I HEAR THE WIND CHIMES TINGING

Another week has flown along, day by day, night by night, then it's Friday the 13th followed by Valentine's Day. I never was spooked by Friday the 13th. It made no sense to the kid, one day bad things are to be expected. Someplace? Everywhere? Where? I and other kids at school experienced it as just another day, though many of them were superstitious about it, a folk belief with nothing behind it. My experience with Friday the 13th has been good days. Facebook is full of warnings and pictures of the ugly guy in the movies. My last of those kinds of movies was the first Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I swore off scary movies. I liked one from time to time before. Texas Chainsaw took hold of me and did not let go until it spit me out at the end. I said I'll never subject myself to any such thing again. Over. Done. Several years later and maybe ten years ago, I had a crazy experience around the movie. A woman from Pennsylvania took a shine to me and I thought she was weird. She asked me to dinner one evening. We were friendly. She was in the kitchen looking over the stove and I looked at her video collection. It was all silly comedies and children's movies. I wasn't surprised, but thought how can somebody watch all those terrible movies. I couldn't find one I believed I could sit all the way though. Then, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, right in the middle. I freaked out. I saw myself in the trailer of a psycho. I didn't want to eat. Already there, I decided to be nice and not run out the door. The meal was the worst ever. Everything tasted like cardboard. I suspected she'd put cardboard flavored poison in all my food. It was a spooky moment. At one point I asked how she got a copy of Texas Chainsaw Massacre in her video collection. She likes the movie. I exclaimed, Really? She said it's not so bad and was curious why I didn't like it. The first moment I could get out the door and into my truck became a precious goal, get there as fast as I could go. I said I didn't want to eat and run but had to go, fled, in imagination running for my life, possibly already poisoned. 

There was a time in my early years I believed other people's energies had no affect on me, until learning I'm perhaps a little too receptive of other people's energies and need to take caution. I've learned there are different kinds of energies, some aggressive, some not. I know this one old boy, a few years older than me, who radiates energy like nobody I've ever known. It's anger in him. He's angry all the way to the core, or more accurately, from the core outward. But I don't feel threatened in any way by his angry vibes. He thinks I'm a twirp, but likes me a little bit, dumb as I am. Compared to him, I could only call myself dumb. He has a brilliant mind, has skills, experience and knowledge I'm wide-eyed impressed by. I respect him. Anger is his aura. It's an aura you feel instead of see. Intense life. Not someone I would say has peace of mind. He thinks I don't respect him, thinks I judge him. Somebody so different from me it makes me glad to see I'm able to have a friendly association with somebody so radically different from myself, the other end of the spectrum, or so I assess it. I like knowing people different from myself. I live a passive life, largely not engaged with the world around me. I stay at home and wrestle with my own ignorance day by day. I feel the spirit of God all around me on the mountain. The donkeys, Caterpillar, the birds, the crows, the squirrels, possums, coons, the trees, all are in the Garden. But me. They let me live in the Garden with them as long as I don't hurt anybody. The world before the forebrain. A world of peace. I'm grateful to have a home in the Garden. I feel like it makes me whole. My connections with other humans are of the mind, mental, largely, heart too. Connection with the mountain is my whole being. The mountain is my battery charger. Off the mountain, I'm running on battery. On the mountain, I'm plugged in. 

Yes, this is my comfort zone and I like it. It feels like snow outside, like snow is not far behind. Heavy overcast, mid twenties, just enough wind to make the wind chimes ting a time or two. If the temperature rises above freezing, which it may, we'll have cold rain. Or nothing. Weather forecasts have become so dramatic, I seldom pay attention. I saw a weather-related article yesterday saying North Carolina will get ten inches of snow this coming week. All of NC? Part of NC? By the end of the paragraph it was down to maybe one or two inches or none, and no indication of where. It was presented in high drama like the Bush-Cheney color-coded levels of anxiety we're expected to conform to or die. Snow has been a winter phenomenon all my life; now I'm expected to hype myself into a state of high anxiety over a forecast warning two inches of snow. It has become annoying to hear such exaggerated weather forecasts. Brings to mind a friend who tells the temperature five to ten degrees colder than it is in winter, and warmer than it is in summer. Two inches of snow equals at least eight. Called on the exaggeration, he'll say, "In some places." We live with our heads in media mind, ready to do what we're told: be afraid. The song, Leader of the Pack, comes to mind; Lookout! Lookout! Lookout! Lookout! I felt so helpless, what could I do? followed by another great pop nonsense line, after all the things we been through. Allowing the weather to be what it is, I feel no anxiety about the forecast. Receiving it as it happens is relaxing. Earlier, the sky suggested snow ahead, and now, a few hours later, the sun is out, temperature above freezing. The donkeys stand with one side full to the sun, feels so good after a cold night. It comes under one-day-at-a-time thinking. The day, itself, when it  rains or snows, is beautiful in itself. Dreading rain tomorrow ruins today.

A gust of wind passed through, making a brief song with the wind chimes. The chimes bring Japanese composer, Toru Takemitsu, or Takemitsu Toru, into my mind. I discovered him as composer in the soundtrack of a video I was given at least twenty years ago, Japanese gardens. Faulty memory recollects it a National Geographic film. Takemitsu composes with Japanese gardens in the way Leonard Bernstein incorporated American pop into his compositions, and Bartok wove Hungarian and Romanian folk music through his. I've inspired myself to put on one of my favorite of Takemitsu's compositions, I Hear The Water Dreaming. Flute, viola, harp, guitar, with BBC Symphony Orchestra. His music flows through my mind like wind chimes in varying wind. Somehow, it does not distract. The flute and the strings flow into my ears so in tune with my inner space in this moment, outer becomes inner and inner, outer. The wind chimes interject a ting, adding an abstract note now and then, like the drone string on a banjo. I don't like to listen to music while writing or reading. Whatever  it is, it pulls me into it. Takemitsu's music flows with my mind continually searching for how to complete each sentence, word by word, waiting for and finding the next sentence, seeing where it goes, word by word, playing with words fluid as air. I think of words being fluid, easy to change, move around, hear the rhythms. Wind chimes don't distract, perhaps having to do with their seeming random notes. Takemitsu's notes happen with the random quality of wind chimes, though held into a seeming order making music. He has listened closely to wind chimes. They are the only music I want in the course of writing. Takemitsu's music enters my mind as flow patterns the mental meanderings ride as freely as with wind chimes.

photos by tj worthington

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RAIN AND TORU TAKEMITSU

Light rain all day. The world outdoors the lush green of late spring heading into summer. The green world is radiant happy, the leaves of jewelweed between a foot and two feet tall dancing as they're struck by drops falling down through the leaves of the trees. They're not so much struck as tapped, like tapped on the shoulder, not to jolt them, but to set them in motion like music. The West African balafon comes to mind, the wooden vibes that have their special tone. I think of it as a honey tone. Like Thornton Spencer has a honey tone on his fiddle, to my ear. The sound of raindrops on leaves is a softer sound, but reminiscent, including drops of water striking water, striking rock, softly, quietly. I'm hearing someone like Steve Reich amplifying the sound of water drops touching jewelweed leaves, making them dance. Reich could find the music in repetition sequences, the rain. The sound of rain brings Japanese composer, Toru Takemitsu to mind. He's made compositions of rain in a Japanese garden. Not the literal sound like recording it, but the sounds he found in the piano that best evoke the sounds of the rain falling from leaf to leaf, to falling on the surface of a pond.


I've put some Takemitsu compositions on. Robert Aitken plays a flute, David Swan the piano, with viola, harp, guitar and clarinet. Lovely music. Takemitsu composes water themes frequently. How could one not become so fine a composer studying water so closely as to make music just right for a day of gentle rain exercising the leaves in dancing motion, A relaxing day, a day that says I don't want to go out the door. The pictures above were taken standing in the doorway with screen door pushed back enough to allow visual freedom. Outside, the rain on leaves; inside, a flute playing a composition about rain. What I see in my mind's eye is a Japanese garden of moss, large rocks, trees, water, big rocks standing in the water, red leaves, yellow leaves, evergreens, a mountain in the distance, clouds flowing across the sky like boats seen from below. This has about it something ideal seeming. Summer rain, Takemitsu music to hear in the near distance strolling through a Japanese garden, gazing out the open door and two windows in mild wonderment seeing one of the more subtle manifestations of beauty there is. A gust of wind flew by rattling the wind chimes that sounded like they belonged in the music.


The present composition is Rain Spell. A vibraphone played like wind chimes in a gust of wind soon after the wind chimes outside rang.  Piano notes punctuate the soft tapping of water drops on the leaves of dancing jewelweed. Inside and outside have become one, the music inside and the music outside like one playing rhythm and the other playing melody, both softly at the same volume. The music inside has stopped, the windchime outside the door rings a leisurely ting-ting in the soft percussion of raindrops splashing on fresh leaves, an orchestra of random water drops striking random leaves. The windchime sings a melody, the wind increased the rhythm of percussion from the ground, from above, from all around. What an experience. I've never listened to Takemitsu so in tune with the subtleties in the sounds he makes with piano and flute bringing forward the music he heard in the rain. The rain outside makes the original sounds he recreated on piano strings. On a day such as this I feel like I'm in a Japanese poem.

             An old pond---
         
          a frog jumps in:

            the sound of water.

                            ---Basho


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SHOSTAKOVICH AND BUDDY GUY

wall drawing by sol lewitt



Shostakovich is in the air, a piano concerto, Martha Argerich of Argentina tickling the ivories. Sometimes I think I've heard so much music in this lifetime that I've come to the place where wind chimes have become the most ideal music I know. They're abstract music of chance. The wind isn't blowing now, so the chimes are not making music. When they make music I love to listen. I've been thinking about making a cassette tape of the windchimes on a day with enough wind to keep them going. It would make good music to drive with in the car. Several years ago I made a tape of katydids on one side and crickets on the other. It was relaxing to have it in the air driving. Shostokovich is in full storm at the moment, big piano bass chords and right hand fingers walking slowly in the middle notes.



I hear binLaden, binLaden every time I turn on the radio. The situation in Lybia gets worse daily. It's kind of absurd thinking demonstrations are going to convince a North African dictator, Khadafy in particular, to turn over power, fortune, family, anything, because a bunch of people made some noise on the internet. I get the impression they (NATO) think they can smoke him out not allowing him to use air force to defend himself. Surely they've not forgotten he was the terrorist they kept their eyes on until binLaden. He's clever as a fox and not necessarily rational.



A lightning storm came through. Thought I'd better turn off the computer. As soon as it was off, the storm was gone. Buddy Guy's album Sweet Tea had been calling to me from the shelf. It's his album of blues as played in northern Mississippi, Jr Kimbrough country. Been having it on my mind, possibly because the South has been on my mind so much over the last week or so. This is music Suthun as it gets. It's music you might hear in beach joints on the Gulf coast. It's not California beach music, it's Suthun beach music. This is electric blues guitar to the max.



It calls to mind the concert Martin Scorcese filmed of the Rolling Stones, Shine On. Buddy Guy came onto the stage to play. He and Keith Richards made some Suthun blues outa this world. At the end of their duo, when the audience was in full roar, Richards handed his guitar to Buddy Guy, saying, "It's yours." Ron Wood took a close look at it, recognized it by the smile on his face as the perfect guitar out of Keith's collection to pass on to Buddy Guy. Being totally outside the know in such matters, I'm guessing it must have belonged to one of the great blues singers of Mississippi, maybe Robert Johnson or Son House, somebody like that. Something only Keith Richards could afford when it came up on auction.



The big difference between Shostokovich and Buddy Guy is when Buddy Guy is playing it's all I can do to pull my head out of the speakers. His music, his guitar, his vocals, the songs pull my attention the same as a really strong electromagnet. I sit here, fingers on keyboard, foot tapping, grooving, flowing with the rhythm his band generates in the air. This is why I can't write to you and listen to music at once. It never works. Had to turn it off. Earlier, I'd heard the classical dj say something about playing music that it clears the mind. It does that for me too, listening. Perhaps it's something I found young that could at least temporarily wipe away worries and concerns. Shostakovich pulled me in too, the piano, though it's not quite so strong a magnetic attraction. I like hearing his approach to mind music. Buddy Guy's I'll call heart music. By heart I mean emotional. Blues, like mountain music, isn't music unless it's played from the heart.



I'm back to windchimes. Hong Kong composer Tan Dun understands the sound of windchimes. Japanese composer, Toru Takemitsu understands wind chimes too, and he understands Japanese gardens. Takemitsu understands water flow. Sometimes his music is like flowing water and wind chimes. Water dripping from the edge of the roof and from the trees make the only sound in the stillness after the storm has passed.



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