Sunday, July 16, 2006
WWIII?
Regarding what is suddenly happening in the Middle East now, I didn't see it coming. But now that it's here, I do believe it has been planned for some time now. Modern military establishments map out lots of contingencies, and what we are seeing now is the unfolding of a pre-existing strategic plan. I don't know where it goes from here, but somebody does.
The kidnappings of Israeli soldiers provide the occasion to put a plan in motion. The kidnappings may be what they appear to be, but I don't presume that is the case just because my television says it is so. There is ample precedent for such incidents being arranged by so-called "intelligence" services.
This is a dangerous mess, and very sad to see. I expect Iran, Syria, the United States, and I don't know who else will be drawn into warfare (more than they already are) before it's over. I said I don't know what other countries are destined to be drawn into this, but somebody knows. The scene is shocking and may look chaotic, but I believe there are powerful forces pulling the strings here, and planning and executing the choreography. Power certainly can corrupt, and most of us aren't even aware of who these powers are, much less how much power they have or how the whole system works. I went to a pretty good college, studied economics and history and psychology, and graduated with a major in political science, and I still didn't have a very good grasp of how all these events fit together. I still didn't know a lot of the things that probably every American should know. I think I see it all a little more clearly now, but it takes a lot of digging and inference to piece it together, and when there is so much disinformation and so much truth that is hidden from view, it is more difficult. Too difficult for most people to really even try.
Only a few weeks ago there were hopeful signs in the peace process. Things appeared hopeful anyway. But I believe there are powerful forces who more or less depend on endless war, and who engineer that outcome. Unfortunately, even living in my society -- handling money, paying taxes, and burning fossil fuels -- makes me part of the matrix of war and destruction.
On the spiritual/universal plane, I guess this is all just sand castles for spoiled children. The forces of chaos and and destruction won't really win. They just leave a legacy of nastiness... "Once upon a time, some feverishly ill bullies decided to take a crap in the sandbox instead of playing nice, and they screwed things up for all the kids including themselves because they were just too ill and less-than-conscious to do any better."
...
Did you see the Al Gore movie yet? I was glad I went, sad though it was.
Some (possible) comic relief from George Carlin:
We're going away. Pack your shit, folks. We're going away. And we won't leave much of a trace, either. Thank God for that. Maybe a little styrofoam. Maybe.... The planet'll be here and we'll be long gone. Just another failed mutation.... An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet'll shake us off like a bad case of fleas. A surface nuisance....
The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we're gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, 'cause that's what it does. It's a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed, and if it's true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new pardigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn't share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn't know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, "Why are we here?" Plastic...asshole.
Saturday, July 01, 2006
Shifting sands of consciousness...
I wrote an email this morning to my friend John O'Brien and Olle Romo, who are helping me with recording some of my songs.
John and Olle,See why I don't drink anymore?
It is 5:02 am.
I just woke up.
I was composing in my sleep. This is unusual, but it does happen from time to time... a sign of creative energy flowing.
In my dream, there was a song that you guys said needed a bridge.
I came up with a poignant addition to the song that I was pretty sure would impress you.
There were four lines of lyrics, with perfect meter. I remember I even had an idea for the visual scenes that would go along with those words if we ever made a video for the song. It had to do with being trapped underground, like in a cave, and water coming into the cave. As the water level rose, there was a protagonist who had to be quick and resourceful to find a way to save his girl and himself.
In my dream I was writing the lyrics out on paper with a pen.
Then I woke up, and found that I had been dreaming. Then I realized that meant that the lyrics I had just composed were therefore not actually written down.
I thought, now that I was awake, I'd better go over the lyrics in my conscious mind, so I could remember them and write them down just to evaluate them with my waking mind.
I thought I should start by retrieving the rhyming parts of the stanza I had composed.
I recalled that I had rhymed "urgency" (or possibly "urgently") with "emergency."
I started to feel that these lyrics were going to turn out not to be as good as they'd sounded in my sleep.
And then the Foreigner song, "Urgent," came into my mind, from 1981. I must have heard that song at least 400 times in my life, despite never actually *wanting* to hear it.
That song displaced and dispelled my own lyrics, and they are lost.
One day in 1798, Samuel Taylor Coleridge fell into a sleeplike trance while under the influence of opium. He claimed that he composed somewhere between 200 and 300 lines of a poem in his trance. When he awoke, he remembered the entire poem clearly, and intended to write it down. But unfortunately, just then a friend came to his door to discuss some business, and they talked for about an hour. When he later returned to the task of writing down the poem, he realized that he could recall only a fragment from the beginning. The remaining fragment is his famous poem "Kubla Khan."
When I compose in my sleep, the process often moves with amazing fluidity and speed that I wish I could recapture when I'm awake. But then if I do remember any of it long enough to write it down, it turns out to be garbage more often than not.
Sometimes I can do a bit of work just after awakening, in the quiet of the morning when I still have some of that dreamlike fluidity, but I also have some of my critical faculties available so I can tell between the decent ideas and the nonsense.
A large section of one of the songs we're working on, "Find Your Way," was started just upon awakening.
I went straight to my piano, and worked out at least half of the lyrics for the song really quickly. Then my friend Shaun rang my doorbell, and I talked to him for about two minutes. When I came back to my piano, I'd forgotten most of what I'd composed. I think it took me at least a week to reconstruct the lost sections that had come to me in just a few minutes. Fortunately in that instance I felt like the reconstructed parts were as good as the parts I'd forgotten.
The first lines of the song:
I woke up this morning
With the rain coming down
And a pain in my head
From the sorrows I drowned
I bought myself some time
On the rail last night
Now my troubles reappear
In this grey morning light
I realized subsequently that the first 2 lines might sound a little cliched, but all those lines were 100% true. It was morning, it was raining (in the middle of the summer) and therefore somewhat grey, and I was feeling washed out from going out the night before and drinking over my troubles.
Joel
