seven straight days of physical pain, and i am desperate for relief. so today i sought beauty. when i lived in amsterdam i became so overwhelmed by the power of pain, by the sorrow and suffering, i shut the door to experiencing pain. life was easier that way. so the woman who wept in my lap when her two children were taken from her-- i didn't feel it. i will never forget it. i had a friend alex who i tried desperately to keep from a drug addicted boyfriend; i didn't feel anything when months later i saw her still with him. i will never forget it. but in shutting out pain, i shut another door. i spent a week in the breathtaking beauty of the black forrest. i didn't feel it. spent a month in the english countryside taking long walks down wooded paths. i didn't feel it.
today i found the music of my second favorite film score composer, zbigniew preisner. he composed the music to two of my favorite films (kieslowski's rouge and bleu). faulkner once said, "Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain". camus on beauty, "Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time". janis joplin sang the blues. it's said that her mom once asked her why she screamed when she had such a pretty voice. it's because she had "soul", wanted "you to feel what i feel". "You know why we’re stuck with the myth that only black people have soul? Because white people don’t let themselves feel things. Man, you and any housewife have all sorts of pain and joy. You’d have soul if you’d give in to it.”
today i found the music of my second favorite film score composer, zbigniew preisner. he composed the music to two of my favorite films (kieslowski's rouge and bleu). faulkner once said, "Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain". camus on beauty, "Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time". janis joplin sang the blues. it's said that her mom once asked her why she screamed when she had such a pretty voice. it's because she had "soul", wanted "you to feel what i feel". "You know why we’re stuck with the myth that only black people have soul? Because white people don’t let themselves feel things. Man, you and any housewife have all sorts of pain and joy. You’d have soul if you’d give in to it.”
preisner's work is a thing of bitter beauty. listen and weep. it's that good. it's got soul. i've been listening to it this afternoon and i am transported by the beauty, by the music, and the pain seems.... trifle. it's like being in rivendell.
"When despair for the world grows in me, and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be -- I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought or grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free." Wendell Berry
"Joy, sorrow, tears, lamentations, laughter, to all these music gives voice, but in such a way that we are transported from the world of unrest to the world of peace, and see reality in a new way, as if we were sitting by a mountain lake and contemplating hills and woods and clouds in the tranquil and fathomless water." Albert Schweitzer
1996 lake tahoe, view from heavenly by micah holcombe
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