Icarus flying home # 22

Phew- it was hot
I had to get my belly out

Joni has been on my mind for a time now because I really like this song and I just found it and it feels right for tonight. Once when I was working in London a friend of mine asked if i could stop singing the same song as I worked. It was River and I hadn't realised I was doing it. Isn't that odd, 'I wish I had  river i could skate away on...' I was older then, I am younger than that now. But this is a good un...mistakes and all...

Icarus flying home # 21

Oh your a mean old daddy
but you're outa sight

Rumour has it that the sun has been shining all week while I have been taking my hermit vows and writing what just might turn out to be rubbish. Sigh upon sigh upon sigh, finding the right words is harder than it looks sometimes. This is Easter weekend and I am taking Dorothy Parker's advice and listening to a saeta. These are performed during Holy Week in Spain and were much loved bu Lorca. This one I am posting is quite modern but there is something quite exotic about it - and it is the amazing Antonio Canales, I have to get me a pair of those shoes. But if the sun is shining out there, I will dress like the picture aside and maybe go for a wee walk - ¡Adiós Amigos!

Icarus flying home # 20

Who is that guy

I'm not sure I recognise myself in this picture but it is me and only a week or so back when the shaving had stopped. It's worrying, I had stopped shaving for 6 days and this is day 4, oh my goodness. And look at those glasses, Asda special because I stood on my best ones and haven't the time to replace them - memo to self!!!! Today has been a good day, hit 50,000 words which is a good milestone in the writing stuff - and I have had masses of distractions but what the hell. I am shoveling words like my dad shovelled coal and he had a harder life than me so I am cool with that. I also wrote a song this week which is good and worked on an other, which is gooder (goodness isn't the English language a bummer). But if I count the words here, I have probably typed around 4000 today, which is ok, not a bad tally, but in among them I have a great secret to impart! Are you listening? Writing is easy! Honest! It's just a question of getting the right words in the right order - hmmm, didn't realise that did you? But keep your eyes on the prize and remember, others are less likely to have our chances to be heard:

Icarus flying home # 19

Banjo Blues

I am out on my feet, too tired to think. Writing this Bogeyman is doing my heid in. It's relentless. But after my last blog when I mentioned Wallace Stevens talking about Erfahrung and the idea of ‘lived through’ and ‘narratable’ experience and then I read Rainer Maria Rilke who wrote this on the manuscript of his Duino Elegies (1924),

Happy are those who know:

Behind all words, the unsayable stands;

And from that source alone, the infinite

Crosses over to gladness, and to us –

Free of our bridges,

Built with the stone of distinctions;

So that always, within each delight,

We gaze at what is purely single and joined.

And I love that idea of the 'unsayable behind the words' so I will say nothing else tonight, for I am too tired, except, perhaps, to play banjo. Or maybe I will just listen to this - such a delight, The Chieftains with Sinaed O'Connor.

Icarus flying home # 18

Under a parasol

This is my new record (see clip) remember those days when you got a new LP and you would take it round to yer mate's house cos he had a better stereo and you would just chill, listening, not saying much, though occasionally  replaying a track as you tried to work out the chords. Now of course the chords and the words are there at the hit of a return key to google (where would we be without google). Wallace Stevens has been my poem a day buddy this week, this is from ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’,

The poem refreshes life so that we share,

For a moment, the first idea... It satisfies

Belief in an immaculate beginning

And sends us, winged by an unconscious will,

To an immaculate end, We move between these points:

From that ever-early candour to its late plural

What's not to like in that "ever-early candour to its late plural" - love the idea that takes us from the connection made in the arrested moment, the moment of surprise and wonder and awe, the ever shifting but impermeable connection in the ongoing shift through the lived through and narratable. Poets huh, don't they just have the soul of it all?

Icarus flying home # 17



The Last Picture Show

And now today the new part of the Bogeyman commences, though I have a feeling it will take less time the effort will be no less intense.  But I am buoyed by these words of Robert Frost:

"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned in life: It goes on."

I miss my Danny, this is his last school pic ever,  he's having a wee holiday with his cousins and I will drink a glass of wine while listening to this  from The Chieftains and Diana Kroll, a great folk/jazz crossover of a great song because I like it and also its so hard to sing it well, without sounding like an auld pub crooner at chucking out time - Scotland was fu' o' them when I was growing up. Goodness, I am beginning to sound like Marcel Proust.