Icarus @ 59 # 352

Now the hard to see guy standing between the front legs of the giant reindeer is me. The silly season is just about upon us and now I am counting down the last days of this blog. How strange it all seems because even in this relatively quiet year I have been reflecting on how much my life thus far has stretched well beyond any dreams I had for it - well maybe I dreamed but I could never have expected it to have panned out quite the way it has. So the plans for the next half (oh yes, it may not be exactly half in years but it swill be in experience) are already taking shape and I am excited about them. New songs (have already started recording the Attic Tapes), new books (I am 40,000 words in) and I already have an invite to spend a week in Montana in April, how cool is that (actually it will be cool). But this morning I am in the kitchen with the early grey tea and its still pitch black, coal dark outside, Sunday started early (for a Sunday) and I have a study to tidy, I reckon there are around a hundred books stacked on the floor against the fireplace - where do they all come from because I am running out of places to build shelves (a very cathartic exercise, if I say so myself) and then what do I do with the five or six pictures awaiting framing and hanging, and then there's the limited edition Hockney prints, oh and then there's a 'box full of water' poems that cascade down from the shelf onto the desk, there must be a way of displaying them better. Sigh, I won't get the new shelves built today, nor will I get the pictures framed but I will have an idea which I want to keep here and which I can take to Winchester - ah, its what Sundays are made for. I have a very nostalgic attachment to this Tom Waits song, let me hang it on your screen, just for a breath:

Icarus @ 59 # 351

A little-known medieval poem written almost 800 years ago is called the Melrose Chronicle. It was written in the 13th century by worldly Cistercian monks (thanks Geoff)  and is an account of what happened around the signing of the Magna Carta - and the plot thickens on that particular event. The poem, written in Latin, is remarkably clear. It begins: 'A new state of things begun in England; such a strange affair as had never been heard; for the body wishes to rule the head, and the people desired to be masters over the king.' Ah, the them and us situation between the Scots and the English was apparent then and still is now. Of course, 'the body wishes to rule the head' points to republicanism and that too is fraught. I mean I am all for it, but look who it has potentially brought us in the past, Maggie, Tony, Boris, Ken... goodness wee Eck and Nigel on opposing sides of the border - I shudder. Mind you playing to type is the nature of history - and we shouldn't be surprised. While we are concerning ourselves with issues of state (and Chaucer's medieval poetry with courtly love, warring nights and dodgy church people) a new translation of comic French poems written in the same medieval period and known as the fabliaux has been translated into English published. They are comic, often anonymous tales written by jongleurs in northeast France between circa 1150 and 1400, and are generally characterized by sexual and scatological obscenity, and by a set of contrary attitudes—contrary to the church and to the nobility. So while the Melrose brings you a commentary on the Magna Carta and not the saucy French ideas offering cuckolded husbands, randy priests, lusty women—and a fondness for scatological humor - don't you just love those érotique française? It is Saturday morning and I am am off for a run. I have a copy of this and have had it for years, can't remember why I never posted - not so fond of the angelic voices in the background but the Brenda Fricker intervention is something else - and hearing Yates spoken by a woman gives this an altogether different meaning - enjoy, happy Saturday:

Icarus @ 59 # 350

I am feeling this colour this morning, 5am and its dark outside and I barely slept, and now with a long drive to Winchester looming I guess I best get rolling - hey ho, as we say, just get up and go, everything will fall into place. Thank goodness for Audible, the talking novel site. I like to listen to a novel while I drive and the day when they supply the book with the audio will be better for the coming long dark nights too. But something good happened this week. I resurrected another song. Having completed a song I wrote forty years ago (which I posted here) I remembered another chorus and tune and blimey it really works well. So this weekend I will complete it. I read recently Bob Dylan has been doing this for years, mashing old stuff into the new - I must be getting to that age, I guess because I am also doing that with a book I am writing, mixing and matching some old material with some new in a dual narrative piece - ooh, that sounds good, watch this space. But it is Friday morning and the loneliness of the long distance drive awaits - hoots, its Friday and the weekend cometh. This year I am thinking about Womad and wondering if this is the year I should go - and if you have the time, let this album roll, I often do when I am writing, I like the hypnotic roll of their playing - its Ali Farka Toure and Toumani Diabati:

Icarus @ 59 # 349

Carl Jung says the the finest symbol of manhood and his potent libido is the portrayal of him as either a devil or a hero, caught in his paradoxes and I guess he is essentially a bit of both in that context. Most of us are not hugely devilish or heroic but the madness that is called love and libido surely draws on those extremes, although most of the extremes are buffed away by cultural conventions and social acceptability - and of course the influence of the church, in this country certainly. And indeed that thought reminds me of a short Stevie Smith poem called Angel of Grace:

I was talking one day

To a lady gay

When my Guardian Angel

Plucked me away:

Where can she be

Oh where does she wander

The lady of whom

I grow fonder and fonder.

Ah well, I guess I could always just sit in the garden and play the banjo instead. November is nearly drawing to a close and with it the rest of this year looms. The realisation that you are actually hitting the last furlong doesn't linger, I confess, indeed I never think of it. I thought I would but I don't and that has to be good. Today I get to work at home - I have tons to do but oh yay, I will be in my own study, with my own desk and stuff and endless cups of citrus early grey - small pleasures on a grey day, while talking to a lady gay, just once in a very blue moon. 

Icarus @ 59 # 348

Young free and single and living in the most amazing flat I had bought in East Dulwich, South London. Well not so young, I am thirty here, half the age I am now, goodness but how time has flown since those days - and look at the dark hair. Nostalgia is never a good thing but the things that have happened in the last thirty years would have confounded this boy. There is no way he could have seen them all coming, but that's not to say he wasn't happy here, he was, very. Yesterday I strummed some songs and one of them I wrote on that sofa, with that guitar, way back then and that is what brought this memory back. Its a curious thing, memory; listening to our own thoughts can remind us that staying this happy all the time is a real challenge. In fact its a challenge I feel every single day of my life and I can't be alone in thinking that, surely? But of course we change and with it our efforts go into making others happy and that is just fine too - and this track is I dont want to change...

Icarus @ 59 # 347

The view from over here is a quiet one, a small voice speaking quietly from a long way off, and I am not sure anyone would listen to it, but I can't be the only one worried about the word democracy and what it really means. Yesterday, a St. Louis County grand jury declined to indict Police Officer Darren Wilson for the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager. The community response to Mike Brown's death, and the response that is likely still to come, surely marks a pivotal moment in the U.S. human rights movement and indeed in U.S. history. It's a moment of passion and of frustration, that is very clear but its more than that. It's an international issue and a moment in our time when the United States, who use the word democracy is a stick to beat their drum throughout the world, must stand up to ensure that each individual's human rights - including the right to freedom of speech and peaceful protest - are respected, protected and fulfilled. Anything else amounts to hypocrisy. Its not a clear cut situation, nothing ever is, but this is a human rights scandal, no question - maybe I should speak a little louder, just like before: