Thursday, October 29, 2009

that familiar clack and thump



Philip Glass & Robert Wilson - Monsters of Grace (listen) Seeing the Dickie Landry interview in print has put me in a Glass mood. This is one of the more recent and less celebrated pieces in the immense Glass catalog. Robert Wilson eventually distanced himself from the piece and musically, it can be seen as a train composed of the same old Philip Glass boxcars, rolling by with that familiar clack and thump. But I went for a walk at lunch with "Where Everything is Music" in my ears, through the crowded student union, browsing a sidewalk plant sale, weaving in and out of the tangle of slow-walkers and cars and bikes and the concrete and clay beneath my feet pushing up the persistent nag of self-doubt asking "Why write about this? Who is reading it? What are you doing?" and I hear from these lines from Rumi:

Don't worry now, about saving all these songs,
There's so many more just waiting to be found.
And if all these instruments should disappear
We would still hear something coming up from way down in the ground

and I remember why. Clack and thump.


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