Brad Mehldau

Here’s the text of the liner notes written by Brad Mehldau on his album, "Places." Very contemplative tracks, entitled with the place where the song was written. I like "Airport Sadness" most. Here are his interesting thoughts on the idea which built the album.

"Places," by Brad Mehldau 

"Oh, it is the same with the distance as with the future! A vast, twilit whole lies before our soul; our emotions lose themselves in it as do our eyes, and we long to surrender our entire being and let ourselves sink into one great well of blissful feeling. Alas, when we approach, when There has become Here, everything is as it was before, and we are left with our poverty, our narrowness, while our soul thirsts for the comfort that slipped away.”
– from The Sorrows of Young Werther, Goethe

It seems like the grandeur of a place only reveals itself after you’ve left it. Memory can make the place more ‘real’ than it ever was in reality. For instance, there’s the scent of an object that’s been brought home from somewhere far away. (It doesn’t have to be a beautiful scent. Examples for me have been bug spray or deodorant.) When you smell it again at home, after some time has passed, it brings up a feeling that’s profound and unique — something like nostalgia and acute yearning all at once. You’re dislocated from your surroundings, but only in order to receive a different kind of clarity. You are allowed a glimpse of something essential to that place. It’s a temporary unveiling. After half a minute or less it passes and you’re back in the everyday world that now seems more banal than ever. The feeling is dreamlike: It’s like the heavenly music you dream that fades from your memory as soon as you wake up. You can not recollect the nature of this feeling or recreate it. It becomes a mystery, and you can only wait until the next time that you’re granted that experience.

To say, “This smell reminds me of that place,” doesn’t tell anything. The strangeness is that you never had the dreamlike feeling when you were there. In fact you couldn’t have. Two events must happen to have this experience: spatial distance and the passage of time. A place can only reveal itself in your consciousness with such allure when you’re far from it. That’s disturbing, because it suggests that some of our most authentic experiences have very little to do with the apparent reality that surrounds us, spatially and temporally. For me, those experiences aren’t just brain farts.

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On Prayer

Order of the Day

Such a small Psalm, such a tall order.

Lord, I am not proud and haughty. I don’t think myself better than others. I don’t pretend to “know it all.” I am quiet now before the Lord, jsut as a child who is weaned from the breast. Yes, my begging has been stilled. O Israel, you too should quietly trust in the Lord — now, and always.

TV

One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on
television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.

Kurt Vonnegut (1922- ), “Cold Turkey,” In These Times, May 10, 2004

Soledad

One of my more well-liked poems, from our very own:

SOLEDAD
Angela Manalang Gloria

It was a sacrilege, the neighbors cried,
The way she shattered every mullioned pane
To let a firebrand in. They tried in vain
To understand how one so carved from pride
And glassed in dream could have so flung aside
Her graven days, or why she dared profane
The bread and wine of life for some insane
Moment with him. The scandal never died.

But no one guessed that loveliness would claim
Her soul’s cathedral burned by his desires
Or that he left her aureoled in flame…
And seeing nothing but her blackened spires,
The town condemned this girl who loved too well
and found her heaven in the depths of hell.

For the writer in all of us

No write, no eat
PENMAN By Butch Dalisay
The Philippine STAR 09/05/2005

I had a great time last week speaking before my youngest audience ever
– a group of exceptionally bright children attending a special school,
the Little Farm House Holistic Education and Development Center in
Beverly Hills, Taytay. Part classroom, part garden, part zoo, and part
laboratory, the HEDCen, as it’s called, caters to a small community (or
a large family, if you will) of 300 students and teachers for whom
personalized instruction is the norm. The school has grown along with
the students, so there’s a junior high school class, but no seniors yet
– but there are kids galore, happy hordes of them eager to show off the
school’s pet python, ferret, and iguanas.

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I’m sorry, Philippines!

What follows is the full text of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s statement on June 27, 2005 on the issue of the tape recordings:

Mga Minamahal kong Kababayan,

For the last several weeks, the issue of the tape recordings has spun out of control. Tonight, I want to set the record straight. You deserve an explanation; from me, because you are the people I was elected to serve.