I have dreamed of you so much that you are no longer real.
Is there still time for me to reach your breathing body, to kiss your mouth and make
your dear voice come alive again?
I have dreamed of you so much that my arms, grown used to being crossed on my
chest as I hugged your shadow, would perhaps not bend to the shape of your body.
For faced with the real form of what has haunted me and governed me for so many
days and years, I would surely become a shadow.
O scales of feeling.
I have dreamed of you so much that surely there is no more time for me to wake up.
I sleep on my feet prey to all the forms of life and love, and you, the only one who
counts for me today, I can no more touch your face and lips than touch the lips and
face of some passerby.
I have dreamed of you so much, have walked so much, talked so much, slept so much
with your phantom, that perhaps the only thing left for me is to become a phantom
among phantoms, a shadow a hundred times more shadow than the shadow that
moves and goes on moving, brightly, over the sundial of your life.
"I have dreamed of you so much"
Robert Desnos 1900-1945
Monday, April 24, 2006
Sunday, April 23, 2006
SF - Oregon
Leaving SF and on into beautiful, mournfully pale Northern California. Cedars and firs begin to appear, distant mountains of sand give way to another immense, low plain. The moon is hanging to the East as we head up Route 5, as transparent as a circle of tissue paper in the sky. The moon in the daylight is always magical, woven into the rhythms and shadows of the day. You only notice it on really pale days, winter days: I remember a chain of them leading back into my childhood, when, with my feet on the gravel of a cul-de-sac, I dropped my bike and stared, hypnotised for the first time. As I wrote this self-consciously Proustian paragraph, the sun suddenly faded, and the moon disappeared behind sullen rectangular banks of cloud. the light is too dim to carry on writing in the car.
We stop at McGrath's fish restaurant in Medford, Oregon and I order oysters with a glass of wheat beer. Having visited once before, Medford, and McGrath's in particular have taken on a strange quality for me, approached in darkness, an enchanting light in the barren stretches of the 5, the perfect resting point between SF and Portland, a place to get lost in beer and er.. shellfish, it dissolves into strip malls, Subways and Taco Bells in the light of day. Medford reminds me of where I grew up - boredom, bracing mornings, a faint and inexplicable sense of foolishness.
I woke in the night with a fear I had never experienced before - the fear of growing old alone, the fear that one day there would be no one left to listen to me. I slept and dreamt of holding a girls head in my hands, the slight movement of the skin, the hair, the plates of the skull in my supporting fingers. I woke up deep in the territory of cramps and nightmares. Damn oysters.
The redwood forests of Oregon are like a version of the Sutherland I grew up loving, magnified into impossibility. Enormous. I have a crush on Oregon, it seems a special place, my heart flutters when it's mentioned in conversation!
4:18pm: the moon appears again, this time away to the North East, and very low in the Sky. Enormous snowy mountains in the distance which I had initially mistaken for clouds! The late afternoon light is amber, russet. Crimson and burgundy leaves line the 5, with pockets of evergreen and Weeping Willow breaking through in patches. We are very late for soundcheck and I am hungry. The Louvin Brothers' 'Come and Meet Me in the Shadow of the Pines' is playing.
We stop at McGrath's fish restaurant in Medford, Oregon and I order oysters with a glass of wheat beer. Having visited once before, Medford, and McGrath's in particular have taken on a strange quality for me, approached in darkness, an enchanting light in the barren stretches of the 5, the perfect resting point between SF and Portland, a place to get lost in beer and er.. shellfish, it dissolves into strip malls, Subways and Taco Bells in the light of day. Medford reminds me of where I grew up - boredom, bracing mornings, a faint and inexplicable sense of foolishness.
I woke in the night with a fear I had never experienced before - the fear of growing old alone, the fear that one day there would be no one left to listen to me. I slept and dreamt of holding a girls head in my hands, the slight movement of the skin, the hair, the plates of the skull in my supporting fingers. I woke up deep in the territory of cramps and nightmares. Damn oysters.
The redwood forests of Oregon are like a version of the Sutherland I grew up loving, magnified into impossibility. Enormous. I have a crush on Oregon, it seems a special place, my heart flutters when it's mentioned in conversation!
4:18pm: the moon appears again, this time away to the North East, and very low in the Sky. Enormous snowy mountains in the distance which I had initially mistaken for clouds! The late afternoon light is amber, russet. Crimson and burgundy leaves line the 5, with pockets of evergreen and Weeping Willow breaking through in patches. We are very late for soundcheck and I am hungry. The Louvin Brothers' 'Come and Meet Me in the Shadow of the Pines' is playing.
San Diego - LA
The light on the West Coast is just as bright, but less harsh, Pacific blues and greens have entered the spectrum. I love LA, but we leave it with the usual shudder of relief, passing through steep, misty hills and canyons, which suddenly give way to a stretching plain, disappearing into a dirt grey haze. It's as if we're driving through the shifting, nightmarish-but-beautiful landscapes of Robert Browning's 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came'; a big influence on the lyrics of 'Strange Geometry'. My feet ache and I am quite tired. Radio sessions and shows have been and gone, playing guitar seems as natural to me now as sleeping or eating, as if I will be able to apply for jobs when I get home with the special recommendation that I can get a lovely tone on the b-string when playing an F# minor 9th chord.
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Tucson
Tucson is nicer in November than August; having visited with Spoon in the height of sunmmer, I can testify to that. At our Hotel, the Inn Suites, there is a beagle convention and I am stuck behind several enormously fat guests who are checking out internet beagle sites. No visible roaches here this time (unlike our August stay) perhaps the beagles have eaten them all up. It's Andy's first show with Annie Hayden, he is great and has a lovely Rickenbacker bass. As we leave the hotel a little beagle-jump is being set up and we are rather glad to be gone.
There is a traintrack immediately behind the venue, and as the trains pass they let off their long, lonely siren, the building shakes to its foundations and the musicians either stop or incorporate this 1000 ton piece of cliched americana into their set. These trains are enormous, it's hard not to think of them as strange, long suffering beasts haunting silent stretches of desert, the uninhabited zones of a throwaway society.
Back into the desert, fascinated with this stretch of wilderness and what someone, somewhere called its 'limitless secrets', the most alien landscape I have ever seen, even just from the freeway. Standing among the cactii, feeling the dry heat beating around you, it's easy to see things differently, the world is different here and you have to make adjustments.
There is a traintrack immediately behind the venue, and as the trains pass they let off their long, lonely siren, the building shakes to its foundations and the musicians either stop or incorporate this 1000 ton piece of cliched americana into their set. These trains are enormous, it's hard not to think of them as strange, long suffering beasts haunting silent stretches of desert, the uninhabited zones of a throwaway society.
Back into the desert, fascinated with this stretch of wilderness and what someone, somewhere called its 'limitless secrets', the most alien landscape I have ever seen, even just from the freeway. Standing among the cactii, feeling the dry heat beating around you, it's easy to see things differently, the world is different here and you have to make adjustments.
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