#but i can live with wistful or passionate/romantic yearning or nostalgia so that's my

[pianistbynight]

ugh when you have the perfect kind of day for chopin's e minor prélude but it's really quite an awful mood to be in so you try as much as possible to avoid it but ugh i think in this state i can play it with emotions that sound quite right... let's hope i can replicate that the next time i practice (i should be sleeping rn)... bc it seems that even if i write down in words what i think the emotions are, they just don't seem to come out right if i'm not currently feeling them myself. and sometimes i don't want to feel them myself. lately i've been putting a block on my emotions when i play because i don't want to feel them. but then i start playing like a robot. which makes me feel worse because this ONE artsy thing i was supposed to be good at, i can't seem to do anymore.

but maybe i should just get better at allowing myself to feel the things i don't want to. imagining the physical and mental sensations of it, the heaviness, the lethargy, the resignation, the shaking with racking sobs, the resolutions made while depressed, just sitting with them, and accepting the feelings and thoughts for what they are. an experience, a sensation, but not my entire being. maybe being able to pick and choose what i feel, both the super negative and the super positive, would be a sign of me getting better at regulating my emotions...

[randomlycynical]

Kokomo, NY

I feel wistful and contemplative this rainy morning.

As time goes on, I am beginning to realize that the one song that seems to capture so much of my nostalgia for New York is, funnily enough, Kokomo, IN, by Japanese Breakfast.

It’s ironic that this would be the song that does it for me, the song that seems to bring back all of my sweet Brooklyn memories, which, as that I type that, feels so strange to write. It’s hard to believe that those are what they actually are now — memories.

I’ve had such a chaotic summer that I haven’t had the chance to really sit with the fact and come to terms with the fact that, yes, I really did move out of New York, and for good.

I’ve been shuttling back and forth between Boston and other places that I’ve had no chance to really sit with myself in DC and to be present here. But now that I have this rare chance to, listening to this song alone in my apartment is making me confront these feelings for maybe the first time.

But back to why it’s ironic. To me, the song, through its lyrics and instrumentation, seems to evoke this sort of pastoral longing — a portrait of aching desire from the heartland, with the speaker yearning for a loved one who has left her to move to the city. 

This narrative seems like a far cry from the life I lived in the biggest city in the US. But that feeling is universal, isn’t it? Even though I’ve never lived in a flyover state, this kind of earnest longing, so often felt so genuinely and passionately in youth, is something that we’ve all experienced; the simple desire to sit entangled in the arms of your loved one alone in your room in the middle of nowhere, cozy and comfortable and safe, peace unto yourselves in your tiny universe, is something I think we all know.

And even more bittersweet is the idea the song presents that sometimes you have to be apart from your loved one so they can go off and be themselves to their fullest expression — that sometimes letting go can be the greatest act of love you can do for someone else. What could be more bittersweet, more romantic?

---

Last summer, she and I moved into our new place in another part of Brooklyn. It was the first time that she and I had ever signed a lease together.

Soon after, my sister shipped her car over from California to give to us and made us official car owners too -- another first for us. We found ourselves freer than we were before, which felt all the more liberating after a year plus of the pandemic. 

We were finally able to go to more places whenever we wanted, on our own schedule. Of course, owing a car in New York had its own stresses (namely parking it, maintaining it, paying for gas), but overall it really was a gamechanger.

We started to drive around Brooklyn and Queens and saw those neighborhoods from a different angle for the first time — quieter streets, more peaceful parts of the city — on our way to far-flung grocery stores, all as Fall rolled in. And, at the end of the day, we’d return to a place all to ourselves. To me, that signaled the start of a kind of domestic bliss, visions of a quiet life within reach — things that I’ve always longed for my entire life.

Later that Fall, she bought us tickets to see Japanese Breakfast in Williamsburg. Driving all the way out there to the concert venue, seeing that incredible show, driving home through dark, empty Brooklyn streets, just the two of us, heads filled with good memories and music -- these moments are the ones I think back on when I think of New York now. Not the stress, not the noise, or the dirtiness, or the unpredictability, or the uncertainty. And how perfect it is now.  

---

I wish that we could go back there, left alone in my room...

[mikesmithrhythmandrhyme]

Thursday, 8th June, 2017

A Response  to ‘May’, by John Clare (1793-1864)

After reading John Clare’s ‘May’ (in ‘The Shepherd’s Calendar’), I began to explore it through writing on Monday evening, 22nd May, 2017, the day following the Manchester bombing. The contradictions on a beautiful sunshine day soon became apparent …. John Clare’s words are in italics.

To write of John Clare seems absurd

On such a day as this,

A day when blue sky sunshine

Cannot clear the troubled mind ….

A day when May-time’s fulsome growth

And thrilling bird song chorus

Fail to help us as we ponder

On the state of human-kind ….

Yet I will visit John Clare’s world -

In spite of yesterday:

‘Come queen of months

Wi all thy merry minstrelsy’ ….

It’s May!

But first - this morning - step outside,

To walk down Parsons Lane:

And oh, the fresh of air on skin -

I’m wearing shorts again!

I have nearly, almost, just about

Put on my shorts for days;

Though other men have done it,

I’m more cautious in my ways.

Right! That’s enough. I’m well aware

There’s more to life than shorts:

So now I visit John Clare’s ‘May’,

To think upon his thoughts ...

‘Sweet month that gives a welcome call

To toil and nature and to all

Sweet month’ of May all ‘thick with green’

Fulfilment of our winter’s dream.

Before me, John Clare’s school-bound boy,

‘With bookbag swinging in his hand’:

“Shall I go to school or not?”

He’s lost in Nature’s Wonder Land -

Birds ‘chirping for his company’ ...

Spring lambs stand ‘bleating in his way’ …

Field ‘weeders’ sing their ‘toiling song’ …

The boy’s entranced. No school today! …

He rambles over ‘field and plain’ ...

‘Lolls’ on ‘resting stile’ …

‘Sees the wheat grow green and long’ ...

In fields which ‘sweetly smile’ ...

He bends ‘to view the fish’ in streams …

‘Seeks larks nest in the grain’ …

Then ponders on his dreams to come -

Of punishment ... with cane!

But so much life to tempt him!

‘Woodmen thinning trees’ ...

‘Bustling dames’ leave spinning ‘wheels’

To watch the ‘thronging bees’ …

All through the day he listens

For the ‘church clock’s’ hourly bell,

‘To know the hour to wander home’,

Whilst hoping none will tell

That they have seen this wandering ‘truant’,

So at home, away from home:

It’s an elementary passion ...

It’s his simple right to roam …

It seems to me that John Clare

Is this wonder-wandering boy,

For whom the natural world remains

A source of deepest joy …

His May is tinged with sadness, though:

‘Old may days glorys gone’. *

Flowers, garlands, songs and games -

Have ‘left thee every one’.” **

Nostalgia? Wistful sense of loss?

A yearning for ideal?

Is John Clare thinking on what’s gone -

Or what was never real?

But as I walk with him through May

I think I understand:

There are forces out of his control

Enclosing common land.

‘Where enclosure has its birth

It spreads a mildew oer May’s mirth’:

The common land the village roamed

Is now closed off. It’s Private. Owned.

A sense of loss there is, of course,

But quiet anger, too:

For village ways will change

And there is nothing he can do ...

To wander still upon the moor …

Seek out his favourite tree …

Rest quietly by down-wind hedge …

Be where he loves to be …

~

But back to Howden’s month of May -

Sun higher in the sky -

Where watering cans stand ready,

And where rain paths quickly dry ...

Where gardeners lose themselves once more

Amongst their shrubs and flowers,

Surprised to learn their minutes spent

Are more like countless hours …

As they work upon those wintering plans

Of dreaming, cold, dark nights,

Intent upon establishing

A Garden of Delights ...

Where winter brown allotments surge

With healthy shoots of green,

As proud allotment-holders hope -

‘This season? Best there’s been!’

Whilst distant agricultural fields

Industrialise the crops:

The first we see of what they grow

Is when we’re in the shops …

Where we trolley up and down the aisles,

At ease, and well aware

That if what we want is not in stock -

We’ll simply try elsewhere …

We are customers, consumers -

Even though some ‘grow their own’ -

I wonder how John Clare would feel ...

If only he’d have known …

Known of how excluded,

How detached we’d come to be

From the living, breathing natural world -

But hey! We’ve got TV -

And how most of us must travel

For a woodland bluebell wander ...

For a country stroll to nowhere ...

For the wonder of what’s yonder ...

~

Whereupon, I think once more

Of where I left John Clare:

As truant boy in love with life?

Or poet near despair?

As innocent romantic?

Or a prophet of his time?

As change-denying dreamer?

Or a teacher through his rhyme?

Whoever John Clare was - and is -

For us who live today,

Let’s celebrate with closing lines

From what he wrote of ‘May’ …

‘Yet summer smiles upon thee still

Wi natures sweet unalterd will

To crown thee yet as thou hast been -

Of spring and summer months the queen’.

~

And here I’ll vent some May Day spleen,

Whilst thinking on John Clare:

I’ll tell him where we’ve got to,

Just in case he’s unaware ….

Now ‘May Day’s’ called BANK Holiday!

Our banks have pinched the name:

The more those bankers say they’ve changed,

The more they’ve stayed the same.

So, Bankers, do the decent thing!

Return the First of May,

As May Day - Festival of Spring -

We’d like it back - OK?!

 * May Day - May Day is a public holiday usually celebrated on May 1st. It is an ancient northern hemisphere spring festival. It is also a traditional spring holiday in many cultures.

** For example, cowslip cucking balls - balls of flowers for throwing in May games: “My grandmother used to make balls from cowslips. We used to pick cowslips and take them to her, she joined them together until they formed a tightly packed ball. My brother and I used to play with the ball and as far as I remember there was a rhyme associated with it. The cowslip ball was called a tisty tosty and as you threw it to one another the rhyme was sung, something about spelling out the letter of the name of your future love!”