Manafonistas

on life, music etc beyond mainstream

2016 11 Mrz

Zeta Reticuli knows: the Magpie may too

von: Ian McCartney Filed under: Blog | TB | 5 Comments

And dreams should stay in dreamspace, for that’s where they belong. Mainly cos a dream remembered is a dream that has only half done its work. And the cosmos is made up of stuff the scientists can’t find. Most of it is dream matter – a product that fuses language and music, iration and realisation, past and present, up and down, war and non-war, everything and everything else, and more, into one synaesthesic ball of luminous gloop. Everything* participates. Why does your heart as well as your gut feel music when music is only auditory – just chimp 1.2 banging skins and strumming wires? Because there’s no such thing as playing music: the music plays you. All the successful musician does – in the final analysis – is mediate smudged echoes of the moment of creation and maybe the moment under the moment too. They are listening for the ghost of a chance. They may help us make sense of who we are and where we came from; and as a compassionate side effect, teach us that nothing is lost. So I rake the sky, I listen hard. I trawl the megahertz.

And one night in 2013 a dream half did its work, remembered it on awakening in the middle of the night. The visuals have longsince turned to cosmotic/dreamcosmotic dust but the main theme of it was entirely word based. A repeated phrase that meant nothing to me. It went „Zeta Reticuli knows“, I don’t know how many times. I Say ‚remembered it‘ but the riff was still bouncing around my cerebral cortex – I could still feel it. I picked up my phone and sent myself an SMS so I could remember this meaningless phrase in the morning: „zetaretikuly knows“. Went back to sleep. Typed the nonsense phrase into Google the next day. And it turns out, with the help of search engine semantic/syntax correction, that Zeta Reticuli is real. Why it had got buried under a bush in the boondocks of the subconscious is not for me to conjecture. But hey, Zeta Reticuli knows – for it is written in light on a speck of lighter lighter light in the synaesthesic oblate globe of luminous silly putty that 90% of the cosmos comprises of. Somewhere.

And last week I dreamt I saw the cover of Marillion’s record Misplaced Childhood on a post written in pixels within the everchanging wider set of pixels on Manafonistas. And I dreamt I listened to the whole thing over again.  Ich brauche eine bestimmte Energie, um diese Schallplatte zu hören. & this was all I needed. &:
 

And I looked out the window
And I saw a magpie in the rainbow, the rain had gone

 

 
 
 
What the record offers is a nexus: the place where the dreamers of the dream meet the morning at the window, where The Incredible String Band, Boards of Canada and your own warblings make sense. The cup is broken. And everything is broken. And everything is repairable.

 
*Even stone.
 
[Note: 12.35% of this text is copyright Paddy McAloon, 2003. The rest is copyright: the universe]

This entry was posted on Freitag, 11. März 2016 and is filed under "Blog". You can follow any responses to this entry with RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

5 Comments

  1. Martina Weber:

    New style to write about it :)!

    These days I can´t listen to any other albums cause I´m still occupied by Misplaced Childhood. The lyrics strike me more then this large bunch of poems I read these days. I wanted to write about this album months ago, maybe in November, but: Ich brauche eine bestimmte Energie, um meine Manafonistastexte zu schreiben.

    The music plays you. It can even repair the broken cup.

  2. Ian M:

    The cup is Tralfamodorian. It is pre-cup, cup and post-cup in all directions all at once. It is dream cup/real cup. Repaired and broken, repairable and breakable always. The cup that will never break is the cup that never will be. Next time you have your morning coffee, take 15 seconds to think deeply, fleetingly about the cup. It’s more than just a cup – it is a receptacle for (and giver of) tiny but real miracles.

  3. Martina Weber:

    Sounds convincing and philosophical. I hope this thinking experience/exercise/excitement works with a glass of morningtea as well. I´ll try tomorrow.

  4. Martina Weber:

    I read some untypical poems by Rolf Dieter Brinkmann while drinking the very green tea and thinking about the cup which was a glass. Watched the fotos in „Westwärts 1&2“, Köln 1970s and – don´t walk – maybe London. Brinkmann is not only this angry young poet somebody wrote here on mana months ago. There is eastern wisdom in some of his poems (e.g. Improvisation 1,2 &3 (u.a. nach Han Shan) – „Vergessen / der Erinnerungen, was / eine Leistung ist“ – and political hints (Fotos 1,2), a poem which remembers me Charles Simic´s „Jahrmarkt“ where a dog with six feet performs. Hier hast du den Fahrschein.

    Ian, I´m going to listen to „Clutching At Straws“ within the next days. I want to read the lyrics as well before talking about it.

  5. Ian M:

    Martina – „Clutching At Straws“ is great. I will be interested to know what you think.

    I read some RDB poems in translation – and they see to survive the ordeal pretty well.


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