From Rabindranath Tagore's The Gardener:
(a poem I love)

Peace, my heart, let the time for the parting be sweet,
Let it not be a death but completeness.
Let love melt into a memory and pain into songs.
Let the flight through the sky end in the folding of the wings over the nest.
Let the last touch of your hands be gentle like the flower of the night.
Stand still, O Beautiful End, for a moment, and say your last words in silence.
I bow to you and hold up my lamp to light you on your way.

The Unreliability of Pure Feeling

I’ve been thinking about what makes an artist last. There aren’t that many artists that continue to make “good” or “relevant” work as they get older. Most bands make a few good albums, they stick around for a few years, then they sort of sink. But that’s pretty easy to explain, people grow apart all the time. Then there’s drugs. But you know, I’m not so interested in listening to Joni Mitchell’s later stuff, or Paul McCartney’s later stuff. And usually when you go through a Best of type of album, the later stuff puts me to sleep. Have they lost their edge? How does that happen?

This isn’t always true. Neil Young, Caetano Veloso, David Byrne, Mark Mothersbaugh still make great music. But what makes it that they continue to make good music for more than ten years? Because ten years seems to be the average lifespan.

So how does someone like david byrne or caetano continually create relevant music, while others sort of burn out in their mid thirties or what have you. I would hate to think it is just due to the deterioration associated with age, because obviously there are those who have made amazing things in their older years. Georgia o keefe. Meanwhile others have just let the weight of their lives, their compromises weigh them down, I dunno, they get soft or something.

I think also there’s something about exhausting your emotional resources. Your personal emotional resources. Wordsworth mined his childhood; for some reason when he moved away from that his poetry suffered. Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” is a breakup album. There is a particular kind of artist who looks at art as a way to to exorcise demons, to do something productive with the pain of life, as opposed to actually being interested in the fashioning of something artificial in order to convey or create responses in other people. Everyone writes poetry at 17, when their hearts are breaking. But what about when you’re forty and so much of that angst is gone? Because people are interested in drama, crisis. People are interested in art that feels like someone’s bleeding onto the page.

I’m starting to think that you can’t rely on your own personal dramas to create art. The reason why I’m thinking about this is due to a couple of interviews I’ve recently read in Pitchfork, from Sufjan Stevens and from David Byrne. One thing that struck me about Sufjan is that he doesn’t listen to music like a fan, but rather dispassionately, intellectually, to see how emotion is conveyed. Listening to Illinoise, I hear a sophisticated blend of technical skill and emotion, storytelling with feeling. It's pretty cerebral. What I see in him is curiosity about the world, about music, how sound communicates meaning, more than it is about his own feelings. But all this thought doesn't make it any less good; I get chills listening to "John Wayne Gacy, Jr." I think the same holds true of David Byrne. Neither of them makes personal emotion primary. They put it in their proper place. And though Sufjan Stevens is untested in his range or his lasting, I can see him being something like David Byrne, somehow remaining relevant.

Besides, personal emotion is so temporary. Once you’ve worked something out, it becomes no longer relevant to you. It’s a flash in the pan. And you become disinterested with what you’ve created. And if you keep mining yourself for tasty morsels of drama, what is left after? Not much. And you’ve turned yourself into somehow, less than human, because you’ve turned yourself into a mine. If you sacrifice so much of yourself to art, well, you’ve got a lot less to live on.

Voxtrot- raised by wolves

falling in love with something on first listen. zap! some songs shoot you down swiftly, you go down in ecstasy. and I thought I was the hunter.

i am a sucker for certain things. unabashed, optimistic pop songs, for one. they are like instant happiness. aural sunshine.

yay for voxtrot. where are my seventh grade pom poms? affirming that I am still the same person after all, no matter what adventures I pretend to have in my music listening, i still want to jump around, i still want tambourines and hand claps and finger snaps. i'm still a twee english major, with a closet affection for plaid and satchels and bedroom dancing. i still want life to be like a high school slow dance, like I never had.

voxtrot is in some ways nothing new for me. but it makes me so happy! I'm in bouncy adoration.

words/phrases I'm trying to incorporate into my vocabulary:

excruciating: to describe things that are so bad, it's good. or so bad, it's bad.

tubular: because you know, the 80s are back, but are they really back?

that's such honey: because honey is yummy.

So I thought I would write a poem
about the peonies in my bedroom,
like lion's faces, their pink manes flowing, their ferocious grins.
And how they are a new flower for me,
because it doesn't snow here, and they need frozen ground to bloom.
They aren't supposed to be in my bedroom. They're foreigners.

They've been opening, opening.
At first just smelling green,
and I barely noticed it as I woke, or dressed, or pet the cats.
But as they lasted, they became stronger in beauty, and in their
dying. I kept them too long, because I could smell
the center of them, fully exposed, they've given themselves completely.
I could also smell their death, but this didn't bother me.

Until one morning, while I was sitting very still,
I heard a quiet, weighty thud.
A petal dropped
without force of wind, or touch.
And I thought, I had never heard a flower dying before.

You couldn't predict the moment of their falling, one by one, like a slow random rain.
It wasn't long before I couldn't bear it any more, the suddenness of a sound
from where sound shouldn't be. I scooped up the curling petals so many in my hands,
and still velvety, and threw them into the trash, and that was it.