The ghosts have incapacitated me

Why is it that the ghosts of our past haunt us even after a decade is old?
And thus, veiled in allusions and metaphors and sorry songs,
Mourning wracks and wrecks the soul.
No names cross my lips, but the story is told.

Word Ward

Struck by good writing or powerful speeches, I am reminded of the impressive ability of words. Read a review before you experience a product of consumption - be it actual food, or music, or literature - and you will find your experience indelibly coloured by the words of another. A journalist's grizzly exposition of a prominent personage's transgressions can be the harbinger for his resignation in the imminent future. Two simple words said in front of a congregation cement a lifetime partnership.

There is an odd cadence to words, and a rhythm to them that suggests they have a life of their own. Beyond the speaker and his speech or voice, the words he speaks have an intrinsic music, and a power of their own. The speaker's own abilities, like a musician's, make a difference between a good rendition and a bad one. But ultimately, the delivery is only a rendition. Words in themselves are something purer still. More than content or style, every word has meaning and meanings which you can tease out and make resonate by the way you string them together with other words. Constructed and deconstructed, they are greater than the sum of their parts.

Eloquence and story-telling. Eloquence in story-telling. I promised myself once that I would endeavour to these things. But I have failed my old primary school motto. I have endeavoured, but not persevered, in craftsmanship. Talking to a friend recently, I remarked on how I relied upon the spirit of inspiration to write. Her response was that in order to best do justice to that you need to have the discipline of consistent practise.

Reminded of this, I am resolved to write. I do. Not just as the spirit moves. Not just in fits and spurts, at times engorged on hypergraphia, sometimes starving. But in controlled, intentional way, chewing through the varying forms of texts in a regular diet intended for growth.

Mainstream religion

This video. It was love at my virgin experience of Hozier's Take Me to Church. I watch this video and I count my blessings.

The blessed outcome of a bad breakup, the song decries the fallacies of organised religion whilst revelling in the hedonic and powerful experience of love. As Nick Messitte so eloquently describes, it is a 'deliciously acidic criticism of religious institutions, particularly their interference in our bedrooms'.

Drawing on Wikipedia for some incredible insights into the songwriting, in an interview with The Irish Times, Hozier stated, "I found the experience of falling in love or being in love was a death, a death of everything. You kind of watch yourself die in a wonderful way, and you experience for the briefest moment–if you see yourself for a moment through their eyes–everything you believed about yourself gone. In a death-and-rebirth sense."

In an interview with New York magazine, he elaborated: "Sexuality, and sexual orientation – regardless of orientation – is just natural. An act of sex is one of the most human things. But an organization like the church, say, through its doctrine, would undermine humanity by successfully teaching shame about sexual orientation – that it is sinful, or that it offends God. The song is about asserting yourself and reclaiming your humanity through an act of love."

As the song rose to fame, the official video made to go along with the song was riveting political commentary of Russia's facist stance on homosexuality, which is perhaps subtly echoed in other communities, particularly those of a religious nature.

As a dance video, it took me on an exploration into Sergei Polulin's other works, as well as his stormy course as a professional dancer and growing up in Russia, as explored in a video by NOWNESS, yet another treasure trove of humans exploring humanity.

I leave you with Messitte's concluding paragraph:

We live in a complicated, often dismal world, one in which governmental powers are increasingly terrifying (from ISIS to Putin and everything in between—including aspects of our own system). 

In the United States, we find ourselves in a landscape now roiling with discomfort, in which even the most ardent democrats have lost faith with our executive branch, in which iniquities of gender and race have yet to be been addressed, in which child homelessness is on the rise, in which nearly half of us blame poor people for their own poverty while simultaneously overlooking the entrenched nature of our corporate welfare systems. 

Has any of this been reflected in the pop charts? 

Not recently; the last political protest song I can remember discussed in the mainstream was John Mayer’s “Waiting for the World to Change”—an utterly toothless and passive song if ever I heard one: 

Marvin Gaye asked us a direct and powerful question (“What’s Going On?”). John Mayer simply took a walk by the East River and waited for the world to change around his beautifully sculptured face. 

- Nick Messitte in his analysis of Hozier's Take Me To Church

A stress on the positive

"Don't stress", as they say in Singapore, or "take it easy", as we say in Australia. We often think of stress as a negative thing, and that living a stressful lifestyle can increase our risk of gastric ulcers, or heart attacks. McGonigal shows us otherwise. She discusses how the stress response can not only be a positive bodily response, but also the social lubricant that enhances human relationships.

"Go after what it is that creates meaning in your life, then trust yourself to handle the stress that follows."

brain pickings does it again

The greatest love letters, of course, aren’t those written for public greatness — they’re the ones penned for one particular trembling heart, honeycombed with private memories and private miracles, written in the language of the possible.

The website's snippets of critical analyses of Orlando by Virginia Woolf makes me want to read it now.

Process

Quite possibly the most beautifully eloquent and true pieces of writing I've seen in a while:

The creative process has more than one kind of expression. There’s the part you could show in a movie montage — the furious typing or painting or equation solving where the writer, artist, or mathematician accomplishes the output of the creative task. But then there’s also the part that happens invisibly, under the surface. That’s when the senses are perceiving the world, the mind and heart are thrown into some sort of dissonance, and the soul chooses to respond.

That response doesn’t just come out like vomit after a bad meal. There’s not such thing as pure expression. Rather, because we live in a social world with other people whose perceptual apparatus needs to be penetrated with our ideas, we must formulate, strategize, order, and then articulate. It is that last part that is visible as output or progress, but it only represents, at best, 25 percent of the process.

Real creativity transcends time. If you are not producing work, then chances are you have fallen into the infinite space between the ticks of the clock where reality is created. Don’t let some capitalist taskmaster tell you otherwise — even if he happens to be in your own head.

- Douglas Rushkoff, quoted from brain pickings

Gmt

Em  G  C7 Cdim7

Em
I'm standing by
G/D                    (D)
as my breath hots up
Bm
on a cold glass pane
                                          C
and it's only a matter of time.

I watch airplanes land
and carousels fill
with no bags that belong to you
but it's only a matter of time.

Bm/E (Em7)                        G/E
It's like the fast-forward scenes
Bm/D                      G/D
in a time-lapse movie
G/C                          C7/C
watching seedlings grow
     Bm Bm/D                 D
or stars chart the night sky.

Nothing seems to happen
watching life pass by
for somebody else like me
and it's only a matter of time.

in homage to Phillip Glass' Metamorphosis One

breath/life/willy nilly

breathe in to inhale

quince scent in the unwashed sheets 

wrinkled of you still

an empty bed is

harder than your shoes to fill

an empty heart, harder still

breathe out to compose

and create composure still

rememb’ring not love

broken composure

lost in the passage of time

not love, but self will

A humbling reminder

Dear Lord, the great healer, I kneel before you. Since every perfect gift must come from you. I pray, give skill to my hands, clear vision to my mind, and meekness and kindness to my heart. Give me singleness of purpose, strength to lift up a part of the burden that is my suffering, fellow man, a true realisation of the gift that is mine. Take from my heart all guile and worldliness, that with the simple faith of a child, I may rely on you.

- Mother Teresa

Lost for words

post modern 

we can't say what we want to 

directly anymore

avoid cliche

we fill our lines 

with meaningful 

meaninglessness

favor irony 

to avoid sounding trite

words are just words 

all they are is hollow 

black and white

i project what meaning i want 

imbue these screens with hue

visible only through my tinted lenses 

nowadays

we can't say what we want to 

directly anymore

i write these words

and hear them ring inside my head

to potential music space

an emptiness i can't efface

we can't go it alone

we can't go it alone 

we can't go it alone

we can't go it alone

we build up to a rhythmic drum

that no one else can hear

could we ever;

we can't say what we want to 

directly anymore