It's all tumbling at an alarming rate. I'm feeling and receiving so much, I don't think my fingers or brain can keep track! Gone are the quiet moments of self-reflection, they happen so quickly I can't hold them long enough to share. As fast as I pick it up, It runs away through my clutching hands. But no, sadness these days is a fickle beast... most of the time I'm the most excited I've been in a long while. Om Namah Shivaya... every day I experience a new grace, a new moment of learning and lesson and I'm so ridiculously happy and momentum fed there just isn't room for anything else.
Today my crush said, "It's okay, I'll take care of you" with a kind and meaningful glance. My heart actually stopped. I felt the ache in my chest and the blush on my cheek. I've been invited to go camping with my crush for New Years. One tent, one night.... can my heart contain such happiness??
So I've written about crushes and intrigues and love losses many many times - if anyone is interested just revisit most of my summer posts [or any of my posts really. Love is my grand motivator].
That said. I have a crush... it's something I hate bringing up in blog form or print unless it's something. It's definitely something. I didn't sleep much last night, minus the stupid neighbor's dog howling at her absence... because I'm doing the thing I do when I really really truly like someone. It's embarrassing and the opposite of poetic. Or maybe the epitome of poetic. I day dream about them, as they are not. As I want them to be, as we are together. Last night's insomniac visions were perfect, as life isn't.
So this time... I'm keeping my crush to myself, as much as I can. There is a reason one of my coworkers calls me Chismosa which basically means I can't keep my blipping mouth shut. About anything. Which isn't actually true.... I'm a vault and a volcano equally. She was lucky enough to meet me in a gregarious phase.
That's it. Almost a hidden place.... but I've not shared with anyone the incredible power of this crush. Overwhelming, I could be wrong about this one. But this feeling is like no other... it's something I want to hold in my hands and cherish, protecting it from everyone else.
A few weeks back I drafted but never posted an entry entitled "Mary's Dying" hoping to somehow share without sharing how it feels that my Alzheimer's afflicted grandmother [who raised me for most of my life] is moving further both geographically and emotionally away from me. I feel strongly about this. I'm quite bereft about this stage in her memory, this loved one's final journey. She is the last parent in my life who remembers my infancy. She is My Person. The person who has taught me so much, the Person I love beyond anyone else.
It has been quite painful to remind her, "Love, it's me
Genevieve" and to watch her tears flood her age-tissued cheeks when she
realizes she no longer recognizes my face or relation. Many times she
thinks I'm her long dead daughter, Rose [my mother].
Radiohead - Bulletproof
This ties into feelings of loss that stretch into my past, a past riddled with loss because of many things but which ultimately link to my childhood and mother who, while alive, suffered from schizophrenia and died fourteen years ago. A death I've only recently made peace with and posted about here but which has most definitely indirectly influenced much of my life's experiences [read choices] since that point... years spent running, chasing, hunting, blood-lusting for bleached bones in others. A chance to recognize another's haunted spaces. Moments spent creating and destroying. In a way I feel like much of the last decade has been spent both hungering for and pushing against these energies. The lust for home and the push against anything resembling roots. Hence the advent of a rather silly personal mantra [that my dearests have heard many times]: I don't want to be buried in a box, I fucking refuse to live in one.
Repetitiously, I've been listening to a mixed tape made about twelve years ago [you can read about why in my temper tantrum rant here] and this phrase from Nick Cave's love song lecture, The Secret Life of The Love Song begins side one and it just keeps reverberating in my mind at the strangest moments in my daily waking life these days. Life is both cyclical and sarcastic in so many ways. How beautiful the notion, that we create our own personal catastrophes and it is the creative forces within us that are instrumental in doing this. Here our creative impulses lie in ambush by the side of our lives, ready to leap forth and kick holes in it. Holes through which inspiration can rise. We each of us need to create and sorrow itself is a creative act.
It really is quite a fantastic lecture, I highly recommend a listen, several in fact. He is also fascinated with saudade [as am I: here, here and here] and his thoughts on this and sorrow speaks so closely to my own innerlings [his father died in Cave's late adolescence]. When I listen to him I breathe deeply with a rare peace. Dreaming wise, the other day I had the most visceral interlude that included Wayne Coyne of Flaming Lips. We had the most powerfully hot sexual exchange. There were lips, there was hair pulling, there were salty oral exchanges... we were hairless and slippery in all the right places. I'm guessing his Twitter is finally getting to me... still... nice dream and the feeling of buoyancy upon waking was such a relief. I don't think it's possible to separate sorrow, sex and love.
Someone remarked to me today that The Cardigans are one of their
favorite female-centered bands and I sat in silence shocked. Bound by
confusion, disdain and an urge to be both supportive yet separate. At
least they're trying, right? No. There are just too many female led
bands that I believe would fit this person's aesthetic... I'm not sure I can sit quietly and just let this pass.
Kate Bush is absolutely fucking fundamental and though I could have started with SO MANY bands and albums [UM you guys Cat Power's Moon Pix for a killer cry/masturbation session if nothing else], tonight I'm plowing through Hounds of Love with a bottle of wine and hopefully the stamina to finish. I've elected to skip the money makers; though beyond impressive and super personally powerful, we'll leave behind Running Up That Hill and Hounds Of Love because I'm going to trust you already know and love those tunes if you're perusing this odd space. If you don't, do the world a favor keep that fact to yourself and RUN to listen then share with someone you love.
As anthemic as Big Sky is [and you'll see this track posted very soon], I actually prefer the pounce and pull of Cloudbusting. The child-like climax is so anticlimatic and that speaks volumes.
You're like my yo-yo
That glowed in the dark.
What made it special
Made it dangerous,
So I bury it
And forget.
But every time it rains,
You're here in my head,
Like the sun coming out
And Dream of Sheep is the only song that could possibly follow such an anticlimatic song with its quiet thunderous bass/soprano murmurs. Do you hear that delicious snowy pull?? Breathtaking.
I tune in to some friendly voices
Talking 'bout stupid things.
I can't be left to my imagination.
Let me be weak,
Let me sleep
And dream of sheep.
Waking the Witch is already slotted for my Winter Mix this year - such an incredible delicious aural tale of what feels like Little Innocent Red Riding Hood meets Dark Devil. It ends ominously and sonically with no conclusion... so wicked. Watching You Without Me brings an element of quiet organic insect-like warmth with its Indian seagull sway to what I've always felt was a relatively cold album and makes me want use it as a cushion in a mix I have in mind. It speaks of loss, nostalgia and something... something I can't put into words.
Watching You Without Me
Can't let you know
What's been happening.
There's a ghost in our home,
Just watching you without me.
I'm not here.
Jig of Life is what I believe to be the album's roots and joy. Listening to John Carder Bush's narration... holy shit! I can't help but think of My Mary when I feel this tune and hear the lyrics. And then follows Holy Earth... holy moly.. it's not for everyone but for some it's pure magic. It's my magic.
Jig of Life
Hello, old lady.
I know your face well.
I know it well.
She says,
"Ooh-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na!
I'll be sitting in your mirror.
Now is the place where the crossroads meet.
Will you look into the future?
"Never, never say goodbye
To my part of your life.
"Let me live!"
She said.
"C'mon and let me live, girl!"
Can't you see where memories are kept bright?
Tripping on the water like a laughing girl.
Time in her eyes is spawning past life,
One with the ocean and the woman unfurled,
Holding all the love that waits for you here.
Catch us now for I am your future.
A kiss on the wind and we'll make the land.
Come over here to where When lingers,
Waiting in this empty world,
Waiting for Then, when the lifespray cools.
For Now does ride in on the curl of the wave,
And you will dance with me in the sunlit pools.
We are of the going water and the gone.
We are of water in the holy land of water
And all that's to come runs in
With the thrust on the strand."
I picked a hard album, I realize now. Picking just a few songs to showcase is proving impossible, Kate Bush is working her spells and that's a good thing. I've already decided that some people have to come to her in their own time and if they only touch upon her but once they're lucky. If you let her wash over you in one sitting, you're likely to melt into the stream and become one with her enchantments. At this point, one bottle in, I'm okay with that.
Belgian Subject's glorious 1982 track What Happened to You is one of several current mantras coloring my life these days with its steely wisps. The honeymoon is over and now begins Battle of Stasis. State of
deflation, hieroglyphic hypnosis. A time approaches when you must
actualize all the finger pricking work you've been practicing in silent
solitude. A time to embrace choices and eschew that other underbelly. It's odd that I craved a sabbatical for so long and here we are a month
out of Babylon Tower and I'm already itching for something more.
There's nothing quite like restless boredom to shake you from the fuzzed
out dream state where you left an important part of your brain Somewhere,
somewhere in a field in Hampshire. Alright.
I hate everything. I hate today. I hate those happy people with their stupid trees and cookies. I hate my choice to leave Babylon Tower. I hate the stupid day I just had. I hate the fact that I can't leave today behind. I hate that Che Guevara has taken up residence in my stupid uterus and is plotting Uterine Guerilla Warfare and I had to pretend while at work that I was a happy person while stupid bloody uterine massacre made me a cranky unhappy goblin. I hate that I brought a coworker to my weird teeny home and my dog Mavis got so excited she peed on my bed. TWICE. I hate that my headphones don't work. I hate that I'm listening to an amazing mix made 10 years ago that isn't digital [because it's a mixed tape] and I can't upload it to share. I hate that I haven't done laundry in three months and have shit to wear tomorrow and have to get creative with what the fuck I have left. I hate that I have crushes on some people I work with when I know better.
I REALLY HATE THAT I HAVE NO FUCKING HEADPHONES.
But holy mother of fuck I love Joy Division. This amazing cover of Love Will Tear Us Apart [incidentally one of my ultimate favorite songs] by Squarepusher is currently playing as I type and it's making the madness of today ease and throb. Throb, throb, thrummm.....
I can't seem to stop watching this video of Portishead's Into the Fire synched by some wonderful fan with a portion Maya Deren's 1944 silent film At Land.
My new job attracts a strange troupe of lovable oddballs and I can't wait to share with you glimpses into the quirks of these intriguing characters. Forty people spanning twenty years worth of varying ages and probably just as many backgrounds. I find myself in a chemical dance of attraction, electron to proton. Wavering on a precipice, caught between annihilating dissolution and the steadying beat of constancy. Already dreamy, if I'm not careful I'll lose all sense of time.
