"This grey day is soft," I could think. "This grey day is dank," is another choice.

I never asked. No, that not true. What I never did is I never asked and followed the asking with large listening.

More subtle and bigger and I can't quite remember it. But I remember that it was more subtle and bigger.

I want to write with gold to you, shining, soft, hard, valuable. I can't. But where we meet there is a gleam.

It doesn't matter til it does.

When the two songwriters stopped writing together, one went off to do songs that tended to err in the direction of being too sappy, too happy, and the other erred toward too angry, too weird.

When they worked together, they tended to not err. They also didn't repeat.

Two people with different imaginations when working together pulled each other and held each other back just enough. They got ahead of people in general, but not too far ahead. They got a little ahead, made music there, and whoosh! lots of people were in the new place and liked it.

The oppressors contol me by making me angry.

When I'm angry, I want to make it force against force, and they have more force of the unimaginative kind thought of when angry.

There are a million ways to chagne the set-up, but when I'm angry, I can only feel one or two.

Maybe I'll come up with a way to explode my rage that will helpothers to be angry and not just me. Any child affected can have secret nightmares that may become public pain unless the kid can find a way to heal into being a being like a patch of earth that grows many kinds of plants, being a person who shows there are many ways to live and helps them happen.

Rage says there is one way.

Sit where life smells good and many different ways may form themselves, ways out of built-in oppression and rage and into. . .I don't know. Meet you there.

With the exception of

Works of art and wars seems logically extraneous to the project of being alive.

In a New York Times Magazine article about the writer Margaret Drabble that ran on September 13, 2009, there was a small picture of Drabble and her friend, the writer Edna O'Brien, standing around at a party in the 1970's. Looking at this picture gave me a whole other take of O'Brien's superb writing.

Edna O'Brien was gorgeous. Beautiful, a stunner. I almost gasped at her beauty looking at this thumb-high reproduction of a snapshot. (Margaret Drabble looked like reasonably attractive writer standing around at a party.)

If you could take dourness and skillfully cut it into a gleaming gem, that would be the view of human nature presented in Edna O'Brien's writing. We don't look good.

The writing is very well done and convincing. I have to rest after reading Edna O'Brien.

Physical beauty doesn't bring out the best in human observers. It often evokes in people who see it something much like desperate, self-centered greed. A person walking around on planet Earth being beautiful has many chances to see the everyday yuck of how people are. Any writing by Edna O'Brien is a useful bucket of cold water on mushy mindedness.

Things are happening. Afootness is afoot.

We hold each other, relaxed and gentle, while something else takes us across.

In a "New York Times Magazine article about the writer Margaret Drabble (9/13/2009Any writing by Edna O'Brien, such as a short story from the collected short stories of, is a useful bucket of water on mushy-mindedness.

Shapes and words are ways of knowing. So are smells and the trailing ends of echoes.

You remembered the part that I forgot.

[second paragraph new--the quotation. In fourth paragraph, changed "pianist" to "classical musician."] In this three sentence quote, I think the last two sentences are about what Kazuo Ishiguro's novel "The Unconsoled" is partly about.

"I interviewed John McCain a few weeks ago in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he was conducting his first joint town-hall meeting with his running mate, Sarah Palin. A Presidential candidate spends a lot of time in bleak backstage settings: hotel suites, service entrances, greenrooms. Our interview took place in an empty two-room suite on the top floor of a Marriott hotel, at the end of a dark, narrow hallway guarded by three or four Secret Service men." --Nicholas Lemann, "Worlds Apart: Obama, McCain, and the Future of Foreign Policy," "The New Yorker," October 13, 2008.

People with power spend a lot of time in a strange and ugly world that is samey all over the world--back entrances to large building, long hallways they were never in before that are much like long hallways they've been in.

The famous classical musician in "The Unconsoled" has arrived in the town where he's going to speak in a few days, and he is really in that world. In a version of that world where nothing resolved, but the physical confusion just keeps on being confusing. Wasn't he about to walk out of this building but now he's in a hall from the other building and he's not sure what part of town a sudden odd window is looking out on.

Everyone expects this disoriented person to heal the town with his speech.

The town, in the middle of Europe, has been torn apart by a conflict about classical music, about what kind of classical music should be played and/or how classical music should be performed. Both sides of this intense conflict accept the visitor as authority, and thinks his words will heal the wounds that are hurting group life.

"The Unconsoled" is not a realistic book. Ishiguro creates this strange other world he has created to point out some things about how weird the actual world we share is.

Are there, in this world, groups of people who think a visitor or maybe a group of visitors, like a band, can heal what's wrong in some basic way? Yes. Is the person or group often wandering around before performing with very minimal understanding of the place where the perfomance is taking place? Yes. Is that nutty--thinking the confused person is smarter than we and can heal us? Yes.

It's not a matter of thinking; it's a matter of listening.

With mixed motives and uneven ability levels, we bumble toward doing something partly useful.

Sunflowers make a starry day.

If rot sometimes goes on to help with growth, it's hard to call anything over.

What do you like about being a human being?

What do you dislike about being a human being?

Maybe there is a group of human beings, a group smaller that the whole group of human beings, that you feel like you are a part of.

What do you like about being in that group?

What do you dislike about being in that group?