dimanche 14 mai 2006

This Book of Lilith (ii): a page turned on the Thanatos drive Like the musician Sarah Fimm*, whose soup recipe I lifted from her journal to dish out this morning, I'd like to chop up rather a lot of food for thought. I find this ends with a bonfire of my own -- in light of recent and most disconcerting experience -- and in the hope of being clear about it all and where this Log goes from now on. In alluding in part (i) to the recent musical company of Macy Gray, the album I meant I've been enjoying of late has been a 1999 one, 'On How Life Is', which a French fellow rightly describes as a "breath of oxygen in the feminine landscape of the soul", rather than 'The Id' with its nod to Freud. Macy's style is most refreshing! Even track titles such as 'I've Committed Murder', 'A Moment to Myself' and 'Why Didn't You Call Me' all had a strong personal resonance in the interweave of my recent life with those of some very loyal people I know. Some of them I've neglected for too long and others were unavoidably too busy for me during several weeks of rather more moments to myself than I wanted. The iceberg beneath us all It's likely that Macy Gray (at MySpace) will be back once I've got to know her Id, the term Freud used for our unconscious wellspring of primitive instincts. The Id is pictured in the Wikipedia as part of a pretty iceberg picture of ourselves, in that entry briefly covering also the "ego" and the "super-ego". Deep icebergs we sure are, but not always cold ones. I was never drawn to Freud, though I read some heavy stuff of his when I was really young, and felt that some ideas most associated with the man, like the "Oedipus complex", are cobblers. I've never wittingly wanted to kill my father the better to get at my mum in any sense, but a good analyst today will point out that the Oedipus "avatar" refers to something that happens not with the onset of puberty, as often imagined, but when you're around two months old. That's an age when we're in no state to start messing around with a kitchen knife, let alone at assault rifle. Still, I guess we still owe Freud some. Like Carl Jung I'm more attuned to what goes on in our spiritual lives and the breakaway disciple's own concept of "archetypes", which are manifest in many ways and cultures, and even music. Right now, I'm truly convalescing from the almost fatal bout of blues that took me a long way from the Log as it had been heading to give you a triptych of columns on the bipolar disease of manic-depression. There is no doubt either in my own chastened mind or that of my doctors that had I begun another seven-month cycle like the recent ones, by the end of this year I would be very dead indeed! I mean either really deceased, since I couldn't let a disease give me another brain burnout like those of last August and March, or cut off, dead to the world I love and signed in to some bleak institution for a very long time to come. That's how bad it nearly got before I wrote my description here of a return trip to Hell, until we caught the "manic phase" of my latest cycle and its physical cause -- a backfired drug that had turned toxic -- just in time. But that, I now believe, wasn't the only cause... Lady Lilith and the 'Weird Stuff' My profound interest in Lilith, as an archetypal and mythical figure adopted by so many women musicians, is going to be a recurrent feature of this Log, now that I've slowly realised how it's my life's "work" -- a task I said this morning will no longer be the subject of the book for which I've been making notes for many months, but put off to a later date when I retire from my paid job. I don't have the time for such forward planning now, having been so close to death, and see all the wisdom in that adage about living every day as if it were your last. I've decided too while the Log will remain mostly a journey in the company of many musical women, I plan to be more open about my own life of the past 50 years and those to come than ever, if usually light of heart. I've had a totally terrifying experience when at times I so nearly wanted just to die. Much of my family and some of my closest friends now know and understand I'm both learning "normal feelings" I never expected to find -- having had nothing with which to compare them in a life of extreme emotions -- and am now sure of allegedly "paranormal" faculties I've acquired. A 'strategy' for survival and its aftermath The newly brought out gifts, which I earlier said some consider a kind of ESP, have been apparent before, as in the very strange meeting of minds across an ocean that I recounted with Sarah Fimm, along with an ability often just to know when some of my loved ones are in trouble and need my help, including people I've not seen in ages. If the latter happens, I also know what to do. Meantime, the therapist found to implement my own "strategy" for survival and healing will still be scratching his head as to how I managed it, getting over the second full-fledged nervous breakdown inside a year in two months. Usually these things take rather longer. One afternoon next week, I'm going to have to try to tell him! I'm dreading trying to sum it up. It's a long story and I shall never log it all, but music was instrumental. So were women, including the now retired psychiatrist I used to call the Shaman-Shrinkess, with whom I finished therapy in December 2004, believing I was whole, to realise now that she gave me the tools. In short, my strategy was a dangerous game, consisting in deliberately and knowingly splitting my personality, a bit like I've fixed my Mac since it crashed in what I took for a sort of "silicon sympathy" some weeks back. I partioned myself -- like you might a computer -- to use the good bits to work on healing the bad ones, and let things flow again. I also created two composite "alter egos" based on a number of people I love who "told" me things I knew all along and his but which needed bringing up into the daylight of conscious awareness. One such semi-fiction is the 'Dom A.' of St George's Day, when I knew I had to lay low a fearsome beast and discovered the Faust in my musical quest. The other, 'KP Sauce', rolled several real psychiatrists and psychotherapists and their teachings into one! The right centre of gravity If you are still here, near the end of this new chapter, I don't know where you fit in, but know and have begun to tell others that the kind of company I seek on the last part of my life's journey consists of learned scholars and simple, natural souls, of the kind who have always been my real friends. Such people have long been pre-eminent in a part of my blogroll and certainly in the Orchard, while my crazy life has seen me lose quite a number of complicated purported "friends" who are no loss at all! I've been surprised at the ease with which those who know me fairly well have accepted both my illness and the strange insight I was really scared of losing, before finding singer-songwriters who know about these things. One of the nicest, completely real mails I've had lately came from someone who is a mistress of brevity and simply told me, "I understand and I believe you," along with finding others do as well. I've already recommended books in English about the fine line some of us walk between "genius and insanity", and still find it embarrassing to have to reflect on things I've done or perceived myself in the former category -- or close to it -- except when I remember I'm speaking of a gift, not me but something that works through me. With French friends, I'd share a rather spine-cracked copy of one by a psychiatrist and anthropologist called Philippe Brenot (Wikipedia, Fr), whose 'Le génie et la folie: en peinture, musique et littérature' was published by Plon in 1997 and shouldn't be out of print if now it is. This is dangerous ground! I learned from Brenot, for instance, that to use my second, chosen name, Taliesin, as a nom de plume is a common pathology among my kind, while any flashes of real and new insight I've had come from a kind of otherness. We prefer what other take for pseudonyms or the alter egos I wrote about in the Orchard recently. However, I've figured something out. There's no point in blaming my illness and behaviour and writing it's sometimes produced either on bad circuitry -- duff brain chemistry and wrongly wired neurology -- or on the treatment I had in infancy from a mother who makes no secret of her huge boredom with babies and can be inclined to asks other -- like me -- if they share her desire to see tedious toddlers turn into "interesting people". She won't like me saying that here, but I don't hold it against her. The mainly American psychiatrists I admire, very wary as they are of expecting miracles of medication, are right. Drugs are no cure. It's not a killer disease that has made me live my life in the "wrong order", as now I often think of it so far, but doing things the wrong way round that has sometimes fed the illness rather than the healing process -- notably with women, who on the whole have had the sense to tell me when it happens! Women know many things instinctively that I've had to learn, slowly shifting my own centre of gravity to a safer place as a man by pondering, first subconsciously where our minds do all the hard work, and in recent weeks during a conscious process that I've often found more like scaling a jagged cliff than the gentle learning curves of country hills and pastures. The music in simple harmonies So now I seek above all simplicity, and certainly when it comes to what I would call the "language of the soul", the simplest explanations seem invariably to be the wisest and right ones. My daughter today lent me one of her favourite novels, where our tastes conjoin in speculative fiction and mythological matters. I asked her if she could bring 'Les Thanatonautes' by Bernard Werber, one of France's finest science fantasy writers who is also much translated, since I'm certainly in the mood for another brush with Thanatos, just not my own death wish. The French are good at this kind of thing, as with the Lilith legends we'll explore here. However, I don't believe for an instant the faculties I've developed more fully now and need to learn are in the least bit paranormal really; they have become prominent, along with the "coincidences that aren't" of synchronicity, the more I've consciously been aware of the importance of simplicity and natural ways. Most of my closest friends talk very little of matters of the soul and I understood this and began deeply to respect it as a key part of their "music" while still very sick, seeing it as a part of their wisdom and aspiring to the same. It's a bit like you won't catch me talking about God when instead I can sometimes simply say the 'Big L' and understand that love is something we all need to learn to channel rather than create. Music can often be among the most complex of the arts -- as we'll see when I go on writing about classical music sometimes -- but it doesn't take complications to understand it! In the quest for Lilith and at other levels of the Log, I've realised that a good teacher is like a good mother. And sometimes, a good father! If it's my vocation -- which now I fully accept it is though rather late in my life -- what we do is not only to share in a way that helps bring out the things in others they already partly know, as has happened so much to me of late, but we need to provide others with the tools to go on learning and doing for themselves. Some have wrongly told me occasionally that I am "obsessed" with music. They are wrong because in music and -- having learned this from Sarah Fimm -- in the ways of water, I'll always find the richest of analogies for life itself, knowing how souls need feeding just like bodies do and finding music exceptionally rich in nourishment. The best way to present it is to let musicians go on telling their own stories. But I'll no more rush at Lilith than I would any real woman! For life is about sharing to survive in the face of death and entropy, and I feel already that what draws women musicians to Lilith is not the evil some say it is, out of fear, but an understanding of some true mysteries we men can only really know through empathy and in our creative endeavours -- the mysteries of birth and motherhood. I'm told that "you're really on to something, Nick," with my clouded insight into the very profound kinship between music, sexuality and spiritual experience. Maybe so; it certainly feels that way now. So, this far side of the nearest brush with death I want before I get there, I also believe there's no time like the present to dish out a statement of intent and then get started on learning more and sharing it. I don't know when I'll die, of course. But the Kid had a reassuring word for me today, now I'm telling people that a number of unmentionables I keep unhidden in drawers will pay for the cost of a lavishly musical wake before they tip my ashes into the sewers to rejoin the ocean. She suggested the funeral itself should be a barbecue! "That's fine by me," I told her, "as someone 'touched with fire'. But of the ways of dying, I fear fire perhaps the worst. So kindly make sure I am dead before you put me on it." ________ *The picture of the Seraphim, which I've tweaked a bit to remove an unduly angelic glow, went up without credit on a British music site and was taken last year, when we met in the flesh during her last-minute European tour with plenty of her 'Nexus' album. 11:06:34 PM    your views? [] This Book of Lilith (i): a brand new chapter "Actually," came the afterthought, so I turned on my heels and opened the little green iron gate back into the square to step between semi-stripped office girls sunning themselves on the grass and plonked myself on the bench next to Jan. "I do have one for a man of your learning, so the shops can wait," I told him. "Who, for you, is Lilith? Or 'Li-leet', as you might pronounce her?" "Ahh," he said slowly, folding his freshly opened book. "Lilith ... Lilith. She's the feminine aspect of Satan, you know." "Evil then?" "Oh yes --" "Because I'm not so sure, Jan. I don't know that she isn't a force for good..." "For that, you'd need to go to Beaubourg," the retired social scientist said. "Look in the Jewish mythology. Their, hmm, their --" "They don't have pantheons!" "Their circle! Old things. But some say she's certainly evil, we're speaking of the enemies of God. There's a book, you know, but a woman, written in the '60s." I didn't know but heard him out. This was Friday afternoon in Paris and it was wonderfully hot. The small park, full of spring flowers, where Jan goes to read, at the far end from my own Losserand street of the verdant nearby rue de Thermopyles, is one of many pleasures of a quartier neither of us would leave for all the world. The 'Lilith file' is scarcely opened -- though we've briefly seen how Cecilia is a strangely chaste "patron saint" for a craft and art as corporal and embodied as music, with a limitedministerial portfolio -- but this Log has changed. Later that day, a big whack of weekend shopping done, I settled down with Macy Gray, my own windows wide since I could safely assume nobody out back would take exception to lively rhythm'n'blues with cutting-edge lyrics and plenty of street-wise humour thrown in. Rhythm'n'soul the Gray way What to make of Macy's mix? She's like a rap singer when she wants without being one, there's a smart, funny intelligence in her soul music and I hadn't even got to 'The Id', a cheerily black tribute if ever there was to Papa Sigmund Freud. The first track on that album is 'Relating to a psychopath'! Lilith, she's an "archetype", a symbolic figure, representative of a feminine principle adopted by too many heroines of this Log to ignore. And for Jan, she started "evil", though the further we shot the speculation, the more ambiguous that notion of evil became. I shall dig out the book he mentioned, since this music log has become a detective story and something of a thriller too far beyond the suspense and sex and the warmth, love and poetry shared by the women on it. Bopping around with a Border Girl Before Macy Gray showed up, I spent the iPod part of a trekking day with a very pretty "pin-up", who currently adds a "come hither" look to my Mac desktop in her long black boots and black bikini, Paulina Rubio, the 'Border Girl'. Well, the youngster sure has energy! Though a chart-topper, it's nothing outstanding, that 2002 album of Paulina's. The border's where you might expect to find it with a name like hers, between the States and Mexico. The lyrics are banal, they're mostly silly love songs if ever there were, with facile rhymes and supermarket sentiments, but I don't spit on such music. It's disco dance stuff, pretty decent and competent, and Rubio's got the voice to hack it. A few tracks in, I thought "Maybe I've had enough", but at last came the Spanish touch and high time too! Even there, Rubio churns out mainstream radio "tubes", as the French call pop songs for some strange reason, but it's refreshing -- and she is, oh wicked word, sometimes ever so profane! That's what it is with Lilith, the profanity, the raunchy rowdy stuff, the sweaty sex, the Big L enacted in the essential "carnal knowledge" we enjoy: that's what gets the goat of high-minded purists who put Satanic horns on what they find socially risky or even evil. Reappraising the 'sacred and profane' - the book of Nick! That's why the Log has changed. Music -- sacred or profane -- and real or of the metaphorical kind I've reserved for the Orchard, meaning the "music" people make in our relationships, was vital in pulling me out of it and much crucially depended on the "voices of women". So instead of saying much today about Macy Gray*, a great musician, or the Mexican girl, here is notice that I not only plan to teach here in ways already announced, but the long-conceived book beyond these columns for the day I retire has ceased, as such, to exist. The Log is that book! For I'd been wondering, anyhow, how I could write an ordinary book about women musicians on the basis of my own life steeped in music, since that life's "work" would of its nature be bound and static, without interaction. A warning of 'weird stuff' up front My friends and colleagues are also getting used to the idea that "Nick's weird stuff" has taken on a new dimension. They've seen it happening and been as surprised as me. During the healing process of recent weeks, I opened a door somewhere in myself. Mow I have to live with what we're supposed to call "cognitive insight" -- to pick up on a previous piece -- as well as new-found normal feelings like most people, instead of extreme ones. But I've told friends, let's still call it "weird stuff". You see, I've got ... some kind of ESP. I know. It sounds funny, even silly, boldly written down like that, but it's true. It has always been there, somewhere on that razor-edge between genial intuition and insanity, but now it is manifest. I "hear" things in and about people, according to rules that fail to pay much attention to space and time the way we routinely experience them. This will help a lot in the music writing, which has been my calling in life from the start, while my job on Africa at the Factory remains important. I have to do it well, but it takes second place now to the destiny I've carved out. The Log is my creative way of sharing that deeper destiny. The feminine to the fore Soon the Kid will be showing up. We have music to hear and my fair daughter plans to give me a lesson in Egyptian mythology and civilisation related to the quest for Lilith and her other forms. Why Egypt? Because, as Manou told me yesterday, it was one of the rare ancient cultures that wasn't so patriarchal and paternalistic it put women down. That chimes with me. That rings true with this place. For faint hearts, I have reassuring news. What lies behind the doors to our souls is really nothing to fear. And I suspect that in months or years to come, we shall find that Lilith is standing beside a well. She must know a lot about water. Don't spill the beans, dark Seraphim So what is Sarah Fimm thinking these days? Often she comes to mind, in light of experience, when I talk of things that seem to defy the laws of day-to-day physics... Let's find out. Well, she's around Woodstock, preparing for a new record it would seem, and after a broth like this, she's into both water and what you put in it: "We are lucky enough to be in this cozy mountain place surrounded by rain. Rain does something to focus the mind on inner activity. I am making soup for everyone at the moment. Sarah (Fimm) soup (from her journal while we were in the sun) blend 2 cans white northern beans, 1 cup fresh roasted tomato, vegetable stock Heat on lowest setting for one hour. In the meantime roast one garlic bulb in olive oil (10 minutes at 375 degrees [I hope she means on that barbaric scale, Fahrenheit! It's 190 Celcius, that's a bit more like what I know....]) separate garlic cloves and chop in a fine manner. blend garlic, mushrooms, and one cup of hot clean water in blender. Add into soup, simmer on low for 30 minutes. go back to soup, add ample fresh basil, cilantro, a dash of pepper. Sprinkle on a bit of love and romano cheese Enjoy with fresh warm bread, and music of your choice. Bon appetit!" Thank you, Sarah. Even the French touch, not just for little me I know. But all the same. It's nice being back in the sink. I mean ... staying back "in synch". __________ *The Macy Gray shot is a detail from a photo by David LaChapelle on a neat Salzburg gallery site, Artmosphere (Flash), while Paulina's picture came uncredited. 11:59:11 AM    your views? []

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