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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.
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)
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.
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
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
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)
