I've Got This Rig That Runs On Memories

Being with you and not being with you
is the only way I have to measure time.
--Jorge Luis Borges
The Book of Sand

Leonard Cohen: I Can't Forget

And Know The Place For the First Time

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

--T.S. Eliot

They Could Hear Themselves

Anouar Brahem: Le Voyage de Sahar

Franz Kafka is dead.
He died in a tree from which he wouldn't come down.
"Come down!" they cried to him. "Come down! Come down!" Silence filled the night, and the night filled the silence, while they waited for Kafka to speak. "I can't,"
he finally said, with a note of wistfulness. "Why?" they cried. Stars spilled across the black sky. "Because then you'll stop asking for me." The people whispered and nodded among themselves. They put their arms around each other, and touched their children's hair. They took off their hats and raised them to the small, sickly man with the ears of a strange animal, sitting in his black velvet suit in the dark tree. Then they turned and started for home under the canopy of leaves. Children were carried on their fathers' shoulders, sleepy from having been taken to see who wrote his books on pieces of bark he tore off the tree from which he refused to come down. In his delicate, beautiful, illegible handwriting. And they admired those books, and they admired his will and stamina. After all: who doesn't wish to make a spectacle of his loneliness? One by one families broke off with a good night and a squeeze of the hands, suddenly grateful for the company of neighbors.

Doors closed to warm houses. Candles were lit in windows. Far off, in his perch in the trees, Kafka listened to it all: the rustle of the clothes being dropped to the floor, or lips fluttering along naked shoulders, beds creaking along the weight of tenderness. It all caught in the delicate pointed shells of his ears and rolled like pinballs through the great hall of his mind.
That night a freezing wind blew in. When the children woke up, they went to the window and found the world encased in ice. One child, the smallest, shrieked out in delight and her cry tore through the silence and exploded the ice of a giant oak tree. The world shone.
They found him frozen on the ground like a bird. It's said that when they put their ears to the shell of his ears, they could hear themselves.
--Nicole Krauss
The History of Love

Among These Barren Crags

Cream: Tales of Brave Ulysses

Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
--Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Uly sses

Cream: Tales of Brave Ulysses (live)

Begin at the beginning, the King said, very gravely,
and go on till you come to the end: then stop.
--Lewis Carroll
Alice in Wonderland

Done With Bonaparte

Mark Knopfler / Emmylou Harris:
Done with Bonaparte...Verona 3/6/06



we've played in Hell
since Moscow burned
these cossacks tear us
piece by piece
our dead are strewn
a hundred leagues
though death would be
a sweet release
and our Grande Armee
is dressed in rags
a frozen starving
beggar band
like rats we steal
each other's scraps
fall to fighting
hand to hand
save my soul from evil
and heal this soldier's heart
i'll trust in thee to keep me
Lord, i'm done
with Bonaparte

what dreams he made
for us to dream
Spanish skies
Egyptian sands
the world was ours
we marched upon our
little Corporal's command
i lost an eye at Austerlitz
the sabre slash
yet gives me pain
my one true love
awaits me still
the flower of the Aquitaine
save my soul from evil
and heal this soldier's heart
i'll trust in thee to keep me
Lord, i'm done with Bonaparte

i pray for her
who prays for me
a safe return
to my belle France
we prayed these wars
would end all wars
in war we know
is no romance
i pray our child
will never see
a little Corporal again
point toward a foreign shore and captivate
the hearts of men
save my soul from evil and heal this soldier's heart
i'll trust in thee to keep me, Lord, i'm done with Bonaparte

--Mark Knopfler

Stranded Between Time Gone And Time Emerging

Nearer to the earth's heart,
Deeper within its silence:
Animals know this world
In a way we never will.

We who are ever
Distanced and distracted
By the parade of bright
Windows thought opens:
Their seamless presence
Is not fractured thus.

Stranded between time
Gone and time emerging,
We manage seldom
To be where we are:
Whereas they are always
Looking out from
The here and now.

May we learn to return
And rest in the beauty
Of animal being,
Learn to lean low,
Leave our locked minds,
And with freed senses
Feel the earth
Breathing with us.

May we enter
Into lightness of spirit,
And slip frequently into
The feel of the wild.

Let the clear silence
Of our animal being
Cleanse our hearts
Of corrosive words.

May we learn to walk
Upon the earth

With all their confidence
And clear-eyed stillness
So that our minds
Might be baptized
In the name of the wind
And light and the rain.

--John O'Donohue
To Bless the Space Between Us:
A Book of Blessings

They Have Laughed Inside Her Laughter

Joni Mitchell: Cactus Tree

9/3/70

The cactus of the high desert is a small grubby, obscure and humble vegetable associated with cattle dung and overgrazing, interesting only when you tangle with it the wrong way. Yet from this nest of thorns, this snare of hooks and fiery spines, is born once each year a splendid flower. It is unpluckable
and except to an insect almost unapproachable, yet soft, lovely, sweet, desirable, exemplifying
better than the rose among thorns the unity of opposites.
--Edward Abbey

4/22/74

Though I Am Old With Wandering

Judy Collins: Golden Apples of the Sun

Perhaps the greatest charm of tramp-life is the absence of monotony.
In Hobo Land the face of life is protean ---an ever changing phantasmagoria, where the impossible happens and the unexpected jumps out of the bushes at every turn of the road. The hobo never knows what is going to happen the next moment; hence, he lives only in the present moment. He has learned the futility of telic endeavor, and knows the delight of drifting along with the whimsicalities of Chance.
--Jack London
The Road

The Which He Vents In Mangled Forms

Grateful Dead: 10/18/74
...51 years ago (joined in progress)

and in his brain,
which is
as dry as
the remainder biscuit
after a voyage,
he hath
strange places
crammed
with observation,
the which he vents
in mangled forms.

--william shakespeare
as you like it

And The Veil Is Hidden Behind A Veil

You are right.
There are no mists,
or veils, or distances.
But the mist is
surrounded by a mist;
and the veil is hidden
behind a veil;
and the distance
continually draws away
from the distance.
That is why
there are no mists,
or veils, or distances.
That is why it is called
The Great Distance
of Mists and Veils.
It is here
that The Traveler
becomes The Wanderer,
and The Wanderer
becomes The One Who Is Lost,
and The One Who Is Lost

becomes The Seeker,
and The Seeker becomes
The Passionate Lover,
and The Passionate Lover
becomes The Beggar,
and The Beggar
becomes the Wretch,
and The Wretch becomes
The One Who
Must Be Sacrificed,
and The One Who Must
Be Sacrificed becomes
The Resurrected One,
and The Resurrected One
becomes the One Who Has
Transcended The Great Distance
of Mists and Veils.
Then for a thousand years,
or the rest of the afternoon,
such a One spins
in the Blazing Fire of Changes,

embodying all the transformations,
one after the other,
and then beginning again,
and then ending again,
86,000 times a second.
Then such a One,
if he is a man,
is ready to love the woman;
and such a One,
if she is a woman,
is ready to love the man
who can put into song
The Great Distance
of Mists and Veils.
Is it you who is waiting,
or is it me?

--Leonard Cohen *
Book of Longing

THE PERPLEXED SCENE WHERE WE STAND

I am so often accused of gloominess and melancholy.
And I think I'm probably the most cheerful man around.
I don't consider myself a pessimist at all.
I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting
for it to rain. And I feel completely soaked to the skin.
I think those descriptions of me are quite inappropriate
to the gravity of the predicament that faces us all.
I've always been free from hope.
It's never been one of my great solaces.
I feel that more and more we're invited to make ourselves
strong and cheerful. I think that it was Ben Jonson who said,
I have studied all the theologies and all the philosophies,
but cheerfulness keeps breaking through. *

LEONARD COHEN
9/21/34---11/7/16: Everybody Knows

The Uplands Of My Desire

Kyler Kelly: The Summit

For, after all,
every one who wishes to gain true knowledge must climb the Hill Difficulty alone, and since there is no royal road to the summit,
I must zigzag it in my own way.
I slip back many times, I fall,
I stand still, I run against the edge of hidden obstacles, I lose my temper and find it again and keep it better, I trudge on, I gain a little, I feel encouraged, I get more eager and climb higher and begin to see the widening horizon. Every struggle is a victory. One more effort and I reach the luminous cloud, the blue depths of the sky, the uplands of my desire.
--Helen Keller