar entrenchment of ideas and perspectives."

This is what nearly happened to me.
I know so much about some mental disorders and getting help to inspect one's parts and put them together again that sometimes it's easy to feel that others have too much faith in my ability to come up with answers! At the same time, however, I know a part of me has a lot of the answers. It's also the bit that helps other people and there's no reason to believe it's any different for you.

I'm no longer interested in the practice of psychoanalysis (apart from a soft spot for Carl Jung -- Wikipedia -- and acceptance of principles of some importance) because experience has given me an aversion as strong to people who lock themselves into "schools of thought" as musicians usually hate being classified by critics and narrowly labelled on store shelves and in magazines.
I want helpful therapy. Strong empathy with the moods of others, usually in circumstances when they need to talk about these feelings and want help, hasn't given me enough tools to understand my own moods, since I've got nothing subjective with which to compare "normal". So next week, I plan to take an emotional "crash course", since I can live with the memories, on condition I can be confident what I feel never means I'm headed for an even worse cycle.

Throughout this whole episode, I've heard more sense out of honest and ordinary people than from those who wrote some of the lousy books I've skimmed and from psychiatrists with rigid minds. I've been able to talk openly with cooks in the canteen at the Factory who always spoil me, colleagues who have been understanding and interested in my views on healing with music and in society rather than some institution, friends who say simple and wise things, and my down-to-earth general practitioner.
I guess I've frequently been good at helping people live with emotional extremes and through periods they find hard going because those very extremes have been my habitual territory! In pressing me to become a teacher and use the music Log as my prime means of doing this, some have also called me a bit of a witch-doctor and a shaman. This I'm finally prepared also to accept, because two things have happened since March to reinforce my sense of what's in our souls.
I've said very little about the second "massive spiritual experience" that accompanied a total brain burnout. The doctor didn't put it on my medical record as such this time round when I asked him to refrain. I've been thinking, too, about a talk with a friend in Africa -- not the Lauren who thinks what I do is "officially insane"! -- regarding her loneliness and dislocation and how people best deal with madness and purportedly deranged people in so-called primitive societies.

What people in such traditional societies, close to nature, do not habitually do to those with disorders of the mind and the soul is put them away. In modern France, though, I encountered resistance from some health professionals and even one or two people chose to me to my determination to heal within society, which is absolute. Next week my therapist will again find himself helping out with a strategy I have taken to him: "This is the plan, will it work?"
If I can listen to it, you see, a part of me knows what to do.

The medicine-man inside us all

I believe this bit of me is my inner shaman, my personal medicine-man, and that it's the same part that found me Sheryl Crow and Natalie Imbruglia's 'Left of the Middle' to listen to last week, the album of a spirited woman in her early 20s. She is singing about a new start in the world.
Oh, I could readily identify with that desire! Natalie asks 'Leave Me Alone', rejects the second-hand opinions of others and trusts to her 'Intuition'! I had no idea she was going to title a song for it, but have used the word recently and split it into the bits that apply in what I need to do: "in-" for the inside where I went to find myself and get over the very mad month of March, and "-tuition" for the rest. Put together, that is our knowledge within.
Our knowledge within. This is the essence of my second spiritual insight. It brings me no closer to using the word "God" when I can simply talk about the "Big L", love, and all its power. It would be hard to find verbal language for what I discovered in "that place" in March, when I ceased to sense my own ego again, but I know it is shared ground.

The details of what I did for Lauren, as sometimes I can for people regardless of the fact they may be an ocean away and we've not been in touch for ages, are our business only, but I just knew something about her situation and mailed her to tell her so and what she might do. She wrote back:

"it is officially insane that you know how to say exactly the right thing at exactly the right time, nick. (...)
was re-reading yr long missive this ayem [...], my eyes straying only slightly but coming back to the points where you hit the nail so head on it's a wonder i don't suggest you get into spiritual carpentry (no that was not a jesus reference, just so's you know, i know you don't do that collective monotheism bandwagon thing)..."

No, I don't like bandwagons, nor do I have major woodwork or building plans. The only screwdrivers and sledgehammers with which I'm well acquainted are medication for the mind, the kind of which I approve and the drugs I've known and hated because they left me feeling artificially "better" but more cut off from others and myself. I've always said I don't regret the 14 years I had to forego any sex life, but that's no longer true. I just hope never to regret certain outcomes of the decision...
On seeing a musical connnection last year, I felt it was to state of the obvious about the common "languages" of the art and sexual activity, but now I know better and so appreciate encouragement I've been given to go on through that particular door into Lilith's domain.

"Non, je ne regrette rien" is the brave kind of thing a woman like Edith Piaf (Wikipedia) could sing. The Log is no place for the kind of abusive psychobiography I dislike as much as Kay does, but it could fairly be said that regret is a normal emotion and Piaf had a very disturbed life. It can be courageous to claim you don't regret what you can't change.
The famous song is about significant memories, with their strong emotional component. I have a new and subtle emotional palette to learn -- including grieving events and losses I haven't yet because I never could -- and strong recollections with which I need to come to terms. For the moment, I know that my life has been lived close to one or the other extremes of feeling relatively invulnerable or broken up yet again, which meant my finger found Jann Arden's 'Time of Mercy' tonight, with songs like 'Give Me Back My Heart', where she goes straight to the point! I admire people who have lived all their lives with the real vulnerability I currently feel. What I want from Azoulay is more in my "tool-kit"!

A tool-kit for personal tuition

This was a tool-kit I got from Kay Jamison and Azoulay's retired predecessor ... and from that inner shaman of mine. It belongs in the part of my being Lauren and everybody else who has learned anything from me has to thank for it. I need to be fairly alone with the shaman for a few days.
It isn't going back to work that has had such an effect on me; it's the trappings that have surrounded it on emerging from the deepest journey inside I've ever made and probably wish to make out into a city that often shouts "artificial" and, in some respects, "officially insane" at me. But I made that trip because I was mad myself for a while.

If, then, I am to use the Log to return to women musicians and teach by telling their stories and sharing their songs, I plan to do what all good teachers must in life, which is just to share with others the tools we've found, as equals. I can't deal with people otherwise now I know we all have our own inner shaman, every one of us, and I'm essentially no different from you.
Like Pinocchio, I've discovered that honesty pays, while closing your mind and your heart gets you nowhere. Each day can bring surprises, if I venture to talk quite deeply but without hiding anything from others about what's happened to me, since I find it tends also to draw some of them out of their shells, no longer afraid to speak of what upsets them.
I don't know how often I shall log again. In the period that starts with some medical exams on Friday, this over-stretched Mac of mine must sadly go and be replaced. It's hardly good timing now I'm more aware of the need for new clothes with fewer holes. Worse, the day I disintegrated again was my daughter's 17th birthday, so I must make up to the Kid for having turned down an invitation where I'd have felt like a ghost at the feast given the way I felt then.

However, the weather forecast gets better.
I've ordered a new eMac, which comes for the weekend. It may not be a brand-new model, but I like robust eMacs. It was a nice surprise to find out I can still trade in this one while there is any life in it against the price of a rather more powerful machine that can face the music. So when I'm not in emotional therapy and making sure of my inner shaman's compass bearings, I'll have to tame the Tiger too.
What with all these cats for which Apple names its operating system, it's scarcely surprising that my finger found its way from Imbruglia to Arden via Massive Attack and Liz Pappademas and her piano-driven Hurts to Purr (band and debut album).

For once, I'm going to be discreet about a woman I fancy, just saying I've known her for some time and her circumstances have also changed. We shall soon be having dinner and when I asked her how she had put up with me all these years, she said: "In small doses."
"Well, I hope," I said, "that in future, you might be able to endure slightly bigger doses if they come on a more manageable scale."
That won me a little smile and she asked me to wait until she'd sorted out some other stuff by the end of May. My experience has usually involved being madly in love, but now I know why people say "madly". Is going without feeling over-excited a normal emotion?

A music week to end the 'battle with your mind'

Mon, 15 May 2006 20:41:04 GMT

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.

This Book of Lilith (ii): a page turned on the Thanatos drive

Sun, 14 May 2006 21:06:34 GMT

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.

This Book of Lilith (i): a brand new chapter

Sun, 14 May 2006 09:59:11 GMT

"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.