Reflections: facts and fictions
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
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
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
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
