the tail wagging the dog

I woke up the other day and I was thinking about the word yearn.  And while I was thinking about it, I tried to think of its opposite.  And still being still asleep or something I thought of nraey, which I thought odd.  A sort Chaucerian word it seems to me, out of The Pardoner or maybe The Miller.

And not waking properly I thought oh my god, I promised myself I would read the original in Chaucer's native tounge with all its quaint misspellings and such, and I had to laugh at that idiocy, and that helped a tiny bit, nudging me toward wakefulness.  At least I could see light at the end of the tunnel somewhere off in the distance.

And I remembered that I did read Chaucer in the original, except that I couldn't remember how it felt while I was reading it.  And speaking of that the opposite of a word is not the word spelled backward.

Why did I do that and what is yearn as a word?  Certainly it is too thin to be able to pick it up, it'd just fall apart in your hands, and why don't I use that word every day?

These thoughts as I like to call them were firing away in my head in a real uptempo, and there were zillions of them coming toward me fast, and I was amazed I could remember any of this at all, carefully laying words out on a cloth to dry, looking at them to find its antonym.

Nowhere so busy a man as he than he, and yet he seemed busier than he was.  Geoffrey Chaucer

whimper

This piece I remember, and just found again after 40 years.  I don't understand a word of it, not a word, yet maybe I will after I write it out here:

I used to believe in change and the power of movement.  Dynamics are dead, a thing of the past.  One's senses are frozen to the ice and endlessly assaulted by noise.  Silence, the musician's dream.  Chained and bound, empathy an empty tomb a castrated child.  Whimpering, crying out for a place to rest and a body to climb in it.  Take me Poseidon and bless me.

Chained to a rock, each day the vultures come to eat out my heart and liver.  Friends, lovers, companions.  You desire one and must have more, constantly more.  Your body, where the heart used to pump precious life -now become an abyss to soak in more and more, the tiny things are mountains ripping apart your small body struggling to get inside.  I am chosen, god has called, and it is done.  He calls not from power or from change no he whispers in my ear -My son, it is done.  The change is done in only one action, one futile act.  Giving myself fully to the moment, the great work of eternity, a non-movement.  All music comes from death, all music is death Poseisdon. 

I am weak and my body trembles.  Can a man, myself waiting slowly toward the sound and tone.  Undulations that are a sustained note, a one color symphony.  I can understand her getting upset, but gee, I get nervous not having people to talk to...laughter.   Fast and ludicrous!  A foot step the one foot shuffle.

Well, it just goes on and on.  I have no idea exactly what it is or what it means.  I only know it was precious to me, a secret letter.  I guess at some point, each of us contains that passion to create something, to explain something not even understood.

Strange futures and good humor

The future is already here.  It's just not evenly distributed.  -William Gibson

The work of the eyes is done.

Go now and do the heartwork

On the images imprisoned within you.  -Rainer Maria Rilke

The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens. -Rilke

He reproduced himself with so much humble objectivity, with the unquestioning, matter of fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks:  there is another dog. -Rilke

Who has not sat before his own heart's curtain?  It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart.  -Rilke

Lewis CS & Norman

It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird:  it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg.  We are like eggs at present.  And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary decent egg.  We must be hatched or go bad. -C.S. Lewis

We all want progress, but if you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road;  in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive. -Lewis

 

Experience:  that most brutal of teachers.  But you learn, my God do you learn. -Lewis

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it.  -it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.  -Lewis

I'm looking for the people who have always been there and belong to the places they live.  The others I do not wish to see. -Norman Lewis

Seth

My son spent all day at Delmark records doing recording of a song his band has.  It's a cool place in a sort of unannounced spot on Rockwell.  Been there since 1953.

Original Hammond B3...they got it from Chess Records...and how cool is that!

Some 8 track recording gear, also courtesy of Chess...

 My son and Steve who's putting the touches on the recording...