New Life

I'm afraid the butterfly is not alive now. Unfortunately before it was released into the outside world. But then it couldn't fly so we don't know what would have happened to it out there...

But look what has appeared on the tree next to the butterfly's place! A new shoot! So life is always appearing, even when you think it is disappearing.

Chain of Command

Godowsky was a genius. A self-taught genius - the only kind there is, of course.

He learned how to do anything at all on the piano, and invented some new things too. If you want to have a lesson with Godowsky, try playing any of his music. It has lots of fingerings and helpful comments written in, so it's very instructive as playing music by a great pianist always is. Of particular note are his Studies on the Etudes of Chopin, which, since they are more difficult than Chopin's originals, raise the standard of piano playing in a rather helpful way.

Heinrich Neuhaus was Godowsky's student. There was a great teacher for you. And he was a great player too, though he spent most of his time teaching. You can learn a lot from his book The Art of Piano Playing. What he says seems obvious though, so you have to keep coming back to the book over many years to appreciate its value.

Then Neuhaus had a student called Sviatoslav Richter. He was good too!

Each of these people had their own talent, but it was helped by meeting one of the others. Destiny somehow allows people to look after each other.

Godowsky set off one day to find out how to play the piano, and look what happened!

Richter wasn't really a teacher but look what he did for us. If you can't learn from any of that, there's a problem somewhere!

Thanks very much to those three men, then. Thank you!

Translation

There's a famous line in Baudelaire that goes:

Les soirs illuminés par l'ardeur du charbon

(First line, verse two, "The Balcony")

Actually I thought it was from Proust, and now you can imagine how glad I am that I checked!

Anyway, this line is a sort of famous example of how some things are difficult to translate. Those of you who do not know French, or who think you're probably fairly fluent but actually you're being rather optimistic about that (like me), will already have translated it as:

The evenings illuminated by the ardour of carbon

Which is of course the only sensible translation. These people who pettifogg over unnecessarily precise details may prefer a different rendering but that's not us, eh? We appreciate the broad strokes of our intuitive understanding of the French tongue. Unfortunately that's not how the French would see it, so we have to actually find out what the words mean rather than guessing.

Here are some examples:

The evenings aglow with the heat of the coals (Elaine Marks, 1962)
Evenings illuminated by the glowing coal (Francis Scarfe, 1961)
In those evenings lit by the glowing coal (Francis Scarfe, 1986)
The nights ignited by the fire’s fierce fashions (Arthur Symons, c.1900-1920)
The eves illumined by the burning coal (Frank Pearce Sturm, 1906)
long hours illumined by the glowing fire (Lewis Piaget Shanks, 1931)
The evenings lighted by the hushed flame of the coal (George Dillon, 1936)
On eves illumined by the light of coal (Roy Campbell, 1952)
The evenings lighted by the glow of the coals (William Aggeler, 1954)
Evenings illumined by the glow of coals afire (Jacques LeClercq, 1958)
Evenings lighted by the burning of the coals (Wallace Fowlie, 1963)
On evenings by the ardor of the hearth illumned (Richard L. Tierney, 1981)
Evenings illustrated by living coals (Richard Howard, 1982, no relation)
Those evenings lighted by the lustrous coal-fire’s heat (William H, Crosby, 1991)
Evenings illumined by the ardour of the coal (James McGowan, 1993)
Evenings illuminated by the heat of a coal fire (Cat Nilan, 1999)
On evenings lit by the glowing coal-fire (Peter Low, 2001)
Those evenings lit by the glow of the coals (Rosemary Lloyd, 2002)
On evenings lit by the glow of the ashes (A. S. Kline, 2004)
evenings lit by burning charcoal (Keith Waldrop, 2006)
Evenings bathed in crackling firelight (Ira Lightman, 2007)

(If you want to read more from those translations, look here which is where I found them anyway)

Well there's a few possibilities. One was almost the same as my first attempt, wasn't it! And this is from professionals...

Interesting to see someone struck on an alternative meaning of "illuminated" ("illustrated", like an illuminated manuscript). I don't know if the word has those senses in French and English, though, so I can't make any judgement about its suitability.

So now we know it's hard to translate. But actually everything is hard to translate - unless you're a good translator. Then it is still hard but it looks easy. Remember Samuel Beckett translated Finnegans Wake into French! So anything is possible...

Aha look, you can hear James Joyce reading an excerpt himself with his own good voice hear!

Somehow it seems the best translations give you the feeling of the original, though they may not give the most literal exchange of meanings. The best line is the one that makes you feel the...er...ardour of carbon, as you are reading it.
Perhaps a sense of the social and historical position of the language of the original is possible, too. Cor Blimey, Strike a Light, Guv, that may be adding too many difficulties sometimes.

So something has to come across. Across the page, between the two languages, across the years to today, someone has to make a bridge between the original and the listener or reader. Well, isn't that rather like being an interpreter of music?

To hear a performance by Sviatoslav Richter or Glenn Gould, to take two strong examples, is in some people's eyes to hear a powerful personality imposing itself on the original. Or to hear a partial, or even eccentric, view. But that is not how I see it (or hear it).

Richter is a powerful personality, but what is powerful is the extent to which he's prepared to go to bring you the original. It's instantly recognisable as him, yet it is also instantly recognisable as the "right" music. (That's not to suggest that there's one right way, but if it can sound right or wrong, then I'm calling it right)

Gould is the same. Sadly too many writers describe him as eccentric, perhaps nearly all of them (I am at least one exception), and it makes it very difficult to hear what he's actually doing. I am a Gould sympathiser and I am still surprised when I listen and suddenly realise it's not eccentric. It is always Glenn, Glenn, Glenn, but Glenn likes the music, you see so it's not the same Glenn as if we were hearing some...other...player. (Still trying not to complain about others - they have a right to make a living too! Though they don't always have the right to do it the way that they do, in my view.)

How I imagine playing music is like this. I want to be the composer. I am trying to bring you the music as the composer thought of it - as far as I can understand that. But what is particular about my understanding of how one does this is that I see myself as representing the composer if he were alive today.

That means that things can be different sometimes. Also I do have free will so my "creative commune" can come up with a change in the performance, as, of course, many good players did anyway. Details can change, even the whole idea of the piece. They say Chopin never played the same way twice. It brought tears to the eyes of his pupils - first because of its beauty, second because as they tried to repeat the results it had already changed! How frustrating it must have been. But that was the way it was. And I guess that's the way it is for me, too. Things just can't be the same twice! Even if I tried.

I can't translate
Les soirs illuminés par l'ardeur du charbon
Et les soirs au balcon, voilés de vapeurs roses.
Que ton sein m’était doux! que ton coeur m’était bon!
Nous avons dit souvent d’impérissables choses
Les soirs illuminés par l’ardeur du charbon.
Not today, anyway.

But I have other news from far away and long ago that I have to pass along to you. So that is what I will do, as best I can.

Fear

The things you fear are like shadows in the half of the room that you don't want to see. Your half is not in shadow, because you have chosen to look at it. But what's in the other half?

There is a monster under the bed, and one in the wardrobe too. Dark things come out at night and we clothe them in our own fear.

But in the daylight we can see what is there.

The things we fear are everywhere because we don't want to look at them. So when there is darkness - under the bed, in the wardrobe, or somewhere else we are not sure about - our fears appear. Whenever you sense some unknown thing coming towards you (in space or in time), you shape it into the thing you are afraid of.

The only question is, what is really there?

I think the answer has to be, there is something there. Or, there appears to be something there. What though? It's our choice whether we look closely or not.

Let's think of a situation. General fears around this area (where I am now) are: being robbed, being attacked somehow, losing things, or fear of a general disaster (of whatever type is popular in the media at the moment). Let's take fear of non-specific attack or robbery. OK, so you are afraid of that happening. When it is dark you are more afraid. That may be reasonable because there are fewer people around in the dark. However, that's rather the product of the fear of the dark that we talked about before. If it's dark then you put something there. If you can't see what is there, you imagine what could be there.

As uncertainty increases, this hypothetical person we are talking about gets more afraid. He creates more threats as his knowledge decreases. We can see that fear of attack gets worse when we have less information: if it's dark; if the place is unfamiliar; if we are alone.

However! We can do better than that!

Let's forget about the BlockbusterAttackMode way out. This approach says that the more prepared I am for attack, the less I will be affected by it. Look at these people, they learn a million-and-one-ways of defending themselves, nine-and-a-half exotic martial arts, carry six guns, a knife, and a flamethrower. And that's just for looking out of the window! Are they less afraid? No, and I think they are becoming a bit of a threat themselves actually. Yes, they did get more prepared, that's sort of taking a step, but they did not solve the problem.

The only problem was the original fear, fear created by the darkness we mentioned at the beginning. Then we were talking about a real darkness (the one under the bed, for example), but it's really the same thing if it is physical or a kind of mental darkness which comes from the unknown.

So given that we are afraid of something, we can see the following. First, we are creating more threats wherever we are unsure about something. We talked of a fear of attack but it can really be anything. There are plenty of uncertainties so there are plenty of fears to choose from!

Have you noticed that now? Whenever there is uncertainty, you turn it into a threat. Yes, I agree, the accident could happen now, your job could disappear this week, that heart attack you've been expecting could have happened five minutes ago. But does it make sense to be on panic alert all the time? OK, statistically there is probably a chance of these things happening. Probably each of them happened to somebody in the world yesterday. But you are not a supercomputer. The human mind is very powerful (or capable of being) but you are not helping matters by using that power to imagine how badly things could go wrong. Getting a scratch that goes septic and you die - chances are 2,987,453 to one. A chance. Yes, every second. Even twice a second! All the same...I don't want to upset your reasoning process, but it may not be your day for misfortune. Sorry, it must just be bad luck, I guess.

First of all, you are seeing your fears when you cannot see clearly. You can solve that by: recognising what you are afraid of, and trying to be objective (learning to see other sides of a situation, not just the one you are used to seeing). Low Grade Panic Alert is rather a vague state so it helps to identify what the perceived threat is. What are you afraid of? Write it down. Ok I think it is slightly less frightening already. Slightly is a good start. Then by learning to "see through other eyes" you can see where you went wrong before. Illusion is the product of isolation. "I'm afraid of..." is already wrong because it starts with "I". You think you are separate and you have your own problems. But you must be connected to someone else in some way. You have seen another person before, right? Right, so you are not really alone. Then who is this "I"? It is the fearing part. The part that does not fear is called "We" or "Us". Learn about it.

Finding ways to attack a problem will never solve it. Because you are afraid of attack, you are always attacking. Don't fight, invite! Your hostility makes hostility outside you. If you welcome the world and its chances of...failure or...success, then you are shining a bit of light on your fear and you will have more chance of seeing what is really there.

What is really there? A few naughty people doing naughty things. But not all the time. They want things the easy way and can't be bothered to put much effort in. And accidents do happen, but not to everbody and not every day, and when they do we have to stop and think how we got into that situation and maybe learn how to avoid it next time. Health problems do occur but not every minute. A system under stress has to release the stress somehow, and the results can seem unpleasant. But symptoms that come out are the product of something called health. If you are worried about your health then you must know why you are worried. Is it something you are doing wrong? If it is then you can change it. Your body is the only one you have and looking after it will help you a lot. Your life is your life and can change this world for the better. Our world is our world, too, though we are supposed to look after it rather than drain it of goodness. These are all good things. The bad things exist but they are not everywhere. They may not even be bad! They are probably just "things" until you decide they are going to be bad.

We should be afraid. There is a lot to be afraid of. But it is not meant to freeze us in our steps before we have started the race. We are not meant to stop climbing before the first peak has come into view. Fear is allied with caution, respect, care, and guides experiment. Each of those ensures the harvest comes in safe next year. They may mean the ship gets into port safe and sound. The eggs all get back from market in one piece. But where do the plans come from? What makes experiment? Total caution would have zero result. Now I have a message for you. You are not the victim of a dice game, neither coldly and without intent, nor maliciously twisting the threads of your fate. You are not the victim. You have the power to imagine danger for a very good reason - because of the power to imagine. Why do you have that power? To stop? To shut the shop and sink the ship, to shatter and fail and founder and grind to a halt? Or to see in your mind's eye what lies behind the hill, what lives on the other side of the world, what breathes where there is no air and swims without water?

What crawls in the morning, stands upright at noon, and crawls again at evening? The answer is man, from baby to adult to old age, but we should rather ask: What asks riddles? Who invents the impossible? The answer is the mind of man but what that really means is something we are still learning. Don't expect to read about it in the newspaper. With these things, it's better to try and find out for yourself. Believe me.

Now you are brave again!

You only got to be brave by admitting that fear exists. Well done. Now do more!

The Language of Music

It's hard to explain impossible things to you.

But the reason one person writes to another is that there is something he needs to tell that person, something which he thinks the other person doesn't know. The only problem is that when a fact is an unknown fact, it is hard to understand. In fact it may be impossible to understand - it will take a lot of problems and hard work to finally see what it was. Sometimes, indeed, you can't just tell someone the answer they need, because they won't understand without actually discovering the answer for themselves. That's why we have symbols like mazes and spirals. Labyrinths were popular in ancient art. Popularity comes when something resonates with many people, no matter what the intention behind it. In this case, the Labyrinth is a journey you must follow until it is solved - there is not normally a short way through.

The Labyrinth is a part of the ear, too.

When we hear music we can identify patterns. Without them, it would probably be noise. But as long as we can fit the sound to a pattern we feel there is some sense behind it. We keep creating possible patterns to fit to the stimulus, trying to find a match for one or more templates that we have stored, or creating a new one based on the incoming material. So although I said we try to find a fit, really we are creating the pattern that we hear. The sound is what it is, but the pattern is our own. Listen to noise and see how soon you start to hear words. They may not be there as such, but we are looking (listening) for them.

So we may find there is sense at the first hearing of a piece of music. That depends on what experience we have. Whatever the case, we will try and we will find something. But you might end up saying, no, I just couldn't make anything of it. Like the ladies in the Wigmore Hall who laughed at the 'wrong notes' in a Webern piece - which was written in 1899! I was there, you can believe me.

There are "dissonant" cases where the music is too different from the listener's internal templates and antagonism results. Of course, the dissonance is not necessarily a question of some dissonance in the music's harmonic idiom - I was referring to the dissonance between what they are hearing and what they might expect to make sense, or what they have heard before and got used to. But on the whole the music one hears is mostly more or less familiar - you tend to recognise it as music, and more particularly as "our music". Statistically we are more likely to hear music we already recognise, of course - because statistically we will stay in more or less the same place.

Recognition comes then, somewhat or a lot. You can tell there is a loud bit coming up because it starts getting louder. It started quiet so you know it will be quiet for a bit. Or after learning a bit more, you know that if it is quiet, it might stay quiet or might SUDDENLY get loud. You start to learn what the options might be. And if you know a bit about music you might here where the harmony is going. You might recognise the sort of "subject" the composer is thinking of. Of course there is not a subject, it is music not words, but there are associations and special patterns we notice. It might be something clear like the sound of a bird (the cuckoo in Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony) or something ambiguous like the sound of water or wind in a Schubert song. It might be a topic like "military" (Chopin Polonaise) or "exotic" (Debussy Pagodas) or "academic" (Handelian fugue in Mozart or Beethoven). Whatever it is, you learn, and then finally you understand. It can take repeated hearings to get there though - although most do not try after the first attempt. And sometimes there is no attempt! (What are the chances of success there I wonder?)

All of these insights come with practise and understanding. Some come with learning and knowledge.

They say that a child's mind is a clear mind. They say a child will see the obvious when everyone else convinces themselves otherwise or trips themselves up in tangles of thought and blind guesses. That's why there is the famous story of The Emperor's New Clothes. Maybe it's funny, I don't know. I'm sure no-one believes it could ever really happen. But that's the shock you get when you realise it's happening all the time. Look at what people are doing around you now. A little or a lot, helping or un-helping, but they are certainly taking a lot of different approaches to the maze of their life. Certainly the mazes are different, but can all the people be right? The child says: I thought you had to get to the centre. (Does that mean it is easier than it seemed?)

Yes, you try to hear some sense in the sound coming in. But we are in luck, because the person who created it all - the composer - put sense in at the beginning. So we are in with a fighting chance!

I am convinced that we can understand music purely by paying attention to what the composer has put in it. That's the approach I took when I wrote about Evryali, and it's how I try to understand music on a daily basis. The significance of this is that it doesn't matter how much you know before you get started. Knowledge came down to us because other people noticed things; that means we can notice them too. But it will take a long time if we try to understand the knowledge AS WELL as the music. That's two jobs, you see. Fortunately I have tried to understand the music, afflicted with only a slight knowledge of the technical processes involved. (That's not a joke, I really don't know much!). That's why I'm here today to tell you where to look.

The first time I noticed something important about music was in a Mozart symphony last year. It wasn't a good performance (maybe that's why I noticed it). The symphony was called "The Jupiter", but I don't think that matters because I don't like the "I know it all" approach to music: Ah, The Jupiter, yes, of course. Beethoven's second Razumovsky Quartet, yes. Opus 106, a masterpiece. It does annoy me rather, you see this is talking about music without mentioning the music. Perhaps it is not talking about the music? I know it's helpful to use labels so we can know what is being discussed, but these are the names on the filing cabinet. They are the names on the files. They are not the contents of the files. Inside are lovely golden sounds without names. Songs without words that sing in my heart.

I forget exactly what it was in that Mozart symphony. I think it was a movement in the harmony. I realised he was doing something really funny, moving somewhere no-one could have predicted. I wondered why no-one was laughing. I think it was because they were hearing "A Mozart symphony" - the one in their heads, perhaps. You don't need Sherlock Holmes to tell you that the best Mozart symphony comes from Mozart, not from us. By some twist of fate, that was actually what I was hearing. Yes, no incompetence on the part of the conductor or players prevented me from hearing what the composer had put into the music. It was all there, and it always is in any piece or performance.

Music is highly cultural, you know. There is a lot to learn about. But as it happens you don't particularly need to learn any of it. If you are responsible and care about the music and why it exists then I think it won't hurt to try learning a bit. But you have to listen first.

I listened, and I am now telling you this:

A master composer knows his job and tries to get better at it.

The best composers didn't stop when they had had enough, or when they thought they were good enough. They continued changing.

In these cases, the golden secret inside centre of the music was what led the creator - it was what they were trying to communicate! In the other cases, the composer got tired and his forms started writing themselves, though there could still be flashes of inspiration. It could never dry up completely (some music leads me to doubt this but it is true)

The secret was called ecstasy. Did the composer want to be a composer, or could he not stop being a composer? "Ecstasy" is a word that means being outside yourself. What is outside? Whatever we don't already know. Other people. Other places. Other ideas. Mistakes. Answers. Genius.

Whatever you think about music, I think we all have to agree there is some kind of vision involved in it. Someone wants to communicate something, and that is their vision. It can be predictable, clichéed, or previously impossible - a surprising thing of brilliance and power. With skill, the vision becomes clearer.

That vision is present in every part of the work, and through the opposition between the parts we can appreciate what it is. (The word for an arrangement of parts is composition)

You won't at first know what a piece of music is saying. It's important to remember that it isn't saying anything. As long as you can say it in words, you are not there. You can talk about it but you have to live it to see it.

With repeated slow careful exposure to music you can learn to feel what it really is. Your mind is not understanding it, your heart is not feeling it, but these senses may be involved.

Remember what I am telling you: it is real. Music is real. There is a real reason for it. It is not something in a book or on a CD, it is something outside you, coming in. Also remember that if you were lost in a labyrinth, you might forget your journey. The outside might seem dark and unfriendly. Think then of what it's like to find the way through the maze. Find the end, and you see you were the one who had gone outside. Really the music is inside. People who don't listen are stuck outside. When we hear it truly, we are all joined up again. Or starting to be.

Primo Levi was in a prison camp. Then he sent us a message through his books so that the world would change. James Clavell was in a prison camp. He did the same. He did a good thing too, because he loved the people who imprisoned him. That is how he was set free. Any others who still hated them were still prisoners, weren't they? And Ronald Searle was in the same camp. He had to carefully hide his drawings while he was there. He sent us messages too.

There is a well-known analogy that life is like a bird flying through a lighted hall. It is light for a moment, then it is dark again. That's silly, because although I can see what it means, I think they are looking at it from the wrong side. Think what the other birds are thinking. Wot is that bird doing stuck inside that dark hall when we are all out here?

I spoke of prisoners because when we are stuck or lost, what we need most is a way out. Sometimes it is all we can do just to survive. There isn't much sign of life outside the prison. But one day a message comes.

To understand the message is all we need to do.

It is not obvious. But it is there. If you can love it, then you are hearing it.

This is the language of music.

Who or What is Chopin?

Who or what is Chopin?

How often do we think of France or French things in connection with this composer?

To me, it seems that there are a lot of French connections in the mind. Well, he did live in France mostly so maybe that is not surprising...but he wasn't French, was he?

Or was he actually a "French Composer"? He lived in France, he is sometimes considered a/the precursor of Debussy and the Impressionists, on classical compilation albums he is generally played by somebody with "François" somewhere in his name (in my experience), his name appears often as "Frédéric François Chopin", and while the French are of course perfect and don't need any help from outside (except for using 98% English words with "le" in front of them), I think they like to keep a connection with this man. The French Composer, Chopin. Actually, his surname is French, isn't it. Well, that's not his fault.

There is nothing at all wrong with being French. Ask a Frenchman!

So this would not be a problem in itself. Unless of course it were to turn out not to be accurate.

You see, I always believe there is a real "hidden character" to every composer, or every piece of music (since composers change sometimes, if you're lucky). We listen to CDs and play in competitions and it all sounds like general "Piano Music" - or if someone wants to sound like they have a personality then they can do extreme things with the music like making sudden explosions, playing very fast or slow, etc. etc. - and at all times there is only a little bit of a distinction made between the feeling or character of the different works. I suppose the emphasis is on the piano playing, in fact, which seems like it would make sense. But given a choice between hearing the music of the composer or the music of the pianist, which would you choose? You see what I mean.

So to me Chopin was always maybe a little bit boring or something, a bit hard to grasp what it was all about. It seemed to have no particular style of its own, since it was THE style of the most popular piano music ever written. It got so famous, it had become a headline with not much personal contact to be had. Marilyn Monroe often did that kiss for the cameras, and that was "Marilyn Monroe", but was there more? I'm sure Marilyn was in there too somewhere. Oh, and Norma.

My understanding of Chopin got somewhere when I was looking in the book "Chopin: Pianist and Teacher" which I think is a useful book and I recommend it, although I don't have a copy myself. In this book there is a picture of a page from Chopin's teaching diary (he started at 8 in the morning!), and what gave me a big clue was how he had written the days of the week. On Wednesday it said "Pon."

What is Pon.? It is short for Poniedzałek - Polish for Wednesday. I know we already knew Chopin was from Poland but seeing, in his own writing, that he thought in Polish meant I now understood that he was a distinct personality with his own character. He wasn't French, he was a human person who came from Poland and was Polish. Nobody is entirely national, you can't just characterise music as "Polish" because there are always other influences and directions it takes. Particularly with Chopin who had a lot of input from Italian Opera and Bach, to mention two.

Just seeing "Pon." didn't tell me much about this composer. But it helped me realise that there was something to find out.

I think clues are valuable. There is always a clue in there somewhere if you are patient and listen.

Now I think of Chopin in the same sort of "drawer" as Bartók. It helps me, it may not help you, but I hope this helps somehow!

(Now one often sees his name written "Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin", which I'm sure is not the full story either - but then we can never be completely sure of having the full story on anything - we have to keep looking just in case!)

A Lot On Your Mind

Some people have a lot to think about. They have problems.

One person writes from Germany that her friends and some of her family are stuck in Lebanon, with no access to the outside. The only things coming in are missiles. She says her friend has put up a blog - you can see it here. I don't know if it helps, but it is there, so you can see what it is. (I didn't like it the first time but it made more sense when I looked again.)

That sort of anxiety, the kind that comes from having bits of your city explode all night, is a higher level than most of us are used to. Fear of imminent and unpredictable death is very exacting. I cannot deny that they have a lot on their minds.

Coincidentally, another person writes from Germany to say that she has problems. The future is uncertain, and she can't sleep at night. She has a lot on her mind. But at least she is not in a war situation.

People need help but what help can we give?

And you cannot help them because you too have a lot on your mind.

---

When someone says they are afraid because the future is uncertain, that seems OK to me. I mean the second part is OK: that the future is uncertain. I agree, it is.

What you see coming towards you out of the shadows is unknown. That is more or less given. But to be afraid of this, while understandable, is...not helpful. I am glad that the future is not a given, because that way it can throw anything at me that it wants to. If I could control it totally it would not be as interesting. Even my imagination is not enough for that.

There is uncertainty, but of that one thing at least we can be certain. It isn't a joke! It just shows you that you have nothing to worry about - you KNOW that something surprising is going to happen, sometime. And once you get your life under control you can start to plan things, so it is not a total gamble.

There is still a risk, though! But chance enough that you might win.

----

And in Java they have problems too. Also see my list.

----

So, as you can see, many people need help. In many different ways.

But I think you can see that your problems are not as bad as you thought.

Except they sort of are, because if there is a big problem somewhere in the world then it is our problem. Yet, problems are not as bad as you think. If there were never any problem then nothing would ever improve. Do you see?

The future is never certain, even when we have reached it. That is worth remembering too.

The past? We forgot it. If we remember it, we may have got it wrong but not know.

We only have now. It's a good now. I wonder where it will go next?

Happy Anniversarararararies Darlings!

You and me, we have been together for more than a year now!

I hope you have been happy here since the very first post on 24th June 2005.

Now it is 2006! Just a number, of course...but it tells us that something is going somewhere! If you ever have that common feeling that things are going nowhere, I can reassure you that many things are going everywhere! The planet, the stars, all the people in the world, all ideas and plans are zooming around everywhere all the time. It was the Red Queen, in Through the Looking Glass, and what Alice Found There, who said something useful about that:

`Well, in our country,' said Alice, still panting a little, `you'd generally get to somewhere else -- if you ran very fast for a long time, as we've been doing.'

`A slow sort of country!' said the Queen. `Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.

If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!'

Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 1832-1898) wrote that down in 1871. He was a mathematician and logician, among other jobs, and so may have known a thing or two. I find his writing in the Alice books rather exciting. It is particularly creative, and in speaking of things that have no sensible relationship to the ordered outside world that so many people agree on, seem to be rather useful, to me. I like it, and I believe that so-called nonsense can be extremely useful to us all! Now RICK, who is a regular reader, will be saying, "Oh, of course he says that, but he's just being Philip"...well, yes, I do say it, and, who knows, I may actually mean what I say. I think RICK may have guessed that, too. Perhaps he suppresses this instinct?

These days people are saying all sorts of things about Lewis Carroll, some of them rather salacious. He is not alive now, so I suppose it is not wrong to speak of him. But they say "don't speak ill of the dead", don't they, and I wonder why. Is there some reason for this that lies through the looking-glass? And what is a looking-glass anyway? Well, today it's called a mirror, isn't it. Yes, through the mirror, and what Alice found there. Yet Looking-Glass tells us Dodgson was from a different time. Where is that time now? It is gone away, zooming off into the mirror, with the unnapproachable speed of the unimaginable. You can't catch up to time, because it is not there. Your watch works mostly reliably but it is the only thing ticking along like that. Haven't you noticed we don't feel time in the same way? To make a small example, sometimes we are interested and it goes fast, sometimes we are bored and it goes slow. Perhaps it is not really there, for the part of us that feels the difference between interesting and boring. Can it be, can it be, that there is no time at all?

There was nothing so very remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so very much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself "Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!" (when she thought it over afterwards it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural); but, when the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge.

Yes, the private lives of past men are public information now. But the friends of the friendly, the nice people who are reading this, respect those people, even though they have moved on now. Because we still have everything they ever did. It is all here, in you and me.



Think kindly of people, alive or dead. Let's think kindly of Alan Turing (1912-1954), another mathematician whose non-mathematical life has been flagged up as "interesting" in a similar way to Charles Dodgson. Alan worked on cryptography during the second war, helping to break the codes of the famous Enigma Machine. He was also a world-class marathon runner. His best time was 2 hours, 46 minutes, and 3 seconds - 11 minutes short of the winning time in the 1948 Olympic Games!

There are lots of people whom I think of kindly. They all made an important contribution. They all used their genius. They were not always happy. I think we can learn from them for all those reasons.

I am saluting them! I am saluting you too, my friends on here. There is no music without ears to hear it, and there are no ideas if no people take the ideas into their minds. It might qualify as a hobby to write a blog to oneself, but it would not be quite as useful as it might.

Creativity is what you get when your soul shines through its clouds. Sometimes it shines even though there seem many clouds. People who had that feeling, those are the geniuses that we wonder about. But with genius there are never many clouds - I mean, there is always some sunshine. Spike Milligan had clouds but he laughed a lot. Uncontrollably. Isn't that why it was funny? What would you be controlling it for, exactly?

Please laugh too! And if people can't laugh, you keep away from them until you know how to make them laugh.

I have changed the blog page - as you should have noticed - to try and make it a bit brighter (I will keep improving it). As I said, it is the summer now, and that means more sunshine. But there is always sunshine - I know, I can always see it! Even when the clouds are there, there is sunshine. Even when the clouds are there in the night sky, there are always stars. There is always some good news if you are listening.

I don't really want to stop now, but you can't read this all day. You have got things to do!

I will try to pass on what good news I hear in my mad imaginings beyond the clouds...

And I will write here again soon - for you!

Thanks for reading this year. Shall I mention names?

No, but extensive cryptanalysis will reveal who you are:

Those who could "find no work in the hip replacement industry" - thank you!
Those who don't like dry dinners - thank you!
Those who live in the land of nori and katsuobushi - thank you!
Those who like watermelon, green, and elephant - thank you!
Those who upset the pegs - thank you!
Those families who are fans of the work of the writer Hargreaves - thank you!
Those who keep all their best frogs in a bucket, and do drawings on underpants - thank you!
Those who...well, there are lots of you!

Thank you! (did I mention that before?)

(hee hee)

Weather, oh!

I have been checking the weather forecast for a few weeks.

Always it says that in two or three days the temperature will go up higher by a few degrees.

Then when the day arrives, nothing has changed - in two or three days the temperature will go up higher by a few degrees! Oh, why do they torture me so?

But, as you know, the weather is not predictable over longer than two or three days on the whole.

Seemingly the weather forecast is entirely predictable!

Rain is good but I do prefer the sunshine. Which I am unlikely to see in London very often!

Where else should I go? Any suggestions? You could form a Philip Howard Escape Committee. Those who want me further away, send in the name of a suitable place. Those who want me nearer, write in with the name of the place where you live.

I wonder where I would end up like that? Anyway, I know you are too polite to make suggestions like that. You will just have to wait and see.

Now, which way is the sun going? I should follow that.

I heard that Alexander the Great went to see the Greek philosopher Diogenes. Diogenes lived in a barrel and was lying down next to it when Alexander came. He said to Diogenes,"I am ruler of half the world. Whatever you ask of me, it shall be done. Now what do you wish?" and Diogenes said please could you move a bit to the right, you're blocking my sun...

You know, a barrel rolls. It must be a good way of following the sun. I wonder if that's a possibility?

What did the barrel have in it before Diogenes? Wine? Fish? Heraclitus? It makes all the difference to the internal ambience.

But I guess the sun is always the same, eh? When you can see it.