Wednesday, July 6, 2011

singing to myself

In my attic room studying spanish like crazy. Its 93 degrees out, hotter in. In this heat the work of breaking language out of its music into infinitives and subjunctive clauses, into los estructuras de la lengua, is physical. Still, at times a single word soothes with onomatopoeia. Rascacielos. I can't speak the word without a tenor of passionate menace. Rasca- cielos. Sky scraper. But the music of individual words is partial, fleeting, two serendipitous notes stumbled upon while fiddling with an instrument you don't know how to play. Notes without the the melody of ideas, the virtuosity of emotion. My attention drifts from the text book and I stare out the window into the coolness of canopy, sing the few lines of the few songs that I can sing, over and over. The current cancion is 1842 by Sam Amidon. 
I gleaned these quotes from his tumbler. The first sounds like a line from an early Ondaatje prose poem, the second sounds like what I hope my writing does a little of, and what my favorite writers do a lot of.  
“A musician, if he is a messenger, is like a child who hasn’t been handled too many times by a man, hasn’t had too many fingerprints across his brain.”
-Jimi Hendrix 
“The main thing a musician would like to do is to give a picture to the listener of the many wonderful things he knows of and senses in the universe.”
-John Coltrane

Sunday, July 3, 2011

Word Satori: The Dream of India

In India a year has two summers and two winters.

There are no adulterers there.

There is a race of people whose ears hang down to their knees.

In India there are roses everywhere- growing everywhere, for sale in the market, in wreathes around the necks of men and braided in the hair of the women. It seems they could hardly live without roses.

In India they have a class of philosophers devoted to astronomy and the prediction of future events. And I saw one among them who was three hundred years old, longevity so miraculous that wherever he went he was followed by children.

In India the wise men can produce and quell great winds. For this reason they eat in secret.

There are headless men with eyes in their stomachs.

There is a race of feathered people who can leap into trees.

There are warrior women with silver weapons for they have no iron.

And I saw far off the coast of that land a thing in the sky, huge as a cloud, but black and moving faster than the clouds. I asked what that thing could be, and they said it is the great bird Rokh. But the wind was blowing off the coast, and the Rokh went with it, and I never got a closer look.

                                                     
All of the imagery and some of the language are derived from works written in the five hundred years prior to 1492. India, of course, is where Columbus thought he was going. 

I excerpted these stanzas, and arranged them slightly differently, from the essay, The Dream of India.  By Eliot Weinberger.


Friday, July 1, 2011

little summer story

Rio Carlos

Summer is finally here in Cambridge. Time for an evening paddle on the Charles river with my lovely Kristin. Terrence Malick shot most of his films during this time of day, taking a week to perfect one scene, in this kind of light, when the world softly bursts into clarity and contrast, edges are carved deep, colors are liquid, wet paint, shadows are black ink.