a taste for modern music

When I was 17, I ran with Paul, Robert, Morris, and Harper. We were "The Five." We'd drive around El Dorado, Arkansas at night in Paul's light-blue Pontiac, talking about girls and stuff and thinking up things to do: looking for ghosts in forsaken country cemeteries, talking about girls, zooming over Dead Man's Hills at maximum speed to see if we would survive the multiple lift-offs, going to the drive-in theater to watch spaghetti westerns while smoking Hava Tampa Jewel cigars, talking about girls, spending the night near the Louisiana border in a shack so we could drink beer illegally.

The first time I drank a beer, it was a Schlitz tallboy. It tasted like cold aardvark piss. But I persevered -- drank four of em almost simultaneously. Got obliterated. So it was worth it. Took a while, but I eventually developed a taste for beer. I love it.

It took me some time to get used to and then appreciate modern music. Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Bartók, Shostakovitch, Weinberg, Gerhard, Schnittke, Lutoslawski, Dutilleux, Eliot Carter, some others.

This was not like 18th- and 19th-century form and sound. Melody, harmony, rhythm had now gone haywire. Astringent, dissonant, atonal, kaleidoscopic. Some consider it unpleasant and musically nonsensical. A trial to endure.

But as I opened myself to this music, a new and different kind of aesthetic response happened. For me, modern music creates a hypnotic spell of fantasy and a delirium of time. As if existential puppets had come to life, breathing their quizzical, fractal, and darkly beautiful traumas into aural form.

A new substance, a new way of being-in-the-ears. I love it.

Sometimes, I say to myself....

..."I shall write a poem!" 

I circle around the sheet of paper while jagged Tesla bolts of confessional misery and self-absorption shoot from my head. Just before they touch and scorch the unsuspecting sheet, I pull back and try to gather my senses -- "What the hell am I doing?" 

But then the rabid lightning squeezes out again. So I slap myself, then fling myself against the wall. Ricocheting from one side of the hallway to another, like that transforming dude in the movie Altered States. After a duration of such self-therapy, I regain control and finally sit down to try and write a poem.

In my insane opinion, a poem should open space for the weird of the out-there, the odd of the time-here, the wonder of the gone-where. In other words, ego sublimated into a different substance.

Hebrides Overture

For once, I'm not going to say anything about a posted piece of music.......

oh, hell....I can't help myself....


Not only an evocation of water and wind, but also an awed feeling of discovery and displacement ("Wir sind nicht mehr in Deutschland, Toto.")

A musical sailing past the wave-crashed shoreline. Within forbidding niches and dark recesses, old water sprites lounge, their black gleaming eyes and long faded hair terrifying symbols of ocean mood, of pathological geography.

I'm just roaming...

...around in my brain, thinking about music as the purest expression of fantasy. Pondering music's ability to stimulate in the listener an extensive range of subtle phenomena -- apparitions, longings, the almost-unveiling of mysteries.

EXODUS theme

In my opinion, this is right up there with "Lara's Theme," as far as film theme music goes.

the secret life of a grandfather clock

3 AM can strike through many nights
without a sound but a ruffling into dreams.
Enough to bring pause, retreat, waking.

There's something long ago that's taken on breathing.

Of course! A dead uncle's grandfather clock,
now gone to abstract seizures of time's aching
dim memories, a brute nostalgia for that house
now gone to others. Where did the clock go?
It's no longer making those children shiver
in perfect terror of its presence ticking
in a hallway. It's gone away lost to think.

Old, it struggles through its moments
of standing with a broken mustache
on its face, standing in some purgatory 
it sends odd hours to troubled sleeping.
That tall clock once alert and sentient 
now droops in a somewhere nowhere.

The flight of seeds is random myriad.
One sinks down growing generations
of patient oaks harvested for clocks
imprisoning eccentric grandfathers.

Where is that great clock, is it living,
or did its governor shrug, go to ruin?
I think it's still thinking, breathing...

In my grain and my dark knots,
distant rivers still flow their poems,
hillside gnomes and fairies murmur 
tales long sunken to my substance.
In my gears and ingenious spring,
mysteries of minerals turn and coil
around psychosis of my old dæmon 
orphaned by the absconded gods.
If my chronic and nightly musing
on paradox and fate comes calling
as a dream inside your dreaming,
let it strengthen your imagination.  
I never meant to frighten children
as if a specter in assembled form.
I only meant to tell you children
about duration's freakish presence.

Even in senility and my far ruin,
I'll come a-tocking your 3 AM.



~ TB, 2013

It's Hard Out Here for a Monk (you ain't knowin')

 A Friar Tempted by Demons  

Salvator Rosa (1615 - 1673)