Thursday, July 22, 2010
warm up!
my itunes bumped into this gem on shuffle, can´t stop dancing to it. it´s bliss when something magically possesses your itunes shuffle and reads the exact mood you´re in.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
sin fi (n) sico sonido
(read letters in size 16 as a poem to: _______________ )
(michell halley)
Inhabits, before predation,
the madness of a perpetual sunrise:
time.
Lives before space, from beginning,
where start and finish,
aren´t more than juxtaposed masks between the imaginary and reality.
What would be of solitary space, without a container,
ante saecula
where time is time without name
and the new
what differs from habit.
What is being in idea, but an infinite absolute that discovers,
_______________________,
(the empty mirror)
as the only creative possibility.
Weft, plot,
Being before the first breath (where everything makes sense).
They´ve said of air,
the same as origin,
one never knows where it begins
(one never knows where it begins) squared.
Ignores, like the sky,
the distressed sound emitted by time.
that´s why perfect maintains,
the non physical oscillating in a continous melodic movement,
undulating eternally,
like sound,
delaying time in a without something,
in the nihilistic field where everything coexists,
where no one claims connection
living expended on unknowing in all instance
and once in a while,
returning our eyes into the forgotten...
by dea arjona
this poem was written for me about a year ago by one of my best friends, i had to translate it today for some work i was doing, and hadn´t read it again since then, it stirred something in me i´m still trying to figure out. the answer is right around the corner i believe.
(michell halley)
Inhabits, before predation,
the madness of a perpetual sunrise:
time.
Lives before space, from beginning,
where start and finish,
aren´t more than juxtaposed masks between the imaginary and reality.
What would be of solitary space, without a container,
ante saecula
where time is time without name
and the new
what differs from habit.
What is being in idea, but an infinite absolute that discovers,
_______________________,
(the empty mirror)
as the only creative possibility.
Weft, plot,
Being before the first breath (where everything makes sense).
They´ve said of air,
the same as origin,
one never knows where it begins
(one never knows where it begins) squared.
Ignores, like the sky,
the distressed sound emitted by time.
that´s why perfect maintains,
the non physical oscillating in a continous melodic movement,
undulating eternally,
like sound,
delaying time in a without something,
in the nihilistic field where everything coexists,
where no one claims connection
living expended on unknowing in all instance
and once in a while,
returning our eyes into the forgotten...
by dea arjona
this poem was written for me about a year ago by one of my best friends, i had to translate it today for some work i was doing, and hadn´t read it again since then, it stirred something in me i´m still trying to figure out. the answer is right around the corner i believe.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
"a beautiful sunset that was mistaken for dawn."
All people come to music to seek oblivion.
The music I desire must be supple enough to adapt itself to the lyrical effusions of the soul and the fantasy of dreams.
I confess that I am no longer thinking in musical terms, or at least not much, even though I believe with all my heart that Music remains for all time the finest means of expression we have. It’s just that I find the actual pieces — whether they’re old or modern, which is in any case merely a matter of dates — so totally poverty-stricken, manifesting an inability to see beyond the work table. They smell of the lamp, not of the sun. And then, overshadowing everything, there’s the desire to amaze one’s colleagues with arresting harmonies, quite unnecessary for the most part. In short, these days especially, music is devoid of emotional impact. I feel that, without descending to the level of the gossip column or the novel, it should be possible to solve the problem somehow. There’s no need either for music to make people think! ... It would be enough if music could make people listen, despite themselves and despite their petty mundane troubles, and never mind if they’re incapable of expressing anything resembling an opinion. It would be enough if they could no longer recognize their own grey, dull faces, if they felt that for a moment they had been dreaming of an imaginary country, that’s to say, one that can’t be found on the map.
How much has to be explored and discarded before reaching the naked flesh of feeling?
music is the space between the notes.
claude debussy.
The music I desire must be supple enough to adapt itself to the lyrical effusions of the soul and the fantasy of dreams.
I confess that I am no longer thinking in musical terms, or at least not much, even though I believe with all my heart that Music remains for all time the finest means of expression we have. It’s just that I find the actual pieces — whether they’re old or modern, which is in any case merely a matter of dates — so totally poverty-stricken, manifesting an inability to see beyond the work table. They smell of the lamp, not of the sun. And then, overshadowing everything, there’s the desire to amaze one’s colleagues with arresting harmonies, quite unnecessary for the most part. In short, these days especially, music is devoid of emotional impact. I feel that, without descending to the level of the gossip column or the novel, it should be possible to solve the problem somehow. There’s no need either for music to make people think! ... It would be enough if music could make people listen, despite themselves and despite their petty mundane troubles, and never mind if they’re incapable of expressing anything resembling an opinion. It would be enough if they could no longer recognize their own grey, dull faces, if they felt that for a moment they had been dreaming of an imaginary country, that’s to say, one that can’t be found on the map.
How much has to be explored and discarded before reaching the naked flesh of feeling?
music is the space between the notes.
claude debussy.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
ready to start
i can hardly take all this anticipation lingering around the new arcade fire album, in the meantime i´ve had a couple of songs to keep me company. win butler does seem to want to weave this fiber of not wanting to look back, but at the same time, nostalgia, sadness, and anger inevitably leak through.
one of the favorites.
one of the favorites.
Monday, July 12, 2010
solitude is bliss
if the non-stop rain our city has given us over the past couple of days makes a little room for sun, this is what summer would sound like.
canyons via tortoiseshell.
pre-sunshine bonus. 4:22, just enough for the clouds to pass by.
it´s official, i´m moving to australia.
canyons via tortoiseshell.
pre-sunshine bonus. 4:22, just enough for the clouds to pass by.
it´s official, i´m moving to australia.
Saturday, July 10, 2010
blind
third eye blind was one of those bands that changed my life. 97´ blasting "loosing a whole year" while my parents were getting divorced. of course i had no clue exactly what they were singing about, or what i was singing along to, but it felt good. this also happened to be the first time i fell in love, it was love at first sight and love to mend my broken heart. he had long hair, wore vans, he kissed me and the world dissolved. he gave me a necklace that i clutched tight every night. he moved to canada, i moved to cuernavaca, and i never saw him again.
third eye blind soundtracked.
third eye blind soundtracked.
Monday, July 5, 2010
awake?
i find it odd how certain things seem to fall back into ones hands sometimes. hermann
hesse´s, "the glass bead game" is one of those things... every letter i´ve read and reread has given me some sort of directing hint into this game of unending search for "meaning", "identity", & "truth"... if we could call these such.
below some excerpts/
The game as I conceive it," Knecht once wrote, "leaves (the player) with the feeling that he has extracted from the universe of accident and confusion a totally symmetrical and harmonious cosmos, and absorbed it into himself."
"If only there were a dogma to believe in. Everything is contradictary, everything tangential; there are no certainties anywhere. Everything can be interpreted one way and then again interpreted in the opposite sense. The whole of history can be explained as development and progress and can also be seen as nothing but decadence and meaninglessness. Isn't there any truth? Is there no real and valid doctrine?"
The Master had never heard him speak so fervently. He walked on in silence for a little, then said, "There is truth, my boy. But the doctrine you desire, absolute, perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend. Rather, you should long for the perfection of yourself. The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught. Be prepared for conflicts, Joseph Knecht — I can see they have already begun."
Granted there are those among us who are too easily satisfied, who enjoy a sham serenity; but in contrast to them we also have men and generations of men whose serenity is not playful shallowness, but earnest depth. I knew one such man -- I mean our former Music Master, whom you used to see in Waldzell now and then. In the last years of his life this man possessed the virtue of serenity to such a degree that it radiated from him like the light from a star; so much that it was transmitted to all in the form of benevolence, enjoyment of life, good humor, trust, and confidence. It continued to radiate outward from all who received it, all who had absorbed its brightness. His light shone upon me also; he transmitted to me a little of his radiance, a little of the brightness in his heart, and to our friend Ferromonte as well, and a good many others. To achieve this cheerful serenity is to me, and to many others, the finest and highest of goals. You will also find it among some of the patriarchs in the directorate of the Order. Such cheerfulness is neither frivolity nor complacency; it is supreme insight and love, affirmation of all reality, alertness on the brink of all depths and abysses; it is a virtue of saints and of knights; it is indestructible and only increases with age and nearness to death. It is the secret of beauty and the real substance of all art. The poet who praises the splendors and terrors of life in the dance-measures of his verse, the musician who sounds them in a pure, eternal present -- these are bringers of light, increasers of joy and brightness on earth, even if they lead us first through tears and stress. Perhaps the poet whose verses gladden us was a sad solitary, and the musician a melancholic dreamer; but even so their work shares in the cheerful serenity of the gods and the stars. What they give us is no longer their darkness, their suffering or fears, but a drop of pure light, eternal cheerfulness. Even though whole peoples and languages have attempted to fathom the depths of the universe in myths, cosmogonies, and religions, their supreme, their ultimate attainment has been this cheerfulness.
More and more, during this period of slow breaking loose and bidding farewell, he came to see the real reason for his alienation and desire to escape. It was probably not, he thought, his knowledge of the dangers to Castalia and his anxiety about her future, but simply that a hitherto idle and empty part of his self, of his heart and soul, was now demanding the right to fulfill itself.
... had he not considered his own special kind of perception -- that way of experiencing reality which he called "awakening" -- as a slow, step-by-step penetration into the heart of the universe, into the core of truth; as something in itself absolute, a continuous path or progression which nevertheless had to be achieved gradually...
Thus his path had been a circle, or an ellipse or spiral or whatever, but certainly not straight; straight lines evidently belonged only to geometry, not to nature and life.
"Awakening," it seemed, was not so much concerned with truth and cognition, but with experiencing and proving oneself in the real world. When you had such an awakening, you did not penetrate any closer to the core of things, to truth; you grasped, accomplished, or endured only the attitude of your own ego to the momentary situation. You did not find laws, but came to decisions; you did not thrust your way into the center of the world, but into the center of your own individuality.
What gives these experiences their weight and persuasiveness is not their truth, their sublime origin, their divinity or anything of the sort, but their reality. They are tremendously real, somewhat the way a violent physical pain or a surprising natural event, a storm or earthquake, seem to us charged with an entirely different sort of reality, presence, inexorability, from ordinary times and conditions. The gust of wind that precedes a thunderstorm, sending us into the house and almost wrenching the front door away from our hand -- or a bad toothache which seems to concentrate all the tensions, sufferings, and conflicts of the world in our jaw -- these are such realities. Later on we may start to question them or examine their significance, if that is our bent; but at the moment they happen they admit no doubts and are brimful of reality. My 'awakening' has a similar kind of intensified reality for me. That is why I have given it this name; at such times I really feel as if I had lain asleep or half asleep for a long time, but am now awake and clearheaded and receptive in a way I never am ordinarily.
My life, I resolved, ought to be a perpetual transcending, a progression from stage to stage; I wanted it to pass through one area after the next, leaving each behind, as music moves on from theme to theme, from tempo to tempo, playing each out to the end, completing each and leaving it behind, never tiring, never sleeping, forever wakeful, forever in the present. In connection with the experiences of awakening, I had noticed that such stages and such areas exist, and that each successive period in one's life bears within itself, as it is approaching its end, a note of fading and eagerness for death. That in turn leads to a shifting to a new area, to awakening and new beginnings.
hesse´s, "the glass bead game" is one of those things... every letter i´ve read and reread has given me some sort of directing hint into this game of unending search for "meaning", "identity", & "truth"... if we could call these such.
below some excerpts/
The game as I conceive it," Knecht once wrote, "leaves (the player) with the feeling that he has extracted from the universe of accident and confusion a totally symmetrical and harmonious cosmos, and absorbed it into himself."
"If only there were a dogma to believe in. Everything is contradictary, everything tangential; there are no certainties anywhere. Everything can be interpreted one way and then again interpreted in the opposite sense. The whole of history can be explained as development and progress and can also be seen as nothing but decadence and meaninglessness. Isn't there any truth? Is there no real and valid doctrine?"
The Master had never heard him speak so fervently. He walked on in silence for a little, then said, "There is truth, my boy. But the doctrine you desire, absolute, perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend. Rather, you should long for the perfection of yourself. The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught. Be prepared for conflicts, Joseph Knecht — I can see they have already begun."
Granted there are those among us who are too easily satisfied, who enjoy a sham serenity; but in contrast to them we also have men and generations of men whose serenity is not playful shallowness, but earnest depth. I knew one such man -- I mean our former Music Master, whom you used to see in Waldzell now and then. In the last years of his life this man possessed the virtue of serenity to such a degree that it radiated from him like the light from a star; so much that it was transmitted to all in the form of benevolence, enjoyment of life, good humor, trust, and confidence. It continued to radiate outward from all who received it, all who had absorbed its brightness. His light shone upon me also; he transmitted to me a little of his radiance, a little of the brightness in his heart, and to our friend Ferromonte as well, and a good many others. To achieve this cheerful serenity is to me, and to many others, the finest and highest of goals. You will also find it among some of the patriarchs in the directorate of the Order. Such cheerfulness is neither frivolity nor complacency; it is supreme insight and love, affirmation of all reality, alertness on the brink of all depths and abysses; it is a virtue of saints and of knights; it is indestructible and only increases with age and nearness to death. It is the secret of beauty and the real substance of all art. The poet who praises the splendors and terrors of life in the dance-measures of his verse, the musician who sounds them in a pure, eternal present -- these are bringers of light, increasers of joy and brightness on earth, even if they lead us first through tears and stress. Perhaps the poet whose verses gladden us was a sad solitary, and the musician a melancholic dreamer; but even so their work shares in the cheerful serenity of the gods and the stars. What they give us is no longer their darkness, their suffering or fears, but a drop of pure light, eternal cheerfulness. Even though whole peoples and languages have attempted to fathom the depths of the universe in myths, cosmogonies, and religions, their supreme, their ultimate attainment has been this cheerfulness.
More and more, during this period of slow breaking loose and bidding farewell, he came to see the real reason for his alienation and desire to escape. It was probably not, he thought, his knowledge of the dangers to Castalia and his anxiety about her future, but simply that a hitherto idle and empty part of his self, of his heart and soul, was now demanding the right to fulfill itself.
... had he not considered his own special kind of perception -- that way of experiencing reality which he called "awakening" -- as a slow, step-by-step penetration into the heart of the universe, into the core of truth; as something in itself absolute, a continuous path or progression which nevertheless had to be achieved gradually...
Thus his path had been a circle, or an ellipse or spiral or whatever, but certainly not straight; straight lines evidently belonged only to geometry, not to nature and life.
"Awakening," it seemed, was not so much concerned with truth and cognition, but with experiencing and proving oneself in the real world. When you had such an awakening, you did not penetrate any closer to the core of things, to truth; you grasped, accomplished, or endured only the attitude of your own ego to the momentary situation. You did not find laws, but came to decisions; you did not thrust your way into the center of the world, but into the center of your own individuality.
What gives these experiences their weight and persuasiveness is not their truth, their sublime origin, their divinity or anything of the sort, but their reality. They are tremendously real, somewhat the way a violent physical pain or a surprising natural event, a storm or earthquake, seem to us charged with an entirely different sort of reality, presence, inexorability, from ordinary times and conditions. The gust of wind that precedes a thunderstorm, sending us into the house and almost wrenching the front door away from our hand -- or a bad toothache which seems to concentrate all the tensions, sufferings, and conflicts of the world in our jaw -- these are such realities. Later on we may start to question them or examine their significance, if that is our bent; but at the moment they happen they admit no doubts and are brimful of reality. My 'awakening' has a similar kind of intensified reality for me. That is why I have given it this name; at such times I really feel as if I had lain asleep or half asleep for a long time, but am now awake and clearheaded and receptive in a way I never am ordinarily.
My life, I resolved, ought to be a perpetual transcending, a progression from stage to stage; I wanted it to pass through one area after the next, leaving each behind, as music moves on from theme to theme, from tempo to tempo, playing each out to the end, completing each and leaving it behind, never tiring, never sleeping, forever wakeful, forever in the present. In connection with the experiences of awakening, I had noticed that such stages and such areas exist, and that each successive period in one's life bears within itself, as it is approaching its end, a note of fading and eagerness for death. That in turn leads to a shifting to a new area, to awakening and new beginnings.
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