Picture warning: you may want to avoid this entry at work or with kids around.
Yet another fresh start - revisited Sept. 26
 Oh dear!
The sign's a statement.
I suppose I'd better post this -- with a wry acceptance of some truth in it -- having realised what I've let myself in for now.
The "Oh dear" becomes two-fold on waking up to the rest of this Monday.
People who check in to for a look -- "What's he up to?" -- need to be told why I've gone quiet before I write one or two personal replies to friends, among the "to-dos" I'm looking forward to this week.
The work warning includes notice of a sex photo, posted at the end of one of those weekends most disliked by Parisians, when after several sunny days, the sky went grey and the air chilled once it was Saturday morning.
I didn't want anyone caught off guard, now I've wrapped my mind around music and another language we often speak without words.
I'm luckier than most Parisians since there's no need for me to go to work and if any very nice weather returns I can enjoy to this special week to the full.
I should have said "other languages", plural.
While the work in progess is ambitious; thinking of Lee in Odessa Street and looking forward to meeting up this week after her blogged thesis nightmare is over, I realise there are two "theses" bubbling away in my mind.
They've been simmering for decades, adding my life experience to a couple of excellent pieces of scholarship that are "old" now but have a bearing on music as we listen to it in 2005, probably more so than when they were written.
Any hope of sharing such far-sighted thinking over a weekend in easy words, leaving out much of the scholarship that's always been a part of my musical upbringing and practice when I used to play myself, was absurd!
The two topics I'd like to take on, much strengthened in so doing by the state of the music industry today and everything I've learned of life and from women singer-songwriters, are projects to be explored carefully.
The consequences of ignorance
This week sets the new pattern for the rest of my life, at least until I retire, since the "night of unknowing" I wrote up in August, a while after that experience. It robbed me of a long-awaited summer break, perhaps, but gave me something else in return.
Since those unforgettable hours when my brain stopped working, a permanent legacy -- which at first seemed like one of several passing side-effects -- is a need to take a total break every few weeks from the news by which I earn a living.
"Doctor," I had to confess to Luc, my physician and friend of many years standing, "my violence threshold has gone right down and I'm serious.
"If faced with a daily input and output of appalling news, month in, month out, I'm unable to do it any more. I doubt there's any medicine for a journalist who can't stomach violence for too long, short of quitting."
Luc found it hard to stay polite with laughter once he understood after discussion. I didn't dare say, "What would you do if you suddenly couldn't look at a needle and give any more injections?"
It turns out a solution is acceptable to me and to my bosses, who know I wasn't kidding but won't be able to switch off the empathy I feel as an editor with reporters whose work becomes my job too, including ones in very nasty trouble-spots.
In July, when it would have been a breakdown I suffered if nothing else had happened, my aim had been straightforward ahead of the event: "Music, women, sex, all month, that's all."
Once I've done this particular entry -- interrupted by practical considerations like an appointment with an ear, nose and throat specialist, long awaited to sort me out for the winter, and a phone call from one of those rare people, an honest plumber, happy to come round later and see about giving me hot water at home for the first time in months -- more pictures should help give you ideas.
A matter of priorities
Of an increasing number of music entries I'm working on when in the mood, one has risen to the top of the pile.
So has the other. They are related, but need to be done separately and cross-linked and referenced..
I've changed the way I live since July.
The aim is to give up on thinking except when really needed and instead get plenty of exercise, along with an hour or so to meditate at the very start of every morning. That's already indispensable, a time when my consciousness switches from night to day, dreams to preparation for whatever's ahead.
It's spent in silence more than ever, with a mind untroubled by unwanted thoughts, tuning into to what my body's saying and leaving me free to let real insights come, that new kind of "knowing" I've begun to understand a little.
This morning, I felt pressured, very pressured.
"What's going on?" I thought. "The sun has come out, you've got a great week coming up and few deadlines."
Wrong!
To promise overviews of sexuality and music or the great differences in outlooks to music, and sometimes sex, as well in our "modern" western cultures and others where people have retained an approach we're in danger of losing isn't the work of just a week.
That's my old antic. Nobody else sets me a deadline, so I do!
I really should know better, take the advice of everyone with sense and go easy both on myself and on everyone else, never rush anything.
As soon as I knew this, that pressure disappeared.
Thursday, September 29:
Now I've paused to take stock of what I've been working on this week when not preferring to be well away from a computer and research both more arduous and engrossing than I'd anticipated!
What I don't want includes further analysis at the hands of professionals or medication to help me be myself in a highly artificial environment. Prescription drugs of such a kind are best-sellers in France almost as much as in the United States.
They shouldn't be.
It's an often beautiful environment, Paris, but still made mainly by people rather than a place to live where it's easy to feel natural and be aware of nature's own workings.
To say more of that particular "don't want" is to acknowledge I no longer find it acceptable to live with an "addiction" to the phamaceutical mind-benders people use to treat the symptoms of an existence they find hard, too artificial, rather than strive to heal their scars and go to the heart of the matter.
In our "developed" cultures, where access either in books and among our friends, or on the Internet itself, offers the means for those who care to look and to listen to seek out the real solutions to problems we've made for ourselves, my concern is now with those instead: not patching myself up to get by, but finding a way of living where the difficulties are less prone to arise in the first place!
What I do want, among other things, is to share the gift of being able to write about music well, with no false modesty but plenty of humility and respect, often even fellow-feeling, with those who make music, give others great pleasure, and in so doing, are among people who give us signposts to a "truer" way of being in ourselves.
If people tell me I've got such a skill, a real gift I've been able to bring back to life, then my paid job stays at work and this place gets serious in intent -- a very long-term project -- though not always in style.
Singing in the bedroom
Music can be "heavy", nothing wrong with that if it's good.
Music can be light and as fresh as a purifying wind. The article I put at the top of the pile includes singers from all over the world and their lyrics: when you put women and music together with my experience, it's obvious where priorities lie.
I won't publish until they're ready. Some lyrics I chose to illustrate points simply wouldn't get airtime on many radio stations, even today in an "open society". The musicians know exactly what they're singing, but it's direct, some would say "obscene".
I don't agree: I think the songs are about us and our lives.
 Here a woman and a man are publicly engaged in a very intimate pleasure; one most people, however "broad-minded", don't care to display. But music, like other art-forms, does!
I've known for years something scarcely a musicologist -- somebody who puts music into its social context as part of a job -- considered anathema, taboo, until not so long ago; in my own lifetime, that's for sure.
But in 1957, two people published a book and dropped a huge rock into the middle of a stagnant pond of academic notions about music.
Those two were right.
In our culture, music's become a commodity like any other, widely available but often packaged like meat and bread to be sold or stolen.
But it isn't a commodity.
I don't plan to write about any more singers until I've said why making music is like making love. In a word, sex; I'll publish the entry during the week if all goes well and I'm able to tell you what I know in entertaining fashion.
The deep relationship between music and sexuality is a very complex one: so I thought, until I gave up thinking to know what I feel about these things, and how to take my time with both now I'm listening anew.
Putting the two together upset people in 1957! Some academics are still miffed, but I have little time for them.
zzz
And those words stayed for several days, unamended.
I'm sorry, they shouldn't have done. I had some trouble with Internet access, as seems to happen sometimes when I've left a mess on the log, full of typos too, and can't put it right!
Never mind.
I was wrong anyway. The computer problem came with an electrical one -- now solved --in the wake of the plumber and his mate, not entirely their fault. All in all, though they did prove to be honest and were explicit themselves about their fiddling and how things work, it cost a bomb, that and the other circuitry. "Oh dear" again!
Moreover, the "ORL" (ear, nose, throat) enjoy himself and was also only too graphic in showing me bits and pieces from inside my cavities best outside them, but better left undisplayed.
Then he said, "Didn't you see my photos? What did you think?"
"What photos?"
"They're in the waiting room!"
"I wasn't, I was using your loo while you finished doing nasty things to the last person."
The man's mad. He didn't have a "summer of unknowing". He went to the States where he seems to have visited and come back with huge poster-pics of every canyon he could find. I told him what I thought of that: "You're extraordinary. You spend your whole working days getting up noses and digging around inside people's facial cavities with relish, then when you take a holiday you go and inspect the biggest holes in the ground you can!"
"I hadn't quite thought of it that way," he said, but they were superb photos.
I haven't had time for a luxurious bath since the plumbers gave me the first hot water I've had around here since April. And that is wonderful. But I need to use more of it to clean up some other stuff before coming back to the log and getting very down and dirty.
I thought it'd be safer to warn you.
2:17:42 AM 
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