Wednesday, 18 December 2013

Icarus @ 59 # 6

I am posting this a day early because my old friend Rocky sent me details of an article on ''unfinished paintings''. The idea of the unfinished is something i have been preoccupied with for a while and have just written an academic article on it, which has some of this... 'The narrative future of nostalgia,’ is a phrase Milan Kundera (2009: 106-107) coined in an essay entitled, ‘The Untouchable Solitude of a Foreigner (Oscar Milosz)’ and as I reflect, both the phrase and the title of the essay are relevant to my current thinking. Kundera writes, 

[in Milosz’s] November Symphony… I was entranced not by a myth but by a beauty acting on its own, alone, naked, with no outside support… [which] lay in the discovery of something I had never encountered anywhere else: I discovered the archetype of a form of nostalgia that is expressed, grammatically, not by the past but by the future: the grammatical future of nostalgia. The grammatical form that projects a lamented past into a distant future, that transforms the melancholy evocation of a thing that no longer exists into the heartbreaking sorrow of a promise that can never be realised.

You will be all pale in violet, beautiful; grief
And the flowers on your hat will be sad and small


I was reading this at a time when I wondered what a songwriter should or could write about after nearly fifty years of writing songs. Love songs seem a little gauche at my age, a reflective past, loss, heartbreak and the like are a little too morose, and besides I had done them, seen them recorded, they sit on albums now. And so I decided to write a new song based on the forty year old fragment (above, which i found in a box in my attic) because it brought back nostalgic memories with an imagined future; and I decided to finish it and then back the song up with a new academic paper. I have written both and a scratch version of the song can be seen here (recorded while I was sitting at my desk so don't expect much) but since this is a countdown year in which I am writing and recording songs, this seems to be a good place to start. A better version and video will follow in time: