Soup to art

It's Wednesday already, heigh-ho. A short between-holidays week where the days are all playing charades, with their costumes blown about them on strong winds and lots of driving rain. There is no guessing which day is which, at least not by the normal clues we usually use. This Wednesday is still truly mid-week for me (with Monday being a holiday and me taking Friday off as well), but it is also role-playing both Tuesday's and Thursday's normal position in the work-week.

The campus is quiet. Not many souls working some or all of this week. Even email is strangely quiet. This makes it a perfect week to get a few projects caught up and to do some long-overdue organizing for the quarter/year to come.

The algorithmic DJ in my iPod was serving up a nicely blended selection of tunes on the drive in this morning. The Augustana tune reminded me, however, that a tune can be good even when the lyrics are not, particularly. Some lyrics are poetry, others only vocal filler. In this song (Sweet and Low), Augustana presents us with a nicely crafted and executed bit of rock anthem but then leaves us with lyrics like:

Hold me down, sweet and low, little girl
Hold me down, sweet and low, and I will carry you home
Hold me down, sweet and low, little girl
Hold me down, and I'll carry you home

The rain is gonna fall, the sun is gonna shine,
The wind is gonna blow, the water's gonna rise
She said, when that day comes, look into my eyes
No one's giving up quite yet,
We've got too much to lose

Want a contrast point? Compare the above lyrics to these from the Bruce Cockburn tune Don't Feel Your Touch:

The last light of day crept away like a drunkard after gin

A hint of chanted prayer now whispers from the fresh night wind

To this shattered heart and soul held together by habit and skin

And this half-gnawed bone of apprehension

Buried in my brain

As I don't feel your touch, again

As Jane Wagner says in the brilliant The Search For Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe:  "Trudy, the play was soup...the audience...art."  In this case, the first lyric was soup, the second: art.

The longing for a lover's touch, as in the Cockburn lyric, and the wind and rain of this past weather-strewn night are themes combined in a beautiful poem by Robert Creeley, titled, simply, The Rain:

All night the sound had

come back again,

and again falls

this quiet, persistent rain.

What am I to myself

that must be remembered,

insisted upon

so often? Is it

that never the ease,

even the hardness,

of rain falling

will have for me

something other than this,

something not so insistent—

am I to be locked in this

final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,

lie next to me.

Be for me, like rain,

the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-

lust of intentional indifference.

Be wet

with a decent happiness.

So, what have we learned here? The weather: soup. The poetry: art.  If you must be out and about in this wet weather, may you at least be wet with a decent happiness.

The full playlist:

 - Rocco Deluca: Colorful

 - Augustana: Sweet and Low

 - Queen Latifah: I Know Where I've Been

 - Winterpills: Benediction

 - Billy Bragg & Wilco: Secrets of the Sea

Posted via Hermes.