Pulse and shudder (Music therapy: Rodrigo y Gabriela - Ixtapa)

Take the first song you hear and make yourself at home, all that languid hope lost on strings and rhythmic vibrations. Pretend you live in a place that is both old and saturated with sunlight. The kind of place where lemon trees grow in the front gardens of old ladies who dress in black and wear head scarves. They bicker like all the other old ladies in the world, except they have lemon trees in their gardens and their feet know the arch and angle of every cobble on their street.

This afternoon as I was walking home my head was caught in a cloud of scent. Lilacs, as if suddenly I was about to crash into a mountain of them, pollen raining down and staining my skin and clothes. But when I looked I saw only a small plant inside a grocery bag which was being carried by the woman in front of me. I thought: I want to be as bold as that plant, issuing such an exuberant pulse into the world that doesn’t expect it.

Think of kissing strangers just as they are on the brink of a decision, then stepping back and watching everything they have ever been slip from their expressions. They can’t remember where they are, who they have been, what they were thinking. They can only feel the breath that has left their lungs and the ghost of your lips on theirs. Leave them before they find their way back to themselves. Store up those strange, blissful manifestations. Know that periodically throughout their lives, they will remember that moment as if it were some porthole to themselves that they haven’t found since.

I can’t remember the last time I was barefoot outside. I think it has been cold forever, even though the sun blazed into my eyes as I walked down Princes Street and resisted crossing and going into the bookstore. Even though there are tiny flowers poking up through the grass in the park and the teenage boys are starting to venture out in t-shirts, their hands dug deep into their pockets as they pull their shoulders forward and attempt to create warmth inside the curves of their chests.

No, I can’t stop thinking about a land of olives and sundried tomatoes and fruit that squishes juice almost as soon as you touch it. Somewhere you can still feel the warmth in the stones of the buildings all the way until the evening, until eventually the night pulls the last of it out like the final little shudder after an orgasm. The one that makes your whole body relax and sends you off to sleep.

People keep telling me spring is coming. But it isn’t enough. I need to be filled with the sun, bathed in it, turned over in it until not one inch of my skin remains cool to the touch. I want to be like the Lilac, like the stones in the evening. A giant pulse, a little shudder. Bliss.

Broken down music therapy. Help required.

Listening to The Raven, by Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan. I have started something but have now been stuck for more than an hour with the song on repeat. I just can't seem to get to the next scene.

Earlier today I read Irish Gumbo's post concerning "the background hiss" of the universe, also known as the "hydrogen line." When the song came on the first image flooded into my mind, along with the central idea of this galactic serpent song.

I am a descriptive writer. Put something in front of me and I can wrap it up with words. But ask me what happens next and more often than not I won't be able to tell you.

The following is what I have so far. I know that it is not finished but I am trapped in this moment and can't get my mind to lean anywhere else. So I am asking, can anyone out there tell me what happens next? If you hop on the music link and take a quick listen to the song, you'll catch the mood and hopefully this will help you to help me move this thing forward.

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Inside this song, Quentin Tarantino watches himself climb out of a long black car and stand before the dilapidated remains of an old hotel. The car is impossibly clean, despite the plumes of desert sand that scramble over the paint. Quentin looks down to see the creases in his leather shoes fill with fine beige lines and in his mind the process spreads like a cancer until his legs become ancient Egyptian pillars, frozen in eternal fragility.

His eyes follow the sound of steady hissing that is coming from the hotel. He hears the dust skid across the splintered wooden planks of the porch, a multitude of tiny grains diving like kamikazes between the cracks.

He steps forward, the murmur of the sand like a spent record drawing him in.

Sunday Music Therapy

The song is C'est moi by Rupa & the April Fishes.

For my friend Seasonn, who is moving to Paris.

I imagine your first weekend out, closing the door of your flat and stepping into the busy street. Immediately the waft of warm baguette sweeps past you like a wind-up cliché and you laugh, drawing the stare and smile from the moustachioed man who is sweeping a nearby stoop.

When you walk your hips seem to have little springs in them, like at any moment you will start to dance. You move through the city like it was a giant pop-up sketch, the life and sounds around you the manifestations of newly enchanted scribbles that are erased and redrawn with each passing moment.

I wonder if Paris is one of those cities you can just take from or whether it demands something from those who live there, like New York or London. A sacrifice of privilege, the centuries-old friction of all those subversive thoughts and grand ideologies reaching out from the stones and bubbling up from the latte foam.

There will always be an element of circus pageantry to Paris, the ribbon that is forever unfurling, the flash of red that distracts the viewer while the trick is played. It is still the place of sly grins and slight-of-hand, where strangely dressed men with lopsided faces open unnumbered doors to those who hold the right ticket, the cost of entry being the little squeeze of consciousness that will be wrung out of them in the darkness.

After too many sips at the fountain of sweet depravity, early morning in Paris becomes the tonic to the hangover of history. Each and every dawn the city is born anew, the bulging scents of pounded yeast and roasting coffee erupting from the kitchens and cafes and scrubbing us down until we can’t remember anything but the colliding dominos of simple pleasures.

I wish you long evening shadows and perfect yellow mornings. I wish for your mouth to move around the words of your second language like they are canapés. I wish you a pair of delicate, long-stemmed, round-bellied wine glasses that look perfect no matter where you set them down. I wish you feelings gratitude and relief, wrapped around you as thick as a blanket. Because every time you look out your window or step out your door, you will know that you are finally, at long last, in Paris.

Music Therapy: Oh Mo Dhuthaich (Oh My Country) by Capercaille

The rim of the moon has been unevenly peeled away like a burl beneath a wood-workers plane. The clouds drift in front of it like something out of a film, dark and slow, with just enough space between them to signify a silent story being told.

A small witch hangs against my window, looking out. She is a kitchen witch but I know she prefers her current place, where she can see the buses and the people below and judge the tides based on the flights of the gulls.

I know that Halloween is coming. I can feel it expand inside me like the scent of bread when it is rising, the warm aroma of long dead grains coming back to life. Today I filled two old whisky bottles with coloured water and placed them in the windowsill. I peeled off the labels but on one I left the face and antlers of a deer. I wanted to see them glow golden when the sun was strongest.

The days are still too long to warrant lighting the candles. I will wait until I know it is time. There will be a smell in the air of dying leaves, or the earth underfoot will take on a softness that precedes winter’s stubborn hold. I will place the candles behind the bottles and lower another behind the beady eyes of the green man. Still more will sit surrounded by coloured glass, two red holders and another multi-coloured. Two hanging lanterns -one small and green and another black and hollow like a bucket, with intricate designs carved through it that cast flickering shadows on the walls.

The blackberries are coming into season, those phantom cousins of the jolly raspberry. All over Britain the apple harvest is being celebrated, and people are looking with greater longing at the heavy cheeses in their pantries.

Summer is a fleeting time, weeks when life juggles madly to do it all, to ram youth and lust in a bag together and let friction do the work. Autumn is the wry, matronly smile, that “I told you so” that judges and forgives in one instant before turning back to the stove.

The clouds have abandoned their webbed drifting before the moon and have collapsed into a single, fat line that crawls low along the horizon like a snake. The moon is an unblinking eye, part of a face so vast I will never see it, its features a collection of moving memories, of all those we have lost.

Music Therapy: Nantes by Beirut

A note before we begin. Every month that passes, I find myself falling ever deeper in love with this band. This music is my muse for every season, mixing in as the light grows and fades. This young man (Zach Condon) is but 23 years old and has blended the rhythms and brass expletives of Balkan folk music with poetic lyrics and the sweet approachability of Western pop. If you have never heard Beirut's music and know yourself to be at least a little bit of a gypsy, then you must listen. It will be like going home.

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This is the busy way that insects scuttle over the ground, antennae conducting the rhythmic clacking of mandibles, the sheen of a hundred black husks like volcanic stones come to life. This is ghosts waltzing over their own graves, the mist mingling where longing once churned in their guts. Their feet dancing through the flowers that lay wilting beneath their names, they sway in the gentle forgetting of death.

This is the clatter of cutlery on the breakfast table, the half-glass of orange juice forever turning its cheek to the onslaught of fork tongs and the serrated tongues of butter knives. The spoon has miscarried. The jam jar is empty. The breeze catches the edge of the faded tablecloth, revealing an under-skin as bright as the sun, a reminder that things change, things remain the same.

The day you round the corner and see your old friend, the one you thought you had lost forever, do not stand too long in a trance before reaching out and touching his face. In this way, remind yourself what is real before taking off again into the trees, where the leaves go on birthing and dying with the seasons, despite all your silent wishes to hold them still.

Remember that even if you could fold up all the buildings in the world like a child closing a pop-up book, the horizon would still find its way of escaping you. So while you clamour over the landscape, past the gardens and the forgotten fences, let the clutter in your mind rebuild the scene. This exquisite, dishevelled ensemble. This small fire in the night.

Music Therapy: Glámur by Amiina

For Maggie May, who has been in my thoughts this week.

we are all just fingers and toes, my love
we are the little iceberg that calved
and fell
into the faded apple green
of a northern river

the leaves that I dropped
upon the stream
at the mouth of the culvert
are forever emerging
into the sun

it is this same sun
whose shifting reflection
I skim from the water
to spread on your toast
instead of butter

a catalogue of wafers
can build a library
wordless texts that ache to be read
poised to become the flood
that will make you feel warm again

Music therapy. Fela Kuti: Everything Scatter

Not many men can make this big girl dance, but you did it. Not many men can direct a sound to sweep away the BOOMBOOM chant that followed me through the playground, resonating in my mind for years and years.

All this heavy stuff. Moving. Big thighs driving big heels into the ground, just so the room sends ripples back at them. Oh I hear you quiver - spread it around.

Clear the living room and open the window because this full-sized drama is hitting three acts and an encore. Spine becomes a tall grass in a shifting breeze and the flesh follows, lumps and bumps wrapping around that fragile stalk like pillows. They don’t cut the air - they round it out, make it all curve.

You give me 10 minutes and 31 seconds and I give you my hair down, my feet in love with this sunbeam that is diving like a kamikaze through the gap between the curtains.

You give me mad brass and mosquito rhythms and I give you my unspoken pleasure that my precious bulk does not stop on a dime, but keeps going like an unexpected shudder that consumes the whole body.

You make me believe that there are 10,000 people in your band, and I will unfurl into the cool breeze that stirs the incense and makes everything sweet and heady.

Not many men can make me stretch like a Sunday afternoon on the cusp of a full-blown summer, but you did it.

Now play it again.

Four completely unrelated paragraphs

My first Sunday of creativity didn't go so well and I was left feeling depressed, frightened and questioning why it is I want to write in the first place. So I'm going back to something I love to do, which is to write to music. I find I am less likely to block myself and can just let the images and feelings move through me. There is no pressure; just pleasure. The following pieces are courtesy of (in order) Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan, Rokia Traoré, Moris Tepper and The Warsaw Village Band. My favourite is the second one. Yours?

He dressed like he had escaped from a film set, in a tight white wife-beater, black jeans and greased back hair. He leaned against the wall next to where the sun was trying to burn through the blinds, a row of rust-coloured teeth all the way to the sill. She tried to force her gaze through the tiny spaces and thought of how she had always liked like word slit.
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She dreamed the dust was sinking into her hands. The grains ran like streams along her life line, heart line, head line, and the dozens of tiny rivulets she thought of as the final scraps of her spirit that the gods tried to etch into her at the last minute when she was travelling here, to be born. The dust was the colour of ochre mixed with goat’s blood and as she stared into her palms she saw each granule bulge slightly before descending softly into her skin, the way an animal will eventually stop struggling against its killer and let itself dissolve into death. In her dream she was slowly filled up until her body shed itself in one instant, spreading and mixing her in the air before scattering her wide along the cracked belly of the riverbed. She woke shivering, the prayer for rain already leaving her lips.
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When you tilt your head back and laugh I stare into the back of your throat and think about if my hand were really small I could thrust it in there and flick that little flesh widget like it was a tether ball. I imagine your eyes going all huge and the look of shock and fear taking over your face because your body is screaming INTRUDER! INTRUDER! and trying to protect you from dying. And I wonder whether it would actually be you that your body was trying to protect, or itself. Maybe your body doesn’t care about you at all. Maybe it’s just here for curiosity’s sake.
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Three women crawl on all fours toward the edge of the fire pit, lean hard over the embers and pant in unison against the coals as a meagre line of smoke escapes and climbs past leafless branches towards the full moon. The women can feel their eyelashes peeling back like thin ribbon curling against the fast friction of thumb and knife edge. The skin on their faces starts to burn and the heat is pouring into their lungs. Their panting deepens; the countdown begins. Four breaths…heave…burn. Three breaths heave…burn. Two…burn..burn. One…breathe. Now quick they are up together and running to the field and throwing themselves onto the long grass where the very first drops of dew are forming, clear bellies glowing in the moonlight, pregnant with the cool promise of relief.

Iron and Wine, The Shepherd's Dog

Yes, it is romantic to think this way of the past. Over and over I click repeat on Resurrection Fern, to keep me walking through the field behind the barn. I am surveying the bowing backs of the yellow grasses, which are still cowering as if their keeper Snow could return at any moment. I am a child; I have no words for this rapturous sea of submission. But I feel the kindness building in my belly, and hear the matches shake in my brother’s pocket.

We use rakes to heave the limp bodies of the pasture’s pensioners into a soft pyre, tucking the swollen pin-head heat of the matches into the dark arches between their bent limbs. We drag the fire like we had seen our parents do each spring, and while it spreads we can almost sense the grateful green babies beneath our feet. The slow sweep of freedom takes us into its rhythm, promising us lush new beginnings, each fresh stalk a backwards spike of our good intentions.

Pinecones talk when they burn. They chatter and hiss at the bark at the base of their mother trees. Did they tell her to run? Did they whisper ancients methods of acceptance? Did they pop and spit love you love you, you made me I am your praying child my bleeding sap blood of my blood love you love you?

We nearly burned the forest down that day. But since I have let the songs move on, I can now stand amidst the aftermath, blackened head to foot and staring at my bewildered brother, who is staring at me, too.

I love this album because it dissolves me into the sticky beauty of my history, when there was no difference between the pulse outside and the one driving my heart. Already it’s Flightless Bird, like longing without pain. And there I am, back in bed on a winter’s morning, listening to the chickadees calling to each other, pinball love songs in the empty air. And I understand every word.

Falling into words

Ayub Ogada. The word Kenya printed in black letters on the green stripe of the Real World rainbow. The album is En Mana Kuoyo. I used to play it when I cleaned the cabin – I like the airy clean feeling of it – the bright spaces between the notes and the way the notes themselves topple over each other like children playing in leaves.

It is the album I play when I am stressed, when I know I need to relax. Much of the time my life feels like something foreign that I am trying to balance, like I am holding on to a falseness just so I can continue to function in the world. There are few times when I say “yes” to myself- to who I am. These moments come sometimes during times of solitude, when I allow myself to remember the wordless wonder of things. But it is getting harder to do as I get older – it is like I am going numb, the inner light dulling – scrubbed by routine, by stress, by fear and by a lingering sense of isolation that has been like a shadow throughout my life.

One of my self-guided therapies is free-flow writing. This is like stretching, like dancing and letting my limbs go all floppy. It is for when I recognize my need to find a place without barriers, a land where metaphors can travel and come back, springs and rubber bands returning with the clinging vines of wildness and the snagged thorns of other people’s memories.

I was going to touch down running to Ayub but it feels too fast now. I need to change. Something either earthy or ethereal, but slower.

Illumination is a cd Craig made for me some time ago – the lofty medieval tones of Hildegard von Bingen. I am drawn to mystic religious music – I don’t care what label the divine is wearing. It is the expression of rapture that I love.

There is a language pressing on me from the inside. I fear the flow of it, released through the sieve of my limited abilities, will sound trite, egoistic, flowery and pretentious. But the pressure doesn’t leave until I write, so I’ll just open the taps for now and say yes to what comes.

The only time your hands didn’t shake was when you stood naked beside the sea, the darkness draping over your outstretched arms like cloth. I want you to feel the sand between your toes, accept the fact that you might sink. And yes, you might step forward and walk on water, and yes, I might follow you. But for now you are looking into the gloom. Not just looking. Seeing. The air on your skin is warm and moving over you at the speed of a breeze and a wind, if the two were first cousins that had married. What I mean to say is everything about this moment is specific. Never to be repeated. Precise and beautiful, full but fragile. And I can offer nothing else but a leaf of understanding, that I have acknowledged this lovely moment. It is not framed solid in my mind, but still, on a cool day when the setting sun is warm on my chest like a curled cat, I can let it move over me like the darkness moved over you. And see you standing there again. Watch the fingers of beckoning water and your smile, pulsing with pleasure as you sway in the rhythm of it all.

XXAnd with that, I bid you goodnight.

Left-leaning and scented springtime floods

Flood has arrived. Fitting despite the sky's continued lethargy. And to think, only today I was shaken with the memory of the tiny video rental place in downtown Tofino. Not far from the Co-op, but then again, nothing is very far from the Co-op. Five small shelves of videos and the rest of the hut was stuffed with candy, salt snacks, and freezers of ice creams. That guy who owned it - he was trying to sell out. He had a long face and a voice that sounded like a sluggish recording. Ed?
But this beautiful music - now I can remember sitting in the front row of the Tofino community theatre, watching this man's fingers fly like grains of sand over the beach. Like gravity was a plaything. Remembering also the combination of weird and mysterious scents that had invaded the sloped room. Like a perfume of damp wool and exotic incense, smells carried into the building by the locals. They had come to share an evening out and had also mingled their aromas - fish, salt, sawdust, patchouli, sweat, cedar - which were woven like extra threads into their clothing. Politically they may have been quick to anger, but in general they all smelled mighty fine to me.
I remember writing while I watched him play, his boyish face half in shadow as he looked down at his guitar. A lone spotlight made him glow on his low altar, a simple stool in the middle of a sunken stage. I wish I could remember what I had written. But I recall I felt warm, like somehow memories could be wordless sounds. No need for explanations – just listen. So cast off your wellies, my dears, and don your sandals over your socks. Here’s to turning left at every junction. Because it’s springtime in Ukee. And I love you. I love you I love you.