Icarus @ 59 # 49

Writing on the hoof, have iPad will travel, isn't technology great. But I am teaching in 20 minutes and I have to drink coffee and generally get ready to teach but that's ok because I love that part of my job. So, I am sending a flower. This picture was taken at my own back door in Brighton. After all the rain we have had it is good to remember that spring always follows winter and summer is always close by, close by, close by...

Icarus @ 59 # 48

When I was child, Sunday morning was wash day. Nappies and kids clothes first, pit clothes last, all done in an old Hotpoint twin tub and fed through the wringer. My Dad would wash while cooking Sunday breakfast, bacon, egg, sausage, tomato… Mum wrung the clothes out and then hung them on the line in the back garden to dry. And as they worked they would sing this song (below) to each other over the hum of the Hotpoint (and I can still hear my Dad hitting the  'way down low' note). It was over fifty years ago and I might be the only one in a family of four girls and two boys who remembers. But I am the oldest, I know its true and not a false memory because I know all the words to the song - and remember all the nappies. Has it really been a year? Goodness but I miss her, Margaret Melrose, nee McKenna. I stole this picture from my wee sister, even later in life they were like this so although she was too young to remember the song nothing much changed in all those years. The song is of its time, and pure sentimentality I know, but a happy memory, and that's what I remember, what would you rather... poets might tell it better, I guess, e.e. cummings put it this way:

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in

my heart) i am never without it (anywhere

i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done

by only me is your doing, my darling)

                                                      i fear

no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want

no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)

and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows

higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart) 

Icarus @ 59 # 47

Gymnast in Barcelona

Coincidence, in Barcelona something really unusual happened. We were getting the underground to the Camp Nou when an extremely attractive young Arabic woman, who was with her father and sisters, asked Dan (in English) if he knew the way. He confirmed he did and we showed them the way and parted outside the ground. Now bearing in mind there are 80,000 people at the Nou Camp, how coincidental that we should bump into them in the line to get back on the train back to Las Ramblas. She was so excited and wanted to talk about the game - her first ever and 3-0. But also, as we were going through the gate my ticket got stuck and the young lady shouted to her family in her own language and then said to Dan, 'I told them we have to wait for our friends.' A trip there and back, jostling against each other in a crowded train, and there it was east meets west as friends and nothing but smiles and handshakes when we parted. We never exchanged names even, only pleasantries. I don't know if her name was Nadia but I love this track, east meets west in a cultural exchange:

Icarus @ 59 # 46 continued

I have been instructed to sit with my leg up so this is an additional set of Barcelona pictures randomly posted

Easter egg

Joining buildings meant not having to mix with the tradesmen,

Yup in the bar waiting for Hemingway and Picasso

Grapes of Wrath

The Cathedral

View from the top of Museu Nacional D'art De Catalonia

Artists displaying and selling their art on Las Ramblas on a Sunday

Cathedral at the end of our street

Dancing lady in chrome

Pastry shop

Museu Nacional D'art De Catalunya

Museu Nacional D'art De Catalunya

Fish lady in The Mercat de La Boqueria, Rambla de Sant Josep

rRndom building

Fish and Fruit, top and bottom, I love the food

And to see stuff like this you don't have to walk very far at all - as usual with street players they would rather have your money than applause but they deserve both…

Icarus @ 59 # 46

Barcelona seems like a dream to me now but we left our shadows behind because it has such a hold on the soul. I will put a file of pictures together so everyone can see them but this is just me and Dan gadding about, and we heard this piece being sung amidst the cloisters which Dan filmed as part of his 'gap year vlog': oh yes, the world has moved on from the staid old blogging I do.

Icarus @ 59 # 45

In Barcelona with a room with a view and Internet too slow to load a picture but I will send one via another route. What a fantastic city this is.

Icarus @ 59 # 44

Action shot in Alabama

'Good game, lads, no aminosity, we like playing you,' said Unity's manager as Dan shook hands after the match. Unity lost 4-0 and we looked great but doncha just love the spoonerism. No aminosity, it could be a new term for world peace. Hey, 'no aminosity' we demand the right to be treated like human beings. Don't come looking for trouble here, man. We want no aminosity. How many on your boat from the west coast of Africa, two hundred and twenty-three, sure we have room for you, this is the land of no aminosity. I love it, love it, love it, and I am going to write a song with that title, just because I can and want to own the word, even though it was passed to me by another the intention was clear. No aminosity, the message is clear. I like this song and this film for the same reason, my Dad was a coal miner and he is a man who likes no aminosity... and that is why I like being involved with the football team, Southwick Rangers, no aminosity... such a great bunch o' guys, have I ever mentioned them before?

Icarus @ 59 # 43

Abbi is in Alabama for a tennis tournament this weekend, so she gets to play the cowgirl in the sand role. Judging by the stories she tells, its a whole new experience in the Southern States of the USA. The Republicans think she is a Democrat and she hasn't had the nerve to tell them about Socialism for fear of being called Trotsky. However they do think she is a little pink in her political leanings, which is just fine by me. I like this picture though because she is playing their game, with attitude, and that is just fine too. And we both like country music, or bill hilly music as she once called it, she must have been about 5 when she first danced to this - and it must be as many years since I heard it. So this is me listening to Rose of Cimarron and thinking about my Alabama gal:

Icarus @ 59 # 42

Ikarus 1993 by Simon Benetton 
(at the Bonn Opera)

Aargh, I find I am a fraud, I didn't take this picture (left) at all, though I do remember an Icarus installation in Canberra. This is, as label says, in Bonn. Selective memory syndrome, it happens at my age, I almost remember it, but had I been there I would have taken this picture so that counts. I did take the other picture, though. It is the Cathedral in Barcelona and Dan and I are going back there on Sunday. Just for a couple of days but neither of us can wait because its one of our fave cities. but I like the juxtaposition of these two pictures, the old and the new, the modern and the ancient and the whole city of Barcelona is a little like that because it celebrates Catalonia through the centuries - and I wonder if that other Icarus statue I posted earlier is still there - I will let you know. In the meantime this is one of the best 'car dancing' songs ever recorded - 2468 your never too late;

Icarus @ 59 # 41

Yesterday I had an Oklahoma scare but I am not going to dwell on it. We raise our kids and let them go and we have to hope they stay safe. I might think about this differently later, but not now, not now, not now… I am trying to remember when I took this picture of Icarus but I think it was in Canberra, when I was there last. I will check, but I am posting it because I am trying to put a new writing project together and this will be a major part of the theme, so fingers crossed that we can get it commissioned. Of course there may be some who wonder where the Icarus connections come from, well it started a long time ago, in a blog I posted when I first started writing 55@55 - it was meant to be 55 posts when I turned 55 but it just kept growing and the Icarus theme happened along until it became a pre-occupation. I got to thinking about the flying boy and his conundrum - did Icarus fall or was he pushed? From Ovid onwards it has almost been a given that the story of Icarus (in its many re-tellings) is a tale of folly; the folly of the boy who didn’t listen to his father’s advice; advice gleaned from experience long stored as memory. Icarus’ folly, as if we needed reminding, was that he flew too close to the sun, from which a lesson can be learned. And the lesson is as much about not getting above yourself as it is a warning against reckless behaviour. Yet this troubled me and the more I thought and dug into the tale the more it became apparent that Daedalus (his father) who was a congenital liar and a bad egg (for a supposed good guy) could be lying in his account of the Icarus story - and so a project that started as a pre-occupation began - watch this space for developments… because I have come a full circle and children, Oklahoma and letting go lingers… sigh, I knew it would. I was listening to this last night while writing and trying to get myself to wind down for the day. There is something uncanny about the piece which I adore, for those down times, its Levon Minassian from the movie, Bab' Aziz (the prince who contemplates his soul) and it has a haunting melancholy:

Icarus @ 59 # 40

This week I was asked to post a poem on Facebook by, William Carlos Williams, and since I live in Brighton I chose 'Flowers By The Sea'

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

And I re-post it here because I have read it again, and again, and I like the symmetry of it. Today I will return to my 'Lyrical Future of Nostalgia' essay, because the editors returned with comments and this is good. Keeps the brain working, and distracted front the pain in the leg (pain in the arse is tempting to write but it might be misconstrued). But this will do for today, post 40 in a 60th year is a good milestone. Time for a bit of Copperhead Road:

Icarus @ 59 # 39

On the right day, at the right time, given the right temperature and conditions, this could be just about one of my favourite pieces of music and youtube clips ever and sometimes I strum along to it in the kitchen... it reminds me of a time I spent in Southern California and drove down to Mexico and back. I might do that again, some day. Its funny how much you take for granted. The first time I flew to LA I was writing a film (the first of seventeen in total) and its a roller-coaster but it has taught me that essentially a person changes every ten years. Those were my film years and now I am moving on with other things. In the meantime I hope to have such a day as this music suggests, though starting in the x-ray clinic isn't great. Time to lift the spirits, Marie Elena, over to you:

Icarus @ 59 # 38

It has been a long time since I wore this apparel because its a court side dress. Abbi started her new tennis season in Oklahoma yesterday (she won) but just to combat that, Dan's football was rained off. Different sides of the world, different sports but all healthy and a good reminder that staying fit is all about staying alive. I am pretty sure both will keep fit throughout their lives. But with Dan we are counting down the days now because he is off to work for Medicare in Tanzania. The house will be so quiet with both of them gone, that is for sure. Never mind life goes on and as soon as my leg is better I too will be back in the gym - damn leg, at first it was a pain, then an inconvenience and now the pain is driving me round the bend. Off to get it checked today - should have done so last week (how like a man I hear some say). Apologies for this blog, there will be days like this when trying to write 365 out of 365 - sigh, only 327 to go - car wheels on a gravel road.

Icarus @ 59 # 37

Working as an academic, I have noticed how life has changed. It has been a long time since questions have been answered in the negative. The hierarchy game is no longer played (as far as I can see). When I first started at the University of Sussex the answer to the question, 'who's your favourite critic?' was more than all too often answered with something like, well not F. R. Leavis. This is mostly because no one really wanted to be pinned down and tripped up. For example, if the person giving the answer had said something positive like Walter Benjamin, invariably a question on his Arcades Project which few had read at that point, would begin. It was a real one-upmanship. If you answered Jacques Derrida (thinking about things like deconstruction) someone would ask if you had read Demeure which he wrote with Maurice Blanchot… it would go on like that, a kind of coffee shop bragging rights. Milan Kundera tells such a story when, after he moved to Paris from Prague (after the Prague spring and Soviet occupation) he was asked if he like Barthes. Well, he was the big name at the time but Kundera's response was marvellous when he replied, oh Karl Barth, the inventor of negative theology, yes you can't read Kafka without knowing his work. Mostly its a game, but oh, the times I been in conferences and the like and have asked a question or commented on something and the speaker has no idea what you are talking about, but pretends they do, is growing. I wonder why that is? Perhaps its TV and critical 'opinion' because we no longer read as we did. I mean, The Iliad finishes well before the end of the fall of Troy but could you imagine making that as  a TV special and then leaving the big scene out. Oh well, that's just a musing. Actually its more like me talking to myself - are we really who we used to be, only if you're lucky now:

Icarus @ 59 # 36

Empty desk chair, no early blog this morning because I am having to keep on the move and it being Saturday too there is tons to do. The thing about living in a Victorian house is it has the same problem as the Forth Bridge, once you finish painting, repairing, fixing, you have to start all over again. In my next life I am coming back as a plumbing, carpenting, decorating electrician who cooks and doesn't fall of ladders and boxes (long story but otherwise I stiffen up). But I guess being a renaissance man isn't such a bad thing - which I prefer to a jack-of-all-trades.

But I have painted the living room and that's a good job done for the year and I have ambitions to commission a new light shade feature for the centre of the room from an artist I know. Imagine this, of you will, a light shade that looks like a carousel. Not quite as dramatic as this one, something simpler but full of symbolism. And actually, I have an African one in my downstairs toilet, perhaps I will post a picture of that sometime - because it is interesting. Well, who knows, I have to get the idea past the management - but watch this space. But that is all for the day, I have some cracks in the wooden panels under the window to fill in and rub down before they are painted - gawd, though, this blog is beginning to look like those awful Christmas letters people send. Mandy Bloomfield is an old friend of mine and she sent this poem for dreich days, so moving away from the mundane, she asks, is there a better response to this wet gloom we are experiencing this January

After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to the end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.

It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.

The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.

Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence

Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires. 

Wallace Stevens, 'The Plain Sense of Things'

Three people in an old school hall can use the natural acoustics and make such good sound, I love this song, Rivers Run.

Icarus @ 59 # 35

This is me in my garden in Brighton in the snow last year, and it was a strange time because we hardly ever get snow, so its like remembering Scottish weather. And then remembering Scottish weather is like remembering life itself. Nostalgia cuts in and I become dewy eyed for it all. Mind you it doesn't last long but its nice to dip into it just for a wee while. But this is just a short blog for I have had a troubled night and I am driving to Winchester, so I leave with Pablo Neruda, from The Book of Questions, what I love about reading Neruda is he manages to say or ask the obvious in his poetry, which is a joy, but this (below) is a very Scottish question (in my mind - anyway):

Si todos los rios son dulces
de donde saca sal el mar?

If all rivers are sweet
where does the sea get its salt?

Icarus @ 59 # 34 Cold Night Lullaby

This statue of a winged (Icarus) boy in a small gallery window in Barcelona is an odd thing, and I am not sure about the basket of apples for a brain. Nevertheless, what I like about this picture is all the other ghosted images in the window and in the reflection in the window, they all layer up until they begin to resemble the kind of super-imposed collage you can produce with real film (as opposed to a digital snapper) - and indeed the person holding the camera on the left us a ghosted image of me. It was a nice little gallery, though, or actually a salesroom, just tucked into a little corner behind the Cathedral and I will look out for again in a couple of weeks time. Here's another story song, this time from the very fine Karine Polwart (who lives in Pathhead near my Dad, my sisters and my good friends Gordon Munro, Alex Sharp and Davie Jack) - and if you ever get a chance to see her play  do go. She is a fantastically original songwriter, I have all her albums and she she puts on a great show. This song though, matches the winged statue and the ghosts and though its about Sarajevo it could be about something that could happen in any war; I find myself drawn to the pathos and of the lines:

Caught between the air and the windless deep 

You float like a lily flower
And you look just like you fell to earth to sleep
And you’re waiting for your waking hour.

And I swear to God I saw an angel hand attend you

But that was just the dancing of the light...

It resonates with the writing I am doing at the moment, and I do have a copy of Colin McKay's, Cold Night Lullaby, which is well worth seeking out, well worth seeking out, well worth seeking out… because its all about love and desperately sad but honest… goodness we need the honesty, we need the honesty, we need the honesty - I see this all through my life… honesty…

Icarus @ 59 # 33

Yesterday was a long, long day, leaving the house at 6am to drive to Winchester and after a series of meetings as well as an ongoing, online meeting which revealed the start of this new venture I didn't get back for 18 hours. But this is a good result, Creative Connections and the Pop-up-Poetry Cafe which is part of a new project I have going on at the University. It is going to be such a good idea, especially since it cements a relationship between the University, the Theatre Royal and the city of Winchester too. Watch this space for videos of performances. But this is just a short

blog, after getting to bed well after midnight and up now at 6.30 I have much to do in what will be another long day. I hope its a good one for you too. A song that started as a poem is a good start to this project though. How does this woman manage to look and sound so good - and that voice, wow, always been awesome but as she gets older it has a slight huskiness that whispers in my ear:

Icarus @ 59 # 32

There is an old selkie story (a selkie is a mermaid, not to be confused with a kelpie, which is a horse) and it goes something like this: Once there was a small time fisherman who was having a little difficulty. The big timers, the corporate dredgers, were over fishing the stock and he was struggling. To make matters worse, the dredgers cut his nets and generally made life difficult for him. On one such day, with his nets in shreds floating amidst a mess of discarded fish deemed too small by the dredger, he decided to head back to the harbour. He'd had enough of it all. But on pulling  in his empty nets, he heard a baby crying, and there, all tangled up was an infant mermaid. So the fisherman rescued her and took her back out to sea, returning her to where she could be safely collected by her own people. He soon forgot all about it and then six years later, when the fisherman was back on the same stretch of water, still trying to scratch a living, he was approached by a beautiful selkie and her now thriving daughter. The beautiful selkie spoke to him in her lilting song voice, 'Because of your actions these past six years away,' the mermaid sang, 'I will grant you one wish. Just one wish. Name the wish and it will be yours. It will be granted true.' The fisherman looked over at the huge dredgers and then down at his own empty nets, and then very quietly he said to the beautiful selkie, 'My wish is that your child is safe always.' This (above) is my favourite picture sequence with my daughter Abbi. We were in the kitchen just fooling around. Now she is in Oklahoma and having the time of her life; you know what I wish for and not just for her...

Icarus @ 59 # 31

Newhaven harbour at the dimming of the day, boats sitting in the mud after the tide has gone... it isn't really a place that is known to inspire the poets of Edinburgh, not in my ken anyway, but I remember taking this picture last year and actually what a fantastic place it really is. You can see the Forth Bridges from the Quay and looking over the Firth of Forth you can see the Kingdom of Fife (and for the record it has a couple of great restaurants just walking distance from the water's edge). But I am sharing this because I wanted to share the picture. I love the colours, the reflection of the water on the mud and if you had been there you would have tasted the salty breeze. That's all, its just a wee memory that buzzed back into my head, like this song - looking for a boatman in a harbour.

Fhir a' bhàta, na hóro eile

which translates as

Oh my boatman, na hóro eile

I often look from the highest hill

that I might see, oh boatman

Will you come tonight, or will you come tomorrow

Oh sorry will I be if you do not come at all...

Icarus @ 59 # 30

I know its a natural phenomenon, not even a deep mystery of the world we live in but there is something quite satisfying about driving towards a rainbow. I drove towards this one as I headed for Winchester last week and it cheered up a very dreary day. Rilke gives me hope on the long drive I have to make. He says,

We are the driving ones.
Ah, but the step of time:
think of it as a dream
in what forever remains.

All that is hurrying
soon will be over with;
only what lasts can bring
us the truth. 

Young men, don't put your trust
into the trials of flight
into the hot and quick.

All the things already rest:
darkness and morning light,
flower and book.

If I had a thought for the day that is it, think of it as a dream. This track is really worth the effort, the simply divine Nina Simone who knows where the time goes, Happy Sunday:

Icarus @ 59 # 29

I like playing the mandolin, usually as the day winds down. It helps me to unwind and hear the world anew and last night as I strumming was thinking about something Wallace Stevens wrote,

Light the first light of evening, as in a room

In which we rest and, for small reason, think

The world imagined is the ultimate good.

It would be nice to think the good world imagined was indeed a true and trustworthy place, a world of ultimate good, as it should be. It was Joni Mitchell who wrote, 'That was just a dream some of us had…' but I am not for throwing it away, not yet anyway. But I was sent this picture the other day and it brings back memories of youthful ideas and my old neighbourhood. Can it really be 35 years ago that I lived above the Anchor Bar, blimey. But the bar is still there and how we have travelled, this song takes me back - and I love this video (though its not easy to see):

Icarus @ 59 # 28

Abbi has gone and the snow hasn't delayed her flight, even though she is flying via Detroit (no direct flight - she treats airports like bus stations). But that's not the end of it, in six weeks time Dan is off to Tanzania to work with Medicare. Goodness but life changes quickly. Never mind though, in two weeks time he and I will be in this little tapas bar in Barcelona before we saunter up to the Camp Nou (well, catch the subway) to see the wonderful Barca. Tickets are booked, flights are booked, hotel in Las Ramblas booked and gluten free Estralla Damm available in a glass. Just what two boys away need, it will be good to share QT. In the meantime, I saw Bruce Springsteen do this live in Edinburgh, many moons ago. A blue collar, Tom Waits song, and I have no explanation why I love it, I just do, so there.

Icarus @ 59 # 27

Five-ten in the morning, the car is about to be packed, Abbi, tangled up in blue, is going back to Okie in the snowbound USA today. You have to let them go, let them go, let them go but its not so easy:

Then he binds the middle feathers with thread and the lower feathers with wax

and then bends what he has created 
as to mimic that of a true bird… 

Och, I will miss her but she will fly her own way, we like to play this really loud for car dancing:

Icarus @ 59 # 26

A while back, I wrote, 'Neruda begins his Poets Obligation with the lines, 'A quin no escucha el mar en este viernes - To whomever is not listening to the sea...' and that it  had immediately opened up a dilemma for me because I had recalled reading this as 'looking' not 'listening' and then I realised his wording was perfect because it reminds us to open up all of our senses.' To be aware of everything around us, to react to what we hear and see and smell and touch and taste is a part of the memories we carry, part of the stimulus. Too often we visualise our ideas, like in this picture I took while on a wee trip to the coast with my Dad. The picture doesn't parcel up everything that is going on, it just reminds me of the time, the smell, the taste of salt, the feel of cold sand on our feet, the tea he drunk and the coffee for me. And I harbour those same memories I have of my late mother who only died this year - nearly a year ago as it happens - and I bought a pomegranate this week because of a fifty year old memory, goodness, so many years.  Recently I received a notebook for my birthday that is designed around piano keys, its called 'do re mi' if a notebook can be called anything and there is a picture of piano keys on the front (although they are not black and white but multi coloured keys). On the front it says, 'notes are living sounds,' and I like that but on the back it says, 'the self is what is heard in the spaces between the piano keys… do re mi.' I am thinking in the space between the keys, in the silence. This clip is an old favourite of mine and its as good with or without sound, and a real do re mi performance, for me.

Icarus @ 59 # 25

This is me (pictured right) writing my last but one book. We were on holiday but laptop, coffee, music, early morning light - I can guarantee the house was sleeping as I worked before I had a swim and then just getting on with normal life (that has been a normal holiday for 40 years). Writing is what writers do but its not normal life. We are strangers to ourselves and our friends and our lovers. We are strangers to the world outside, we write, like painters paint and philosophers and theologians think and we all think, all the time, over lunch, swimming in the pool, thinking, thinking, and anyone who thinks academics don't work should spend a day inside our heads because its work all the time…  I can't remember having a break, ever. Right now, even as I write this I am mulling comments made on an article i have to edit… It is 22.39 pm (when I started this) and I have been awake since 5 this morning. I am writing this blog as a way of winding down from the constant thinking - shutting down is really hard.  When I was young I did this with a guitar and thought, am I the only one who can cut himself off from the pack and sit and write, songs in those days. Once in a small seaside resort called Eyemouth and I while everyone in the band was winding down I was writing a new song. But its all of us, all the time, composing in our heads and in our notebooks and on scraps of paper tucked away here and there. I have scraps of paper everywhere in this house. I am writing an article at the moment (see above - och the editors have responded) about a fragment of a song I started writing 42 years ago. Oh lordy, that is a long time to harbouring a lyric or a tune or a breathe but I have been digging out old books and diaries and notebooks and scrapbooks and blimey, you can do a lot with a pencil and a piece of paper. My good friends M and L who recorded two of my songs on their first album have been in touch and want to do more. I could do this, I would like to do this and I will do it because I have always wanted to record with them.  But today big things happened in Winchester! The Pop-Up-Poetry-Cafe is a runner, ooh watch this space. We are already checking out space for it. 

I like to finish every post with an eclectic piece of music. Its not always my every day listening (and I listen to music every single day of my life) but I like this, just because I do and when I listen it reminds me of people and things and indeed people that are important to me from a a way back, it takes me from being sixteen to sixty. Some will say the album version of this is better, psshhh, I would play it just like this, this is songwriting on my top list, never ever tried to figure out what its about, just love it - btw one of my abiding memories is being 15 and learning to play this, with a harmonica harness made out out of an old coat hanger (I remember the reaction of my mates - wow) I don't have that coat-hanger harness, but actually, I still have the one I replaced it with 40 years ago - goodness, it is sitting in the kitchen, on top of the wine rack, as I type. And thinking about it, when I showed that clip of an old song I had written (ref above) i was using that harness… I can still play this and I am a walking antique…

Icarus @ 59 # 24, Epiphany

Epiphany: a moment in which you see or understand something in a new and clear way. I have posted this picture before, it is me feeling very small at the MACBA in Barcelona. Sometimes life does this, the overwhelming, over-demanding  overcoming hugeness of it all is sometimes too vast to comprehend, and when I do begin to understand something in a new and clear way, I realise it is just another small sliver of the picture in the high, stain glass window of life. Which means my life is full of small epiphanies as I build that stained glass window. Still, its good to be able to see the design, every now and then. My favourite literary epiphany is the James Joyce short story, 'The Dead' and I will read it before I sleep tonight and I will also listen to this (below). I have also posted this clip a number of times over the past couple of years, but I love this song by Salif Keita and also this short film so I make no excuses for winding down the first Sunday of the year and taking this posting into Epiphany with it. I can hear what he is singing but have no idea what he is saying, should this matter? Not if it produces a mood for me to think in. Judging by the piece and Salif it can't be anything bad. Rumour suggests the album it comes from is a celebration of the independence of Mali but I really don't know, all I do know is that it helps me to mull over what I am thinking, and to think about new things and perhaps to find an understanding of something a new and clear way:

folon, folon oo mago t