With Or Without You

The lynchian blue light of early morning gently wipes the sleep from my eyes and maybe it's the moon in Scorpio or the last vestiges of the eclipse cycle we just barely made it out of or the time of year, but I find myself feeling soft and tender without pain and a desire for yearning once more.  As a certified GenX yearner, I know yearning songs.  But I've avoided most of them of late because instead of that slinky wistfulness I so adore, I find only acid and twisted barbed cruelty.

I suppose being cool was never a value I really cared about, though at times in my life I certainly masked as though it mattered.  To that end, it's time to out myself as a lover of U2.  Bono's problematic ego aside, there are some classically intense burner yearners in their repertoire. 

Many many years ago in another life, I would drive through the flat plains of broken suburbia to a dingy park surrounding an even dingier pond and listen to The Unforgettable Fire on a loop.  To this day, when I hear the opening bars of A Sort of Homecoming, I feel that person rattling inside the mundane cage of existence as she walked round and round that pond yearning for more.  More nature, more romance, more intensity... more more more! Is this it? Is there nothing more? 

And then Bad.  That song belongs to my mother and her early death.  And to Germany and loss and this pressing desire to free myself from the surface of living.  To taste the limits of existence rather than yet again be bound by the body's cage.  I once brought tears to someone's eyes by belting it out with such passion, all that I felt and was in that young vessel.  I remember that moment so clearly.

How long? How long must we sing this song? 

Nothing changes on New Year's Day.  

October's Gloria and The Joshua Tree.

When I think of With Or Without You, a much more naive version of myself takes the reins. She imagines two souls interwoven, intertwining through millennia. Spinning through space and time, a la Brian Eno's Spinning Away.  With and without each other, periods of connection and wholeness followed by periods of tangy separation.  So intense and poetic, I love that younger version of myself and feel such a gentleness towards her.  To shelter her from the cruel world of disassociation and selfishness, if only I could protect her from the whims of broken people. The one who believed in magic and a love that would rescue me from the gasping chasm of existence.  

On that note, I'm so excited to see the upcoming Luc Besson directed Dracula A Love Tale. I hope it does something to restore my faith in yearning.  In a new way though; because without the beauty of connection and belief in that magic, something truly innocent dies.  And from those ashes a resurrection or something new can be born; one who still believes but holds hands with unwavering truth on her side. Eyes wide open darling, not afraid but not easily duped either.  

Slick Vile

What I'm into lately ... delightfully mad chaotic expressive and free.  

Haute & Freddy - Freaks 

 

 Pleasure Victim - Passion and Punishment 

Not new but new to me and all's I can say is...

DELICIOUSNESS, VILE, SLICK, SLITHERY AND BITTERLY SHARP. <3 

 

Schnallo - Hold It Like Honey 

Their LP was finally released on CD a few months ago (maybe a year now?) and I picked it up in England while I was there in January.  They recently released a photo shoot created in collaboration with Cinnamene for this single but a full length video version isn't out yet.  Sighs... I love it so much and you should hunt it out too.  I could screenshot it but that kind of destroys the magic, don't you think? 

Maybe Baby, Just Maybe

Up before the sun and the first taste of autumn is touching these parts.  After months of forced chilly air, the windows are open and my little kittens' sniffers and ears are working overtime soaking up the birdsong and green scents. Robust black milky tea is my hand's companion along with Widowspeak's 2015 album All Yours.  

Today happens to also be a full moon and a lunar eclipse in Pisces.  If you follow those sorts of things, the energy is so juicy!  I feel so much peace letting the old drift out into the metaphorical sea.  This morning finds me feeling more content than I have in a very very long time.  Yesterday I impressed my own taste buds with a homemade eggplant and lentil stew made to the sounds of OMD.  

So much in the world feels at odds with life but the last few days feel like micro affirmations filled with simple human joys, wholesome sounds in my ears, releasing that which isn't for me and dreaming of all the delights I've yet to experience.  It is professed that the universe smiles on those that move in silence, in quiet... steadily moving towards their dreams.  That irony hasn't been lost on me over the years but maybe baby just maybe this time we might be on a smoother course of this most contrary choose your own adventure slip 'n slide. 

Hopefully, I've not tempted those pesky universe sprites into pushing me off the proverbial table.

Adorable!! My little mess makers have discovered their first squirrel running laps along the porch railing.  Watching them watch the little scamp watching the world is just perfect.

 

 Widowspeak - Coke Bottle Green

Often enough I stare into space

And I get that crazed look on my face

Grace

It's true, surprisingly, what they say.  That one day, you just get over something. As a rule, I despise cliches, find their trite simplicity irritating but here I am, a walking example of them.  I don't mean that I'm healed, I don't know what that even means but I am content and well? Unbothered.  The great energetic omnipresent buzzing is quiet.  With one act, the lever of the primordial electrical complex was flipped and everything went silent, stone death.   And since then?   An absence of that ever present hum.  It's given me time to feel and think.  About me. Just me.  And what it means to be me.  In this vacuum, eons of emotions came boiling to the surface expressed by parts of myself I'd never given the spotlight to before. A new symposium of voices and energies to learn.  To each of them, I handed the reins to heal.  This is your space, do with it what you will but this time? We won't leave.  I thought at times I was losing myself but the opposite was true.  In giving each of those little Mes time to be, I joined myself with them.  Not the abyss of before, but a profound pool of oneness.  In the ever progressing journey of self, the surprise is that we are infinite.  

In anger awhile ago, I lamented to my therapist, I just want to get to the place where I don't need anyone else. It was the anger of a little me, angry that they weren't seen and loved by the broken adults around her.  Angry at the present me for not seeing her and for putting herself in the arms of those that perpetuated the same myths.  In my recovery, I visualize a great many things, so many scenes with each of these versions of myself. Each whole and unique and so very alive. I have always longed to live in a commune, a collective community of beautifully weird personalities and it turns out I already do.  And in this time of innerness, I have come to know them all. By sight and even more importantly by feel. I know her and HER and Her. This collective matriarchy.  And we disagree and fight and thrash and snarl and cry and love and nurture and push and rest and crawl our way to union. 

There is a real grace to this dance. Grace in the religious sense. Beatific and knowing and incredibly patient and kind. The kind of strength it takes to sit with each part of yourself, and just feel. I have always known I was strong, a warrior but I had no idea I possessed the soft side of strength.  The strength it takes to keep quiet while another speaks, the strength it takes to hold one's own thoughts and not writhe in resentment but rather in peace. The strength it takes to walk away and truly leave it, not knowing what lies ahead.  To walk into the unknown, unarmed but awake.  Naked but not weak. Strong but not bombastic. Secure not arrogant. Human, at last. 

The other weekend, I saw the Jeff Buckley documentary, It's Never Over.  Heavy handed in some ways and lyrically poetic in others.  Jeff wrote, "living in the abstract is a cancer and a hell."  There's something about him I've always resonated with and felt equally adverse to. I left the viewing contemplative and hopeful, there is something so lovely about living an analog experience and it gave me the reminder that It is in those quiet moments.  I wonder what would have become of him, had those waters not swallowed him whole.