Economy of Time
Addicted to love, addicted to life
The centre of your attention
And the chill above the lamplight
Alike the the sanctity
Of small things, tender born
And plucked when ripe
The lining of young reveries
Still holding to their doubts
And the secret words that end all hurts
Within economy of time
A joy for being that’s overseen
By the jealous autumn night
And the breath upon the window
Eddied by a stream of conscious flight
There’s much to stay and learn from you
But my feelings have all the might:
My clarity gave charity to the kingdom
Of a foolish, yearning heart
Filed under 
Coltrane: On Green Dolphin Street
Looking into jazz music in its pinnacle years is an exercise in peering into the web of silkworms and drawing out the resemblances and nuances of our soul – from sublime simplicity to great profundity, where it starts and where it ends is anybodys guess. But that’s the intense fun of it all – it’s the art form of those who enjoy the element of fantasy, crave the avant garde and hold an inner child waiting to come out. When listening attentively we let ourselves drift into the craft, into the mastery of the music carried on impulse and whim of consciousness. The emotion arrives so quintessentially that we needn’t a notepad and pen to ponder it later; we live in the moment of the movement and comprehend its universal language. Meanwhile the surface simplicity, with its infinite variety, probes us, programs us with its basic code. We know in the moment of the music – when snares fall, when the smoke rises into the air, when the whiskey swirls over ice-cubes, we imagine a bitterly cold evening where rain sweeps on sidestreets. In our minds’ eye, we imagine the scales yielding rapture, the hammering of ivory keys indenting notes in our hearts, bass lines tugging at time, reminding us, pleasantly, of the passing moment. Class, creed, race are suspended in an ectoplasm, replaced by the dissonant hum, lost in the rift of the sonorous song.
Afghanistan’s Plee for Renaissance: Return to Modernity
It is the time, now, when black-clad shells fall from the sky, the mouths of rivers are skirted with dirt and stones and in place of roaring debate, bronze bullets shriek and pierce the wind. To a child in the neighborhood playground, this is likely a common nuisance and no reason to stop kicking the dust with one’s soles. What more can one do, when the municipal school has closed its doors for safety concerns or perhaps the teacher’s fear of pupil protection.
Sand-blasted, grey armoured automobiles, labouring its treads through the uneven stretch, drag an emotionally sodden platoon through the unknown, for the noble sake of chartering their cause. Meanwhile, the bodies of those deceased are hung out and left to dry by the roadway with absolute nonchalance. Perched upon the dividing line of tectonic plate, it is surely difficult to hear the last voice of resistance for Afghanistan’s historical significance.
For in the quest for stability, what little concern for a superpower, gathering and imposing their troops into a fraught hotbed of unrest, carefully trotting on eggshells as they attempt to reach a resolution for a constitution.
It is the voice of the quest for a return to Afghanistan’s Golden Age that has been squelched and suitably sutured by incompatible visions of a self-governing state. The many wounds of an already fragmented fabric of people is only brought even greater dismay by the glaring totem of death; drowning in images of hallowed crusaders walking upon blighted land.
While political insights and opinions might vary, we should be aid ourselves to look beyond and focus on the true victims of this conflict – the civilians and especially the children, who will grow up merely guided and reassured for the prosperity of things to come, by the stories and memories of fathers and forefathers.
“There was once a time”, I believe they would say, “where a University mall stood there, and a booming coffee shop operated beside it, choking with smoke and laughter. Next door to the opium den and beside the promenade and car-park was the city medical centre, where worldly wisdom and medicine were prescribed treatments as opposed to our present-day emergency rations and infinite squalor. Things will turn around, given time.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/weekinreview/18bumiller.html
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