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.

 

Here I am, finally writing to myself. It seems it is about time. Harold Budd and Clive Wright is playing in my room. I love the titles, like

 

Blind flowers

 

They are poems in themselves. Just reading them makes me see the flowers still reaching towards the sun – even when it is night, even when it is dark. Like they can’t let go of the warmth that is still shining inside them. They are not touched by the fact that the sun is not there. They are not made blind by reality.

 

I am watching  you, typing as quickly as you can as to follow the words, rather than you trying to make them follow you.

Sometimes you stop, like a dog sniffing for the next word, and then! Off you go – left –  right through the high summer grass of your imagination, when you where a child, and Crawlin‘ King Snake was already in you, not as a song, but as being. Crawlin‘ King Snake was in you way before you heard the song, the guitar, the voice. And when you heard it, you recognized it and made it yours once more.

 

You are amazed by how rich the music of Harold Budd is, why did it take so long to discover the rest of it? Yes, you heard The Pearl right away – an unusually beautiful record that you have played over and over in many differing circumstances…

Like when you wanted time to change, when you wanted the world to expand, when you wanted to imagine the hundred years or so between every heartbeat – or the slow motion waves of breathing crashing in on some faraway beach.

 

I write to you, because I have been watching over you these days. You had fever. You have been coughing. You had to sit up in bed to sleep. When you slept some short flashes the colors were strong and vivid. You dreamt new names for yourself. You dreamt of broken down buildings from your childhood, and of naked people walking around like it was normal to be naked, and clothes were something unthinkable. And you dreamt you became the leader of an organization called „The central commity for a meaningless life“.

 

And as the temperatures came back to normalish and the flu gave way to your normal pains you were two places at the same time. You were inside your body, and outside your body at the same time watching yourself. And the image of being watched and of watching yourself remains in you.

 

So if there is two of us, which one is the real me? Or maybe even the real us? I never felt alone when there were no one else around. I need my solitude – the place where I meet with myself.

 

Harold Budd and Clive Wright – The Saints Of Whispers is in my room and he talks to me as i am writing to you. Sometime you heard those whispers – sometimes you ignored them, but sometimes you did what I suggested even if it seemed like crazy riddles and penguins hitchiking.

I whisper to you from a different point in time. Not from the same here and now that you live in. Whereas you are locked inside of time and space, I am locked outside.

 

So I can never be you, and you can never be me. Or so they say. But we both know better, don`t we?

 

Maybe i should talk to instead of writing to you, make a youtube video – then it is clearer that we are on each our side of the screen. That time ceases to exist on one side. That it continues freely on the other. That space is wherever we decide it should be.

 

I look at your hands. From the outside the pains are not visible. It is not that bad in the evening. You have nice hands, many have said – they feel good.

Maybe because when you touch someone else you do not want to hurt yourself, then you are not the only touching – you are aware of being touched as you touch. Harold Budd playing the music. The music playing Harold Budd.

In front of a mirror I often wonder: what does my mirror image do when I am not there. Does it disapear? Does it wait patiently for me to return? Does it sit down with a book? Spend time with a loved one that he has not yet introduced to me? Writing a letter to a different version of himself?

 

Slowly moving towards the end of this first letter.

It will be ten letters.

Ten letters to myself.

 

*

 

Written with

Harold Budd and Clive Wright – A Song For lost Blossoms (2009)

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