In the spirit of my previous posting, here is a celebration of a song lyric from the past. This was written collectively by Jerome Clark, Linda Williams and Robin Williams, the latter who I have seen once, playing with John Renbourn, and though it isn’t a song or band that was that influential to me at the time or since, listening today in the car it made me smile throughout and this seemed such a delightful experience to share and celebrate its playfulness:

I’ve been wearing faces in the strangest places
Just to make a dream come true
The dawn is sweet but it’s incomplete and l’m waiting for you
The breeze is blowing and my hair is growing
Forgotten everything my mother knew
The day is young and spring is sprung and I’m waiting for you
Must you bring that horse in here Miss Jones
(although your snowshoes do look terrific)
Yes, they all come from out of the sky, you know

I’m waiting for the dove that never came home
I’m waiting for the painter when his colours were gone
I’m waiting for the soldiers at the war
I’m waiting for a royal decision
I’m waiting for the sun to snore
I’m waiting for a rumble from Jericho
Waiting for the world to begin

I’m a bareback rider, I’m an outsider and I love to dance the boogaloo
I’m a turnip head, I’m a lately wed and I’m waiting for you

More tea vicar? (Hold that tiger)
Yes, the hydrangeas do look divine this time of the year

I’m waiting for the angels to put on their smiles
I’m waiting for the judges to come to trial
I’m waiting for the aeroplane
I’m waiting for the graves to open
I’m waiting to be sold in chains
I’m waiting for a signal from the trapdoor queen
Waiting for the world to begin

I’m a snake charmer, I’m a guava farmer
I’m a goose to me don’t ever say boo
Let the universe roll, I’m a simple soul and I’m waiting for you

Oh it sounds so sweet when you play it me like that..
(that tiger really doesn’t want to be held)

I’m waiting for the signs to point a different way
I’m waiting for God to take a holiday
I’m waiting for night in the mine
I’m waiting for the hills to grow steeper
I’m waiting for the man they call Shine
I’m waiting for Willie the Weeper to wake
Waiting for the world to begin

I’m off to market with an old straw basket singing dodeodeodo
Green cloth to wear in the spring, in the April breezes how it will blow

I’m going to introduce to you now
The personalities who compose
The Jim Spiggatt Occult Quart

Over there on my left
We have Miss Cynthia de Monfort-Jones
On her silvery toned mandoline

And just a little further over the left
We have that famed Oriental bass player
Miss Fenola Bumgarner (first time in captivity folks!)

On the pounding batterie and coterie
We have that well known bricklayer’s labourer from Pilton
Mr Jack McMarker

And perhaps we just have time
To devastate your synaesthesia
With one more searing chorus
From Black Jack Davy on the steam organ

That’s all

It is becoming, this year, a sad retrospective: listening to the music of artists who have passed, those with whom one grew up, being influenced by their music – an influence that lasts forever as playing the albums at the time generates the memories of those significant teenage experiences, then feeling it again when older in that phenomenon of aural recall – and for so many of the singer-songwriters at that first moment in the late 60s and early 70s, also reading and absorbing the poetry of their lyrics.

Leonard Cohen’s passing yesterday makes him my current revisiting, and I listened to two compilations which contained old and newer songs, but it is today’s playing of his vinyl album The Songs of Leonard Cohen that has meant more because this, from 1966, is the music that most contains and transmits those memories.

And the album covers themselves printed the lyrics, on the back with the liner notes or on the inside sleeves, this an important part of the physical acquisition [I know lyrics are printed on cd cover inserts. I know]. It is fascinating to read on this album’s liner notes by David Sherman a quote attributed to Cohen: At times I can taste the sweetness of death. We know there is much reference to violence in Cohen’s poetry, and darkness in his lyrics, not least on his most recent [very recent] release You Want It Darker,

They’re lining up the prisoners
And the guards are taking aim
I struggled with some demons
They were middle class and tame
I didn’t know I had permission to murder and to maim
You want it darker

but how wonderful to know that his quote presented in 1966 still had 50 years to mean whatever it meant.

It would be hopelessly naïve to think there will be less listening like this as 2016 is only an obvious timeframe, and certainly hasn’t been the beginning: so many of the artists who had the influences I am writing about were already adults as I was becoming a teenage listener and reader – Cohen himself in his 30s when he turned to music – and thus this ironic coming of age will continue. I don’t want to engage in some macabre prediction of selecting and listening to the future if relatively imminent losses, but I must start more celebrating now rather than recovering the past when it has passed.

As contrived as that last sentence sounds, I’m sure, I know this is linked to the other loss of friends too, and thus these realities cannot be separated. To anchor what I mean by this, I will close on the following poem by William Stafford:

Friends

How far friends are! They forget you,
most days. They have to, I know; but still,
it’s lonely just being far and a friend.
I put my hand out – this chair, this table –
so near: touch, that’s how to live.
Call up a friend? All right, but the phone
itself is what loves you, warm on your ear,
on your hand. Or, you lift a pen
to write – it’s not that far person
but this familiar pen that comforts.
Near things: Friend, here’s my hand.

This morning I was dressed by the wind.
The sky said close your eyes and run
this happy face into a sundrift.
The forest said, never mind, I am as old
as an emerald, walk into me gossiping.
The village said, I am perfect and intricate,
would you like to start right away?
My darling said, I am washing my hair in the water
we caught last year, it tastes of stone.
This morning I was dressed by the wind,
it was the middle of September in 1965.

This poem comes from the book above, first published in 1969 with my copy bought in 1970. It is a mixture of ‘classical’ poetry, occasional doggerel, some that is playful, some experimental, much that is passionate, and also, as a poem, Suzanne Takes You Down. Sad to say I haven’t read for a while and have revisited today on the news of Leonard Cohen’s death.

By the way, Trump was elected President

By the way Trump was elected President

Do you see
what isn’t recognised
from good education?

Metaphors that
should beat doing it
‘My Way’:

close the slanted wooden doors
to the cellar of despair

or a conversational aside.

By the way,
I don’t want you,
by the way.

Which is the subordinate clause?
When syntax
is poker’s bad grammatical hand

but still winning.
Do you follow?

Hands down.

when the lesser of two evils
is the least conscience upheaval
and smallest mark of primeval
strained through shit’s retrieval

I want to use the phrase ‘it is interesting’ but it’s much more disturbing than this: the way Donald Trump’s campaign in the US election has appropriated the term Brexit.

There are two obvious reasons this has been used: first, it plants the notion of a surprise result, that against many odds, Trump will in fact receive the majority vote in today’s election; second, and with justification but for the wrong rationale, it conjures up the notion that the general public – the ‘silent majority’ – are desperate for a change from the status quo which in this case is voting for a member of what is seen as the political elite, or the professional politician, embodied by Hilary Clinton.

I could analyse that second reason more thoroughly, but again, as with yesterday’s rejected posting and relatively shorter replacement, it is too late for such analysis and I want to keep comment more focused.

So for this last posting here on today’s US election, I am turning to Facebook for my content. The automated Your Memories on Facebook has proved a successful prompt for people to re-post past comments, observations and, generally I think, photos. As someone who is intrinsically nostalgic, I am a prime candidate for its use, but I actually avoid unless I genuinely want to remind others of important ideas, expressions and or photo-captures of the past.

Today’s ‘Memory’ is, however, most apt, and it comes from four years ago on this day. I haven’t re-posted on Facebook, but use it here:

I have tonight listened to Americans from the left and right speaking intelligently on Obama’s victory and what it says about America as a nation. It seems to me that both intellectually and morally there is strength and hope in this reflection of a bipartisan approach to the next four years – which will have to happen – as long as it is informed by what Obama’s victory actually represents in essence [and you know what this is]. That’s as long as the nutcases at Fox News aren’t involved. Watching this is unpalatable, but instructive – tonight, their moronic view is that Romney lost the election because of Hurricane Sandy: if the election had been before this, Romney would have won; because it wasn’t, it allowed Obama to gain the momentum. Worse, key morons on this channel advocate disaster over the next four years [for example, the total collapse of the economy] so that the Republicans can win it next time! How’s that for patriotism and a love of fellow Americans?! Courting destruction and despair as their platform for future Republican success! This is the true schism: a politically intellectual and articulate expression of hope that wipes the floor with most British politicians; and the influential if dumb pundits’ expression of a cynical nihilism.

The sentiment doesn’t require comment as I think I said it well enough then. I don’t believe its cruel irony requires comment either, as recent election events have made that brutally clear enough, and this next comment, found today as well on someone else’s Facebook posting, also demonstrates the bleak continuation of the schism I mentioned:

You are shallow minded and probably low intellect. Our country is in debt thanks to Obama and Hillary giving billions to ISIS, Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood. Our jobs are being taken by foreigners with HB1 visas, violence and crime has more than doubled because of their lack of ethical practices. Maybe you are on food stamps, but I work for a living and I do not want my taxes supporting any of their evil purposes.

There are two elements to this, both worrying, but one is daft and the other is symptomatic and endemic. Firstly, the conspiratorial idea that money has been given to terrorist organisations is simply stupid. Secondly, the idea that Democrat supporters are largely unemployed and on benefits [‘food stamps’] apes so much of what seems a significant part of the Brexit vote here: those who work and still struggle find scapegoats for their dissatisfaction and suffering in foreigners and immigration/a scrounging unemployed/the political elite, so they vote for those who actively promote or appear to in any way endorse those scapegoats as realities.

Again, much could be elaborated here, but I won’t as anyone bothering to read this will have their own views already. What I will end on is the observation how the comment immediate above is so clearly an ignorant one, and thus I link this to my posting yesterday about Trump’s ignorance.

A few minutes ago I finished writing a very long piece trying to articulate why I cannot comprehend how Donald Trump is supported by so many millions of Americans as the potential next President of the United States.

But it is too long. And too obvious. I have nothing to say that is new or enlightening to add to the debate about his suitability to run for and possibly attain that high office. The one fundamental point I tried to express – but which got framed by an array of other thoughts and feelings – is my incredulity that people can support a person who is so demonstrably ignorant.

Ignorance. That is Trump’s singular main failing, amongst so much else. But it is surely the root of all that other mess he embraces and is.

And I tried to make a comic context for questioning Trump’s suitability to campaign for and possibly win the election to become the President of the United States by asking: can anyone seriously consider voting for a man who delivers campaign speeches whilst wearing a baseball cap?

Of course, that is doomed as an idea. Even arguing that it is a sartorial fraud to represent ordinariness and every-person and joe blogs and the-neighbour-next-door and the working man [I don’t think Trump is concerned about gender representation here] and as an all-Americanism, it still doesn’t make the salient point – the truth is a baseball cap can act as a metaphor for the decency and humanity and commonality that millions of Americans do embrace in a way Trump so clearly does not and cannot.

It is the complete ignorance beneath the baseball cap that matters. The sheer ignorance. The shameless ignorance. The frightening ignorance.

Whilst words and expression do matter – and for me, it is Trump’s consistent inability to express coherent and rationale thought that manifests his disturbing ignorance – there are times where an alternative can better make the point:

Another year gone, leaving everywhere
its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,

the uneaten fruits crumbling damply
in the shadows, unmattering back

from the particular island
of this summer, this NOW, that now is nowhere

except underfoot, moldering
in that black subterranean castle

of unobservable mysteries – roots and sealed seeds
and the wanderings of water. This

I try to remember when time’s measure
painfully chafes, for instance when autumn

flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing
to stay – how everything lives, shifting

from one bright vision to another, forever
in these momentary pastures.

Having been introduced to this fine American poet through her poem Wild Geese, I thought I would share this one of hers this November day.

That how you see
what you have

when hearing,
you remember what matters

when writers are gone.

Each death
removes so much a part

of you too,
each face the mirror to each

word plotting your life.