Care and be cared for
I’ve already made a point for caring, to extend our own lowly existence wider into circles around us. But what about the other direction. It’s an old idea that everything in this world is realised in a split between object and subject.
We are all subjects, thinking, feeling, breathing, crying and laughing our way through our existence. But to everyone around us, we’re another object in a world that’s just getting fuller and fuller.
Care for another and make him a subject of your affection. But what happens when you’re being cared for and made a true subject of someone’s affection, love and friendship?
It’s possibly one of the hardest things to achieve: let yourself be cared for.
In times where we’re being tought to stand on our own two feet from a tender age, where being independent and self-sufficient, we’ve completely lost the notion of accepting anybody’s help. The idea that we need others in order to get better, be better, get more complete, be more complete has something revolting. Completely out of touch with the modern world and the idea that yes, man is an island and that every man can fight for themselves.
Accepting the care of others isn’t so much a dependency or a disguised profiteurism that only lets you consider others in their worth or what they can do for you. That’s just another way of being self sufficient and using anything and everything that you can for your own gain.
No, what I’m driving at here is the fundamental truth of ‘seeing me through your eyes makes me fuller’.
As someone who had to very early on understand the terrible distance between me and the world and my own incapacity to ‘connect’ or blend in, it’s been the biggest change in myself and my not-so-funny automatisms of auto-derogation to accept that there are people caring for me and that them doing something for me, caring for me helps me be better, fight less to be oh-so-awesome and by admitting to liking it, actually learn to care for others more.
Letting yourself be cared for by others, on their own terms instead of your own, can offer new perspectives. Accepting help, accepting their view of you, of your needs and their ways of meeting them, is not just about you, but about them as well and about what links you to the rest of the world.
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Prometheus
The sweet grass bends in anticipation beneath my barren feet,
Somewhere a dead leaf is floating toward the earth,
and here… a sunbeam is crying it’s last glowing tear in my hand.
My heart so full, my words so empty.
I’ve drawn out my soul, pulled out every vein of every feeling,
ripped every shard of every nerve,
every break of every drawn out silence.
In the end I cut out these eyes that were supposed to see so far.
Clap my wings and fly away,
to nothingness and everlasting morning light.
Let me see this end for l am destined to stay
because there is nothing else,
because there is only this… final understanding:
we become the one thing we want to avoid the most,
no matter how many prayers,
no matter how many hours,
how much love, how much heart or conquest.
In the end we’re just another wolf feeding on someone else’s cadavers.
So take your teeth to some other liver, your claws to another lightbearer,
I am all but dead, all but empty, all but used and torn.
This night is not my last, but it truly is my longest.
I’ve had bits and pieces of this for a long while waiting in my notebook. Scattered, really. The first few lines that seem so out of tune with the rest for instance are a couple of months old written on my way to work. In the end, every piece is a journey, a projection. The true sense is only revealed when you reread the title after the poem. It’s a confusing piece and yet, I know exactly what every contrasting picture means.
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Make You Sing: Kate Rusby
One of my big loves and heartaches at the same time is any kind of irish or celtic music. Heartaches because one of my unaccomplished dreams was to learn the Irish Harp and play the flute or Ullean Pipes in a pub somewhere in the backland of Donegal. Sounds like your average point on a list of things you’d like to do before you die. A bucket list of sorts. The longing in my case however takes on dimensions that can border on the tag of ‘unrequited love’.
Apart from one of my favourite Podcasts, the Irish and Celtic Music Podcast I satisfy my longing and dreams with quite a few folk and irish artists. Of course there are the well known ones such as Enya, Clannad, Loreena McKennitt or even Moya Brennan and Aiofé that quite often make it into the bill board charts – particularly around Christmas – there are some that offer a heartfelt new interpretation of the Irish theme to the lover of such music.
One name that is not so widely known is Kate Rusby. Even if The Guardian and other English Newspapers declared her the most well known folk singers of our times, outside of the UK barely anybody has ever heard of her.
And even if such well known names as John McCusker (who later became her husband) show the level of her work and brilliance in her tone and writing, outside of the folk scene, not one song of her was ever featured anywhere else but on the CD of the Sharpe Series.
Originally from South Yorkshire, born into a family of musicians as is the case with most folk singers or musicians, Rusby is a very discrete artist, again not unlike a lot of artists from this genre. But as Helen Brown wrote in the Daily Telegraph about Awkward Annie (her last album of 2007): Listening to Kate Rusby’s lovely new album, it occurred to me that she’s England’s answer to Dolly Parton. Not in terms of the wigs and the sequins, but in her quaveringly sincere ability to tell a simple, downhome story in a song and make your heart ache for it. No scandals, but so much talent.
The only song to ever make it into the official Chartsin 2006 was ‘All Over Again’ which featured Rusby beside Ronan Keating. A song he redid and resang with other female singers such as Foortje. (Read her biography on her official site from the first link on how much she liked that cooperation.)
After six studio albums and countless folk festivals, Rusby has never lost that spherical shine in her voice which comes naturally and without any superficiality through the headphones. Her music is something to be put on in the early hours of a Sunday morning when the fog hasn’t lifted and exposed the land below. When the idea of a fairy dancing around your garden, gracing it to flower, is not yet burnt away by the midday sun.
Edit: Again it’s impossible to get my RSS to show all the Youtube videos I embedded. So please, head over to the post site to get all the goodness.
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Make you sing: Madrugada
Music is one of the most visceral and dividing standards of any culture that there is. Ever since the production spans of albums and concert tours have lessened, the explosion of styles and their according subcultures has become a phenomenon like no other in the history of mankind.
According to what you like to listen to, there’s a whole lifestyle that goes with it today. And while that in itself is an interesting observations, it’s not the aim of this post or the new series I am starting today.
Among this major industry and between bill board charts and sales, there are artists that get lost, but not unheard.
Some of these artists deserve a bit more exposure and I thought that by sharing a few of the hidden gems I have waiting in my iTunes library with readers and friends, everyone could be served.
So, sit back and let yourself be inspired by artists and songs that you barely hear on any radio station or in any chart listing.
Madrugada
A group I discovered through my husband who in turn discovered them when he visited friends and working collegues in Norway. The band name is in fact misleading rather pointing to a Spanish dawn rather than Norwegian solid guitar rock with a voice to melt stones and rival with the best from Bryan Ferry to Nick Cave. After four studio albums and waiting for the big break in the US or across mainstream Europe, the band’s guitarist died under unknown circumstances in his flat… they finished their last record titled Madrugada nevertheless and all fans agree: it’s probably their best. Unfortunately it seems like it will also be their last. The group has split up and no notice of a reunion has been announced.
The first video was the first song I got to hear from them and I’ve been under their charm instantly. Melancholic, haunting and with texts as bold and poignant as they get.
In between Albums, they recorded a song for Ane Brun’s Duet album, another fine artist that will be featured here very soon.
And finally, last year, after the sudden death of their guitarist, the group finished the album with the remaining artists and it is my favourite of them so far.
Listen to this to know what I mean:
Sivert Høyem’s voice holds so many colours, so many shades of emotions and the sound has a feel of something you’ve known for a long time… like your favourite sweater or cardigan, that wraps itself around your soul and heart and leaves no place for superficiality.
EDIT: RSS Subscribers, please read the original post on the blog to see and listen the embedded videos that apparently aren’t parsing properly here. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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Let’s talk about it… or not
Now that the US Presidentials are over, I can finally start thinking about blogging and writing again.
Sounds like an odd thing to say, doesn’t it? Why would the US elections keep me as a European, a writer or a philosopher from blogging my mind? The answer is easily given. There are only two ways to go about a topic that is so invasive in our everyday lives and has such a massive presence in the news: either you avoid talking about it completely, but then the avoidance will always show in your writing since it is what is on everyone’s mind after all OR you do write about it and open a can of worms that you cannot close again.
Of course I had an opinion on the votes and the elections, of course I have a personal stance and a professional one since I can rarely dissociate the one from the other. As someone trained in philosophy going about in the world, you can rarely not be influenced by the things and current topics around you and think about them with your ‘philosophical’ mind. So, even if I wasn’t to talk about the elephant in the room, I would in a way by avoiding it meticulously.
So the main question remains: why not blog about it if it’s such an important issue of our time?
Because in the myriad of comments, opinions, partisanship battles, demeaning thought processes etc. my word doesn’t count for anything. Not amongst the friends that I live around, close contacts over the internet that I’ve come to consider my friends on certain levels, not among the people that share my faith or convictions or the people I respect. Because just as the media coverage enlightens our knowledge of the world (not to be confounded with actual knowledge, I’m just referring to factual knowledge), it also taints and escalates the dialogue. There is practically no informed discussion to be had about anything in this respect. Not about the kind of dog Obama’s kids will get or the colour of Palin’s breakfast cereal.
I have in all honesty only seen ONE explame of a discussion that could be called constructive and instructive for both camps in all of over 2 years of following the whole circus called U.S. Presidential Election.
What a sad bottom line that makes.
And something I was not ready to expose myself to. There are only so many fall-outs with friends and family that you can get past and once certain things are being said… the going back is almost impossible. The Philosopher’s Attic isn’t about that. It’s about looking at the world in a different manner. It’s about getting a small spark of something else in your day and in mine. And that is what I’ll try to bring back now that this race is over.
A great weekend to all of you.
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Atomic fracture
Feeling the loss of a thing you never had,
every day, every hour of every passing moment,
breathing in your every move,
weighing on every look turned to the future,
turned to the solid grounds,
turned to everyone but me.
It’s like a coat of arms that’s rusted in the sun,
while others happened and no clouds were near.
The best days are unexpected, unplanned, untainted,
while life happened all around, away and elsewhere.
It’s like dying every day, and losing every night,
to feel the loss of something unexpected and unknown.
A mourning without end and a wake that has no send off.
It’s like the death of a stone, unseeming and unreal,
like being splintered into the smallest piece that wouldn’t fit
in any hand or any life.
Nothing lost and nothing gained.
And yet, you’re dying everyday anew.
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