I do hate software upgrade days, using VersionTracker. There can be lots to check out and usually install, it takes ages, then you have to clean up the Mac afterwards. I don't knock the poor developers, churning out one new, often better version after another. It must be like housework sometimes: you think you're done, but have to start again, getting ever better.
Rare is the musician with the gift a friend, Jean-Paul, voiced over lunch today in the Canteen. "Sometimes," he said, "you just have to say 'Let go' and feel finished, complete, that will do."
I've no VoW for you today. All being well, tomorrow I'll write about a "new" one, far from finished but complete, scarcely known in Europe and too much of the world. It'll be a reintroduction: discovering this songwriter led to one of the strangest "meetings" of my life.
Where might 'broomqueesha' put her among the '5 Main Types of Female Singers' (Amazon US): that's some ambition. I can't be so true to "type", hence fun demolishing, visually or otherwise, the idea of types of women and sticking definitive labels on them or anybody else.
Occasionally, for doing this, I've been accused of playing with fire and worse.
A week ago my exhaustion was so deep I furthered a pyromaniac's reputation -- and a cheerful French misconception -- that caused much amusement at Le Bouquet.
I'd done masses of shopping, the bags were heavy. Between a supermarket stretch of street and remaining shops further up, I stumbled into the corner café downstairs, said "Double crême, please, I'll be back when I'm done, but leave this lot before my arms fall off."
I bought the rest, returned happy to see a saucer keeping a huge cup of coffee warm and said: "What's that smell of burning?"
Nobody answered. I shrugged and was on to a second big cup when my bar neighbour said "He's right, there is one. What is it?"
Everyone noticed before I did.
"British Airways, your bag's on fire."
So it was, oh merde, smouldering, very slowly but surely.
It was mostly the post. I pulled out the bills, made a dismal bid to extinguish envelopes by banging them on the counter and sending sparks everywhere before a mate had the sense to grab the lot and trample them underfoot.
The laughter got louder when Hugues, the barman who always calls me "British Airways", said: "Now we must blame you for Joan of Arc."
"Unfair," I protested, as usual. "We didn't burn her. We perfidious English merely betrayed her. You did the asphyxiation."
I've done much of what I hoped this week, except that stupidity briefly mentioned when writing up the last Voices of Women. When I told my friend of my interference, a furious reaction from somebody whose life I should've left alone cast doubt on my ability to understand other people. My friend said sarcastically maybe it came of the way I think sometimes I get right "into their heads."
That shook me, along with a pressing demand I think and explain my motives. To say more would turn this into a confessional, but it's bad part of a story. After the moments my wrondoing took, I knew it was no favour, more a betrayal. I was grinding an axe and dragged in someone else.
Yes, I had done a "head-trip" and with time on my own hands, I thought my friend might need some more.
Time.
You rarely can buy it for people, but it's weird stuff, time. Though I apologised and sought to make amends, I've not asked for forgiveness, since I believe forgiveness, just like love, works through people. You can't ask for either and nobody really knows where they come from.
I can't explain my motives, not entirely. Some of it defies analysis.
Long before this week began, I was thinking about a seraphim. Hers was the weirdest "head-trip" I've ever done, since it's "mind-blowing" and breaks almost all the rules I know.
I've really been thinking what to do: thought's a conscious process, however fleeting and fantastically fast. Anyone who's sceptical -- unlike the Shaman-Shrinkess who finished helping me last year -- about my odd "travels" may do better to stop reading, because I'm likely set to suspend disbelief and had to do it with my own.
For others -- those who know getting into people's heads just happens to me and always has, but I repressed the faculty until told I'm stuck with it, so better put it to good use -- I'd do well to say what does usually happen.
It isn't telepathy, no paranormal transfer of thoughts.
I've written how a clinical psychologist who's dealt with people like me says it's empathy, feeling with others and not just for them, but pushed beyond bounds. It occurs in extreme situations: post-trauma or conflict, states of shock, and, in my case, often such weariness lots of the "me" circuits in my brain switch off.
Empty-headed, I can go somewhere else and feel I am somebody else. I don't do it on purpose, it never lasts long but the insights linger, as some dreams do when you wake up and they bring their dimension to the day.
Until a few weeks back, I'd never done this with a stranger.
At work, it can be useful to be "in the head" of a journalist in a difficult position and on the phone: that's probably part of it, I don't waste time with questions if I "know" the needs straight away. People's ideas, desires, needs are a part ot it, but usually nebulous, like clouds I see and feel around me, they don't always make a lot of sense. I can't "read" them, often I get the general drift.
Feelings, however, are different. Those I know and understand, without choice, because I feel them too; often enough, it's doing that almost every day I find tiring. I'm no psychotherapist and lack the training and ability to switch off between sessions. Instead, I take a break.
It's interesting how our emotions colour our thoughts and play a key role in memory. Perhaps I "feel" ideas because of the "colours". Apologies about that betrayal were in part for how my action could have coloured a friend's thinking about a dilemma and interfered with the judgement of anybody concerned. I have no right to do this.
So I must be prudent when it comes to that seraphim, a "quiet revolutionary" if ever I've encountered one. Perhaps a little less careful, though, because what do you do when you "meet" a stranger who seems to have the same ability? It didn't take me long to end up with the even more inexplicable feeling she's perhaps paid a trip to my own head! She may simply not know it ... yet.
The seraphim's no angel, that's for sure, but as soon we'll see, she's good at letting go and being "complete". You wouldn't believe that to read some reviews, but I think such critics bring their own axes into it; at least I know my judgement is multi-coloured.
An e-mail seemed the sensible thing. A quick hello from me to her, in private. Further reflection, another look in a mirror, said: "Go further, take a risk. If you're wrong, it won't do any harm, she doesn't mind publicity. But if you're right, it's a test of your notions of just what the Quiet Revolution is and of how some of those who are aware of it work."
 I got a good omen while shopping again. I was listening to her voice at the time, enjoying it -- and making another "reality check". Perhaps you remember Pauli the painter in his 70s. I met him in March, put a rude title on the log entry and showed you a picture he gave me almost at first sight. Those whose browsers show the titles given the illustrations here may have spotted that one: "Inside out, upside down and just fine."
As I crossed the road, the seraphim was 'Wrong Side Up' ... you can't say you're short of clues. And there was Pauli, first time I'd seen the fellow since that day. Buying figs. It was all a bit much, even her album's called 'A Perfect Dream', one I'd found by then. Of course, I went to tap him on the arm and in the next few moments, we'd agreed to meet for lunch on Friday.
Yves Simonpauli, it turned out, doesn't eat lunch. I usually stuff myself, but this week I've found little appetite, today I watched the others do big main courses while I shoved down two desserts in a row. So Yves took me instead to sit on a terrace in the sun, hot chocolate for him, the usual mega-caffeine dose for me. Being the QR Pauli is, he launched into his art as an act of making love, then a recent chat with Daniel Buren, who built a 'Time Box' (stolen here from 'Art Minimal and Conceptual Only' [MindWebArt]) in 1975, to remain unopened for years.
Buren, a story in his own right -- if you explore those links and look for others, you'll find boxes within boxes and a huge exhibition in Paris in 2002, "Le Musee qui n'existait pas" ("The Museum that Never Existed") -- is famous, or infamous, for his "columns" at the city's Palais Royal. What he, Pauli and others fancy cooking up is quietly revolutionary even for a capital of contradictions: to fill a former factory site with ... nothing. They'd like to build a virtual museum, the technology being such that visitors to the place can conjure up the art they want.
"I'm into paradoxes," I told Pauli. "I love 'em. You make me laugh by telling me about the architectural plans you need for a place that won't 'exist'."
"There's a condition," said Pauli. "All the artists have to be alive."
I wondered how they'd know if somebody died while their art was still there. What would happen to it? I kept that to myself and decided to tell Pauli a bit about the Quiet Revolution and other people I know in it. It took little talking, the way it does when people are on the same frequency.
We could still have gone for hours but didn't and, as the man put it, "have all the time in the world." He wasn't surprised when I even told him about the seraphim or the wretched "head trips", had some remarkable stories of his own and some neat ideas on sharing and exchange.
I'm in trouble though. I began this week, on "African time", with plans for the screenplay, 'Sting in the Lotus'. And I've got on with it, hard work. Now the week's almost over, I can't help feeling it's "wrong side up", real people, odd moves. Maybe that's how it should be, I don't want to analyse all this, it has to flow, keep flowing, but sometimes it's overwhelming, I fear I might have bitten more than I can chew.
The film's like software development, housework: you think you're done, but have to start again, getting ever better. It's a good job the Kid's agreed, without even a bribe, to help me with the housework soon, the bigger jobs that need doing. Meanwhile I keep finding QRs, some are shining stars, a few remain interested in the Lotus Project.
It's time to talk networks. For this, for reasons she already knows and anybody who's still here wishes to find out, I can think of nobody better to begin with than a stranger who just for today, remains the seraphim.
After such a mental cleanout, I shouldn't neglect the Squip: where's Cindy at?
Hmm. Well, I haven't got a pretty dress. And given of my lack of success so far in getting my RSS title links to work properly again, with just a couple of ideas left, I don't think I can blush with pride, let alone say: "I actually *LOVED* being called a nerd. Go figure."
I can't. It's reassuring, however, to find she brings that up after "one of those weird, freakish things that tend to occur in my life" (Dusting My Brain). Squip, I know how that feels too.
I just don't want to start a fire.
(To be continued...)
11:57:26 PM link 
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