Pleasures
First look from morning's window
The rediscovered book
Fascinated faces
Snow, the change of the seasons
The newspaper
The dog
Dialectics
Showering, swimming
Old music
Comfortable shoes
Comprehension
New music
Writing, planting
Traveling
Singing
Being friendly
- Bertolt Brecht
Here's a excerpt from a book he wrote. He was living in Ireland, the emerald green isle and preparing to move to Donegal in the remote northwest.
He met a shopowner in a Liberties, Dublin antique shop to buy mirrors for his travels. He gifted her a piece of gringseng cloth, a healing fabric from Bali.
“Wonderful," she said, "many thanks. Travel safe and look after yourself. Before you go I will reveal a small future to you,” she said.
“After Tiglin you will ramble across country to the Killarney hostel where, sadly and unfortunately, you will be awake in the predawn morning of December 8 hearing a BBC news announcer tell the world about John Lennon being shot in New York. You will turn your head to the wall and cry.
"Later you will take the black push bike down narrow wet twisted streets and meet a nun opening heavy steel black church gates and you will tell her what happened. You will push open the heavy wooden doors, genuflect, cross yourself, walk the length of a cold aisle and light votive candles in silence.
"Then you will ride into town and go to every news agent to buy every Irish paper with the screaming black tabloid headlines full of desperate black ink and grainy images of death personified before retiring to a pub to sit by a peat fire drinking, reading, and sadly, quietly remembering John’s creativity and his words Imagine and Give Peace a Chance.”
i know the music
but for got the words
he said playing in shadows
at life's little intersection
feeling binary code chords
as a child
seeing anxiety
carry curiosity
with courage
passed through
Goodbye May. Pound out your bright beautiful future.
A Turkish man with a hammer. Gypsy music.
Only madmen and pilgrims travel alone.
We began in India. Wandering no name alleys, streets, villages, rivers, valleys, mountains.
Darkness whispers, Who's there?
I received a reprieve from death row one night in Vietnam. My sentence was commuted to life without parole. A South American writer said parole means speech, word, a word of honor.
Parole is the condition under which you are free, with a language and human awareness.
Human freedom is unconditional.
Memory fades into living color remembered with absolute infinity. Desperate hands fold across heaving chests, feeling abandoned sucking air injuries. Stop the bleeding. Start the breathing.
It rained yesterday. It was long sweet and slow and heavy. Streets became quiet. Everyone huddled in corners of their mind.
Speak memory.
“Years ago, I broke a bunch of roses
from the top of his wall.
A thorn from that is still in my palm,
working deeper.” - Rumi
Her voice, loss, recovery, passion, life.
Paying her dues. Singing her blues.
"She was able to dig so deep in kind of such a raw and unguarded place when she sang, and that's the power of gospel and blues and rhythm and blues. She brought that to all those beautiful standards and rocks songs that she did.
"All the number of vast albums she recorded, she covered such a wide variety of material that brought such unique phrasing and emotional depth," said Bonnie Raitt, a close friend, in an interview on Friday afternoon after James' death.
"I think that's what appealed to people, aside from the fact that her personality on and off the stage was so huge and irrepressible. She was ribald and raunchy and dignified, classy and strong and vulnerable all at the same time, which is what us as women really relate to."
See and hear:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADDigK8LwyE&feature=related
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