5 Days

Drums and backing vocals.

Hey there lonely boy

Flowers By The Sea- William Carlos Williams

When over the flowery, sharp pasture’s

edge, unseen, the salt ocean

lifts its form—chicory and daisies

tied, released, seem hardly flowers alone

but color and the movement—or the shape

perhaps—of restlessness, whereas

the sea is circled and sways

peacefully upon its plantlike stem

The Groundhog- Richard Eberhart

In June, amid the golden fields,
I saw a groundhog lying dead.
Dead lay he; my senses shook,
And mind outshot  our naked frailty.

There lowly in the vigorous summer
His form began its senseless change,
And made my senses waver dim
Seeing nature ferocious in him.

Inspecting close maggots' might
And seething cauldron of his being,   
Half with loathing, half with a strange love,
I poked him with an angry stick.

The fever arose, became a flame
And Vigour circumscribed the skies,
Immense energy in the sun,                   
And through my frame a sunless trembling.

My stick had done nor good nor harm.
Then stood I silent in the day
Watching the object, as before;
And kept my reverence for knowledge         

Trying for control, to be still,
To quell the passion of the blood;
Until I had bent down on my knees
Praying for joy in the sight of decay.

And so I left; and I returned                     
In Autumn strict of eye, to see
The sap gone out of the groundhog,
But the bony sodden hulk remained

But the year had lost its meaning,
And in intellectual chains                                                 
I lost both love and loathing,
Mured up in the wall of wisdom.

Another summer took the fields again
Massive and burning, full of life,
But when I chanced upon the spot             
There was only a little hair left,

And bones bleaching in the sunlight
Beautiful as architecture;
I watched them like a geometer,
And cut a walking stick from a birch.

It has been three years, now.
There is no sign of the groundhog.
I stood there in the whirling summer,
My hand capped a withered heart,

And thought of China and of Greece,         
Of Alexander in his tent;
Of Montaigne in his tower,
Of Saint Theresa in her wild lament.

"For a Lamb" by Richard EberhartI saw on the slant hill a putrid lamb,Propped with daisies. The sleep looked deepThe face nudged in the green pillowBut the guts were out for crows to eat.
Where’s the lamb? whose tender plaintSaid all for the mute breezes.Say he’s in the wind somewhere,Say, there’s a lamb in the daisies.

Hurt Hawks

I

The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder,
The wing trails like a banner in defeat,

No more to use the sky forever but live with famine
And pain a few days: cat nor coyote
Will shorten the week of waiting for death, there is game without talons.

He stands under the oak-bush and waits
The lame feet of salvation; at night he remembers freedom
And flies in a dream, the dawns ruin it.

He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse.
The curs of the day come and torment him
At distance, no one but death the redeemer will humble that head,

The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes.
The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those
That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant.

You do not know him, you communal people, or you have forgotten him;
Intemperate and savage, the hawk remembers him;
Beautiful and wild, the hawks, and men that are dying, remember him.

II

I'd sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk;
but the great redtail
Had nothing left but unable misery
From the bone too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under his talons when he moved.

We had fed him six weeks, I gave him freedom,
He wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening, asking for death,
Not like a beggar, still eyed with the old
Implacable arrogance.

I gave him the lead gift in the twilight.
What fell was relaxed, Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what
Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising
Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.

-Robinson Jeffers

The Beaks Of Eagles
An eagle's nest on the head of an old redwood on one of the
precipice-footed ridges
Above Ventana Creek, that jagged country which nothing but a
falling meteor will ever plow; no horseman
Will ever ride there, no hunter cross this ridge but the winged
ones, no one will steal the eggs from this fortress.
The she-eagle is old, her mate was shot long ago, she is now mated
with a son of hers.
When lightning blasted her nest she built it again on the same
tree, in the splinters of the thunderbolt.
The she-eagle is older than I; she was here when the fires of
eighty-five raged on these ridges,
She was lately fledged and dared not hunt ahead of them but ate
scorched meat. The world has changed in her time;
Humanity has multiplied, but not here; men's hopes and thoughts
and customs have changed, their powers are enlarged,
Their powers and their follies have become fantastic,
The unstable animal never has been changed so rapidly. The
motor and the plane and the great war have gone over him,
And Lenin has lived and Jehovah died: while the mother-eagle
Hunts her same hills, crying the same beautiful and lonely cry and
is never tired; dreams the same dreams,
And hears at night the rock-slides rattle and thunder in the throats
of these living mountains.
It is good for man
To try all changes, progress and corruption, powers, peace and
anguish, not to go down the dinosaur's way
Until all his capacities have been explored: and it is good for him
To know that his needs and nature are no more changed in fact
in ten thousand years than the beaks of eagles.

-Robinson Jeffers

Victory In Sight

I'm in love. I never noticed this in the Prado before, but found it the other day when my aunt and uncle were visiting.

To Redeem The Day

[Writing] begins with an appetite to discover my self-respect. To redeem the day. So the day does not go down in debt. It begins with that kind of appetite.

-Leonard Cohen

"Into this furnace I ask you now to venture. You whom I cannot betray."

I was four years old the first time I heard Leonard Cohen's music.

One Saturday morning I came downstairs to 'So Long Marianne' playing from the speakers in the empty living room. 

I went over to the hearth of our long disused fireplace, and half-standing, half-hanging with my hands on the mantelpiece, I listened to the song with a furrowed brow and tried to work out just how destitute this man was.

If he wasn't homeless he was at least hungry, and possibly an alcoholic. 

Up to that time my understanding of homeless people had been that they were always sad and you could do nothing for them but frown until you felt similarly sad, give them some pennies to put towards the house they were going to buy, or ask your parents to buy them an ice cream if it was a really hot day. 

What struck me about this homeless singer though, was that he intended to laugh, cry and then laugh again.

Life wasn't simply a vale of tears and you could be happy and sad at the same time. There was something sphinx-like about it that stayed with me.

My parents played that album on loop for a few years, but aside from some brief exposure to 'I'm Your Man' during my dad's minidisc phase, I didn't hear any more of Cohen´s music until I was eighteen, when a friend of my brother played a few chords of One Of Us Cannot Be Wrong on the guitar one day. The memories came flooding back. I began to teach myself the guitar immediately.

Twenty-three years from that initial morning and Leonard feels like a fundamental part of me still. When I started to travel alone he was a great comfort.

  "Yes you who must leave everything that you cannot control. It begins with your family but soon it comes round to your soul. I've been where you're heading, I think I can see how you're pinned. When you're not feeling holy/wholly, your loneliness says that you've sinned."

After the travel and into work, a brief university attempt and bouts of young-man's-depression he stuck around. 'Dress rehearsal rag' functioned as the litmus test for suicide at one point. Sitting here I'm now glad we both failed that one, and it took the edge of shame off to know someone else who was compelled to pull out of the nosedive...even if levelling out still just meant clipping the shrubs with one´s wing-tips.

His music has been a map for me that played strangely well into the territory I came to experience, and anything of his that gave some solace I've generally internalized without thinking about it. 

There is something elemental about the poetry in his work that I think allows it to be embodied so readily, specifically in his first three albums. I see him as something between a sculptor and a glacier, bearing upon his words gradually until they are few, and worn smooth. An ineluctable force working in hope of ineluctable language. The result for me is almost gnostic. The language gave me either permission or reassurance when wandering and experimenting. It made it feel alright to grow in hope of a light as yet unseen.

Right now I am processing his death from the perspective of someone who owes no small part of their thinking to the man. So much of his work offers itself to help in remembering, celebrating and mourning him, but what has struck out for me at the moment is 'The Old Revolution'. I'd overlooked this song until last week. It is difficult to comment on the significance of this song for me at the moment without giving it chapter and verse and pulling a few psychological threads to the point of unravelling, so I'll try to keep it short.

What I feel I took that first day, from the man who laughs and cries and intends to continue doing both, was that you can tolerate and, moreover, survive apparent ambiguities and contrasts. What seemed to be in very simple terms, something of a mission to remain happy in sad times.

Twenty three years and a lot of ambiguity and contrast later, and I can say that that the odd sense of continuity in my own life would affirm this, and that it probably helped to have had this model to work with from the start.

There is a reframing of this point in a staggering line from the first verse of 'The Old Revolution' that says what to me is the same message about tolerance of contrast, from an inverted angle that fits my own cycles of fevered searching and resignation:

"Even damnation is poisoned with rainbows."


The gyroscope of resignation rebalances from either side. When you are desperate to remain happy despite life´s sadness, you can do so. Some years later when depression and cynicism begin to show signs of leisurely use, it can be alarming to remember that moments of happiness are inevitable, whether you like it or not.Your new challenge might be to remain aloof and stoic whilst stepping around the puddles of joy.
This is almost like a permission slip to come back off pseudo-intellectual Heraclitic world-weary holy mountain and have a slice of cake with the other idiots, of whom you are of course one, in case you´d forgotten.

And then in the last verse I am hit by a line that contrasts this. After permission to put your picnic blanket down in the shit and enjoy the atmospheric phenomena of a life in gruel, there comes a line that gives me restlessness.

"The hand of your beggar is burdened down with money. The hand of your lover is clay."

Having spent perhaps enough time the last year foregoing intellectual perseverance for comfort, this makes me want to scoff my cake and get back on the search. Joy in sadness, yes. Sadness in joy, yes. Stopping at either one for too long? Not really possible. You may be figure of eighting between the two nuclei for the rest of your days, and that might be pointless, but so what? You can´t just stop here in the land of relative financial comfort and untold cynicism, enjoying your sandwich whilst batting the flies away. You have to take another shot at something meaningful to you, even if it just ends up being the return journey.

 I imagine life will continue to be a constant tacking between the two, and perhaps the searching-stopping cycle is the furnace he speaks of, in the last line of the song. In some way these words embody the golden breadcrumbs he left for me as I came through innocence to experience and grew up with him; acceptance and love of the human carnival in its glory and its weariness.
 I would like to echo his words back to him as he embarks on his voyage into the place where real ambiguity begins:

"Into this furnace I ask you now to venture,

 You whom I cannot betray."

Sleep

Really reminded of Mahler.

Borne by the autumn tide comes the return of mopey music.

Chin Up

Be happy Ürgüp, there is no smoke above you.

Fluvial prayers.

Rogers on Learning

Regarding Learning and Its Facilitation (1969)
How does a person learn? How can important learnings be facilitated? What basic theoretical assumptions are involved?
Here are a number of the principles which can, I believe, be abstracted from current experience and research related to this newer approach:
Learning

1) Human beings have a natural potentiality for learning.
2) Significant learning takes place when the subject matter is perceived by the student as having relevance for his own purposes.

3) Learning which involves a change in self organization - in the perception of oneself - is threatening and tends to be resisted.

4) Those learning which are threatening to the self are more easily perceived and assimilated when external threats are at a minimum.

5) When threats to the self is low, experience can be perceived in differentiated fashion and learning can proceed.

6) Much significant learning is acquired through doing.

7) Learning is facilitated when the student participates responsibly in the learning process.

8) Self-initiated learning which involves the whole person of the learner - feelings as well as intellect - is the most lasting and pervasive.

9) Independence, creativity, and self-reliance are all facilitated when self-criticism and self-evaluation are basic and evaluation by others is of secondary importance.

10) The most socially useful learning in the modern world is the learning of the process of learning, a continuing openness to experience and incorporation into oneself of the process of change.

Facilitation

1) The facilitator has much to do with setting the initial mood or climate of the group or class experience.
2) The facilitator helps to elicit and clarify the purposes of the individuals in the class as well as the more general purposes of the group.

3) He relies upon the desire of each student to implement those purposes which have meaning for him, as the motivational force behind significant learning.

4) He endeavours to organize and make easily available the widest possible range of resources for learning.

5) He regards himself as a flexible resource to be utilized by the group.

6) In responding to expressions in the classroom group, he accepts both the intellectual content and the emotionalized attitudes, endeavouring to give each aspect the approximate degree of emphasis which it has for the individual or the group.

7) As the acceptant classroom climate becomes established, the facilitator is able increasingly to become a participant learner, a member of the group, expressing his views as those of one individual only.

8) He takes the initiative in sharing himself with the group - his feelings as well as his thoughts - in ways which do not demand nor impose but represent simply a personal sharing which students may take or leave.

9) Throughout the classroom experience, he remains alert to the expression indicative of deep or strong feelings.

10) In his functioning as a facilitator of learning, the leader endeavours to recognize and accept his own limitations.

Boom!

Shimmering goodness.

"If you can remember the 60's, you weren't there!"

Barbara Dane

All this is coming off of MGMT's Late Night Tales comp. Absolute gem.

Here With Me

Hang in there two minutes and you'll feel it.

Gentle Thoughts, Soothing Notions

Showing mad love.

As the furnace draws away for another six months, can't say it wasn't golden.

Blessed are the brassholders.

Who taught this cat to sing? Real deal.

Lal

I got holes in my pockets baby, I got patches on my pants.

Aman; A part

An episode from the recent hitch from Madrid to London. Rest soon.

At 4 in the morning it started bucketing. Nervous engines pre-stoked by a few hours of light-infused half-sleep, my body reacted suddenly and I came to consciousness stood under a tree, sleeping bag and rucksack in hand. Small joy in being surprisingly dry, soon crushed under the recognition of how little sleep I'd actually had.
Initially bedding down had been fun- a skulking tour of the waysides and a trip through a hole in a fence into the inviting black fields adjacent– until it dawned all I'd done was catalogue every of the truckers' ideal piss perches then almost throw my sleeping bag down in a manured furrow.
The pitch I'd just leapt up from was the one innocuous place I'd found climbing back through that hole. Anyway, rain avoided,  I toddled off to a dry spot in the doorway of an abandoned restaurant in the service station. Threw down yesterday's signs to add a bit of padding to the roll mat and the half-hearted attempt at more sleep. It didn't work and I was soon browsing the garage for coffee and non-extortionate foodstuffs.
At that point I came across a card to give my dad for his Ph.D graduation (one of two reasons I was hitching to the UK.)

A bit of a nutty card but you have to know my Dad. Whole thing is summed up by the expression of the zoo-keeper, lip curled in an expression of considerable muscle strain and flagrant curiosity at how much confection can be dropped into such a maw in one go. To me it suggested the spirit of enquiry at the moment of its absolution.
Some time spent outside of the garage with my sign, watching what I guessed were two colleagues rambling away in French together. Guys in their 50's, both with spectacles, curly grey hair, smart shoes, tight jeans and shirts tucked in. Just quietly observing them. Six cigarettes and four coffees later they got into separate cars and disappeared. I padded off to the main entrance of the service station to meet the 'dawn', or the wan grey misty barometric car wash that passes for dawn at that time in that place. Spain has ruined me- the sun lives there and merely haunts the rest of Europe.
Playing the game of numbers, waiting there gave maximum advertising to the maximum number of people. I think an hour later the rain went up a gear again.
Coming back to throw myself on the bench inside I realised I'd been in that station for 13 hours.
"Hey!"
I looked up to see a teenage boy smiling at me from the bench across the way. Sat beside two women, whom I guessed were his sister and mother from the resemblance. Mother wore a headscarf, smiling politely, leaning forward with her hands folded. The two teenagers were sat up straight, beaming, eyes engaged with my bag and sign.
Boy: "Everything's going to be fine! You just have to have that mindset."
Me: "Thanks, I'm glad to hear someone else thinks the same."
He and his sister got up and came over to talk, and we spent about half an hour on life goals, the military, becoming a millionaire by the time you're thirty, curiosity, teaching, the road from Morocco to Amsterdam and school in Holland. I showed them the card I'd chosen and the boy fell on the floor in tears of laughter...twice actually.
When I arrived at sunset the evening before I wrote in my notebook that all I could hope for at that hour was a good conversation. Took half a day but it worked. If I was scientifically persistent enough I'd consider a study on the fatigue-eliminating aspect of positive acknowledgment at the roadside. Some days before in Burgos when I was at my wit's end (sleepless start to the day, endless marching, sore feet, rain and a dead national road) a garage owner came over, looked at my route, paused and opted for buoyant prescription over leaden/realistic prognosis:"Buena suerte!"(Good luck!) and a pat on the back.
That was an intense day for a number of reasons, but any small kindness during the wait acts as a pivot and the slate is wiped. You get on with it. In Burgos this meant a vampirical springing to the feet and the next car stopping immediately and whisking me to Irún.
In the same way, the thirteen hours in that station south of Lille was immediately redeemed by the positivity and openness of those two young people. The boy was somewhere between woeful and angry that both myself and his sister couldn't give him a firm answer in terms of a life goal, but we talked that over till he was sure we had them and they were just latent. His is to finish school in a year so that he can join the army and start making some serious money.
Their father came in from napping in the car to collect them for the drive back to Holland. We said our goodbyes and here again prescription was chosen over prognosis- they thought I'd get a lift but also that I'd be in France at least another day, and they just said good luck. I wished them the same and said farewell, and as the boy trailed the rest of his family out the door he stopped suddenly, came back, shook my hand and introduced himself as Aman.

Well Aman, if you end up here somehow, thanks to you and your sister for that chat. Ten minutes later I got a lift all the way to Brixton.

I Don't Know Why

Hitched to london safely.report to follow.

Ringing In The Dawn

Been listening to the whole album a lot recently. If you like this follow it up.

Colleen

First heard Colleen about ten years ago when snooping through my dad's CDs. Didn't know if she was still making music but she turned up for a rooftop gig around the corner from me this weekend. Enchanting would be the word, she played a 6 string viola* and sang like a siren.

*Treble Viola Da Gamba

Patrick Caulfield- Earthenware (1967)

Reading "The Anatomy Of Human Destructiveness" by Fromm as part of a drive to read the list of 15 books that Bill Coperthwaite 'would have saved if the world burned'. Reminded of other books of his, including this from The Art of Loving:

"Our society is run by a managerial bureaucracy, by professional politicians; people are motivated by mass suggestion, their aim is producing more and consuming more, as purposes in themselves. All activities are subordinated to economic goals, means have become ends; man is an automaton — well fed, well clad, but without any ultimate concern for that which is his peculiarly human quality and function. If man is to be able to love, he must be put in his supreme place. The economic machine must serve him, rather than he serve it. He must be enabled to share experience, to share work, rather than, at best, share in profits. Society must be organized in such a way that man's social, loving nature is not separated from his social existence, but becomes one with it. If it is true, as I have tried to show, that love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence, then any society which excludes, relatively, the development of love, must in the long run perish of its own contradiction with the basic necessities of human nature."

Hockney- Sun (1973)

Spinning gold from hay.

Tea

Midas Put His Mitts On This

Lu'ay Sami

Rimbauld-Illuminations clip

"As soon as the idea of the Flood had subsided, a hare paused among the sainfoins and the swaying bellflowers, and said his prayer to the rainbow through the spider's web."

"From that time, the Moon heard jackals howling through the wildernesses of thyme - and eclogues in wooden shoes grumbling in the orchard. 
Then, in the forest, violet-hued, burgeoning, Eucharis told me that it was Spring."- Rimbauld, Illuminations

 

Blast from the past.

Message from Dad

"I have never seen this picture card vista except on a postcard. I guess we have to take it on trust like the moon landings."

"If I was a catfish, swimming in the deep blue sea..."

"You are precisely as big as what you love and precisely as small as what you allow to annoy you."- Robert Anton Wilson

Crackalackin'

Dying stuck inside a guitar.

Positive Vibrations

"We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future."- McLuhan

Steps to an ecology of mind- Bateson

"As I see it, the advances of scientific thought come from a combination of loose and strict thinking, and this combination is the most precious tool of science."

"No organism can afford to be conscious of things with which it could deal at unconscious levels.
This is the economy achieved by habit formation."

"...a demonstration of an inevitable fact: that mere purposive rationality unaided by such phenomena as art, religion, dream, and the like, is necessarily pathogenic and destructive of life; and that its virulence springs specifically from the circumstances that life depends upon interlocking circuits of contingency, while consciousness can only see such short arcs of such circuits as human purpose may direct."

"If the course of true love ever ran smooth, it would follow an exponential curve."

“Or, here’s another way to say it: I have one foot in the grave and the other keeps dancing.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/11/us/11osheroff.html?emc=eta1

Follow him down

"...a favorable conjunction of the most diverse factors..."

Few books on the go at the moment.

"Fate sends individuality back to its limitations and destroys it if it transcends them."-Otto Rank
"One cannot quench one's power of imagination, but the imagination is made keener and more correct by continually studying nature and wrestling with it."-VVG
"At the present time money is what the right of the strongest used to be."- VVG
"For every week I now make something which I could not make before, and it is like becoming young again."-VVG
"When you don't know where a road leads, it sure as hell will take you there."-E.W. Sinott
"The worst thing about shopping is having to pay."- One of my students.
"Virtue is perfection in man's being, and not the absence of vices."- Exupery, Citadelle

Blast from the past.

Learning to play this at the moment. Simple structure, difficult picking, beautiful.

"To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly."- Robert Oppenheimer

"There are children playing in the streets who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago."- Robert Oppenheimer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Slocum

"The question of identity has changed from being something you are born with to a task: you have to create your own community. But communities aren’t created, and you either have one or you don’t. What the social networks can create is a substitute. The difference between a community and a network is that you belong to a community, but a network belongs to you. You feel in control. You can add friends if you wish, you can delete them if you wish. You are in control of the important people to whom you relate. People feel a little better as a result, because loneliness, abandonment, is the great fear in our individualist age. But it’s so easy to add or remove friends on the internet that people fail to learn the real social skills, which you need when you go to the street, when you go to your workplace, where you find lots of people who you need to enter into sensible interaction with. Pope Francis, who is a great man, gave his first interview after being elected to Eugenio Scalfari, an Italian journalist who is also a self-proclaimed atheist. It was a sign: real dialogue isn’t about talking to people who believe the same things as you. Social media don’t teach us to dialogue because it is so easy to avoid controversy… But most people use social media not to unite, not to open their horizons wider, but on the contrary, to cut themselves a comfort zone where the only sounds they hear are the echoes of their own voice, where the only things they see are the reflections of their own face. Social media are very useful, they provide pleasure, but they are a trap."


Source: http://elpais.com/elpais/2016/01/19/inenglish/1453208692_424660.html?rel=lom

Braided gold.

Champion

"I listen in envy, F. said. Don't you know you're being loved?"

"Don't you want to hear what happened when I was a telephone?"
"I do, but I don't want want to beg. I have to beg you for every scrap of information about the world."
"But that's the only way you value it. When it falls on you from out of the trees you think its rotten fruit."

"Oh F, do you think I can learn to perceive the diamonds of good amongst all the shit?"
"It is all diamond."

Reassuring thought of the day

"It has been said that it is quicker to list the plants that do not form endomycorrhizae than those that do."

Eh?

"There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the 'practice of freedom', the means by which men and women deal critically with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world."
— Richard Shaull, drawing on Paulo Freire