World island

Water falls to give life to everything and trees take the life of water after it's fallen to give life back to earth. I'm thinking of Larry in Wyoming who likes to fish the rivers there more for the sound of the water than for the fish he most always catches.

Time is the way we experience the world, time's in everything--love, business, sex, food, sports, relationships, books--everything. Music is the art that gets us closest to the time we're experiencing. That's why it's so hard to define what music is, and what it does. Music is time, and time is unexplainable. My friend Michael Hannon, a poet, said that when a 7-year old asked him, "what's a poem," he couldn't answer. Not to be able to answer was the best answer Hannon could have given the kid.

There's a really great map made of the British geographer Halford Mackinder's concept of a World Island in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books (Feb. 21, 2013). I wish I could show it to you. The notion is that Eurasia and Africa comprise an island, and that the "heartland of Central Asia is the pivot on which the fate of great world empires exist." It's reprinted in a review of a new book, "The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate", by Robert Kaplan (Random House, 2013), in which the following appears: "Radical Islam is, in part, the story of urbanization over the past half-century across North Africa and the Greater Middle East...It is the very impersonal quality, which is lived among strangers, that accounts for intensified religious feeling." 

Thinking about Christianity, I think I've been overlooking the fact that the religion was formed as a reaction to suffering, of trying to find a better way to endure physical pain. That seems really important for me to remember. When I hear people sing, live, in church or in a place like the SF Center for Jazz like I did last night, I always get emotional, always get to a point when I feel like crying or close to crying. I don't know why I feel this way either. I guess it's just one more thing I don't understand about myself.

The sweetest part of Neil Young's sweet book, "Waging Heavy Peace," is how sincere he is about wanting to make great sound available to people again. It has something to do with technological corruption--analog vs. digital--and the belief that the new means of re-producing music is taking it farther and farther away from its source. Neil thinks recorded music should sound as close to the source as possible and is going to great lengths to try to make that happen. 

I'm a mid-technology writer, at a point between visual and aural art, who tries to give pleasure to the eye (mind) and the ear (heart). Poems must be well-arranged, look good on the page or whatever surface they're placed on, and sound to the ear like something the heart has to hear, and cannot live without.