Mushroom Magic

Soundtrack Clue - Two slightly distorted ideas

There is no link to something I don't think is worth linking to but the story is on the BBC news website for today (so look for the posting date).

It stays dark for at least an hour after I get into work in the mornings. I have stopped turning the lights on so I can sit in something like the atmosphere of an X-Files episode. Why don't they ever use the light switches? It must be much more suspicious to see a moving torch beam rather than a static lighted room. I think we should all work in darkened rooms. We haqve to put up with intense beams of sunlight at certain times of the day and have to open and close the blinds to get the right light levels. I think I would much prefer to work in a windowless room. I actually enjoy artificial light. I like rain better than sunshine and I love sitting on the doorstep looking out at bad weather. None of the houses I have lived in over the last 20 years actually had any view from the front door so I have had to look at the house on the other side of the road. We used to live in a house with a view across open common land (The view was sort of like this) but I didn;t really get time to sit in the doorway. It is a pity they don't have lighthouse keepers anymore as I can't think of anything better than standing in the lamphouse looking out through bad weather. We used to stay in a small clapboard house right by the sea at Llandanwg near Harlech. It had one long room runnng the length of the ground floor with big windows which looked out over the beach and the Lleyn Peninsular with Cricceth and Pwllheli. As we used to go most often at October Half-term, it was often wet and windy and with no telly, reading or looking out of the window were the only real activities if we didn't go out. The poem below is about those holidays.

Welsh Spirit Cycle December 2001

In grey October, no one left our house;
The books and writing held us all
Like insects in a cone of light
To finish all that must be finished
For the cool and bright automata,
The Jacquard-carded Angels.

Until, on holiday, the rain got in
And led us through the sand
To dampened oceans, sparked with stars,
An earthy, white-noise ecstasy,
Twenty years away from now
And all the new Millenia

Here lies Janey with her water-cycle drawing;
A brilliant mind map quoting all
but what they taught her years before,
And in the rain it turns to spirit,
Dissolves upon the paper like a flame,
Diffuses into Celtic ghosts.

Janey with her urban heart,
Melting slowly on the wet streets,
Has taken acid rain and made it whole,
Mountain water clear as minds unclothed
With worry for the world of now,
Some sub-atomic bass of real things.

She starts with songs evaporating
Through the roofs, the Chapel chimneys,
To the slate clouds and star nurseries.
And there the border ghosts,
Define the spirits of this special land
To turn to rare companions for this child.

This was one of those ideas that I get really fired up about when I am not able to actually write down any of the components but then lose interest. It finishes in the middle again but as Coleridge said, Poems are never finished, only abandoned. I looked for that quote on Google just now and although the whole quote was definitely attributed to Coleridge (except for the Guardian - bad person AC Grayling), so many people say that their own poems are never finished. Ted Hughes remarked that Sylvia Plath would never abandon a poem, If she could not make a piece of furniture out of it, she would fashion a toy instead. This distinguishes between abandoning a poem as useless and never reading it again and abandoning the idea you had when you sat down to write it. I do that all the time. When I was in my early twenties, I wrote poems which were pages long and really just like metrical journals of the ideas in my head; a sort of poetic blog. I would carry a big A4 notebook everywhere and just scribble continuously. This is where the auto-blog machine comes in. The dictaphone is just naff and means that everyone can hear the rubbish you are recording. I was reading the sleeve notes to 'This Sentence is True' by Sheila Chandra and the Ganges Orchestra and she quoted one of her reviews in The Wire which said that the album was 'as gnomic as a physicist's notebook'. I though that this described my notebooks but after having had to look up another word after 'gnomic' I am not so sure. Maybe the word 'obtuse' would be more suitable. Maybe the reviewer in The wire wasn't quite sure what gnomic actually meant either. Sheila Chandra started her career as an actress in Grange Hill though her potted website biography does not mention it. Every person of my age will probably tell you this fact as the one piece of information known about her; like the fact that Sir Patrick Moore plays the Xylophone. Anyway, Ever so Lonely is one of my favourite pieces of music ever which makes me sound like a teenager but there you are. The previous sentence is true.

The first person on Mars has already been born.

Talking of Xylophones :-

New Soundtrack - Music for Eighteen Musicians - Steve Reich

There is no link to this as you are probably bored with linking to the sites.

That doesn't mean that I can't write about it. MF18M starts with a pulsing set of chords on all the instruments with no real melody and then suddenyl starts a beautiful marimba pattern which develops on and off all the wway through the piece until the pulsing re-asserts istelf. I can;t see why this is called minimalism as it has more compexity in just the pulsing than any of the manufactured "Rival, Fame-academy, Pop-Stars rubbish around at the moment. Yes! I know you can't compare the two genres but get the point! My wife still hates it even if it is melodic. I have just noticed that certains parts of it have a simliar rythmic feel to Ever so lonely which I suppose shows the link between Indian music and that of Bali which Steve Reich studied.

The mention of Bali has made me think of the poems I wrote about that island and have posted here. Their context is changed though we seem to be talking about the tradgedy of the bomb in terms of the number of Western lives lost rather than devastation of the island. One Islander was terrified of all the ghosts. They spend so much time placating the spirits all around them that something like this must be a real strain on normality. You learn to love the spirits as they are responsible for everything which happens. They live on offerings put out in every garden and by every shrine. It must be like the opening of Pandora's box with all the spirits flying about. One can only be comforted by the fact that hope must remain in the box. Oh! I am sorry is that a cliche? You are confusing me with someone who cares. Tragedy destroys the distinctions of originality and Cliche.

The most thing that can come out of any religion is the idea that your ideas are the one true view of the real and spiritual worlds. There is no one True God. To say that you believe totally in the correctness of the things decided by elders based on 'visions' and other such things, without proof simply by having faith and then to use that as an excuse to do terrible things to people who do not believe your way of belief is LOGICALLY flawed and in addition against the baseline teachings of most religions. By this thinking you are in danger of removing the one crutch that society has for moral behaviour. To say on the one hand that society is damaged in its moral foundations by the lack of belief in God (and sometimes you say The One True God), and then to damage people because they don't believe in your God, is the single most damaging thing to spirituality. All this smacks of self-reference doesn't it? But over the years, the crutch of the great leaders of many religions has been the creation of a lot of self-reference along with a lot of fear.