three things

1] you are my music.
you are the ground on which any music of mine stands:
without you there can be no music.
this is a relationship I cannot 'understand'
but nor do I need to.

2] I mustn't be afraid when the psalms disintegrate before my eyes.
it's only old perceptions that shatter. . . . .
always, always I cling to what seems true
taking refuge in yesterday
yesterday's comprehension does not do for today.
understanding is not a collectible.

3] this thing about language:
I have to let it go because, intellectually,
it will remain forever beyond my grasp.

it remains a problem but not one that I can solve by staring at it.

and this is so with the music also.
the music is not about the music.
the music is about you.
it seems essential that I understand that
somewhere deeper than I can presently reach.
I suppose its the essential secret ingredient
without which all music turns into noise.

sometimes I 'have' it.
oftentimes I do not.

'let him who has ears to hear

something broke.
shattered to pieces.
what it was I cannot tell.
but psalms and music broke together
and left me with nothing:
no handle at all
no way forward.
and yet
yesterday a glimmer.
today another.

so life goes on
and I still have an unexpected place in it.

just one speculative thought:
my imagery is wrong.
the psalms are not a boat
in which I sail to God.

or rather,
because I have rather treated them as one
(along with my music?)
when I am driven on the rocks
I fear death by drowning
only to find that,
though wet and dumb,
I didn't drown at all:
just capsized for a while.
you hold me up?
(notice the hesitant question mark)

perhaps the music broke the psalms
and the psalms broke the music.
one language destroying another
like warring tribes of old.

noticing the glib post of 16th oct,
such philosophies of 'building'
can never work for me:
part of my present mess.

'the psalms tell me' what the psalms tell me:
nothing more, nothing less

somebody said

To speak the truth in love, means not only to love but also to be myself lovable. Alas, for too many of us, the Gospel is not the revelation that we are loved by God, that is that I am lovable, but the opposite, that I am unloved. The fundamental anthropological truth of the Gospel is not that we are sinners, but that we are loved. Repentance is not grasping that I am a sinner, any fool with a modicum of self-knowledge and awareness knows that about himself. No. Repentance is knowing in a deep and personal way that I am loved. Based on their words and actions, I wonder how many, if any, of our self-appointed apologists know that they are loved? Love makes me gentle, patient, forgiving, respectful and long suffering with others in their struggles (see Gal 5). Where these are absent in speech, then (we can be sure) that it is merely a word spoken from my ego and that the Gospel is not being proclaimed.

reaffirming my place in the kingdom of God
where we speak a language which involves Him in every word:
the language of God.

and so I say my psalms and the psalms tell me where I belong;
they reveal to me my brother and my brothers:
when I speak these words I do not speak alone:
even in my aloneness I am with
we speak together.

speaking together is not so much 'speech' but song.
and so I speak the song and the song reveals you
and reveals me in you . . . .
[and the words begin to spin like tops and lose their meaning]

and I played again tonight that strange lost piece I just wrote
and when I came to my psalms this morning:
' my music must not come between us' I said

the problem of language

I broke my golden rule:
putting the computer on before early prayer finished.
this always makes prayer later much harder:
distraction; scouring internet instead of soul;
trying to be creative in uncreative ways . . .
but
trying to say the psalms today - having listened to an amazing performance of gaspard de la nuit yesterday and then gone and delighted, for half an hour, in exploring ravel's way of using the piano (linked I think to flamenco).
I need, urgently, to get to the bottom of this problem about languages. [or perhaps I sense a possible way through this?]
ravel's musical language is a gateway for him and for the talented pianist. it opens up a way of listening and a way of interpreting which offers apparently endless possibility until you come to the edge and realise just how limited it actually is.
there are a thousand things you can do within his vocabulary and you can push that boundary right to the edge but if you push too hard you fall out of ravel's 'realm' and meaning is suddenly completely lost.

language is all we have to communicate with, but if you speak with the wrong one noone understands you. you become not just unintelligible but alien as well: and possibly then an enemy - depending upon how trusting is the person to whom you are trying to make yourself understood. (don't get lost in your own details here!)

last night I watched again the 'arena' programme about t s elliott: a poet who I have so often 'tried' but never 'understood'. elliott (deliberately) obscures by using language in a 'clashing' way; juxtaposing images which don't belong, silly songs, foreign words (italian, german, latin etc), and all sorts of apparent intellectual snares to confuse and alienate his reader.
so he uses language against itself: making the point perhaps (rather like postmodern artists do?) that, whilst it can sound as though we should be able to understand it,(poetic flow and all that) actually the real meaning still alludes us and that feeling of 'being outside'; of not understanding (as kingsley amis discusses in the arena programme) becomes deeply disturbing which, I suppose, might be why I can never get to the end of an elliott poem. but it might be also exactly what he was trying to do. . .
. . . . I had the thought later on that perhaps elliott is more like dylan thomas than I realise in that he is looking for a deeper meaning below the 'normal' meaning of words . . . in the way that music sometimes succeeds in doing (not always I think). a sentence with urgent poetic flow - despite not being intellectually understandable - might have a hidden power of its own: a power then of 'spirit' and 'imagery' which enables it to crawl under the intellectual fence as it were and take us into a different realm . . . . .and so the 'normal' search for intellectual meaning in the sentence actually stops us from 'appreciating' it at this deeper level. ('he who has ears . . . . .' )

and how does that relate to my problem?
the problem of day-to-day language is that it excludes things that need to be said (spiritual things) and so we have to look for another language which does say them. (for me this is essentially the psalms). there is no place for 'God' in everyday language which is all about shopping and the weather and health and news. [any time I use the word God in my everyday language arent I really just straying into the language of the psalms?]

which brings me back to music because it strikes me today quite forcefully that, strictly speaking, there is no place for God in music either; in the sense that you cannot say: 'God' with sounds. . . .this means that the whole language is in a different 'realm' which renders it meaningless when juxtaposed with the psalms which are always about God. . . .
. . . .of course I realise that there is something I havent understood here, only I can't put my finger on it.

are the psalms always about God? isnt it more accurate to say that they are addressed to him rather than that they are about him? (actually, of course, it is often both or either). and , similarly, he is more often apparently absent than apparently present - and the apparently bit seems curiously important here.

in music we do not address anyone: we slap sound onto a canvas and it has to mean what it means and can mean nothing else and yet, if I ignore the need to do that slapping onto canvas, I gradually lose my grip on something essential . . . or is that just self-fulfilling nonsense?
ok lets take this from another angle: language creates its own assumptions. it has to because otherwise no meaning could be conveyed by it at all.
(and yet perhaps modern poetry (eg. elliott) is exactly questioning those assumptions.)

language is something taught by the person whose language it is. If I want to live in spain I learn spanish from a spaniard but, even if I lived in spain, I would still say the psalms in english because I wouldn't be addressing a spanish God any more than I address an english one . . . my audience is different . . .

suddenly thinking now about the malcolm arnold 5th symphony I heard the other day and, over and against this, mahler. mahler incorporates into his music language (without really wanting to) all the stuff he hears around him. this is perhaps what elliott does too and it is certainly what arnold does - but they all do it in an inclusive way so that their own assimilation of all those different languages is 'right'. it is 'right' because they are poets (artists). is that then what the artist is called to do: to assimilate? to take clashing languages and assimilate them?

I have to understand that it is necessary to speak many languages.

when jesus says 'man does live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God' isnt he actually talking about this problem of language? daily life language, about shopping and the weather, is not enough for us as 'spiritual beings' (ie made in the image of God).

but why then are the psalms not enough for me? why the music?
because I need to create perhaps? because the psalms are already there and all I can do is say them but I need to be creating as well - another essential aspect of spiritual being?
this is a minefield:
is 'being creative' necessarily about communication? does an artist create because he needs to be 'listened to' or because he simply needs to 'be creative'?
when confronted with a piece of art people 'listen in' ('appreciate') perhaps less to understand and more to 'enjoy' ('participate in')the act of creation itself. . . . we listen to italian opera and might enjoy it (I say 'might') despite it being 'unintelligible' . . .

which brings me back to my own problem with my music: the search for meaning overrides anything else and so I am constantly doubling back into the crisis over languages instead of just 'singing'.
which brings me out more or less where I started doesnt it?

yesterday in prayer: the idea returned over and over:
'an invading army enter the temple in search of treasure
and they are baffled to find the ark empty.'
[why does the pure white stone delight me?]

and another thought was: mary visits the tomb
[what was she going to do?]
the tomb was empty -
just as the ark of god was.
[I've just read the four accounts: each so different.]
do we need to visit the tomb also?
is this what we do in our psalms?

the battle between music and psalms rages on.
all I know is that
it has to do with the place where you are.

my music is strange and unfathomable.
I wrote a piece over the last few days which makes no sense to me
and yet, when I came to review it this morning:
meaning to double back and rub out stuff
too unbearable to leave on the page
it was all as though set like cement:
I couldn't change a note!

my music robs the psalms of meaning
and the psalms rob my music of meaning:
cancelling out each other

the music is 'mine' in a way that the psalms obviously cannot be.
could this be the source of the problem?
[setting words remains out of the question].
how far does the music interfere with what it is I am saying the psalms for?
[why am I saying the psalms?]
does my music do anything other than create distance between us?
(or perhaps it states a truth about you that I otherwise cannot countenance?
I cannot say: I do not know.

the thought yesterday: that my music is akin to painting:
streaking a canvas with colour.
for some reason this makes it more bearable.
the very act of doing this adds significance
[almost regardless of results].

could the keyword there be significance.
is that what I seek?

painting a portrait then.
which can only be you.