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Kafka on the Shore
I found an old folder of lyrics today. These ones must have led to The Sea is Asking. I must have been reading Murakami as the title is ‘Kafka on the Shore’:
The open door waits for me
And I must go through it to the edge of myself
Silence says something to me, waits for me to hear it
Waits like forever
And I listen to nothing but endless heartbeats
That sink in like water into sand
Like rolling waves into the sea
And there are layers, new layers of myself
Fresh waves in the sea of myself
That beg to be heard.
Newness
Slowly some new songs are working their way into the set.
Vina - mostly about things disintegrating into the sea. The SS Vina is a shipwreck off Brancaster beach in Norfolk.
Cloud Forest - a little bit about the tale of the little snow girl mixed in with some other things like the beauty of the wilderness. King of the Cloud Forests was one of my favourite books as a child so I nabbed half of the title.
Tengo - written after finishing 1Q84 by Murakami. Tengo is the main character in the book.
I also feel another new song coming on. It feels like I’m in a nice period of creativity at the moment. It takes me a long time to write and finish songs so long may it last.
From ‘Lights Out’ by Edward Thomas
I have come to the borders of sleep,
The unfathomable deep
Forest where all must lose
Their way, however straight,
Or winding, soon or late;
They cannot choose.
“From the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web…we must pick out what is good for us where we can find it.”
Pablo Picasso
Dream triple bill
I’ve been under the weather so have spent the weekend indoors reading or watching. I just finished watching a beautiful documentary called Nostalgia for the Light for the second time this weekend. It is one of those films you feel the need to watch again, not just for the visual beauty, but for the searching questions raised by astronomers, archaeologists and those affected by the coup. It’s a very sad film but also very beautiful…if that’s possible. I think it is.
It made me think of other documentaries I’ve seen in the past few years which have really moved me and made me ponder. I remember thinking that if a cinema wanted to put on a perfect double bill of documentaries that Cave of Forgotten dreams, Werner Herzog’s beautiful exploration of the oldest known cave paintings in Southern France and Into Eternity, a film about Onkolo’s nuclear waste repository and the challenge of keeping it sealed for 100,000 years, would be an amazing combination.
After watching Nostalgia for the Light I can’t help feeling it ties in with similar themes. Cave of Forgotten Dreams looks to the past and sees us stumbling across drawings from another time and trying to decipher their meaning. Into Eternity imagines what it would be like for future generations to stumble across a past (nuclear waste) that we don’t necessarily want to be discovered and how it would be interpreted. Nostalgia for the Light looks at the past astronomers search for in the skies to find the origins of the universe, the past archaeologists search for in the desert which preserves so much and the more recent past which others do not necessarily want us to find (the bodies of political prisoners buried in the Atacama desert) but which relatives of lost loved ones will continue to search for until they find it.
