Manafonistas

Who are you today?

Who?

Yes, that is right. I asked who and not how.

“How are you today” seems to me to be one of the most useless questions i know.

 

 What choices do you have to answer?

 

“Thanks, I’m fine.” Just answering to brush the question of like some dust that happened to land on your jacket.

Or you can answer how you actually feel. But that might take too long time for anyone to listen to. Most people are not really interested. In most cases whatever you say  does not change anything anyway.

According to rumor there is a tribe somewhere in Africa where they greet each other:

 

„How is the space between us today?“

 

That makes some kind of sense to me. The question also includes the one asking. That also makes sense to me. How I am feeling might change with whom is the asking.

Today, the space between me and myself is rather good.

We are almost one. Still we are at least two.

 

How many me`s is there inside of a me?

Are they individual me`s or just graded variations?

What is me and what is not me?

Do I have enemies of me inside of me?

 

Who are you?

 

I am watching you pointing at to those who love or have loved you as the answer to the question i am asking.

I am watching you looking at your loved ones as one creature instead of individual creatures. One big ball of a creature with everchanging faces and bodies. Sometimes different faces melt into one creating a loved one you have never been with in person. One person taking over where another one ends. Sometimes they fall in love with each other as well. Sometimes they let you in. Sometime they leave you outside to watch.

I am watching how the ages of your loved ones change. I am watching how they talk to you, how you sometimes are making the same moves, yet they answer you differently, and so the game changes. And sometime you communicate differently to them, but still the answers they give you are mostly the same.

You go in and out of love like in and out of a room. Or like you go in and out of the many faces and bodies of music.

 

Where does love stop and begin?

 

When does music start and stop?

Does the music start when it starts?

Does it start when you start to wish for the music?

Or does the music really start when you begin to remember it even when it is not playing?

 

Sometime you say that the biggest problem we have with music today is that it is so easy to listen to that we mostly forget to listen to it in our minds. That we hardly ever have to go hungry for music. There is music everywhere. We have to shut it out. We don’t get to listen to the music inside us. We do not spend time making that meeting with the inner and outer music. On the other hand: we have to seek silence actively if we want it. Not to play that record, however nice it is. Not to listen to that audiobook, no matter how fitting the voice reading it is.

I see you walking with your lovers hand in hand. Sometimes you are in the middle, sometimes you are on the side. I see the some people ignoring the three of you, but also that some people smiles longingly at you as if it is their dreams you are taking for a walk.

Its like music you say: i listen to different music. One music does not exclude the other. Blues does not exclude ambient. Rock does not exclude jazz. Red does not exclude black. You do not exclude him or her. And so on and so forth.

 

I started by asking who are you today, did you answer? I do not remember. I will ask again.

 

Who are you today?

 

Answer as you like.  Yourself or somebody else? Patti Smith or Robert Mapplethorpe? One or many?

 

 Who are you today?

 

I will watch you as you search for the answer.

Will you go deep inside and take a look?

Or will you just take a the first one surfacing?

 

Who are you today?

 

Who?

 

 

 

*

 

Todays song:

The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress – Radka Toneff

 

*

 

Written with

Eraldo Bernocchi & Harold Budd – Music For ‚Fragments From The Inside‘ (2005)

on repeat, every composition played three times, before moving on.

 

Good morning world :-)

 

Tonight you slept well. Tonight you had dreams from both sides of the border.
In one you were in America. The land of the Brave and the free. You were in a house with many rooms, and in every room so many things, unused and dusty. And you went from room to room without your feet touching the floor. And you looked at the objects wondering what to take with you. But as you reached for them they dissolved into nothing. And then you woke up in your bed, your hands empty.

These days you seem more obsessed by the thoughts of giving away  and getting rid of than collecting more. Yet things come to you and cling to you, as if they have decided that you are a safe haven where they can rest peacefully for a while.

What is possessions? What is it that fills up the rooms in your house? What is it that is yours, and that you do not have to leave behind on that final day?

 

The final shirt has no pockets.

 

I am watching you, growing up between books somewhere in a big house in one of the nicer parts of Oslo. Not rich, but certainly not poor.

 

And you were traveled with.

 

You were a child in Africa. Your father: a surgeon for the Croix Rouge – Red Cross. That`s were he got ill. Growing up with fences surrounding the blocks were you lived. Outside: the black children. You: not allowed to play with them. Yet, there were trades. They made toys of wire and brought sugar cane to sell. You had money. Negotiations across the fence. Deals made. Goods and money exchanged places.

And later when you had to go back to Norway because your father was ill. Cancer of the colon. Normally easy to cure, if discovered in time. But my father had been to busy saving others, to have time for himself.

Then: going to Spain because the climate was not so harsh as in Norway. Bag of books in the backseat. Paper to draw on. Comics. Walking under the burning bright sun through the dried up landscape to El Vikingo to have a dip in the pool, and afterwards a vanilla icecream before returning the same way continuously creating ever-changing stories always centering around some deed to be done, like dragons to be killed or universes to be saved.

 

Then: back in Oslo, your father died.

 

It was august. You were eleven. You knew it was to happen. It was no surprise. The reason why you cried was not that he was dead, but that your mother had not told you in the morning when she sent you of to school. That you had spent that day as if nothing significant hat happened in your life. That you had been lied to, kept outside of what really happened.
And so on. You learned early that there were something as dying. And that things have an end.

 

But also that even endings end and then turns into new beginnings.

 

I watch us as we read what i have written so far. You observe that this is one possible version of the story, one remix among many remixes. Next time you tell the story it will be different again. Only liars who have rehearsed tells the story the same way every time. The more it changes, the more it stays the same.

You were never good at learning by heart. And you are not to start now. Either you perform what you have written or you let the words form in your mind as you speak – never knowing where you end up – or if you have an idea about your destination – not a clue about how you get there.

More than once you have been stuck in a corner – and you have had to wait for the paint to dry. But also: wings have grown as you were falling into the abyss, and you just learned to use them in time before you would have splashed into the ground and the story would have been over.

 

I sense you are getting restless.

 

Soon it is time for breakfast. I will let you free to eat. There is no hurry. There is always tomorrow. Or is it? Is every today turned into a yesterday one less tomorrow? Or is that number always changing? I remember that summer when I started a new habit: walking into the street without looking. I was worn out, tired from constantly being on the move.

Anyway, these days, I look both left and right before crossing any street, sometimes I even wait when there is no cars passing. It does not make me immortal, but should i ever die, let it not be because of a metal box with wheels.

 

I choose to end with a song from the other dream:

 

Bo Jo Cie Kochom – Depress.

Nine to go.

 

*

 

Written with

Harold Budd and Robin Guthrie – Before the day breaks (2007)

on repeat in the background, every composition played 3 times before moving on.