What an unusual day this is. Hard to describe.
I have no wish to sound crazy, but I’m sensing some very positive emotional/psychic energy at the moment. Strong stuff, a deep current. I swear, something is going on. Okay, I am crazy. So what.
Before I took that picture (view at 750 px here), I had another thing happen: I was listening to the CajunFest Internet radio station on iTunes through the outstanding M-Audio Studiophile AV 40 desktop speakers I finally allowed myself to buy last November — you need those — when up came a song I’d never heard before, and I was transfixed. It had a Celtic-sounding chorus, like a Scottish sea chantey, inside an unspeakably poignant, beautiful Cajun walz, and it made me cry. I mean, good cry, happy stuff. These days I’ll cry at most anything, for some reason, and me with not a single drop of Mediterranean blood in me. At any rate, you could say that I was overwhelmed by unfocused happiness for a while.
Why do we all not let this happen more often? I know why I stop: fear of being cracked open, of “losing it.” And yet, and yet…
The song that did it? “Chez Seychelles,” by Beausoleil. This is a wonderful instrumental recording about three and a half minutes long. You can probably buy it at the iTunes store, but what I did was google the song, find a site selling the CD it comes from that had the full track of “Chez Seychelles” available for listening (3x max!), then fired up Audio Hijack Pro while I played the song from the website and recorded my MacBook’s system audio at maximum quality for archiving to disk… Okay, I snatched it, and all it took was $40 worth of software. I suggest iTunes or Amazon for most of you — it’s certainly cheaper that way! But you can listen to it 3x here for free.
I haven’t done all the research yet, just enough to find out that it’s a traditional song. I don’t know why there’s a traditional Cajun song with a Celtic-sounding chorus about being home in the Seychelles, but there is. After all, the Seychelles are tropical islands in the Indian Ocean, some distance off the southeast coast of Africa — bizarre enough in itself, and this next part is even better: I’ve had a recurring image in my mind for the last few years of virtually this exact same scene or one just like it, which I found at the Wikipedia page for the Seychelles Republic.
Could be worse, eh?
This has happened to me before, where I have an image in my mind, maybe from a dream, that comes up time and again, and then I find myself face-to-face with either the thing I “saw” or a picture of it. I have no idea what that means, but the experience feels good, like everything’s in running order. But what about the symbolism of the scene at hand? Let’s try something:
I just now read a little about the Seychelles, and it looks like the 155 islands that make up the republic have exactly the wrong weather for me: hot and humid, with thunderstorms almost every day. Well, the storms would probably cool things down and lend excitement. But I look at that picture and imagine myself sailing a kayak in and out of every cove and inlet. I’m an old man (really old), but tough, and all I do is paddle and sail and watch. I’m the most wrinkled, sunburnt geezer you ever saw, and everything is perfect…
Oh, I am having a fine Sunday.
So all of that is going on, and then somehow I find out that the New Moon and an annular solar eclipse visible over much of the southern hemisphere occur tonight, a little after midnight. Good Lord. I don’t care what you believe, solar eclipses are a big deal, and things bust up. For the better, one assumes.
Go listen to that song, anyway. I’d post it for you here, but I’m too paranoid.
UPDATE & BTW: That concert on Saturday night was a powerful breath of fresh air. There were not only pieces by Debussy and Beethoven, but new works as well. With one of the two contemporary compositions, we had one of the simplest and most effective multimedia treatments I’ve seen for a musical performance, using photographs (that actually made sense within the whole) projected on the wall. For both of them, there was a remarkable marimba player. Yeah, marimba. My favorite of the two works featured piano, marimba, clarinet, cello, violin, and flute! It was satisfyingly loud.
But what brings me here is remembering what the program notes said about the marimba lady, who moved to Santa Fe in 2002 because of the “thriving folk marimba culture” there.
Folk marimba culture??
Okay. If only for that reason alone, I refuse to believe we’re screwed.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Yes, I have heard that song down here……and danced to it many a time…..I love that rendition!! Thanks for reminding me why I love where I live soooo much……Food ain’t bad either!!!
carolfrombatonrouge
this is going to make me sound like the total nerd dork i am, but i’ve been noticing over the last few years the one piece of music that ALWAYS cracks me open and makes me jump and flail around like an epileptic orchestra conductor in joyful tears is, for some reason (probably to do with timing and cultural imprinting coinciding with onset of puberty): the Superman Theme by John Williams (from the 1978 movie). there’s something just so cheerfully epic and heroic about it – gets me every time (my eyes are beginning to well up now just thinking about it). of all the absurdly random mass media cultural artifacts to trigger such a response; even the music from Star Wars doesn’t affect me this way (and i’m a HUGE Star Wars geek, oddly much more so than for Superman, which i do like and am a fan of, but not at that level of total nerd immersion).
think i’m going to listen to it right now, in fact – i need some cheering up…….