Tim Buckley and the Siren song

Let me tell you how it all happened…Jason and the Argonauts after having succesfully carried out their quest to find the fabled Golden Fleece of Colchis, boarded once again “Argo”, their boat, and headed home. But their journey back home would be filled with further challenges and adventures. One of these challenges was to pass the boat through a narrow strait between three rocky islands where the Sirens lived. The Sirens were strange winged-women creatures who sang beautiful songs that enticed sailors to come to them. This would result in the crashing of their ship into the islands and the sailors would be heard no more.

Chiron had told Jason that without the aid of Orpheus, the Argonauts would never be able to pass the Sirens — the same Sirens encountered by Odysseus in Homer's epic poem the Odyssey. So Jason looked far and wide for Orpheus. Unfortunately, Orpheus had already descended in the dark lands of the Underworld to search for Euridice and could not be found. Jason was exasperated. He even thought of trying earplugs. But one day he came upon a lonesome busking musician called Tim Buckley who was playing his guitar and sung on the cobblestone streets of a small town. He was startled by the beauty of Buckley’s voice. Immediately he recruited him on the spot and off they sailed towards the Sirens' islands.

When Tim Buckley heard the Sirens’ voices, he drew his 12 string guitar and played his “Song to the Siren” which he had composed for the occassion. The beauty of the haunting melody and the poetry of the lyrics managed to drown out the Sirens' bewitching songs…

Song to the Siren

Long afloat on shipless oceans
I did all my best to smile
til your singing eyes and fingers
Drew me loving to your isle
And you sang
Sail to me
Sail to me
Let me enfold you
Here I am
Here I am
Waiting to hold you

Did I dream you dreamed about me?
Were you hare when I was fox?
Now my foolish boat is leaning
Broken lovelorn on your rocks,
For you sing, touch me not, touch me not, come back tomorrow:
O my heart, o my heart shies from the sorrow

I am puzzled as the oyster
I am troubled at the tide:
Should I stand amid the breakers?
Should I lie with death my bride?
Hear me sing, swim to me, swim to me, let me enfold you:
Here I am, here I am, waiting to hold you

Jason and the Argonauts passed safely through the Sirens' islands and eventually returned home. The Sirens abandoned their music careers and lived on royalties for the rest of their lives. Tim Buckley turned to stone at the age of 28.

Eugène Carrière - The Monochrome Master

"Le theatre de Belleville", 1895

Eugène Carrière's (1849 - 1906) paintings emerge out of the mist, out of the shadows and the subtle transfromation of light into darkness. The sublime smudge of truth is in every brush stroke and it's the result of a life dedicated to artistic development.


"Le contemplateur", 1901

Even his portraits, for he was an amazing portraitist, emerge as if seen through water or at a certain hour at dusk when surface and volume merge in a sublime blur. Carrière strived to make the model "confess". And in Verlaine's portrait the painter travels through the shadowplay in the obscure corners of Verlaine's soul. The torment, the fatigue, the obstinancy, the remains of childhood, the contradiction, the passion, the excess, the deception... it's all there. In this gaze, in the suggestive vagueness of the features.

The painting was completed based on only one sitting as the following extract recalls:

"The poet was sick, and was in the hospital on the far side of the city. Everything had been prepared, and Carrière was expecting him. But crossing the city was no easy task, despite hiring several cars, because of the poet's excitement at this one day leave of absence. - Verlaine did not pose for a single moment. During this only session which lasted several hours , he incessantly paced the studio, speaking loudly, with that effervescent verve he had [...] - Carrière didn't stop working for a second. Verlaine left, I think, without having noticed him. But Carrière knew the poet intimately; he had read his work, meditated on it , guessed many things; he knew what gifts the divine poet possesed, what an immense intelligence and infinite sensibilty were concealed beneath his childish laughter, and what his persona was in a society that imagines it can do without beauty. Carière did not reproach him for breaking down at times under the sorrow imposed by the crushing role he played. The painter saw the poet's inner truth and knew how to express it." (Charles Morice " Eugène Carrière, L'homme et sa pensée..., Paris 1906)

Verlaine on seeing the portrait must have liked it for he composed the following sonnet:

Running through my gutter wit
And the harsh flow of dreadful jibes
While your brush travels
On the canvas turned to velvet by your art

Imperceptibly on the trail
-one might say- of nasty schoolboys,
There rises a forehead full of lumps,
The lump of crime is not alone,

And small eyes sharp with malice
Shining under the rough arch
Of brows whose line is botched,

Shining, it seems, as wet
With tears, sincere in fact, of a fellow
Who was once, an imperfect Socrates.

(Extracted from the book of Valérie Bajou "Eugène Carrière"- sonnet translated by Michael Gibson)

If the monochrome simplification of Carrière was enough to convince the imperfect Socrates who are we to argue?

Don Paterson, a poet from Scotland

The Swing

The swing was picked up for the boys,

for the here-and-here-to-stay

and only she knew why it was

I dug so solemnly

I spread the feet two yards apart

and hammered down the pegs

filled up the holes and stamped the dirt

around its skinny legs

I hung the rope up in the air

and fixed the yellow seat

then stood back that I might admire

my handiwork complete

and saw within its frail trapeze

the child that would not come

of what we knew had two more days

before we sent it home

I know that there is nothing here

no venue and no host

but the honest fulcrum of the hour

that engineers our ghost

the bright sweep of its radar-arc

is all the human dream

handing us from dark to dark

like a rope over a stream

But for all the coldness of my creed

and for all those I denied

for all the others she had freed

like arrows from her side

for all the child was barely here

and for all that we were over

I could not square the ghosts we are

with those that we deliver

I gave the empty seat a push

and nothing made a sound

and swung between two skies to brush

her feet upon the ground

This poem was taken from Don Paterson's new poem collection entitled "Rain".

See the sounds

A manuscript musical score of Ludwig van Beethoven was discovered in some obscure second hand shop. The composition was dated from the last years of Beethoven's life when he was stone deaf. The notes, scribbled furiously with ink on the yellowish paper, would grow in size when the music reached a crescendo and become small in the slow, softer passages.

Joseph Conrad's Youth

On the 21 September 1881, Joseph Conrad set sail for Newcastle as second mate on a bark named “Palestine” to pick up a cargo of coal bound for Bangkok. From the outset, things went wrong. A gale hampered progress (they were stranded for sixteen days on the river Tyne), then the “Palestine” had to wait a month for a berth and was accidentaly rammed by a steam vessel. At the turn of the year, Palestine sailed from the Tyne. The ship then sprang a leak in the English Channel and was stuck in Falmouth, Cornwall, for a further nine months. The bark was deserted by a sizable portion of her crew. “Palestine” eventually set sail with a largely new crew from Falmouth on 17 September 1882 (after a whole year’s delay) and reached the Sunda Strait in March 1883. Finally, off Java Head, the coal in the cargo ignited and fire engulfed the ship. The crew, including Conrad, reached ashore safely in open boats. Joseph Conrad was a young man when he first sailed with the “Palestine” and this was to be his first contact with the exotic and mysterious East.



As a novelist later on, he revisited these events in his famous story/novella “Youth”. There, the ship is re-named Judaea but the deceivingly simple, precise and perfectly cinematic descriptions provide the canvas for the depiction of something larger. Conrad uses these details and metaphors and the whole sea palette to evoke the human condition and the human struggle in all its rugged glory. Take for example this passage which describes the aftermath of a storm on the deck of Judaea:



"…Then we retreated aft and looked about us. The deck was a tangle of planks on edge, of planks on end, of splinters, of ruined woodwork. The masts rose from that chaos like big trees above a matted undergrowth. The interstices of that mass of wreckage were full of something whitish, sluggish, stirring - of something that was like a greasy fog. The smoke of the invisible fire was coming up again, was trailing, like a poisonous thick mist in some valley choked with dead wood. Already lazy wisps were beginning to curl upwards amongst the mass of splinters. Here and there a piece of timber, stuck upright, resembled a post. Half of a fife-rail had been shot through the foresail, and the sky made a patch of glorious blue in the ignobly soiled canvas. A portion of several boards holding together had fallen across the rail, and one end protruded overboard, like a gangway leading upon nothing, like a gangway leading over the deep sea, leading to death - as if inviting us to walk the plank at once and be done with our ridiculous troubles. And still the air, the sky - a ghost, something invisible was hailing the ship…"

When the cargo of the ship eventually goes up in flames and the crew including Conrad are obliged to abandon the bark in small boats, they nevertheless stay to watch the end of the Judaea. For Marlow the narrator and in extensis Conrad the young second mate, this total disaster is just a part of the adventure of life. For Marlow is thinking how for the first time he will become the first in command responsible for the three or four men that are rowing in front of him in the small boat. Nevertheless, in the novella, Marlow is old and looking back as he is telling the tale to his sea friends and therefore he can reflect on the vanity and beauty of that moment in time when one feels so strong, so open to all challenges, so young:



"…We should see the last of her. Oh the glamour of youth! Oh the fire of it, more dazzling than the flames of the burning ship, throwing a magic light on the wide earth, leaping audaciously to the sky, presently to be quenched by time, more cruel, more pitiless, more bitter than the sea - and like the flames of the burning ship surrounded by an impenetrable night…"

And Joseph Conrad would later on leave the bright flames of his Palestine, Judaea "Youth" burning and plunge into the impenetrable night. Plunge into the “Heart of Darkness”.

Listen to :
"Incinerate" by Sonic Youth

Arthur Rimbaud (2)

Arthur Rimbaud was now living in Harar, the legendary Abyssinian walled city, since November 1880. The poet had died together with the last verse of "Une Saison en Enfer" in 1873 or 4. Who was that poet? And who was the child before the poet? "Once, if I remembered well, my life was a banquet where all hearts opened, all wines flowed..."

It was surely somebody else. For Arthur Rimbaud had completed his transformation into "The Other". And as "The Other", he lived through his own Heart of Darkness in Africa and he so readily assumed the role of Kurz. But it was only when he returned to Charleville, back to mother dearest, a cripple and having fought the law and lost, that he became a man who in the words of Charles Baudelaire " a senti l'horrible fardeau du Temps qui brise ses épaules et le penche vers la terre..."

Actually, Rimbaud's sister, Isabelle, was wrong when she insisted that his last words, on his death bed at the hospital in Marseilles, were a confession. He actually whispered to her in perfect english: " The horror! The horror!" and became immortal.

Listen to :

"Invocation (of things to come)" by Minimal Compact

Arthur Rimbaud (1)

" ... In [Arthur Rimbaud's] Illuminations there is a symbolical poem called "Royauté", and it describes how a man, one day, cried to all those who he met, as he walked through the town, that he was King and that the woman by his side was his Queen. To all who would listen he recounted the story of his trials and their end, and of the revelations which he had received. For one whole day the man and the woman were in fact King and Queen because they believed this to be true..."

Taken from Enid Starkie's biography of Arthur Rimbaud.

There he goes... It's 3am in the night. He is walking unsteadily on the cobblestone streets of Paris, a ghostly figure in the fog. The stench from the Seine seems to permeate everything. Rimbaud in the absinthe aftermath of a Verlaine encounter, suddenly stumbles and falls. And there lying on the wet and dirty side street, he closes his eyes and has a vision pure and beautiful and his lips move and the words flow effortlessly from his mouth...:

"...

Royauté

Un beau matin, chez un peuple fort doux, un homme et une femme superbes criaient sur la place publique : "Mes amis, je veux qu'elle soit reine !" "Je veux être reine !" Elle riait et tremblait. Il parlait aux amis de révélation, d'épreuve terminée. Ils se pâmaient l'un contre l'autre.

En effet ils furent rois toute une matinée où les tentures carminées se relevèrent sur les maisons, et tout l'après-midi, où ils s'avancèrent du côté des jardins de palmes."

He stops but the voice carries on in echo, coming back to him, bouncing off the wall and deflecting on the pavement. It transfoms, it mutates, it moves backwards and forwards, it transcends the present and leaps into the future and the words come back to him as in a song and in a different language...

"I
I will be king
And you
You will be queen
Though nothing will
Drive them away
We can beat them
Just for one day
We can be Heroes
Just for one day..."

"Heroes" by David Bowie

Listen to :
"Heroes-Helden" by David Bowie

A short animation film called "Father and Daughter"

" Father and Daughter is a film about longing, the kind of longing which quietly, yet totally, affects our lives." - Michael Dudok de Wit

Running Time: 8 minutes 30 seconds

Year of Release: 2000

Michael Mitsakis and the most beautiful thing in the world

Michael Mitsakis was born in 1868 and became a noted journalist in Athens contributing to many magazines and newspapers of the time. What characterizes the writing of Mitsakis is his style. He adopted a phrasing which followed the meanderings of his thought at the expense sometimes of a plot or a story. His long parenthetical and highly descriptive constructions could leave the reader perplexed and his use of language that combined “demotic” and “Kathareuousa” set him apart. Unfortunately in 1894 he suffered a mental breakdown and in two years he was completely incapacitated for the rest of his life. He died in 1916. He left behind many beautiful and interesting texts and among them I consider one called “Αυτόχειρ” as his real masterpiece. Unfortunately it is extremely difficult to convey in translation the lyrical flow of Mitsakis’s prose in this small novella.

Looking through the texts of Greek literature collected by Nikos Sarantakos (http://www.sarantakos.com/), I came across the following short piece by Mitsakis which is characterized by its simplicity, humor and wit. I decided to give it a try and translate it…

The most beautiful thing in the world by Michael Mitsakis

Let the sea splash and let it froth under the keel of the ship! The delirious ship bounces from wave to wave. The captain careful in the preparations for the voyage, commands the silent and willing sailors. The youngest of them takes a wine jar full of old good wine, lifts it up and places it on the bench. And one by one, each traveler on board drinks a glass after answering, with a verse swept by the wind, the question asked by the voices of the other passengers all around him.

“By God, tell us, what is the most beautiful thing in the world?”

“Where does the ship come from and where is it going?”

Who cares? The wine from the jar is strong.

“By God, tell us, what is the most beautiful thing in the world?”

- The most beautiful thing in the world is my love, says a student almost 20 years old. Love is the only happiness.

- Happiness is in war, pops up a soldier. The most beautiful thing in the world is a rider dashing forward with sword in hand.

- As long as I have a safe full and well protected… says the miser.

And the farmer replies: - Is there anything more beautiful than a field, gilded form side to side with wheat?

But the poet stands up: - With laurel beauty is crowned. What can be more beautiful than laurel? By Apollo! How can happiness be found elsewhere than in thought?

But the musician at the same time: - What do you need thought? Have you ever felt what the nightingale has to say? Just listen to it and that’s enough.

And the painter stubbornly: - Beauty cannot be found in sounds and words. Beauty is an image.

And the philosopher, angrily: - What are you talking about, he tells them. Beauty is the Truth.

- It is success! Cries a politician gesticulating, who was on his way to his country to install a ballot box.

- You are right! Says the adventurer. Beauty is this gorgeous woman with her breasts hanging out, holding the cards of the lucky gambler.

- Oh! Whispers quietly a merchant, how awful it is to play. Accounting, yes, that is the thing!

And even a priest, making the sign of the cross: - Oh my brothers, what better than faith, what more beautiful than prayer?

But suddenly: - Damn, groans the captain, and the amateur singers hold their tongues in fright. Damn! Shut up, may the devil take you… Tighten up the sail!....

For the sea had become wild, and then for the sailor, Beauty laughs on his ship’s stern when the ship proudly enters the port after the storm.

And then, at the same time, a shiver of happy sharks was following the water course engraved by the ship on the waves and they were talking and saying between themselves:

The most beautiful thing in the world is a ship ready to sink to the bottom, full of travelers…

Listen to :

"Your beauty is a knife I turn on my throat" by Eagle Seagull

The world of Yoshihiro Tatsumi and the gekiga comic style

Yoshihiro Tatsumi penned the word "gekiga" around 1957 to describe the comics that he created which did not fall under the all encompassing word of manga. To start with, Manga was created initially for children whereas Tatsumi's comics dealt with serious dramatic themes and were for adults. Tatsumi moved away from the fantasy element of the manga and can be considered one of the first artists to create graphic novels as we know them today. He even adopted the difficult format of the short story as a way to tell gritty, hidden and dramatic everyday tales of the dark face of a real Japan which came out of the second world war deeply wounded in all levels of its society.




When you read one of Tatsumi's literary short stories you are immersed in the private world of the underground. A dark world of late night bars, of pimps and prostitutes, of hidden aspirations and passions, of people working in the sewers of Tokyo or having a 9h.00 to 22h.00 blue collar job, of poor everyday people that you might bump into in the street. People with their secret fantasies, their hopes and dreams and the situations that they find themselves in. But this is not only the underground of Japan in the 60s and 70s. It is an underground that we can all relate to. Our personal underground. A private place that we want to keep hidden and when we see it out in the open we are uncomfortable with what we see. Originally these works were circulated as underground art but eventually found their way to more mainstream publication in the 1970s. Now thanks to the serious work of Canadian editing house "Drawn & Quarterly", these important works are being published for the first time in English. In 2005 "The Push-man and other stories", in 2006 "Abandon the old in Tokyo" and in 2008 "Good-Bye" were published by D&Q.


To accompany the reading why don't you listen and buy some interesting experimental music freshly created by Kobe based Hirohito Ihara alias "Radicalfashion" from his album "Odori" available from HeftyRecords. This specific piece of music starts rather mechanically but be patient and you will be rewarded.


Listen to :

"Shousetsu" by Radicalfashion