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Spring

daylight comes calling, laying on the long table its sheet of white gold

~|~

Sunday morning, blue and breezy. I’ve had a full breakfast and brewed a pot of tea (Si Ji Chun, Four Seasons of Spring, sweet and sharp, good for mornings). I am writing surrounded by sound, blissed-out Balearic downtempo melding seamlessly with the quiet echoes of Sunday, and daylight is glowing in the porcelain and lacquer of my tea service. And I find myself thinking that, in terms of the sheer richness of possibility and the texture of everyday life, this is the finest era there has ever been in all of our history, and I am glad to be alive in it. Today will be a good day. Later on I’ll head out to the gym, attend a yoga class, maybe run a little; and today I will write. An idea for a quick short ebook crystallized yesterday, something I’ve been thinking about for a while. I’ve recorded the ideas on my phone — I am slowly but surely discovering the joys of dictation — and what remains will be to flesh them out, organize them, turn them into something worth reading. Few emotions can compare to the feeling that one is moving forward, that the next step is worth taking, will get you somewhere. I feel like a sailboat casting off in the bright white sunlight of a Mediterranean harbour, journeying on towards new destinations.

Back to the old ways

Something in the air tonight. A voice, a song, one I haven’t heard in years, not since — how long ago? 2006? 2007? Before the great detour began, before I made the error which cost me five years of my life. Before I entered the world, became one with it, let it consume me. Over now. Back. Myself again, the person I once was, the person I was meant to be. Free. Independent. No organizations to work within, no external systems to abide by, no social groupings to appease, no politics. Nothing more of human society for me now. For the first time in five years I feel truly free, truly myself, and the world is singing and singing and I can hear it in a way I never could while stuck inside of it all. I can hear my own voice clearly now, and it is not drowned out. I am orphaned, lonely, poor; in those things abide riches. I am dreamer, writer, reader; I have again my old magicks, my old powers. And I am happy — happy in a different way, a deeper way, possessed again at last of a kind of resonant simplicity. I can see beyond surfaces in a way I rarely could, caught and struggling in the world’s web. At last, around me, everywhere resounding — depth. And it is good.

This is what I wanted out of life, this.

among silent leaves,
whispers; on the breathless wind,
the billowing mind

Chasing fireworks

like silk in the ear of the retired fighter, the ring’s voice beckons

~|~

Part of the answer turned out to be intellectual stimulation: the need to recreate a world beyond my usual concerns of writing, living, dancing. I have been living a comfortable life, but not necessarily an exciting one — not the kind of life that propels a man out of bed in the morning, eager to face the day. It has been a steady life, evenly paced; but now I feel the need to reintroduce some additional verve, spice, colour, variety, excitement. It is time to begin accelerating again.

As part of that project I have been reading a good deal, more than I have generally done over these past few years. The quantity and variety of my reading has rather been dropping off, and it’s time to bring it back up again. I want to come back to that ferment of the mind, with ideas interacting and shooting off in all directions. At my peak, when I had time, I was reading almost a hundred and eighty books a year; I doubt I even approach a hundred now. So now I’ve been reading books on science, on business, on fashion design; also novels, genre fiction, poetry, philosophy, literary criticism, sociology, psychology, even self-improvement. I’m casting the net wide.

I live a relatively long way from the city now, and the long bus journeys have been perfect for my reading: long uninterrupted tracts of time with nothing to do, no distractions save the landscape passing by. And today I came to the realization that my ordinary reading speed (without skimming, scanning, or speed-reading) has more than doubled over the past ten years. A decade ago I would have been able to read roughly thirty pages an hour; today I found myself doing seventy. And I wasn’t even trying. I haven’t lost it yet.

After

rusted and sad — a bayonet left weeping in the trunk of a tree

~|~

The long line of hills stretches out across my horizon, running north to south, hazy and green in the after-rain air. Not so far away now: perhaps a couple of kilometres, no more. I could walk if I wished. Here and there are clearings where the mist is thicker and blue, and I know I am looking at the reservoirs whose names I learned twenty years ago as a child: Upper Peirce, Upper Seletar. Once upon a time I dreamed of this, a dream which shifted and changed cloudlike over the years to become this apartment with big wide windows and hills on the horizon and sky. I will not be here long; but while I am this is a space to write, to dream, and to put life in order for my next big change, whatever that will be.

Last night Denise and I sat and talked, over lassi and wine, about what it means to be young: to be starting out, in your early twenties, with dreams and fears and hopes, ambitions like ribbons worn bright on your sleeve. But I am in a different phase now, and older: I have gained (and sometimes lost) all that as a young man I once wanted. What next?, is my question. What next? What spark now will ignite my engines, what will be the fuel that feeds me? In what direction does my next journey lie?

Making it all sustainable, perhaps. That’s an important part of the life of any artist, finding ways not just to survive but to thrive. But that is not enough, not sufficient. There is my work, of course, continuing to do the best I can: freely I have received, and freely too I give. But as an artist I am an engine of transmutation; I cannot create ex nihilo. There is a certain verve and vibrancy missing from my life now which was there in my younger days, like an explorer who made his way to the pole only to find all other roads leading away from it. I feel like a battleship rusting in drydock, a soldier who has run out of war. What happens now?

After a birthday

competing to see who snuffs out the candles first — my breath and the wind

~|~

Yesterday was my birthday, and it was a good one. It started just after midnight at Häagen-Dazs, with friends sticking a birthday candle atop my ice-cream tower — and it ended just before the next midnight arrived, with laughter and wine and dancing and a party by the beach. It took me until this evening to discover that my wallet had gone missing. Then a friend who’d driven me home found it in his car. I have, once again, been lucky.

I habitually take big risks if the returns seem worthwhile to me, and so my life has been marked both by significant achievement and by catastrophic loss; there have been highs and lows, as with any other life, but the highs have been more euphoric and the lows correspondingly more devastating. People sometimes ask me how I’ve managed to do so much with my life. The answer is simply that I’ve followed my heart wherever it has led me, without asking the questions most men ask: whether the time is right, whether I have resources enough, whether enough safeties are in place. Whenever I have wanted to do something I have simply done it, walking the high wire between myself and my goal. And sometimes I have fallen. And at other times I have won through. (more…)

New directions

a hedge of wild thorns snarls and springs beneath a man’s unwavering axe

~|~

I have had a good breakfast of eggs and bread and sausages and potatoes and am now settling down to write, a cup of tea at my right hand, hard on the heels of two coffees taken earlier. Things have been poorly on this end lately, and I am not pleased — but I put it from my mind. There are more valuable candidates for my attention here and now. My work contains a ferocity it has not had in some time, a younger man’s fury and drive. And there is always work to be done. Seven months of the year are almost over; in that time I have suffered loss, watched dreams die, also successfully accomplished a few things. I give little shrift to either, victories and defeats alike; being who I am, I can do little else. This is the hallmark of the man who gambles, who takes chances, who has the guts and madness to routinely stake everything on a single throw and damn the consequences. But one must be careful when playing for these stakes; too much loss can make a man careless, and that will kill him more surely than anything else will.

A new day

Day breaks on a Monday morning, the sky lavender over the earth olive and grey and brown. I have been drinking tea, singing the office of Prime, and the light from the window is now enough to cast shadows. It reflects off my furnishings, simple and orderly, reflects off the wooden floor. Ten years ago this was also how I lived, at daybreak, greeting the light as the birds do, with a song in my mouth. I live a contemplative lifestyle now, no longer having to keep rushing from place to place; a writer in his study, a hermit in his cell. Strange to look back and find how little fundamentally has changed, though I am older now and kinder, more forgiving. Perhaps I am as I was born to be, enfolded in the silence of the dawn. The more things change, it seems, the more they stay the same.

clean white linen laid
upon the breakfast table –
silence at daybreak

On song

I miss singing. Haven’t done so in over a decade, sadly, and I don’t have the voice for it now: my voice has been ruined by age and coffee and liquor and tobacco and yelling at unruly students. Once upon a time song — especially partsong — took up much of my life, and it was nothing unusual or exceptional to lift up my voice among friends. Many of us were singers then. Those days are now long gone, long over. But still I am drawn to quires and places where they sing, unaccompanied, the human voice wanting for nothing. There is a certain clarity about it, a certain purity, like the fresh air of morning before the sunrise heartbreaking in its simplicity. I am not a fan of the contemporary vogue towards special effects, a vogue for hisses and drumsounds and percussive rhythms and sighs and shouts and whispers and clapping of hands and stamping of feet, the province of those singers who strive for effect or who feel a need to impress. For myself, nothing is superior to clear phrasing and timing and tone and diction and dynamic control, the great and classic mainstays of musical interpretation. Or perhaps they are the mainstays of all art, there too in different ways in dance, in writing, in the making of images, in sport, in those works of our hands we call beautiful.

*

Here I am, through the long nights, rain pouring down outside, standing firm, holding on, keeping faith even in the midst of these dark times, knowing that the light will dawn for us. What is it that truly matters, my love? You and I, you and I, for which I have given everything and would give it all again. So long as you stay by me my heart will not break, worlds away though you are, though tyrants and their armies bar the way. So long as we remain one none can stand against us; if our faith be broken, the war is not worth winning. Stay. Take as your guide not the expedience of the moment, but those things which go deeper, last longer: faith and trust and love and honour, dignity, courage, strength, those things which were and are your own and mine. Hark not to those who can be bought and sold, nor to those who seek to strut smugly before others. What good is a lifetime’s worth of beads and baubles? I set us at a dearer rate than that. Hold fast now;

on the dark ocean
let life orient itself;
on the horizon,
our star; no less dear, surely,
the quiet lamp each steers by.

O clemens, O pia

one world, this world in its briefness and sorrow is still enough for me

~|~

It was a good idea to go dancing tonight. I wasn’t planning to and was feeling tired, having been busy all day; but dance has a way of revivifying the soul in its flows and rhythms and community. To dance is to feel a little more alive. I wonder how I lived without it.

Lately I’ve been revisiting the Liturgy of the Hours (the daily round of Christian prayer associated with various times of day), and creating a little Book of Hours for myself. The Hours have always served me well: they structure my day, keep me in touch with Latin, provide a ready source of chant texts, and make me a better writer by giving me access to well-written devotional verse. Now, of course, I’m hoping to use them to explore Sarum Use hymn settings. I’m basing my practice around the 1979 Book of Common Prayer of the U.S. Episcopal Church, relying on it for Matins, Evensong and Compline and supplementing that with adaptations of pre-Tridentine Prime, Terce, Sext, and None. I doubt I’ll stick with the Hours for long, and they haven’t been a regular part of my life in years; but so long as I do I expect it will be a salutary experience.

I am of course as Christian as the men of the Renaissance were pagans, which is to say, not at all; and my own spirituality is in fact far closer to paganism than theirs was, relying as it does upon the cycles of the earth. But just as Renaissance writers and artists referenced the Greek and Roman gods — studying their histories, fashioning images of them, and uncovering their monuments without ever worshipping them — so too can I draw on the rich cultural heritage of medieval Christianity for my own edification, without necessarily having to worship its God. One does not have to believe to be comforted by order, language and music. And that, to me, is grace.

In between

pour me another, before the night and slumber come to claim us

~|~

I’m sitting in the bar where we regularly dance, which is quiet tonight, having a pint of ruby before tango. Music’s good, the voice of a chanteuse carrying over the sound system, high and husky and sweet. I’m thinking of friends old and new, those who are gone now, those who are here, those who have come back again. There are those whose lives have run on different tracks to mine, their faces receding from me in the clatter of carriagewheels. I am a wanderer: a man with a pack walking, walking on, climbing over boundaries and stiles, bedding down wherever I can find shelter. A dreamer, a dancer; a gambling man used to staking everything on a single throw and starting over again after, win or lose. I am that man who has walked away from loves and homes and gods, whose life is lived in the spaces between worlds, with no anchor, no binding chain. The freest of free men, paying always the price which comes: the price of being always a stranger. Life will have its due; I don’t begrudge it. A life measured in pints of beer and moments on the dancefloor and so many, many words.