It seems as though a spot of intensive teaching (4xs week at 2.5 hours a pop) does not really give me the reflective-thought-processing time I need to write.
So be it.
I was in the car last week with a Sony discman on its way out, but it has the battery power and basic 'playing' power, listening to a Chris Whitley song I hadn't heard in a while. I probably had not listened to it since I got wind of his death nearly a year after the fact.
Something haunting about the nasally-twang of its singer and the dobro strumming hand that went with the voice. While its singer has died, there is something haunting about a voice that survives and outwits the grave. So it is with most musicians. So it is with the poets and their verse. And so it is with other artists who leave their mark. Their progeny rings eternal... and bequeaths a certain anxiety.
For some reason, this particular song,--I know not why, but it just is so--more than any other of Whitley's, drives it home that its voice and hand create no more.
Just like one of O'Hara's quotidian poems (why not a Yeats? why not a Shelley?) captures sentiments of love and an appreciation for ephemeral beauty so clearly to me.
The gamut of sentiments for these pieces (and other affective creations...) speak often on an intuitive--not overly intellectualized--plane of appreciation and common experience.
Perhaps an advantage of highly scheduled time is that there are still moments for observations and intuitiveness:
smelling Russian olives at my exit that would elsewhere graze on river banks...
passing a little girl in her this-is-my-Sunday-best-dress on her tricycle---on any old day...
wincing at the day's sky ---a saturated aegean acrylic blue released onto a canvas...
drinking in a song's dobro chords and vocals that could revive the dead...
kissing the beloved--very much in love...
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