Monday night music

Julian Bream plays BWV 1000

I'm getting back into playing classical guitar, after a long hiatus, so I'm enjoying videos of great players. Here is Bream playing a rather difficult fugue, courtesy of Bach, of course. I love me some Bach. Years ago I played and recorded this on my answering machine:

These days I think that I'd be lucky to remember how to read the music. However, it is coming back relatively quickly -- those neurons may be out of use, but they're not completely gone yet. My girlfriend back then called me up recently to say that she'd heard this piece and was reminded of my answering-machine piece, and that really took me back.

I remember playing a lot of music when I lived in Germany, mostly because (1) living in Germany as an expatriot, without a job, is an extended lesson in Suck, and Suck is only really relieved by Art; and (2) it gave me a great excuse not to have to interact with people.

Meanwhile, back in this world, here is Finn being all cuddly and friendly next to my Bay Laurel tree seedling, wanting to get inside and have a snack:

And here is my proudest plant, an onion that was part of winter time salsa and whose foot got thrown out into the compost heap, only to come alive in the spring. I rescued it and gave it a place on the edge of the garden. It has now sprouted into a bunch of green onions, one of which is now sprouting a seed bulbil. I am just gonna let this little guy grow without interference, and maybe I'll get some seeds out of it!

And here we go again

I shut down my facebook account today, and with it, instant updates with ~90 people that I've known.  Some of them close friends, most of them not.  It had begun to feel like a clique, and I've never been good with being a part of something.  Once a group claimed me as a member, I always found a way to piss them off and be free, and that's just as true today as it was in the past.

I really don't get extroversion and group mentality.  People that need to be around other people are foreign to me.  People who are afraid of time alone, especially long periods of time alone, weird me out.  I just don't get it.  What better thing is there than an entire week to oneself, free of any interpersonal interaction whatsoever?  That sounds like heaven to me.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a hermit.  I need people around me.  I just need them on my own schedule.

Think of it this way: when you go to the supermarket, there's probably music playing, right?  If you're any kind of a patron of the arts, the music that is playing is probably not to your liking.  You're in the market, and you need to be there, but after a while you just want to get the hell out because of the stress that that horrible background pop song is creating for you.  You get away, you escape, and you relax away from the awful Britney Spears, or whatever it was.  But eventually you need to go back to buy food again -- you need the market -- and what the hell, the braindead pop music is playing again.

That's how I feel about being around people, in general.  I need social interaction to be happy, but something about it that I can't pin down quite as nicely as above -- something makes me just recoil and want to be alone.  I really do appreciate entire weeks alone, and I really wish that they could be longer.

This sort of attitude is not conducive to a happy relationship.

Sigh.

Which is hard because everyone, no exception, seems to need love.  Or at least companionship.

Poem of Next Week

Just getting an early start on things.

As Douglas Adams might say, great things are afoot.  Eddies in the space-time continuum.  (Oh, is he?)

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. 

-- Yeats

Poem of the Week

 Long one of my favorites, and I have been recently reminded of it.  Larkin was in some respects a despicable man, in many more a remarkable one.  That description is a sort of archetype for each individual human, perhaps.

Loneliness and living alone is something that continues to absorb me.  Curiously, I don't think that Larkin was lonely in the sense of not having close persons around him.  But this poem speaks to a personality that detests what it has become, that practically longs for what horrifies, and which sees just a shallow, conventional existence in larger society.

I've been awake at four AM, and I've seen the curtain edges grow light.  I know how night brings new moods.  I have heard that most people in ER's die at night, and it makes sense to me.  Have you ever awoken in the depth of night, and felt fear and loneliness that seemed almost laughable the next day, in the light of day?

I have a recurring dream of people breaking glass and running down the street outside my home, in the depth of the night.  It wasn't until recently that I realized that it was a dream -- I thought that it was real.  But I had ear plugs in, and my closed window was far from the street.  What is it in my unconscious mind that dredged up the (very real, to me) sound of anarchy, in the dark of night?

The fear of darkness, both literal and figurative, is engrained deeply in our psyches, or so it would seem.  Of course, this poem is about much more than night, but the opening is so evocative and so familiar to anyone who has awoken and stood up, just to stare outside and feel alone and afraid.  This is a poem of fear and loneliness.  It's this kind of feeling that drives people to matches that they don't really want, or as my dead father once said, "to be with someone, anyone, because the alternative is too unbearable."

I love the last lines of this poem.  "In locked-up offices, all the uncaring intricate rented world begins to rise... Work has to be done."

Aubade†

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

--Phillip Larkin, 1922-1985


† Aubade is french for "morning serenade." Traditionally, an aubade in english is a poem about lovers separating at dawn.

El amor en los tiempos del cólera

I just finished watching a rather good movie, and now I'm winding down, sipping a nightcap, and pondering.  Pondering the movie, that is, which was an adaptation of a Gabriel García Márquez novel.

I'm pondering it because I don't get the notion of idealized, romantic love.  I just don't.  It seems so medieval, this hollywoodesque longing and yearning, which is not centered in sanity in any way but rather upon an individual's single-minded obsession.  And yet people seem to exist in this state.

Case in point, I once knew a blogger who told me that "for the right man, I would move anywhere in the world."  So... how and when do you know that he's "right?"  And what happens in ten years when he's a different person altogether?  Because people change, and rarely together.

Now, "love" as "deep emotional attachment" I understand very well.  I've got no beef with that.  It's the pedestal and the blanket willingness to act that I don't get.  I keep trying to figure it out, too.  I mean, apart from my family, I have maybe five or six close friends, not a single one of whom is anyone to whom I necessarily felt any strong/close connection at first meeting, but all of whom I've known for many years.  Some of them are thousands of miles away from me, and have been for a while.

Here's what I'm starting to suspect: that people live in a state of generalized loneliness, and they're willing to do almost anything to escape it.  That feeling is what religion preys upon, for example.  And cults.  And not to equal religion and cults with love, but I do think that western peoples' idea of romantic companionship and love is really just a symptom of loneliness.

I'm starting to sound like a curmudgeon here, so I will end this by stating that I'm not some kind of bare-lightbulb, manifesto-writing loner here, and I don't discount not only that there are happy couples in the world but also that making that work does take effort.  I just think that being alone is underrated.  There is much to be discovered in oneself, almost none of which can be found in company, and certainly not while one has starry eyes for an unknown someone, somewhere, somehow.

Favorite Artists Series

Joan Jett. She is WAY near the top of the list, if not on the top!