Touching Beyond

I'm writing a piece now. It will soon be finished.

I don't know where the music comes from. I do have some control over it, but mostly I can only control how bad it is. So I try not to control too much, since I obviously don't help.

This feeling, when I am out there/in here, writing, I can't tell you! Like lying in fertiliser, like having nourishment without eating, like warmth without heat, like life and living just from holding the pen and trying not to make too much of a mess of music!

You're welcome to try, of course. But please don't try too hard. You don't need to add anything; just don't take away from what is already there.

Silence

All this talking gives me a headache sometimes.

I wish I could write silence to you every day.

Water

Water really has a strong smell!

This may be something of a surprise.

I have had so many diet restrictions in the last two years I am like a temple now. Water has a smell! Next thing I will be bruising when air particles hit me. I suppose this is the Princess and the Pea syndrome. I am allowed peas, so that's possible.

The greatest irony was cutting out dairy from my diet. I am The Man Who Won His Own Weight In Ice Cream. In 1998! It was Ben & Jerry's. And I haven't finished it, obviously. But they let you have vouchers so you don't need your own deep freeze warehouse.

I used to put it in my biography when I was a bit short on competition wins.

Not ostrich: working

The answer to this constant threat of atrocities etc in London - for me, someone practising the piano at home all the time - is only to check the news occasionally. I looked once today. Result of not checking the television every two hours: work achieved.

And I still know what the official line is on events (I check my internet links). And I can put the events in their proper place in my life - something that happened but is not stopping me from being effective.

Anxiety!

Feeling anxious would worry me.

Giving

Is it OK to charge money to give a concert?

That question does not apply within the UK - you will never have the opportunity to be paid for a concert except in extreme circumstances. Music in Britain is not considered a professional activity, therefore no-one expects to pay you.

However, I'm talking to you - out there, all over the world (wherever there's a computer, anyway...this is not actually everywhere, you might be surprised to hear).

I would really do concerts for no money. You're paying me by letting me play - that's one of the things that keeps me alive. However - I do need some money to literally physically survive long enough to do the next performance. And I'm quite cheap!

For a free concert you'd have to put up with my own choice of repertoire. I would take requests (where possible) because I'd be doing it for you, for the audience, so I'd like to give you what makes you happy. It's called GIVING a concert, not taking one away!

But what you like isn't always what's good for you. Lots of music has been forgotten or hidden so you will need to hear some of that. Pleasing the audience has a variety of meanings with me.

Please give generously! I will try to do the same.

Inspiration

Inspiration - is that a word that's used lightly?

Or perhaps it's just a figure of speech nowadays.

Real inspiration - ask me about it.

And I might tell you...

Takk and tak

As part of my travel plans for the future, I'm back to learning Polish. There is this word, 'tak', which means 'yes'. So far so good, that's all quite clear (in some pronunciation you can even hear a bit of a 'd' sound at the start, so you can think of 'da' in Russian and know for sure that this word means yes). But in Norwegian (which we discussed at length, starting on 25th June) the word takk means thanks. I get just a little bit confused as I try to decide whether I'm saying yes or thanks. Solutions: get focused into speaking Polish and not have any other options for the 'tak' sound in my mind; or, concentrate on the different sounds between the two words - which are very different, if you get close enough to see all the differences - and associate different pictures and feelings with each one which will always be there when I use the words.

It may seem a small thing to be talking about. But once you know bits of a few languages, some of the bits can fall into some of the other languages, so I'd like to know what you do about that.

One great linguist (polyglot, or by definition, hyperpolyglot - speaking more than six languages fluently) - the first that I think of - is Richard Francis Burton, the great English ...well, there isn't a word for what he was, he was everything - and everything England was not, so we can be thankful for having him (1821-1890). He was one of the first Westerners into Mecca - he went in disguise, linguistically as well as everything else (you can read about this in Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Mecca). He translated the Arabian Nights (the Alf Laylah Wa Laylah, or "Thousand Nights and One Night") and the Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana - among others. Burton, who was supposed to know 29 languages, was an incredible man who went everywhere and did everything - fantastical, unlikely, impossible, but he did it. He even discovered the source of the Nile. Read something by him or about him. Then have a think about what you have to do to qualify as 'being alive'. Lord Derby said of RFB: "Before middle age, he compressed into his life more of study, more of hardship, and more of successful enterprise and adventure, than would have sufficed to fill up the existence of half a dozen ordinary men".

Improvisation

Did you know that George Gershwin was Leopold Godowsky's brother-in-law?

Did you know that Fats Waller had lessons with Godowsky?

Did you know that Godowsky and Rachmaninov and everyone used to go to hear Art Tatum play?

You do now!

Panic and calm

Well, there were four explosions here today. Again.

Fortunately, nobody was hurt as far as I am aware (going by police reports etc).

I was wondering about panic. We won't go into the mechanism of panic just now. But I was thinking about it because I always imagine that in an emergency people should help each other. This is not to say that they will, but it is to say that I think they should. (From what I heard of today, this did happen some of the time).

So what's your priority? Save yourself (easiest), save someone near to you (achievable), save everybody (hero)? And where is your sense of urgency in a mortal situation? Is it in you, in a tiny circle in your own centre? If you have a family it might be with them. If you consider yourself part of a wider family (the widest family), perhaps it could be with them - I mean, with us. If you feel part of humanity, or part of life as a whole, then if you can help someone, you know it will be someone important to you - always. As I said two weeks ago, you can do the things that you can do. You are not paralysed. On your own you can't stop the whole thing, but you don't need to try that. You only need to do what you can do. And for that, you have all the skills.

XHTML 1+

I was really excited when the XHTML 2.0 specification came out!

What is exciting about XHTML (to me) is that the code for an XHTML web page is almost all meaning. In HTML, particularly before we got to version 4, there was a lot of layout in there. All kinds of elements like tables, paragraphs, headings, the whole lot, they were all being badly abused in attempts to force web pages to look a certain way. A terribly confusing situation for browsers and everyone as we tried to make sense of this cobwebby mess. Just think, a table (like a table of results for something) should be used when you want to show a table! Rather than to fit objects on the page, exactly where the designer wants them - and exactly where they aren't going to end up once different browsers have tried to make sense of them. It was an attempt to make the visual element completely controlled, and the result was the opposite - a visual element that was never controlled, because it would always behave differently in different situations.

Now we can control the look of a web page externally. But this is real control, because we know that there is no control. We know that browsers are different. We know that people's settings are different. We know not to try to control down to the millimetre. Real control has flexibility in it.

More importantly, the content of the web page is now the content. Elements are used to signify what they were designed to signify, not just used because of the way we think they will look. It's getting dangerously close to real communication! And communication is the wonderful thing about the Internet.

Plenty of people complain about, well, everything really, but specifically in this context they complain about the new specifications. Yes, I guess they complain each time there is a new specification. There are grumblings about the W3C. But I have never found any substance in the complaints. I see the developments they are making as completely positive in all ways.

I feel a good feeling when I write in XHTML. I was starting to feel good with HTML 4.01. But I feel bad when I can write loose code without consequences. Imagine all those unclosed elements (even the empty elements)! Imagine the improper nesting! Ugh. So just be thankful that everything will make a lot more sense in the future, and get started making well-formed documents!!! Oh, and please don't complain about the new specifications. I have already heard it. All comments welcome about how good XHTML is looking!

Wishes

When you wish that things were different, you are shutting out the things you do have. Your mind is somewhere else.
How bad are things now? Probably not so bad. Whatever it is, there is something worse somewhere else.
Those things that are wrong, all of them are somehow part of your life and our world. Is that what you want to say no to?

...

But there is something special about wishes. They could be important.
It's easy to say: "I wish I had..." - you hear that word a lot. Watch out! You never know who's listening.
A true wish is like a star that guides you. Seeing it is part of saying yes. The other way, we might all miss something good that's coming up.

Editions

You need a good edition of the music you are learning. 'Good' means 'correct'. Correct means that what you see on the page is what the composer wanted you to see, in other words, that no-one has altered or improved the original.

Sometimes there are a variety of originals, so it's not a simple matter to make an edition. But you have to find the best one you can. Because you need your instructions - the notes on the page. If you haven't got that, then what are you learning?

For Chopin, I use Henle's Urtext Edition. I always used to play from old editions like Augener, mainly because I liked the printing. And when I first looked at Henle I was sure I didn't want to play Chopin in German. But now I need them, because my other editions don't tell me the whole story. They also have extra notes and words that I would like to forget now, please!

But having said this, Henle isn't perfect. Look at the beginning of Chopin's B Flat Minor Sonata (Op. 35). When you play the repeat from the end of the exposition back to the start, consider whether you should go right to the beginning (the introduction, "Grave"), or repeat from just after that (in B Flat Minor now, "Doppio Movimento"). Because only one of these is correct. The answer is: the exposition finishes in D Flat Major, and you repeat right from the very beginning which begins on a D Flat. The other way doesn't make sense, so I have applied myself to removing that from my Henle edition. (See Charles Rosen's The Romantic Generation for more details on this matter).

I'm busy

Did you think I would forget?

Discovery

The German film maker Werner Herzog (Kaspar Hauser - Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle/The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser; Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht/Nosferatu the Vampyre; Fitzcarraldo; etc.) says when he is directing an emotional scene he likes to film the actors from behind. An example is the scene in Nosferatu where Jonathan and Lucy Harker are together on the beach just before Jonathan leaves for Transylvania. They are walking away from the camera, in the middle distance. In a Hollywood film the tendency would be to shoot such a scene in close-up, to extract the maximum intensity (and to release more of the box-office value in the stars' faces, I suppose). But he says "I don't want to see the actors crying, I want to see the audience crying". So we live the emotional life of the characters rather than being fed it.

The painter Mark Rothko said that his purpose in making such large works was not to create something grand and impressive (as one might expect historically), but rather to create a feeling of intimate intensity.

To find an answer of genius you must first set off in the opposite direction.

Indispensable

The one indispensable work in world literature:

My Young Years
by Arthur Rubinstein

I am telling you to read it.

But only if you enjoy being alive!

Growing

The man who had lived in a small cage for thirty years. Maybe now it would hurt more to leave the cage.

The young girl who had been kept in a cellar all her life. Would the sun hurt her eyes?

A dog that had been mistreated. Could it learn to trust you?

We have the power to see ourselves. We see the face in the mirror and know that it's our own reflection. Not exactly 'me' but the reflection of me. And over there in the mirror you can see what others see - if you can quiet down your own picture of yourself and make friends with what is through the glass. It's someone nice. It's you. (From before)

The sunlight might hurt. It might hurt to stretch what had been cramped and locked away. For a while. How much more would it hurt to stay the same?

I don't know much about dogs. I would hope you could help a dog to learn to trust you. But he wouldn't learn without you. He can't see his reflection. He can feel emotions but he can't understand them. He can't change himself.

What about me and you?

Listen...but not too hard!

I had an article published recently.

It looked to me like it would alienate academics through not being academic enough, and that it would alienate non-academics by being too academic.

But I wrote it the way it had to be written.

The only thing I was concerned about was - where were the jokes?

To be really serious about something, you have to be able to laugh. The ones who can't laugh, who are too important to be joked about, who have a serious bearing that's damaged by laughter...where are they going? Nowhere, by the looks of it.

Too late! We've gone. We laughed, and it made us zoom off into the sunset together!

And if you couldn't laugh, what would you do? Cry?

I laughed until I cried anyway!!!

HA HA HA HO HO...

Sea of ferns

I came back to London on the train through one of England's most famous forests. For some reason it stopped on the way, and I was unexpectedly surrounded by lots of green ferns and purple foxgloves. Good! This is the feeling around me that I am missing when I'm back with the city people. Grey and shut in, they pass me by like ghosts when all the time the green is calling them to reach out their tendrils to light...and other life.

English Words

Least favourite words:
1. "Mate".
A term of endearment directed at people for whom one has no dear feelings of any kind. Rhymes with "hate".

2. "Chat".
The sound made by flapping open mouths when the brain is not currently in use.

Some favourite words:
"Yes"
Also a flexible, inviting kind of silence (not a word, but I like to hear people saying it - especially people who enjoy category 2 above).

That is all!

Seeing

Sit down somewhere (you can stand up if you want, or lean on someone, but please don't lie down, we're not trying to go to sleep here). What are you thinking?

Can you see what you are seeing, just for itself and in its moment? Or is it all affected by your thought? I wish it was different, today is a terrible day, today is an ordinary day, why can't I do anything right, I must be better than them, I will succeed, must change this, must not think this way or that way...

Then what happens to your life? Do you change that by your thought?

It's difficult to find the moment. But I think it is there to be found.

More soon.

Line of Fire

I'm out of London now.

On the day of the bombs I looked out of the window to see if people were behaving better. I imagined they would all have seen what their real priorities were. I thought that a great shock like that would have made a great difference. But I looked out and they were still avoiding each other's gaze. They were still pretending not to notice each other.

On the way out of London yesterday it was the same. By now I was feeling that this was worse than any killings and explosions - the possibility that great loss of life, everywhere, immediate and instant, had made no difference at all. That the cages we all live in were so strong that nothing could break the bars down.

Then at Canary Wharf (a big target) I saw them. People who had changed. A few. They have to work there. They have to be in that building all day, afraid that it could be their day to have their picture in the news. Now they were friendly. They were glad to see me, and glad to get through each minute and hour safely. I looked in their eyes and saw souls looking back at me. In this kind of crisis, there was nowhere to rest the mask, there were no masks to fit the job, so all masks fell to the ground. These people didn't feel safe, they didn't feel at peace, but they were reaching out and now they were part of something wider. They weren't alone any more.

So I felt better myself.

Song

"In the songs of the jackdaw each and all of the different cries peculiar to the species are constantly reiterated. All the call-notes [...] are reproduced in the song, and that includes the "Kia" and "Kiaw" cries, "zicking" and "yipping" and even the sharp rattle normally used in defence of a comrade. In all other birds that I know, sounds with a "meaning" are not used in the song at all, or, at the most, they occur only singly. But the song of free-living jackdaws consists almost entirely of such sounds! And the unique part of it is that the singer accompanies the individual cries with the corresponding gestures. When rattling he bends forward and quivers with his wings, just as in a genuine rattling reaction; when "zicking" or "yipping" he assumes the appropriate threatening attitude. In other words he behaves exactly as a human being who becomes so engrossed in the recitation of a ballad that the individual passages awaken corresponding feelings and emotions and automatically evoke the appropriate gestures. To my human ear, these "song-sounds" are in no way distinguishable from those which are meant in earnest. How often have I rushed, in alarm, to the window, hearing a loud rattling and thinking a marauder had one of my birds in his clutches, only to find that a loudly reciting jackdaw had made a fool of me. But never have I seen a real jackdaw taken in, in that way. This is a constant source of wonderment to me, considering the blind, reflex-like nature of the reaction which follows on the rattling of a fellow-member of the species in cases of emergency. It is this significance of the individual sounds and still more the touching expressiveness of the accompanying gestures that make the jackdaw's song so enchanting to one who understands its emotional movements and sounds. How delightful are these little black fellows, repeating with elation their ballads, in which are conjured up pictures of all the exciting experiences pertaining to the life of a jackdaw!"

KING SOLOMON'S RING - New Light on Animal Ways
Konrad Z. Lorenz (Translation: Marjorie Kerr Wilson, 1952)
Chapter Eleven: The Perennial Retainers

Do you know what is important now?

Did you hear what happened here? Look at the news.

I just wanted you to know that you can only control the things that you can control. But those things, you really do have control of them.

Some events are great and wide and directed at a larger whole than just you or your circle. If you could fight them, you would know what to do.

So you know what to do. Do the things you can do. Mend what you can mend. Then if we all do that, each little pool of light will touch the edges of the next one.

It is a little bit distracting. I might say more later.

Love from Philip

Sitemap

There are so many websites now that it is quite a task for Google to crawl through all of them to update its search results. That's why you can now submit your site information using Google Sitemaps - in our case here, just an XML file that lists each page of www.dreme.co.uk together with some basic information like how often the page is updated, and how important each page is relative to the rest of the site. Easy! Simple folk can do it using an online sitemap generator from which you can download the XML file, and upload it to your server. Keep track of its progress in Google by signing up for your own account with them. It doesn't cost anything. Now when you update your site Google will know about it FAST. Better than the four weeks or whatever it was when you first submitted your details! Technically more experienced people are probably aware of more sophisticated ways of submitting to Sitemaps, so I won't mention any more! (These are useful if you are regularly adding a lot of new pages to your site.)

A smile, here or there...

I made one person smile yesterday. It's one, but I think more would be better. What are you thinking - the others were all dialling for the police in terror as I tried to tickle them with my feather duster? I do try to fit in a bit more than that. I am just another face in the crowd normally. But that face!

Please make someone smile soon if you can. It will be much appreciated in all sorts of ways by all sorts of people. Thanks.

Weather Matters

From my Polish phrasebook:

cloud chmura
fog mgła
frost mróz
ice lód
lightning błyskawica
moon księzyc
rain deszcz
sky niebo
snow śnieg
star gwiazda
sun słońce
thunder grzmot
thunderstorm burza
wind wiatr

To me this is the material for an incredibly exciting conversation which I heartily look forward to having!

[pronunciation help: ł = "w" / ó = "oo" / ę = a nasal "e(n)" sound / ś = "sh" / ń = a bit like "ny"]

What's New?

I got my Friedman music in the post. That's Ignaz Friedman, and if you don't know who that is I don't know if I want to tell you - you should!

Was yesterday such a long time ago? Did all the truths we learnt then suddenly fade away? So why does it feel a bit strange to be getting Friedman in the post?

And I didn't tell you what I need it for!

Fashion is not all it's cracked up to be. You can buy the latest car, and you will have...a car. It is a vehicle for getting you somewhere. Once a car was called by its longer name - a carriage - and it had a horse or horses in front. It did the same job.

And the old faces that passed by mirrors now stained, broken or lost, are they suddenly useless?

But he who loveliness within

Hath found, all outward loathes,

For he who color loves, and skin,

Loves but their oldest clothes.

John Donne (1572-1631)

Golden Laughter

I did it.

Well, I did a lot better than before anyway.

I always make an effort to like something if I don't like it already. Because you don't know what you might be missing. I did it with pizza, and I will do it again although I don't yet know with what.

It was a struggle over the years, but I got there.

I listened to the beginning of Das Rheingold without laughing.

Alright, I know that must be a bit of an incredible claim. If you thought that, you are right: I got as far as 3'37" without laughing. So I was lying after all. I thought it was pretty good to get that far though!

So Richard Wagner, what were you thinking of? I think I know only too well, but we won't go into that here. I did laugh, but I can't really claim it as a moment of enjoyment. Although I did like the bit in one of his operas where Elmer Fudd is searching for Bwunhilde.

Tangled Web

It gets worse! How can this be?

Because of some of the popular superstitions of the Middle Ages it was believed that the bite of a Tarantula (which is a hairy arachnid) could cause the victim to turn into a Werewolf.
[Wikipedia]

I'm not making this up!