February - My Thirty Eighth Birthday bonus post.

　

I keep asking
to whose benefit?

for whom do I work? Day in the field, and night at the drawing board
scheming plans and plotting perfection

plotting my downfall

striving for peace, I fight for air
in the smoke of my catcha-fire
I smoke and catch fire
and all the right words come out
and I play all the right notes
and I neva missa beat
and when I am alone
its just me and you - the one without a reflection
the one whose shadow stretches long from my feet to the sunlit horizon
and these questions of benefit, of utility and gain

...well, they all go away.

Though the cost exceeds the profit
though the demands exceed my capacity
though day after day, hour upon hour I am taken from my family
and made to kneel upon the altar of music

I cannot reverse my fortune and reject the gift I am given
You who have no reflection in the room of mirrors
you whose voice is silent
whose face is hidden
whose shadow stretches long towards the sun
I am bound to the destiny of your desire
I let my hands be guided by your hands
my voice by your voice
for in my silence
and stillness
you move me and all is well with the world
even if only
for today.

　

***

Some thoughts on time...(tick, tock, tick, tock...)

　

Tempo (Tempos, Tempi): Funeral March, Slow March, Street Walk, Quick Step, Double Time, Rushing, Largo, Meno Mosso, Andante, Adagio, Allegro, Alegretto, Presto, the unfixed Rubato...

Tempo CAN be described as a number of beats per minute, but this mathematical approach lacks feeling for me. I prefer to use my imagination, and set tempos in relation to the natural rhythms of my body. Starting with my heartbeat, I try to trace a line between it's pace, and the pace of my footsteps as I walk. This is my central tempo, and faster or slower are measured in relationship to the speed of this cross rhythm.

Tempo: I have been drumming for seventeen years (so far...). I began with a pair of Indian Nagori drums, then I bought a Djembe, then another Djembe, and another Djembe, and then I got my first Darbuka, and a set of Doun Douns. It was around this time I was given my first harmonica. It's a bit of a blur now, but somewhere along the way I started playing Koncovka, Harmonium, Cajon and I also began to sing. Next came the Dulcimer, then the Setar, and Ukulele. Most recently I found a Xylophone and Glockenspiel in my basement that belong to my landlord, and after a bit of a clean up, I have been them playing frequently.

Tempo: How quickly did I pick up music? What tempo desribes the slow and steady gains of a life devoted to the study of music in it's broadest sense? And then I ask you, what impact must dance have made upon my musical learning? I have never studied dance, but for nearly a decade I have found my musical home among a dance community. I have studied their dance, and it has had a powerful influence on my music, it is an important facet of my study. The tempo of the dancer's footsteps now mingles with the rhythms of my hands.

How long should it have taken me to learn what I have learned? If pressed, could I even describe the network of knowledge and experience that I belong to? I have been teaching for about ten years now, and I haven't reached a place where I feel like I am covering the same material twice. Every day I find a new way to play Baladi, and a new way to teach it. Music is a different kind of knowledge, and the interconnected and cross disciplinary nature of its study makes defined goalposts of achievement very hard to pinpoint.

Now we get to the bones of the subject.

How long have you been playing music? Or Dancing? How long do you expect to continue to do so? Are you nearer the beginning of your song or the end? The ocean of knowledge has no floor, and the distances from continental shore to shore are so vast that even a lifetime spent sailing would not reveal the world to you. I have been playing music for seventeen years, I am currently thirty eight years old. I expect to continue playing music until my death. My grandfather recently died at ninety nine years old, so that's my benchmark. He was a clean living gentleman, never drank or smoked, and spent a great portion of his life aftter the war growing roses and playing golf. I am not such a healthy one as he, so lets knock fifteen years off his life and say that I might live to be eighty four.

So that leaves me...forty six more years of study.

A PhD is meant to take three to five years of study and writing.

Do you understand what I am getting at ?

What is the tempo of my life? At what rate does learning happen? It is easy to get caught up in disheartening thoughts of one's own shortcomings, but musical knowledge is not like any other kind of knowledge or skill. There is a blues singer named Muddy Waters (aka. McKinley Morganfield), who, born in 1913, began playing music at age 17 and recorded his first album at age 33. I have listened to songs he wrote on his very first album, songs about drinking and fighting and chasing after women, that he re-recorded in his later years. As a senior citizen, his mojo was working plenty good, and his later versions do not compare disfavourably with the originals. His skill did not diminish with age, it matured, it adapted, it grew as he grew. I am inspired by his music, and by the development of his style as a musician. He did not let age reduce him, rather he let time develop his style, as a photo might gradually become more visible in developing fluid. As he aged, his true nature only became more visible, and his music more beautiful.

What is the difference between young and old? Between ignorant and experienced? Are those two ideas really the polar opposite of each other? As my musical skill continues to develop, it is not an ascending graph of increasing complexity or technicality (although it includes such), it is also a deepening of subtlety, a softening of my youthful desire-bound passions, and a development of the relaxed, confident ease of playing that only comes from the self-centred assurety and trust in the beauty and wonder of my own creations. The years mature my skill, and the more beautiful I allow myself to become inside, the more magnificent and captivating my music becomes.

Tempo: Does one grow more beautiful with the passing of years, or do you only grow older? How does a mountain age? Or a river? Are we not made of the same atoms as the earth and even the stars? What is the tempo of the pulsing expansion of the universe? At what speed are the planets expected to develop? Is Mars behind schedule in the devlopment of living organisms? Are you lagging behind your own expected development as a musician? What harm do your expectations inflict upon you, when the outcomes do not match up to the illusion of your aspirations?

Does playing for hours every day really make you a better musician, or does it just make you better at playing your instrument? There is a difference, and it is one that should be considered very deeply. Are you moved by the songs and dances of your heart? Does this tide of feeling also move others to feel more deeply, as you feel more deeply for having moved them?

Where am I going with all this?

There is no rush. You cannot force your years to pass more quickly than the Earth's rotation demands. A day will always take a day to pass, and with musical skill so perfectly and harmoniously bound to one's own emotional development, it too cannot be rushed. You cannot halve the time it takes to bake a loaf of bread by doubling the tempertature of the oven.

So play today, play tomorrow and the day after, and if your progress seems slow, consider the speed of tectonic movement. Consider the speed of the planet you stand upon in its passage through space? Consider the speed with which an insect lives its life, or an elephant, or the Sun... Consider the rubato of your life, consider how the morning is gone in the blink of an eye, but the night goes on forever, how childhood seems eternal, while the hungry mouth of eternity swallows all living things. Consider how old age must too give way to an even greater age and how the beginning is so like the end...

Rushing, Double Time, Quick Step, Street Walk, Slow March, Funeral March. The frantic near panic waltz of birth, the limping gypsy crooked circle dance of youth and adulthood...rubato...my hands move quick but my heart beats slow. Rubato, my thoughts are like lightning while the speed at which I read the book kept at my bedside is a crawling caterpillar, languid and unafraid. Rubato...the controlled flexibility of tempo by which notes are deprived of their length by slight quickening, or given more by slight slowing...

How like love, like tenderness, like the waves of passion we rise and fall upon, floating as leaves upon the wind, as driftwood upon the ocean, as notes upon the string and the beating of our hearts.

D-Doum, D-Doum, D-Doum...

(As an addendum, I thought I might add a little piece of writing from one of my favourite Podast authors, Joseph Fink. This is from the serial fiction 'Alice Isn't Dead'. At the end of each episode, the author tells a 'Why did the chicken cross the road' joke, but the answers are not what you expect. The following is from Chapter seven, season one.)

Alice Isn't Dead can be found at Aliceisntdead.com

　
"Why did the chicken cross the road? Because time moves so slowly, doesn’t it? Only sometimes it moves so fast. Some days the morning is done by nine, some afternoons linger long after sunset. "What time is it?" you’ll ask. "What time is it?" you’ll ask over and over for years, a repetition of thousands throughout your life. What time is it? What time is it? Time moves so slowly, doesn’t it? Only sometimes it moves so fast. But it was only just morning! But I only just had lunch! Is it evening already? When will the morning come again? When will the morning come again? It’s been so dark. So dark, for so long. When will the morning come again? Time moves so slowly, doesn’t it? Only sometimes it moves so fast. And that is why the chicken crossed the road."




***

A limping, stepping, skipping game,
a blindfold race through centuries
through cities bright and cities dark
through lives our own and loves home grown

a skipping, stepping, limping game,
a blindfold race through time
and in my hand a glass of wine
and I salute the crooked ways
the messy, broken, wayward days
of youth and age and even sleep always

just a limping, skipping, stepping dance
a blindfold chase
through cities bright and cities dark
and when the dawn-birds sing and hark
the coming day
the unknown way
the skipping, stepping, blindfold limping,
crying, singing, fighting, winning and all the ways
we keep on trying,
to play the two against the one
to dance the moon against the sun
but we will find out one by one
by three by six by nine,
the skipping, stepping, tripping, falling
and the ever present,
rising up again
that is the song of all our pain

and laughter.

***

Oh how heartbreak seems the constant companion
of love
that we who love are cursed
and blessed
by the pain of such
delicacies
as to abandon our minds at the first sight of love
and sink willingly into the heartbreak
that is being Known by the Other.

How we break, are broken, and are remade
all by the same force that seems to cause
the heavens to turn and the rains to fall.

We are the earth that rain falls upon
We are the space through which the heavens soar

Oh heartbreak!
Oh love's most bounteous gift
Take Heed! 

For this heartbreak is unlike any other you will know,
or have known.

Stand ready as the night inside you
is pulled apart by the fingers of the sun who will
not be denied its pleasure in you.

***

Review of 'The Wordsmith's Cats', an Ink Pot Theatre production.


The laughter of children is the most valuable resource in the world. So valuable it cannot be spent, cannot be stored or saved, cannot be traded for anything other than the future.

The future.

How present the future is in the present. All our stories written now, as we tell them now, as they become the past, they write the possibilities of the future into the children of our children. The Myths of our past have become the myths of the present, and the fables of the future have their origins in our time.

Our Time.

Did you know that this is our time? The promised, prophesied era in which all our actions mean something? All our lives have the promise of change, the future is unwritten for us, destiny undetermined. We live in a time and place where the laughter of children is commonplace, where the games, songs and culture of the very young thrive, well fed by a diversity of literature, film, music, theatre, dance and technology.

To participate in these things is to participate in culture, and thereby to stand hand in hand with our past and future.

All this I say, because I do not quite yet know how to begin speaking about The Wordsmith's Cats. How do I?, how can I?, how dare I?, an adult, even speak on the topic, without trampling the flower laden earth of their wonder and imagination with my ignorance and amnesia of the reality of a child's ability to believe in fantasy.

I will tell you what I saw.

　

Our first performance, in the sunlit gym at Trinity Gardens School. As we run through some scenes before the show, school children at lunch watched us through the wall of glass doors, their handprints smeared oily and earthy across the transparent barrier separating us, their faces pressed against the glass, their noses pressed against the glass. First one child, then two, then I look up again and the entire entrance is crowded with their wrapt attentive faces, some sitting, some standing, pushing against each other to get a better view of the leaping and caterwauling vultures rehearsing their scene on the mountaintop stage set.

In the huge steel cavern of the gym, the reverberations of sound are disorienting, sounds are swallowed in unusual ways, and sent echoing in others, sometimes laughter bouncing from an unexpected direction. Everything seems loud, my drums, the mandolin, the school bell. The clonk and scrape of wooden props placed upon the stage are booming, while the sometimes frail, sometime shy, sometime brave and noble voices of the children strive to rise above the tumble and rumble and mumble of the audience, seated enmass before them on the floor.

Two hundred children seated crosslegged on the floor, worshipful, gazing with utter belief at the cast of costumed children playing games upon the stage, play pretend, play for keeps, play for real, for pleasure, for life, for fun and laughing, leaping crazy joy, dressed as hyenas wooping and rolling in the mud, dancing and clapping in unison, a tribal line dance with slapping clapping hands and stomping feet.

Then the next day, we play again in the Living Arts Centre at the Mt Barker Waldorf School. The theatre is as different from the gym as the ocean is from the land. Every sound is precice, a word on one side of the stage is heard as if spoken into my ear on the far side. The music is crisp and clear and the softest brush of my cymbals is a gentle breeze breathed into the listening awareness of every audience member. The choir of childrens voices rise in an imperfect, perfect harmony, proud, confident, in love with the songs they sing. Beside me, Joanne Sarre, director, writer, and manager of the whole company, and her lifetime friend, Paul Cleaver, musician and composer, lead the chorus, their voices strong and proud and full of the love that a lifetime of music fills a person with.

Before the play starts, the whole cast and crew stand hand in hand in a circle, our faces, our bodies, it seems that our very souls are illuminated by the stage lights, and to my right there are two girls whose faces are painted feline, in their full, furry costumes and I look at them and even I, from my crooked, stony, lofty vantage of age three times their own, I forget my reason and rational adult thinking and I believe in them, as a child believes in the fantasy of their own imaginations. I look around me at all the faces in the circle, at the evil sorcerer and the blue faced Wordsmith, the questing heroine in her floral skirt, the boy made mute by malevolent magic, the vultures and hyenas and black clad stage manager, and there at the centre of all our attention stands the ever blossoming flower, the ever youthful and springtime faith priestess of our collective endeavour...Joanne. She who believes in us, she who gave us all our roles, she who called us to our calling, to our place in the circle. She does not stand upon a pyramid, master of a company of servants, she, like the Tao, leads us from within.

This is our final performance, and as the theatre fills and the lights dim and a hush settles dusk-like upon the room, I can feel the trickling well of sadness begin to fill up inside me. This is the last time I shall witness this. These children who believed in themselves enough to make magic real, and to make adults and children alike believe as they do, that in the play-pretend of theatre we are taken from the humdrum mundanity of the 'real' world (whatever that means), and for a time, seated in the glowing darkness of the theatre, we dwell in the realm of spirits.

Everything that is real, was first imagined.

We once dwelt in caves, and in the flickering shadows of our campfires we imagined the magic of humanity into reality, and painted our power upon the rough stone walls of our ancestral homes.

The theatre is that cave. We are those ancestors, listening to that first story of stories being told, and in the shadow shapes of our hands, we puppeted our imaginations into a future in which our children laugh and play in a sunlit paradise. Where they learn of the mighty achievements of our forebears in schools we built for their benefit, so that their children might also learn, and build upon the achievements of our imaginations, and our courage to see those dreams made real.

But as beautiful a poem as I might write to tell you of this magnificent play, as wondrous a description as I might craft from words, it is a monochrome and flat stencil sprayed upon the page when compared with the reality of the things that I have seen. The full chromatic spectrum of light that becomes visible when we admit the absolute necessity of beauty as a virtue, is a glimmering rainbow shining forever amidst the grim gloom of human history.

So I say to you this. Go into the world seeking this beauty, making this beauty, believing that it is real, achievable and necessary. Cultivate this beauty with your words and your actions. Make your love real and remeber that the laughter of children is the most valuable resource in the world. So valuable it cannot be spent, cannot be stored or saved, cannot be traded for anything other than the future.

Your future, their future, our future.

　

　

January - February 2018

　

I wonder if I am real.

I stand in the room of mirrors and I ask the monk in grey.


Am I real?
He says yes, but I wonder about him sometimes. He lives in my imagination after all, so perhaps his opinion is not to be credited with truth, but the Buddha once told me not to downplay the importance of the imagination. It is after all the origin of all real things.

I am a creature of my own imagination. I imagine myself to be a musician, a father, a husband, a friend, a gardener, a writer....all these seem real enough, but I have fooled myself in the past, so I am uneasy with assigning reality to any of my own ideas about who, or what I am.

The way people look at me often makes me very uncomfortable. They are looking at something that is real, but I can never tell exactly what they are seeing. I wonder, what am I to them? If I can convince myself of things untrue, then can I also convince other of these same fantasies? If so, then do my friends see anything real when they look at me, or have they the power to pierce the veil of my illusions and see something of me that even I am unaware of?

My secrets have secrets, as they say.

I wonder, does the monk in grey also have a room of mirrors, and does he go there to see a monk in white ? What do my dreams dream of ? Or am I simply mad, imagining agency and intelligence to etheric phantoms of my mind?

Just how powerful is the imagination? It seems a matter of life and death sometimes. Other times I dig my shovel into the warm soil of the garden, planting bulbs for the coming spring and the imagination seems as powerless as a gentle breeze. It seems irrelevant to a reality that does not care for monks in grey or needle toothed demons. The dirt beneath my fingernails and the rough texture of my labourer's hands might be the only thing in all the world I can truly believe is real.

A performer's life weaves fantasy into reality, but the blurred lines between the two are porous, and flexible. Perhaps, the barrier separating fantasy from reality is in itself, unreal. Maybe my hands, dirty from the day, are the gate through which my imagination enters reality, and their quiet dance upon the keyboard grants me this power to share my wonder, and my wanderings, with you.

　

***

The dancer is more real than the room she dances in
the colours of her spinning skirt bleed ink-like across the air
painting the room

her movements become the conversation of our silence
as we who watch, see the reflections of our own thoughts and feelings
mirrored in her expressions,

in the twisting and turning of her hips and hands and
the skin of her tattooed belly
and the fully clothed nakedness of her uninhibited movement
embarassing us in our own inhibited stillness

we cannot look away, we cannot help but look away

her beauty is too real to admit
more real than the room she dances in
the colours of her spinning skirt splash ink-like across the air
the dancer shames us with her shamelessness.

Like a child whose laughter is too bright
our old hearts break at the sound of such liberty
and we remeber a time when we,
maybe,
were that free.

***

I saw a Raven on the side of the road, down near the old stone bridge on the edge of town. I saw a Raven with a Rat in it's beak.

I saw Three White Herons overhead.

The lake at sunset.

At home I saw sunlight gleaming off a knife edge, painting white the wooden chopping board, and right beside it, the shadow painting black the same.

I heard the story of creation, as told to me by my eight year old son. Spirits who made the sky, the crust of the earth and the core. Spirits who made life, and another who made death, so that everyone would get a chance to rest.

My wineglass, filled and filled again, I overflow.

What is the difference between magic and reality?

Is that even the right question?

I saw the soldier with his head hung low, and the lady with her heart hid behind keys. I saw the Raven with a Rat in its beak. I saw Three White Herons, the lake at sunset. I heard the story of creation, and I tell myself, All these things are connected.

　

*

In the faces of children I see the story of the future. Their ideas, attitudes and experiences will inform their actions, which will echo through time as they too become history, and the future can be divined in the eyes of their next generation.

I saw one of my drum students today, a boy one third my age. He looked up at me and every white whisker in my beard, every sunwarmed line upon my face suddenly became visible to me through his eyes.

Yesterday I was not old, but today I am, and it is new and exciting to discover this. The problems of my youth are no longer my problems, the goals, desires and methods of my youth are passed, and today, in a renaissance of self, I laughed. How wonderful it is to be something new!

At last! At last I am not young. Marvelous! I can let go those troubles of my past that troubled me still, and look forward to new troubles, new challenges. Hell, a new way to sing the blues. Every door seems open again, as if somehow I am no longer the product of my past, but of my future. My future decisions will make me. My past decisions have done everything they can to make me what I am, but now it is my future that I will rely upon to inform me. I can already feel it pulling me, my future decisions being made, and their consequences rippling back.

I am typing in the kitchen, golden sunset light stencilling fern shadows on the walls, and all around me the sound of a breathing world, ready to be received.

***

　

In the late evening I sit down to play Setar and immediately a melody comes out, unheard of, played by someone with hands far more confident than mine. I am startled but I do not scare them away, I sit and let them guide my hands. There is someone inside me that doesn't share my insecurites, doubts, or fears. He plays so beautifully, so instinctively that I find myself listening to his song, but it is I who am being played.

Later, I look around in the room of mirrors, but I cannot find him there.

　

***

　

A sunset lake reflection,
a Sacred Ibis, a Black Winged Ibis, a Grey Heron, and an Egret upon the shore
A flock of Wood Ducks upon the water

The ache begins in the afternoon, an arthritic swelling of the senses,
a feeling of tension, inflexible
and by the morning
heartbreak has covered me.

A dead fox on the roadside
stretched out in the summer heat
its carnivorous beauty broken against the steel of human genius

Two Fairy Wrens playing in the shade as I sit beneath a tree
my stomach a sailors knot
the unruffled skies an affront to the storm in my tea cup

Oh how I want to feel good,
to be unburdened by the barbed wire and electric tape of the past
but it seems that growing up, and growing old and
growing out of these old clothes
takes more than good will
more than poetry
more than intentions and inventions and the genius of steel

For the carnivorous hunger of the the past does not lay broken by the roadside
does not fall discarded by the wayside
does not let go when we let go
but returns to us everyday
in every thought, borrowed or bought
commanding us to stay the same
to stay the course
to see it through
to hold on to fear though afloat with love we soar through an unruffled sky that seems an affront to the fireworks of our passion
　
A Plum Tree grown curled and cuddling against the monolith of a Red Gum

A conversation with an old friend, and cups of coffee between us mend
the swelling of the senses
the inflexible morning
and the heartbreak covering me

I pick my son up from school
with a harmonica in my pocket
and a book in my hand.

　

***

The floorboards greak and squin,
barefoot chilldrins dance and sing upon the
soarboards of the stage,
and even in the even light of a rehearsal,
the ordinary world is

lost

on

us

as a butterfly enters downstage right,
emerging irridescent from behind black curtains,
and floating upon an invisible breath so delicate
it feels like being underwater

so I hold my breath and watch.

I see it bubble hopping above the children
I see them, see the butterfly
and then, as if sunshine could be poured from a cup,
the room thus emblazoned
joy and wonder
　

the butterfly

flew over me

　

***

　

The boy drummer,
momentarilly distracted by the cricket crawling across the floor towards him
slips with sudden ease into the rhythm
which has
up until now been inconsistent
and
sometimes

fal

ter

ing

but which for a distracted moment
becomes itself completely
and forms a bond so utterly
to the harmonium song beside it
that the two are one and the song uplifted
and the father glances to his right
at the hands of his boy drummer
and the father smiles and plays and sings a little stronger
and when he stops and asks if they may play a little longer
we sigh, we swoon though seated
and then we cry out
for more.

***

Thank you
for considering my skill
a resource
of value
even if
it is only of value
to you.

***