Caught Between Extremes music by Andrew Lovatt

n o t e s o n m u s i c

by andrew lovatt

a rock & a hard place
a good time, a bad time
black & white
hope & despair

rising & falling
we learn to walk
between the poles

in the sun, under the rain
swallowed by the moment
or a seeming plan to suit
the ever-changing circumstances

we are caught between the extremes. we live in a world where we lie to ourselves about this. pretend that the experience of being alive is somehow containable, can be rationalized and given place and time. always-contemporary-life achieves this for a spell, until we get too old to take part or take it seriously. and that end time, our disappearance, we ignore by every deviation possible. THAT has never been contained, and we know it.

being born between extremes, everyone is bent, dented, twisted or somehow imperfect. we only have to look around and at ourselves. so why split hairs about who's brand of twist is more kosher or rational-seeming. faggot, nigger, a-rab, chink, dyke, kyke, paddy, wop. so what? the current powers of common life will always sell their own brand of reason to go with the process. that's a given.

learning to be one with life requires seeing how we are born into it. how being ensnared in the great-contemporary-nowness, the get with it time, pro-duce & pro-fit & pro-gress or be dead, is diverting us into a passionate belief of something partial, a sliver of the everything and whole. we lose sight of the simple. the binary chemicalized pro-cess of this life now has a volition and purpose of its own. we are all servants to it. we serve who come and go and know not that we have really been here.

being cast into an existence between the extremes, we are made into binary creatures adapted to the vagaries: this is the hypno pulse that grips us. on and off and on and off and on. we see and we are blind. we hear and are deaf.

this is what we have come to
a sitting down with ourselves
stopping for a moment
in-be-tween the notes
of the living, living through us

t r a c k n o t e s

bliss bus : sometimes the speed of the music in us transports towards a bliss

desert rumble : the echo speaks of something unspoken but yearned for

desert river : winds its way through us, pretending to be a landscape

solo piano 2 : a triumphal wish to be upright

onward : sometimes we are smashed into smithereens by life. a million fragments. to never return to the same. we die to was. are naked before the is-ness. just for a little while. all options & equivocations gone. we are frighteningly free of all we leaned upon. and then there is the moving onward.

undulate 1 : the binary wave hides itself and reappears, taking us with it on an unknown journey

joy & sorrow : in youth we chase joy with such naivety, unawares it will pay us with the experience of sorrow too. were we not so foolish we would never learn. there is a wisdom in the process.

prayer 1 : leaning sometimes to yearning, brings us to wishing. prayers are revealed out of our confusion, never in our complacency. squeezed out of us, expressed through us.

pergatorio dolce : even the sweetest intoxicant has its sobrietous reminders, the pangs and pains showing in the fevered happiness. the dancing to fast tunes, faces painted with the edge of anguish. fake joy. ersatz. our jaundiced eye in the midst of plenty. unbelieving is our purgatory. or we are awoken to our dumb play.

[]