we tumble downward

Tuesday afternoon, Clements, Donegall Sq…

..dug out Hopes and Fears by Keane today… found some dark stuff…

as my intentional “time off for me” continues in faltering and sometimes uncomfortable fashion, (amazing how much our daily busyness allow us to avoid ourselves – distracted disregard becomes so much harder when you don’t have to turn up at a desk), and I attempt to be as creatively active as I can with my hours, I sit over my daily and solitary ritual of coffee while drafting words and ideas, or perhaps i am simply escaping the madness of persistant solitude with pen and page as a kind of company. whichever, i’ve been mapping out some collecting thoughts on memory that have been deposited on the water’s edge over the morning. Inhabiting this album, or (perhaps letting it inhabit me), from one of the bestselling and yet “uncool” MOR bands of the past few years has led me surprisingly, yet naturally, to dark contemplation… lyrics brimming with a brutal kind of honesty … braver stuff than it might get credit for, there are statements here that if spoken in open confession would rightfully make the listener drop the eye awkwardly… some truths are just unbearable… and I wonder if we spend much of our lives pretending we don’t feel this stuff…

Here’s just one of several tracks where discomforting honesty seems to be dwelling…

She Has No Time

You think your days are uneventful
That no one ever thinks about you
She goes her own way
She goes her own way

You think your days are ordinary
That no one ever thinks about you
But we’re all the same
And she can hardly breathe
Without you

She says
She has no time
For you now
She says
She has no time

Or think about the lonely people
Or think about the day she found you
Or lie to yourself
And see it all dissolve around you
She says
She has no time
For you now
She says
She has no time
For you now
She says has no time

Lonely people
Tumble downwards
And my heart opens up to you
When she says
She has no time
For you now
She says
She has no time
For you now

::

How many housewives have ironed the laundry to this only to crumple to the lino weeping…? One? A thousand? None? Such sadness, such pointless aloneness… all feel the same… and still we persist in our resisting… even though we’re hardly able to fill our lungs for the lack of one another…

Perhaps the curse of being human is that we cannot live together and we cannot live apart…

or perhaps that's just me.

::

delved back into this bag of tricks today to reread an essay on family and it was followed by one on creativity that grabbed my attention...and i had to chuckle when i read this quote, having just written the above...i put it here entirely out of context, for if i tried to put in in context i'd end up quoting the entire essay...highlighting is my own...

Honesty is simply memory; truth-telling is remembering what it is you want. what the patient is resistant to, what has made the patient a modeller, a Promethean rather than a carver or a midwife, is the horror of the past.

Adam Phillips, Side Effects, (2006) p.88, On Not Making it Up

::

Oddly appropriate Advent listening *2:
Pillow by Adem.

LB,x