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Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye - Leonard Cohen [Cover]
November, mist, departure, valediction, church spire, memory, loss, rediscovery. I busked this (badly) when I was sixteen.
Mockingbird
what could there be, worse,
than shaking off the black dog
on the sunniest of singing, birded,
mocking spring days
I looked for you to come out from behind the clouds again
your hair waving like jettisoned energy
into the dark, trailing spirals,
matter,
into the blind
void of life, imagination
potential
spring.
The sky burnt, the clouds hung,
the sun shot,
the sea moaned, the cliffs fell,
the sand shrank...
the rocks were dumb
I was not.
You ceased.
Even the air failed and died.
Mind World
I am on the beach, with Don Chihuahua. He gives me a cigarette, which I take, since I am no longer able to withstand the contagion of futility. The world is no longer able to find him, or me, without the aid of the blue puff of smoke whorling time into infinity for a few definite moments.
The Don casts his mind back to a recent weekend on which his consciousness dwelt on the rim of the bath. His body remained in his chair, gaping at the live world, but his mind-in-the-world was tethered to the rim of the bath; the hand of his mind raised, constantly, the ideal blade, razor sharp and inches long, hovering on the crest of his will. The movement of his mind-body pushed its arm up towards its chin, the mental knuckles resting there while the blade grazed the polyp-ridden cavities of the neck. A mind-eye watches the wrist flick blithely across the tendons - they are closed in their own world, believing in tension, and oblivious to exteriority, which must disillusion them of their fond dream: severed, the head flips through a half-circle and the gasping of the revealed arteries and sinews traces parabolic out-leaping carnivals of spending blood.
Yet, the Don remains in this chair, breathing, pulsing, living, inescapably. I continue to blame him for my lack of courage, although this very blame is itself the more cowardly act.
Download Mind-World mp3
Motor memory
8 months of silence: the muscles decline, and I feared the physical remembrance imprinted into the mechanical action of my limbs and fingers would be gone. How long is a motor memory?
And why might it be so hard to return to an activity which has always been such a non-negotiable part of what makes me, me? At first it was innocent - a broken thumbnail. But then we head into the depths of winter, exacerbated as never before by depression and paralysis, and the guitar becomes a rebuke: it laughs at me hollowly, taunts my ever dreaming that I might be a musician; the necessary soul is - in me - mere performance; the performance, demotic; my vernacular, hackneyed. Music, it seemed to say, is the only transcendental phenomenon in the world, and what laughable hubris, what tragic arrogance, to think I might have any pretence to accomplishment in the only practice that has any claim to true beauty and truth.
But as ever, spring brings hope - or at least, I am persuaded to be stubborn, and to persist, in the face of all evidence; to believe that to no-one, not even me, is some access to the magic of music denied. Painstakingly, ignore the doubts, and retune withered muscles. Eventually, I discovered the motor memory was every bit there - it was adapted, malleable, and I can see how it might - left long enough - degrade and dissolve. But for now it remains.
Siciliano
Stranded, I decided to travel imaginatively. Segovia's transcription of the Siciliano from the BWV1001 (Sonata for Solo Violin) is impossible to come by, so I laboured for four days over some blank staves and the pause button. It is amazing the things you hear - phrases take on new meaning in isolation, meaning which doesn't disappear when they are returned to passages, seams vanished.
There are also things in pieces like this you only hear when you play them. The Siciliano sways; fishing boats on bobbing seas returning to white daub cottages; or hips languidly wander from sunny avenues to minor shadows. The way to the minor lies everywhere and is as inevitable as death follows life follows death. There is no easy way out from that latin doubt: the lovelorn and bereaved circle in a maze of trying, rush the doors, tilt at windmills, but return to the relative minor. Cycle through modes, be confident, be desperate, leave no stone unturned till a slipway is found, and through there you will stumble on sympathetic company; people gather as distant bells chime, and sadnesses and laughter are what binds them together. Rediscover that sweet major tonic, and let it linger while it will.
Download JS Bach, BWV1001: Siciliano
Re-awakenings
It is enough to say that spring thaws and awakens the frozen germs of life, and early summer melts all resistence.
Download Vals Navarra - Vincent Lindsey-Clark
Death in February
Death in February - part 1
My remembrance is violent.
It’s still not yet dawn
On this misty February morning,
And just the sound
Of a distant bus
Pulling off
- who could be on that bus
at this time of day? –
With a dull crack
It seeps into my consciousness
That it is me,
Years ago,
On that bus,
Leaving you,
And the crack
Is the crack that the dawn
Of realisation brings.
No more tenderness
Will pass between us.
Death in February - part 2
February is to me
valedictory.
The tenderness we lack
is the giving of the ungivable.
If once I said you rendered yourself
Vincible to me
All the more revealing
Of the world's seeming magic
Because you were, and are
So amazonian,
Now I realise
You never did nor ever will
Allow a lover to hold in their hand
Your precious, secret
Vulnerability.
Death in February - part 3
And February mocks us,
Valentine:
Dead behind the eyes.
The world is tungsten and cold.
The sea impersonal
the air salt and asthmatic
the faces inscrutable
the flowers mock too,
rather than predict
recovery.
The soil of my mind is barren
Emotion stunted,
Heart impotent,
Fear that no spring will free
The frozen potentialities
And kernels of new awakenings,
And that doubt will be
Its own self-fulfulling prophecy
Download Dm Medley [Cantico in Dm - Vincente Sojo, Prelude in Dm - Ferdinando Carulli, Portuguesa - Joe Flintham)
Fantastically complicated machinery
Don Chihuahua spoke, but not to me - he addressed someone who was, in his mind, leaving.
"There is nothing romantic or beautiful about depression. It is fantastically complicated machinery, and yet an arbitrary scribble over life. An old friend of mine thinks of it as an unsolvable glowing blue hovering spherical puzzle, which credits it with some kind of aesthetic quality it does not deserve. I might say it was a circle, since it goes round, and around. But the circle is ugly, imperfect, not circular. Not elliptical or ovular, but erratic. Repeating endlessly, enough variation to deceive, but not enough for hope.
"Do not consider my choices to be considerate. Choosing not to die now is not a kindness. Suicide does not signify a soul, and living does not signify hope for one. Might I have forced your guilt to be over me and my death, rather than for him? I am a coward. I am unable even to usurp with absolute selfishness, and yet it is not because I am kind, but because I am already half-dead.
"Something aesthetically pleasing can inspire pity. You must see this as mere ugliness. There is no such thing as a beautiful episode. There are only shifts in the location of nowhere. This will not make sense and I will not explain it, since there is nothing to explain."
I held him in my arms, only to feel his repulsion.
Download Machinery mp3
Shee Beg, Shee Mor
Fionn mac Cumhaill, who ate the wisdom of the salmon, and built the Giant's Causeway to bridge the gap between the celtic nations, died in the battle fought between the fairy armies. Two queens, each from the smaller and the greater hills, Shee Beg and Shee Mor, fought, and continue to fight in the immortal night, and the battle will never be won. Fionn's first love was transformed into a deer, and his later love threw herself from his chariot on the Hill of Tara. A warrior is interned, upright in the cairn of Shee Beg, the lesser hill, alongside a woman, teeth perfectly preserved; they face the Hill of Tara. A common foe will one day unite the warring fairy armies, and the warrior Fionn will rise again, to defeat the invading hordes.
Here, in the tomb inside in the lesser hill,
I lie with my dead love.
Over on the greater hill,
the young warrior still raises armies.
No-one will win.
We will be found, fossils in the ground.
Men will look at our bones,
and see in us ancient truths.
But we will not be there.
Lovers of every generation
will come here, and gaze on these hills,
turn to each other and leave unspoken
the tales of fairy queens and warrior lords
that heave in their hearts.
We will watch them as we wander the fields,
I in the deer and you in the doe,
each in the soil,
communing in the air.
Warriors will hunt us for their prowess,
and our unending deaths will ennoble
their darkening hearts
with a measure of innocence.
Like vultures, rulers will scavenge us;
like snakes, they will corrupt our flesh
with the poison in their tongues.
And bards will come and sing of us
as an emblem of a nation,
a cypher for a world.
They will tell tales of wars
that cannot be won.
Their poems will call for me to rise again
with my conquering arm,
and they will call for you to rise
and be my heart.
They will sing,
until men and women are no more,
of restive vitality
and wise repose.
We will watch,
you and I,
as the cycle continues,
broken only by the look
in those lovers' eyes.
Download Shee Beg, Shee Mor - Turloch O'Carolan mp3
Lady Godiva
It was the cold middle of night, and I was summoned by Don Chihuahua. He spoke to me in low tones, without break, and without expecting a reply. I still do not understand his words, and cannot explain his meaning, except to say that I could see he was moved; as to why he accused me of being a spectre of his past, I do not know. An empty whiskey bottle lay by the side of his chair, and his ashtray was overflowing. He was unkempt and clearly tired. I do not know what to make of it - but here, as I have ever promised, is my account of his words.
"Lady Godiva - you know her - has returned". He looked at me accusingly. "She has left the darkness of the past and reappeared, just as you have. I do not ask what you want of me - I can teach you nothing that will alter the choices you make and if I could, well, then I would not be here now to tell you. You cannot force me into a different course of life, and if you could, well...
"But you know Lady Godiva. You love her as I loved her. And for all that we are connected, you and I - you with your incomprehension, and I with my all-too-familiar understanding - yet we are worlds apart. You, as I in my youth," - he grimaced - "do not see where real and imaginary worlds divide. I understand, as you will one day understand, that the unspoken and unenacted imagination overpowers a youthful mind to the point where he must speak and act, regardless of the consequences. My mind recoils in shame at the disasters and tragedies that could have been avoided had I only understood that the world is not a fiction, that the people in our lives are not players, that there is no drama, no denouement, no irony, and no authorial destiny awaiting us; and that to write it into our world is sheer vanity.
"These are the mistakes that you are doomed to repeat. And when we have switched places, and it is you, sitting here, no longer a spectre of my past but myself as I am, and you face the young pretender, as I face you now, then you will understand that that world you have written in your mind is precious, pure, and fragile. Then maybe you will understand that it should be protected, not because it will be destroyed, but because it has the power to destroy. The real world cannot stand the contamination of the unreal; the fates that you pretend to unfurl will not be dictated; the facts of your life will not yield to your delusion of providence; and the people in your life will not be written as though they were your playthings, but will rise and fight - or worse, simply leave you to your ruinous fictions, as I was left to mine, all those years ago, by Lady Godiva..."
He had stopped, and, since I had no idea what I could say, made to leave. As I reached the door, he called after me finally -
"Understand, mind, as you go about your folly, that she is blameless. It is I - you and I - who are responsible."
He looked away from me, clearly finished with me. And now I must see her, my Lady Godiva.
Download: Download Lady Godiva mp3
Two Voices
BWV 996 is 'possibly' one of the suites we know Bach wrote for the lautenwerk - a harpsichord rather than a lute. Whatever the case, transposing from lute to guitar results in a substantial reinterpretation, because they are quite different instruments. What is clear about the Allemande, though, whatever instrument it is played on, is that it has two voices, which combine, separate, desist and return, cross over each other, and anticipate each other's transition from minor to major.
Segovia tuned his interpretation 5 semitones above the Em in which I have learnt it, and it would be nice to think that helps to make the separate voices clearer, though I suspect his technique - not to mention his enormous talent - has much more to do with it. In my interpretation there is somewhat more muddiness, and somewhat less clarity, which I can't blame on the key. That transposition does, however, alter the octave in which one of the final runs occurs (particularly the bass run of, in this case, the G up to the D#), making Am (in that case, C down to the G#) a more sensible key to play in. Maybe one day I'll try it.
Whose are the two voices? I played recently for the muse for whom the poem was written, and was asked what I thought of when I played. Impossible to answer that I thought of her. There is always an audience. There is no point in speaking, if not to someone - however imaginary - or even to oneself. If one voice is my own, is the other my imaginary friend, the Don? Is it the muse? Is it Bach? Are the two voices myself and the guitar? In any music interpreted from someone else's score, there are always two of us, since we require each other to complete the piece.
This is an exponentially proliferating polyphony of imagined voices, but there are only ever two halves of a whole, two hemispheres of one world, two people exchanging glances and gestures, censored as much by each other's conflicting pulls when they are alone, as they are by a third presence. I think that is what is in my mind when I play the Allemande from BWV 996 - and so grateful for that transition from minor to major.
Allemande
Muse
I shall make you my muse -
since sly smiles and kinds words
that may mean no more than they appear,
now reveal me
no longer on a plain of certitude,
but on a precipice of potential.
The sideways glance of your laughing eye,
the hand resting on the table
are the seeming mirror of the flooded plain -
the unspoken invisible charge
is the white spray crest of the edge
and then nothing
- but muse -
that is the vertigo
of the waterfall.
(And the way you call me 'boy'
hints cascades of possibilities)
I have made you my muse
Download Bach - Allemande (BWV 996) mp3
Sarabande
The Don shares his wisdom, and for that I’m grateful – but I wish he could impart his courage as well as his experience. I told him of my dilemma – my paralysis of inaction, which afflicts me each time I find myself wanting to speak of my feelings: I am rendered mute before the very object of my emotion. He looked at me kindly.
“There have been so very few people who were rays of sunshine in my life. I knew someone who was just such a shaft of light. She came into my life, and her joy threw shadows from everyone around her. Her smile flung away the clouds and her laughing eyes made the world a better place.
“I was in what I thought was my heyday. I thought to distinguish myself, my witty barbs and unconventional manner were magnetic. I revelled in my sharp limelight. My dart words hooked and dazzled, and I held myself guru-like in my acolytes' esteem.
“She had been away for some time, and I felt her absence as though it were a long dark night. When she returned, I put on my display. I was, I thought, on fire. My wit was my peacock feather, and in response to some small remark from a voice behind me, I shot off an offhand and withering remark. On turning round I saw it was her. She lowered her eyes, said nothing, but politely listened to me as I continued to excavate caverns of shame with my foolish words. And then, she left.
“I heard that she had spoken of my insult, and had said she thought me a brute. When I saw her a few days later, though I wanted to scream my sorrow and beg her forgiveness, my anger and pride kept me from it, and she left me in silence - a proud man guarding my horde of nothing.
“I never saw her again. I looked for her, every day, until it was time for me to leave that place. I accepted that it was too late. I never told her what I thought she was; how she lit up my eyes as though I were only half-alive when she was not with me.”
Though I could see he was drifting into a reverie, I asked, “Do you think she would be surprised, looking back on this, if you could tell her now?”
“I hope she has forgotten me entirely. But you – you should not hesitate.”
For Jo L. - wherever she may be
Download: Bach - BWV 1002 Sarabande.
The Port
I spoke again to Don Chihuahua. A gathering of friends brought us together, in the moonlight and flickering illumination of an oil-drum fire, in which the scraps of shattered pallets glowed. The Don bore his soul like a cloak, as though to reveal everything were the greatest protection against the elements.
"When you find yourself in the world and see finally things as they are; when you realise that the world is an ocean of searching and that you are tossed as though you were no more than a fleck of spray; when the comforts of familiarity and safety fall from you like a spent cocoon, and the stays of civilisation are nothing but illusory shackles; when you feel the exhilarating freedom of knowledge - the knowledge that you are truly alone, and that all men are unknowable, and that the only sure thing is that sooner or later you will dashed in the waves and be gone utterly - "
He was smiling as he said these words, but the smile seemed to me complicated and not directed at alleviating the tense silence that had fallen around his voice.
"To what do you cling? To a god? To your fellow man in the hope that fellowship is enough? To gratitude that you have lived at all? To love?"
I think we all wanted to know what his answer would be. But clearly he did not intend to say any more.
For my part, I find his words push me to a precipice. I am unsure whether I envy the depth of his soul - since I am no deep thinker - or whether I am grateful that I have no insights into such matters, and am willing to seek out any port in a storm.
The Port - mp3
Courante
Courtly ladies and gentlemen greet, bow and circle. Courtiers fawn. Attendants scuttle. The surface of things appears brilliant and refined. We accept the semblance because doing so makes the illusory into something real.
Pockmarked skin becomes truly smooth under white foundation, malicious hearts become saintly, snakes in the grass become lambs in the fold.
We have truly become cultured.
Download: Bach - BWV1009 Courante mp3
June
In june, the Don kept his cards close to his chest for a while. It later emerged that he had been working for a considerable time on the Courante from a Bach Cello Suite (C-major). We hope this will soon be performable.
In the meantime, he produced a sturtering version of Merlin's Evocation which, because of - rather than despite of - its stuttering mistakes, expressed, he believes, the self-inspection and associated sorrow that accompanies rejection. The poem was written in 2001 for Charlotte, devourer of hope...
In 2001 the part of me that is not schizophrenic recorded Ferrer's Ejercicio. I had only two years before-hand begun to try playing classical guitar music from sheet. A precious copy of 'First Repertoire for Solo Guitar' fed me. But I was without a 'fitness-instructor', as it were: anything was fair game, and where I found sixth notes a little irksome, I modifed them to whole notes.
Five years later, having taken the time to actually read the score and the instructor's intentions, crying out to me from a century past to take the original transcription seriously, I reconsidered.
I can only refer back to the analogy of the apprentice and the master: restiveness is a quality that seems to recede with time. Learning, indeed, youth, is wasted on the young.
Is it a humiliation to acknowledge that your youthful ignorance did not (contrary to what you thought) excel those who went before? True fact: the first time I played this to a /lady/, she giggled and said it made her think of monks.
Ejercicio
To laze is to not exercise. Hence it is not possible to ocioso during ejercicio. The task-master is always there, insisting you do not slur, waver, or diverge from the proscribed path laid out by the demi-god fitness-instructor.
Are you fit for purpose?
Download: Jose Ferrer - Ejercicio (Vals) mp3
Evocation
Don Chihuahua said:
I am suffering from subjunctivitis.
I would be in your arms now.
You would look at me with eyes
impenetrable in the obsidian light
and whisper the location of the hidden magic of the world.
Your opaque beauty would shock me again.
I would be lost again, absorbed
by the down on your soft cheek,
the pale, flushed skin covering
the mystery I could not
nor would not
want to solve.
I would see a glimmer of movement
in your brow, and I would,
as always,
recognise my thoughts in your face.
A train is carrying me
through ghost towns
lit by dull lamps
barely concealing the hollowness.
The carriage bulges with hollow people
occupying space and time
but nothing more.
They are being occupied by hollowness.
I can even see
their transparency –
they leave the train
as ghosts leave bodies,
leaving a shell.
Flickering across their faces
are the traces
of empty thoughts,
consumed by the nothingnesses
of inboxes,
chattering politics,
dinner for three,
four,
five
hollow people
in a hollow family home.
An eyebrow,
mistily visible
against the outlines beyond,
twitches in the last spasms
of an inconsequence.
Forgotten trains of hollow thought
blink out of mind,
only to repeat themselves
glibly.
The scales fell from my eyes.
The beeches trailed behind me
as I stepped into the future
stretching before me,
utterly certain into infinity.
It is lined with hollow homes,
filled with hollow accoutrements
for transparent people
scurrying to and fro
like ants on a dead trunk,
pursuing vacancy with
blind ardour.
What are they feeding
with the empty seed-husks
of nothingness that they carry
on their shoulders
as though they bore the world?
The beeches trailed behind me,
their eyes impenetrable in the obsidian
transparency of blind ardour
bearing the world of hollow homes
and inboxes into my body, leaving a shell.
Download: Jose Luis Merlin - Evocation mp3
May
May 2006 is the first month of the record of Don Chihuahua's progress, return, last stand, and other punctuations. These things will become clear if they are not now.
It began with Leonard, which uses a finger-picking style which I could never play before when I tried, and then recently discovered I could play. I had, at that time, been slaving away over the Bach pieces Sarabande from BWV 1002 and Prelude for Cello BWV 1007. I was working on a trill from an old interpretation of a Sojo Cantico, and just added a string.
I like to think that playing Bach makes you better: a better person, as well as a better musician.
The Prelude took weeks to master - to the extent that it has been mastered at all... the tricky parts were not those I expected, like stretching for a large barre in the middle of a phrase, but changing my mind about counterpoints. The source I used had very little counterpoint (compared to Segovia's recording, for instance), so I added some of those by ear. Then I took them out again. Each time my fingers had forgotten what to do. And each time, I heard the Segovia version differently. Playing a piece of music changes your understanding of it totally, and there seems to be no going back.
Tarrega's Endecha, is slow, pompous, ponderous, over-dramatic and possibly not in the spirit of the thing at all. But when I played it I kept being put in mind of the passacaglias that Bach wrote for the organ, and so I played it that way. It is probably done more justice to by interpretations such as this by Braumeister.
I think June will see Don Chihuahua dwelling on lost love. I'll bring the story to you when I can.
Metaphorically speaking
Many poets should be left as they were by the riverside. Your first encounter is likely to be the most fulfilling.
Some poets, however, demand a longer relationship, since their words evolve, even if the printed page does not.
John Donne's metaphysical poetry evolves with you as you go by. You can measure yourself by the extent to which you adapt to his conceits.
I used to think a metaphor required rigour: metaphors that broke quickly at points of logic and dissimilarity were inadequate.
Now I realise that the end of the aptness of any metaphor is the beginning of its use: where Donne reaches a broken path in the pursuit of his conceit, he digresses, follows the new road, and never looks back.
Those complex conceits which work on many levels do not remain faithful to their absolute limit, but push you to introspect, analyse and learn from the limitation. You emerge into a new kind of light at the end of the metaphor.
Download: Tarrega - Endecha
Prelude
For my father, Andrew Flintham: 6 May, 1951 - 25 December, 2001. Not a special lover of Bach, but I think he would have liked this.
I think of it like walking into the studio of someone who sculpts in wood. The latest work has been shipped out. All that remains are the shavings, the scraps from the block that were carved away to create the form.
If we lingered, forensically, over each piece, then maybe, we could remake the work of art, the piece that is missing. Each scrap of shaved wood bears the craft and skill of the maker, and the imprint of the lost form. They are too precious to discard.
Some might sweep them away, and pretend the work came into form without the mechanics of production. I prefer to cling to them as evidence of things forever gone.
Chips off the old block: me; my finger-squeak and frett-buzz; and memories of my father.
Download: Bach - Cello Prelude in G-major BWV 1007; transcribed for guitar in D-major
The Return of Don Chihuahua
I spoke to Don Chihuahua today.
He told me that he recently discovered something alarming. More than a decade ago, in his teens, he had stood on a prosaic street corner in a northern English town, and had busked Famous Blue Raincoat, but Avalanche and the Story of Isaac were beyond him.
There was something mature in them; something beyond him. He simply couldn't control his fingers - couldn't even imagine his fingers doing that. Looking back, this was unsurprising. Just as a journeyman could not understand what it meant for a soul to be swallowed, so it was not for a journeyman to master that arpeggio.
So it was with alarm that the Don discovered purely by chance that, nearly 20 years later, he was playing those arpeggios almost without thought, for the first time in his life. He was not playing them with technical excellence; he did not really know what he was playing; and notwithstanding the discovery of a new ability, it felt more appropriate to go to the major rather than the minor for now.
"My fingers may grow old, but I swear my soul does not, and I am still an apprentice."
I understood him, I think: in adolescence one's purpose is to murder one's forefathers - whether it is in one's power or not. In later years, though, it seems more important to defer to them. They have created the paths that we now walk on.
I'll try to tell his story here.
Download: Leonard (mp3)
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