In one entry, 'Notes towards a "revolutionary" referendum' (June 1), I wrote nonsense. How would you feel having sex wired up with gooey electrodes for optional extras rather than whatever turns you on? I'd hate it, but enough couples let scientists tell us finally that when we do, the animal brain circuits used have no links to the ones handling romantic love.
My nonsense was when I yelped "I told you so!" to the world.
This was when I'd stopped being wild for a woman in a life relationship with someone else. She knew mine was love at first sight and anybody can sense the "vibes" behind our words. My denials got me nowhere, messed things up, and the contradictions on both sides encouraged me to learn eye language. What a relief it's over, the madness that made Eleanor the "woman of my life"! Her story, that's to say my fantasy as it blossomed and faded, is still here, because others have gone down that road too and said what I wrote helps.
She helped, she knew what to do.
Very special people show up when we need them. To know them is intuitive. I believe that now. We can know them. I'd known Eleanor was coming one day, but when she did, I didn't understand why, got it wrong. Now I'll find the woman who needs that kind of love. "Love" is a word I stopped using before being aware of a lie to myself in saying I ever ceased loving anyone I've been passionately in love with, but the nature of the love changes.
Eleanor recently said: "Nick, you can blog anything you like about me."
"Ellie. That's really nice, but I don't want you or anyone else treated like that on the log over again."
I took it for coincidence, but it was something she told me that evening that led to what nobody calls a "breakdown" any more. She told me what she was working on. An innocent remark on her part -- she had to get a news story done fast -- was the trigger for those hours when my brain couldn't process any more violence, that 'Night of Unknowing'. Yes, it could have been anyone, but it wasn't.
People have since told me of my odder notions: "Nick, listen. You won't admit it, you can't yet, but some of those links you make are real."
They were right. In meditation, I'm learning to hear it, the pattern wise people know to be there. But the special people can recognise hate being called "special" if it's for the wrong reasons.
Inherited obstacles to confidence
I don't plan to remove all the nonsense written on this log since early 2003. Such pruning would take until Christmas and might accidentally include the absurdities people enjoyed.
You'd also get no more singers.
Look at Mylène Farmer (home) in a shot from 'Je te rends ton amour' ('I give you back your love'). The French Canadian-born poet and far-out singer-songwriter has found international renown, well deserved. Here, she became famous for videos too, this bloodbath being one facet of an imagination that sounds limitless.
Farmer's career has included open play on androgynous looks, lyrics and music she does with her partner, and stage sex that turns up the heat in the boys and the girls alike. When I take the Kid's advice and write up musicians who are good in France, you'll hear no walls in Mylène unless she wants them. Some fantasies allowed into practice, not kept in a cage, are fine any time.
Mylène's act would have put her behind bars during my formative years in a very different era. The jokes that went round with "ciggies" behind bike sheds included how crimson our parents went when it came to beating around "the bees and the birds."
We got biology and an inheritance of inhibitions, guilt and fear, dispensed with dire warnings, rather like condoms were for many of our parents and teachers in the army in World War II. My parents sent me to expensive boys' schools, but soon I found this had been too costly. In 1955, I was born in a Britain that had won a war and lost an Empire. It was unsure of itself and even at war with itself, dulled of any colour I remember but grey until the late 1960s and '70s,
I wouldn't have let my daughter grow up without boys around, though many of my generation recovered from a single-sex education faster than me. A troubled home background didn't help in my case -- that's frequent. I was supposed to be pure brain, a clever boy cultivating my mind in an England riddled with the abhorrent class consciousness I eventually fled while others stayed to become victims or rebels.
One of my piano teachers was good with music sheets, but would have been deeply upset to let in any thought they just might have something to do with those on her bed and a man on them! My left-handedness was bad enough. She felt the best way to "save me" was frequently to sting my knuckles with an old wooden ruler.
She was a stiff, but kept on saying "Loosen up, you must learn to play with all your fingers and both hands separately" and answered a cheeky question with: "No I'm not, I much prefer music to marriage."
Yet she was a potentially sexy woman and it's a shame she found an ability to play like an angel incompatible with heavenly or rather devilish pleasures. She loved to perform music by Chopin, Rachmaninov and other passionate souls dubbed "romantics".
'Sublimation': the convenient conceit is a cop-out
That spinster might be a case for sublimation, defined by one who studies the ways of our minds as a "defence mechanism by which the energy derived from an instinct when it is denied gratification is displaced into a more socially acceptable interest or activity" (the 'Oxford Companion to the Mind').
Sublimation's one thing. Music is another. The closing line of that book entry suggests: "Dancing may represent the sublimation of sexual impulses." Well at least the contributor to an excellent reference work did say "may" and left it open.
My first chance at sex was with an adolescent lad who so confused me emotionally I thought I was gay. I wasn't, but people who were had an appalling closet life. During my time at the BBC, in 1975 to 1980, one or two gays working there very nearly got jailed for illegal activities, but were let off with a fine and a cover-up by Auntie Beeb. Strings were pulled.
My way with girls usually got me nowhere.
I felt like chewing them out in revenge, but any bid literally to do so was met with a "How could you be so horrible?" and got my head pushed away or slapped before it even reached their knees. Where I grew up boys simply didn't go out with girls who were "fun" -- unless they struck gold. The smart suburban young lady who was very smart in private was a sought-after stereotype. What younger readers who have started coming here for the music take for natural behaviour was illicit and "sinful".
A book I'm coming to shortly began slowly to change an outlook it may be hard even to imagine in today's world. I know that reading memories of what I lived, some people would say I'm painting a picture worse than it was, but others tell me they recognise themselves in the upbringing I'm now logging.
Though that book was written for musicologists and people who study music in its social context, the authors found it wise and necessary to begin with a close look at sex, sustained throughout its pages. Their views on "decent sex" were then to academics what Woodstock was to Americans.
I identified with the album Liz Phair called simply after herself since she was open about changes, including the embers of affairs and handling single motherhood, and honest about insecurity in someone taken by her fans for a model of the no-nonsense chick. She sung of a "phase" that comes to a lot of people who screw up the relationships they've got by convincing themselves of their sustained sex appeal by chasing people too young for them.
In a city as populous as Paris, you see many such couples. I tried the same for a while once I was free to have sex again but it lasted no time, because I found the prospect grotesque.
Last summer I had music and a cheerful digging gang who closed my road completely for months. Many residents got crosser and crosser. I liked the huge obstacle courses and never cheated by looking out of the window before leaving my building to see where the barriers had moved and new holes been dug in the mornings. The gang widened the pavements while they narrowed the one way street.
How easy it was to see the Way of Lao Tzu in this, having understood the old fellow. I perused, with one version, a well-illustrated copy of the 'Tao Te Ching' (Amazon US. Meanwhile, the hotels on my stretch of road managed to do a roaring trade.
The wider sidewalks filled up with people, including women who were mainly tourists or Parisians like me, often happy most had gone away. I felt, since the sun got them randy and wearing as little as possible, that "casual" would be just fine right then! But pages from my Kama Sutra stayed fantasies, since I knew I was in a state of shock weeks after the "night of unknowing". Even when one or two chatted me up in cafés where everyone calls me "British Airways", it would have been wrong to say "Yes, please fly me!"
I'm sparing with my humour, now it's back, done with being the sad clown and permanent court jester; people who complain the latter is a loss might have seen through it. My fragmented personality, evident in the highs, lows and long gaps on the log of old, was put together last year.
But when people said, "Okay, we're through, you've made it," the process wasn't finished. It took more than knowing this as an idea to rejoice over to start thinking with the heart. It's only been latterly that the long absence of music and why it happened has been at the heart of my meditations.
I trust the knowledge that comes in the silence free of thought.
How music unearthed lost academic balls
Now you get some "scholarship" I can't leave it out.
I'll make it easy, since music led me to dust off old tomes while becoming a little used to the new kind of "knowing" that's bound to leave me always grateful for a profound experience; as well as for "sex according to Ursula" as I reread the five-starred 'Always Coming Home'.
I was two years old when Walter Howard and Irmgard Auras threw their slim grenade at other musicologists.
I'm lucky to have it and it's thanks to a woman who adored music, was a great poet, bisexual and so engaging I quit the Beeb in 1980 to follow her across the Channel after meeting her in smoky jazz clubs and pubs.
That summer of love is unforgettable and so's she, the bright beast. When we went to bed she soon got rid of those hang-ups, with carrots and sticks, before life cost me my confidence later. When at last I got my body back, I'd known an explosion like the one that book caused when it sunk below the surface of the little pond where complacent scholars did their fishing.
'Music et Sexualité' is unobtainable today. This yellowing copy, translated by Alex Rosemweg dates from 1957 and was torture at the time. My French was then abysmal. Ghyslaine put away her carrots if I was lazy. She went into 'Hearts of Oak' in May 2003 when I wrote about my "gurus" and today I'd add three more women. She spoke at least two languages with genius.
Neither needs words.
Walter and Auras weren't dry, write well and set with relative brevity about splashing the "purists" with so much spunk and humour some couldn't face it. Sorry for a down and dirty metaphor, but those two got it right:
"People, wake up and try using your ears!
Musical scholarship has been poisoned because you insist it's an abstract art-form and study history, scores, notation and the rest of it while being deaf to one reason people listen to it: it's full of sex! It's made like love, your scores are the kids."
Years going crazy in silence
After my life went wrong and I felt broken and bruised, hiding this under a surface of charm and of wit, with an ever growing sense of the absurd, even Bach's mathematical genius as a wonder of oneness with the universe was almost unbearable. The memories and associations, and the stories music tells with or without words, were more than I could take. I couldn't then understand that sexual abstinence had cost me music as well.
You'd think I'd have found a substitute in it, a relief from the loss, an escape from myself. I wanted it and bought heaps of it but listened to almost none. That music was always "for the future". And so was she! By the time I was a frog, or old toad, my princess would come as soon as I could meet her without putting others at risk, but it all felt so very remote, I began to resign myself to thinking it would come on retirement.
Thank heavens it didn't. I made a dreadful mistake with Eleanor, but I can't live a day without music and that's how it's been for a couple of years and more. It took more time to find not only harmony in myself but realise how when you've got mind and body together you have got soul. I had to make sense of "non sense" three months ago.
What you know as facts in your head isn't enough. Once you're through with analysis and judgements, you begin to interpret our human behaviour instead in terms I've mentioned before: "harmony" and "discord", "health" and "sickness."
I never said music and sex are exactly the same thing, I was more careful. They express what we are, how we feel, what we know and can do by using languages impossible to separate. I can't go on writing about women musicians any more than you would listen to a piece of music because "you're in the mood" and pretend I'm being objective. If you use a "shuffle" or something, like I did when Liz sung "Fuck and Run", chances are it changes your mood, doesn't it?
Time to get it together
People go on far too much about my brains, say I'm very smart and extremely stupid. They're right, it's a bit of both, but the same people, especially the women with whom I've done the silliest things have often said: "For fuck's sake, stop thinking!"
Thinking isn't knowing. I'm a very physical person, full of hugs, kisses, massages, caresses, just holding hands, and the rest of it. I'm good at breaking known laws of physics, as proven in my visit to the Seraphim's head when she was in New York and realising she was more like me than anybody else I knew.
Sarah picks up sounds of many kinds to make every album quite different from the last. In classical Indian rags, there's jazz with a fun batch of rules allowed as a basis for free-style improvisation, just no cheating. Some of their twists and turns you can hear in the blues.
Decades ago, one Ginger Baker, still dubbed the "world's best drummer", went off to Africa to learn how they do it. Now we've got "world music" to help, everybody can hear all sorts of emotions expressed by all kinds of melodies, instruments and rhythms -- even words -- exactly as in love-making. Musicians have a passport to advances, responses, foreplay, caresses and sighs, enjoyably "rough treatment", numerous penetrations, sustained delivery, approaches to climax followed by postponements of pleasure, pauses, and orgasms aplenty.
The ancient Greeks knew a thing or two about harmony. So did I when when I suddenly began to realise those hang-ups and inhibitions had simply vanished again, just like that! Not because of a sublime introduction to French ways by one person, but instead due to daily exposure to the huge range of variations women were singing to me every day on themes we share in common.
There are so many approaches, some soft and cushioned, others tough love, some with lots of ornamentation, others more direct. The singers can be very different from us, that doesn't stop them addressing our joys and our sadness in sharing their own. The language of music is sexual, but the themes most people sing have a lot more to do with love. And whatever else takes their fancy.
Some scholars are so deaf they refute the very nature of the language itself, they still put purist prose on the Net in 2005, like people who piss into a river and watch the drops without seeing the flow. I hear a certain irony in talking about "sublimation" when the most sacred of sentiments are expressed in a language that finds it hard to endure coitus interruptus.
'Only connect' -- or risk your souls
I'm an "angry young man" when it comes to the way musicians and their skills are routinely abused. Christopher Small threw a huge stone of his own into the pool of scholarship in 'Music - Society - Education', now a best-seller. In 1978, the year after he wrote that and we had a chit-chat, I met an insurgent who warned us we stand to lose more than the hotline between music and sex if we go on treating musicians as "manufacturers" of "consumer products".
Many miss the boat and are on the wrong side of the war within the music industry. It's there for musicians, but some see it the other way round. Philip Oxman knew this in 1978, that's why he's here. I got lucky yet again. A few fellow dissidents when Radio 3 had a Controller named Ian McIntyre we called "Mack the Knife" -- after I left he was safely given talk radio instead -- allowed Oxman to broadcast this "radiophonic essay": 'From Hand to Mouth: the music of production'.
I taped it, listened and caught a train out of London to meet an arrogant, likeable and sharp mind. We were tough because the war had begun. We needed to be as strong as stodgy idiots who misunderstood "production" as still they do. Oxman's then explosive insight was to know music begins in the first wail of your newborn child and remains -- in societies that have kept a natural culture -- not an accompaniment to any activity, but a part of all in life that is sacred.
I don't just mean religious ceremonies.
Sex used to be mostly about reproduction; the pill and contraceptives are right ways for me of keeping the love and the fun with no harm. For Oxman -- I only read that transcript again this week -- the direct relation between music and sex was already obvious, I didn't hear it then, but I knew it's in work and in play, in dance, and every rite of passage in our lives.
Sonic wallpaper conceals gateways to growth
What have we got? We've got muzak in supermarkets, music as entertainment, music as background, and the more we buy and the less we do and share music, integrated into our lives, the more we're at risk.
A fine French magazine, 'Les Inrocks', has great fun each week asking the same questions of all kinds of people: the answers are usually just as amusing.
They pulled the stunt on Heather Nova; I'll translate wee extracts:
"- What distinguishes you from others?
My voice.
- Do you think anyone can be an artist?
Art's a choice. Creativity is natural and spontaneous. (Note: most people give a reason to say "No", she gets it right.)
- Name three living artists you detest.
I respect anyone who performs an art. I detest everyone who claims to be an artist.
- What do you defend?
- The Fifth Amendment, the right to remain silent.
- What's art for you?
Good art is a spell cast in the face of death.
- Write your own epitaph.
Yours!"
Heather's talents and ability to turn her hand to whatever she fancies are not just "spontaneous", she breaks the rules fans impose on too many musicians and gets away with it, like they all should. If she wants to change and do something completely different, she will. And says: "Blow your expectations, I'll blow your mind."
My system prefers nature's rhythms and harmonies to the artificial distractions we blind and deafen ourselves with. Most African people don't. Nor do the Navajo and the Inuit peoples, I'm exacting because many people have told me to listen. When I do, I also take a good look and when I hear it, say in a shop, a café or the Métro, though it's a rare quality, I'm sorry to say that I get this burning feeling a little below the belt to which the iPod is firmly fixed.
You know I like eye talk. Now you know how much I adore body language, if you didn't before, don't be surprised if the frequency of logging is irregular; I'll be doing the research that makes sure you read about the singers from their own, understood outlooks on life. Silence means I'm listening.
11:56:45 PM link 
Sex and music are very much about the same thing, whether we're talking of the needs of the soul or those of the body.
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