Quotes

'Beautiful music is the art of the prophets that can calm the agitations of the soul; it is one of the most magnificent and delightful presents God has given us.'

'Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.'

'Everything that is done in the world is done by hope.'

'For in the true nature of things, if we rightly consider, every green tree is far more glorious than if it were made of gold and silver. '

'If you are not allowed to laugh in heaven, I don't want to go there.'

'Let the wife make the husband glad to come home, and let him make her sorry to see him leave.'

'Music is the art of the prophets and the gift of God.'

Martin Luther

Does Amy Winehouse have a duty to her talent?

A POINT OF VIEW By Clive James

'Fans who say Amy Winehouse has a duty to her talent are twisting the argument - the duty of the greatly talented is to life itself, because what they do is life affirming, says Clive James.

When the American rap star Snoop Dogg gets into trouble, he goes from strength to strength. When the British singer songwriter Amy Winehouse gets into trouble, she goes from weakness to weakness. This is especially sad because, whereas you might think that Snoop Dogg has a talent from Hell, Amy Winehouse clearly has a talent from heaven. Already it has earned her millions of pounds, so you might say that her worries are working in her favour. But even the press is by now realising that it's callous to say so.

Last weekend a voluntary visit to the police turned into an overnight stay and the story was instantly in all the papers, but there was a new note detectable, as of a farce finally being recognised as an incipient tragedy. If there was ever any fun to be had from reading about her troubles, the point has been reached where there is no fun left even in writing about them.

When that young woman sings, it's the revelation of a divine gift - but when she behaves as if the gift were hers to destroy if she feels like it, you can't help thinking of divine wrath

Probably the best we can all do for her is not to mention her name except when buying one of her albums, so perhaps I am making a bad start. But I remember too well the first time I heard her sing and was so moved that my heart hurt.

And I also remember the first time that I saw her in real life. It was last year, in downtown New York. We happened to be staying in the same hotel, and I passed her in the foyer. She looked so frail that my heart hurt again, but in a different way. When that young woman sings, it's the revelation of a divine gift. But when she behaves as if the gift were hers to destroy if she feels like it, you can't help thinking of divine wrath.

Can't the same force that made her so brilliant give her strength?

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And then there's Amy Winehouse, whose best songs really are works of art, no question. And she can actually sing them to you, in a way you would rather remember than forget. And yet she looks as if she can't wait until it's all over.

Billie Holiday, by the end, had reasons to feel like that. But at the start, she guarded her gift. And Ella Fitzgerald sang on into old age as if her gift belonged to the world, which indeed it did. Amy Winehouse, if she wished, might build up an achievement that could be mentioned in the same breath as those two: perhaps not as varied, perhaps not as abundant, but just as unmistakeably individual, and even more so because some of the songs would be composed by her, and not just handed to her on a piece of paper.

It could be that she does wish to fulfil her vast potential, but she has another wish that conflicts: the wish for oblivion. It's hard to speak against that wish without sounding like an advertisement for a package holiday. As this world goes, there are ample reasons for wanting to be out of it even if your personal history is a comfort, and I imagine hers has been the opposite. But she knows all this. The proof is in some of her songs. The proof is in her voice. You don't get to sing like that unless you can give a shape to grief.

Not long before he died last week, Humphrey Lyttelton said that he admired the way Amy Winehouse sang and would have liked to meet her. Some commentators have wondered what he would have said. There's no telling. He was the prince of joy, and he might have told her that he was glad to have lived out a long life in music. The old Etonian would surely have admitted that he had begun his career in conditions of privilege, as she had not, and that he had always had the gift of happiness, which she plainly hasn't, or anyway does not have yet.

But he could have added that he only had to listen to a few bars of her singing to realise that she had been given the greatest gift a musician of any kind can have, and that a gift on that scale is not possessed by its owner, but does all the possessing.

Maybe that's what she's afraid of. When people say that you have a duty to your talent, they all too often mean that you have a duty to them. But they're misstating the case. The duty of the greatly talented is to life itself, because what they do is the consecration of life. I could end with something that Pavarotti once told me in his dressing room before I interviewed him. He wouldn't say it on air, for fear of sounding immodest. He said he knew his gift was from God. But perhaps a better ending would be what Philip Larkin said to the ghost of Sidney Bechet. "On me your voice falls as they say love should, like an enormous yes". Come on, kiddo. Give us a song.'

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7381065.stm

Published: 2008/05/02 17:12:03 GMT

© BBC MMVIII

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7381065.stm

Witness

Part of art is about bearing witness - this event, feeling, experience, happened - pass it on. Maybe we can learn from others having had the same or similar experience, their telling us about it.

Developing or living a relationship is like learning a language - we make the decision to start, to embark on this journey, but it is a journey with no fixed destination. Just as we know we will never fully master the language, so we will never completely understand each other - for one thing, we are unlikely to ever fully understand ourselves. But we will try - and that trying, that endeavour is an on-going process of living - living, learning, understanding, enjoying life - through each other. Like a language, we are always changing. We develop, become wiser, learn about the human condition, this human heart within us - we are all at once teachers and students - we teach each other. Don't ever give up.

Steady as she goes

Maybe there is fate, destiny. As soon as I learn to let go of the past I start to embrace the future.

Where I was once all at sea, I am now starting to feel like I have my hand on the helm, there's a fair wind blowing and I just worked out how this thing works.

The hair's gone - bit of a shitsurenshimashita crew cut - a clean cut and a fresh start - and so has the jacket. For years I have put up with cheap imitations that don't bear close inspection, but yesterday as soon as we landed I got myself the real thing - a matching pair of Helly Hansen combinations to see me safely through any gales that may come my way, that I intend to look after and keep going as long as I possibly can.

My life has been like a barely controlled pendulum - but let's see whether it'll settle down into something like the steady rhythm of a grandfather clock quietly ticking in the hall.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4keNw7Q0Aw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG0-cncMpt8&feature=related

The Outsider

Just spent a very pleasurable and interesting evening with a couple of colleagues, ending up in The Bank in Kamakura - it was a bank but now makes a mint from selling very good whisky at 900 yen a shot. But the best selection of whiskies I have ever seen.

At one point we got onto the state of the world, in fact that was about half the evening, and my French colleague mentioned Albert Camus, and in particular The Outsider, which we had both read in our teens, and its relevance to today - Camus wrote as a French ex-pat living in Algeria during its struggle for independence:

The quote runs something like 'we have to accept violence as an inevitable part of human existence, but we must never accept the justification of violence.' The second point my colleague made was that we have to declare our opposition to the use of violence - even if it is just in a private conversation, that act is a subversive act, and a step, however small, towards peace.

Duodecimal cycles

At 12 I began the transition from childhood to sub-adulthood, a process marked by a couple of key moments.

I bought my first work of art: Machine Head by Deep Purple.

I attended my first concerts in High Wycombe Town Hall - the earliest I can recall being Deke Leonard's Iceberg (ex-Man) and a prog rock outfit called Fruupp.

I flew to Paris with a brown paper luggage tag labelled 'Unaccompanied minor' tied to my jacket, like Paddington Bear, and was kissed by Sylvie Caplan, aged 13, on my cheek on arrival at Charles de Gaulle airport - that first soft gentle feminine peck as her lips brushed for a second against my skin marking the initial stirrings of my manhood. I can still feel the touch, on my right cheek - which I avoided washing for as long as possible, so as not to wash away the feeling of love and tenderness - and the exciting bewilderment in my body.

At 24, still very much a child emotionally and intellectually, I conceived my first son. I married into an artistic family, having grown up in a science-based one, and was drawn to the other. My wife had grown up in South East Asia and Africa, and introduced me to the visual arts, although she had few words to help me understand what I was looking at.

At 36, still with childlike attributes, I met the person I consider to be my sensei, and who would eventually teach me everything worth knowing about life, one way or another.

At 48, I learned a couple of important lessons.

That art is the voice of humanity, and artists speak for all of us. Art is the social glue of human communities, the vehicle of our culture. That good art is transcendental - artists have a way with words, or paints, or music, or physical expression through dance, and so on, that transmits their human experience to us, that resonates within us, and triggers emotional responses - the greater the art, the more triggers it pulls.

I also learned, or finally accepted, that we are designed to be social - just as parents are designed to love their children, we are designed to build ever stronger bonds with those around us - our family, our friends, and if we are lucky enough to find one, our partner.

If these bonds are cut, through death or divorce, we feel intense pain - grief, remorse, sorrow - even if we didn't feel like we particularly got on with the departed. This is the Diana syndrome - a woman with whom I felt little in common, and in whom I had never been consciously interested or cared about, but when she died I grieved along with millions of others.

This suffering is a demonstration of our humanity. As the Buddhists say, life is suffering. As Basil Fawlty says, what's it all about? God knows. We have just got to get on with it I suppose.

We live through those around us, through socialising. If we are cut off, or cut ourselves off from those around us, we are not being alive. We can cope with being in prison - in a way we all are anyway, rubbing along with our fellow prisoners - but we are not designed to deal with solitary confinement, which is perhaps worse than death. And yet this is what some of us sometimes put ourselves through.

As with people, we also need to build bonds with a place, to develop a sense of physical belonging, a sense of continuity stemming from a secure past and leading into a reassuring future. We like our routines - to walk a certain way to the local shop, to find our regular product waiting for us on the same shelf as it was last week. We are naturally loyal customers - we have loyalty cards imprinted into our DNA.

Moonquakes

The cherry blossom is very beautiful now - pink fluffy confetti snowflakes falling from candyfloss trees.
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We went up Koboyama the other day for a bit of a hike, and among other things admired the ashi-onsen - portable foot baths, lined with hinoki (Japanese cypress wood), and heated using homemade charcoal.

Was out on the water a couple of days ago in H's speedboat - shooting along at 21 knots - and came across a three-masted steel-hulled schooner, apparently used for management bonding sessions. She was doing 8 knots.

In the evening 1,000 or so of us attended a meeting in the local town hall to protest against the proposed changes to the Constitution which would enable Japan to officially have a military (at present it's known euphemistically as the 'Self Defence Forces'), and to enable Japan to attack another country if that seems like a good idea, and to attack a third country if that country attacks the USA. The meeting kicked off with a luvvy-duvvy Carpenteresque couple singing Hawaiian based music on ukeleles, which I'm afraid to say rapidly lulled me off to the land of nod. This was followed by a lengthy, impassioned and clearly humorous speech by the writer 井上　ひさし Hisashi Inoue- regrettably the only bits I could catch were the six countries that 'remained neutral' during WWII - Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland, Afghanistan (?), and the cities destroyed by atom bombs (Hiroshima and Nagasaki) which were visited recently by a traditional Hawaiian peace boat that apparently had crossed the Pacific using only stars for navigation.

While in Britain I watched a TV programme on earthquakes - a thought never so very far from the mind of anyone living in the most earthquake-prone country in the world. It seems that moonquakes are considerably larger than earthquakes - while an earthquake is unlikely to last much more than a few seconds, perhaps up to a minute, those on the Moon frequently last for up to an hour. This is despite the fact that the Moon is mostly solid rock with very little molten magma at its core.

It seems that the effect of the Earth's gravity on the Moon is so immense that it pulls great swathes of solid rock around. Made me think about seeing things from the other's point of view - we are used to the idea that the Moon has a great effect on the Earth, particularly its various liquids - the tides, the plants, our natural cycles - but I at least had never thought of the huge effect of the Earth on the Moon. Likewise, we might be very aware of the effects of others on ourselves, but we have to learn to see things from their point of view, through their eyes, our effect on them - not so easy, perhaps.

Smoked Octopus and the Eggs

Great sail today ~ good wind, good company. Smoked octopus and ramen in a force 6 off Enoshima. After some excellent Australian/Italian nosh in a new restaurant by the beach, we ended up in a coffee shop in Kamakura. Got onto films at one point - I have seen a few lately on flights to Europe and back, including the classic Annie Hall. After having an on~off relationship with Annie for several years, they finally split completely. Woody's last lines are an old joke about a guy talking to a psychiatrist:

'My brother thinks he's a chicken'

'OK - bring him in and I'll do what I can to sort him out'

'Well, I would - but I need the eggs'

He says that often relationships are like that - completely irrational, but we need the eggs.

H has very kindly said I can take his dinghy out on Sunday, so he's arranged for me to borrow a wetsuit - 'gaijin size'.