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Im Voraus

1. Mike Spoodles 04.28.08 / 5am

   Conor, my man: has anyone ever told you that you are dreamy? Well played, sir.
2. Conor 04.28.08 / 5pm

   This comment made me grin like an idiot. In retrospect, the Cheshire Cat effect in the beginning, where only my eyes are visibly, was a pretty suave choice of the codec.

   But seriously, I freaking love that song, even if I don’t know all the chords in the outro yet.
3. Emily 04.28.08 / 9pm

   please /seriousface.
4. Anne 04.29.08 / 3am

   Ok, enough with the dreamy. Can we see the guitar, please?
5. Anne 04.29.08 / 3am

   And btw, we miss you, too. <3
6. Conor 04.29.08 / 9am

   The guitar playing is the same chord progression for 90% of the song! And it’s a boring one, at that.

   But yeah, I kind of couldn’t see what I was recording while I was recording it. I’d thought I’d framed it up correctly.
7. Paul 04.30.08 / 7am

   Conor,
   I’m watching your youtube video in a motel in Colorado, having come out here alone to visit Dad in the nursing home. He was recently hospitalized with pneumonia (discharged back to the nursing home even more recently), and in the delirium caused by the infection, he developed the delusion that he was captured by bad police who had stolen some oil, and he knew about it–and they wanted to kill him because he knew of the theft. Odd how at times delusions speak more truth than the news.
   The wonderful Sunday that you had with your guitar on loan, I had borrowed time with my father. We talked about death, and God, and I told him that one of the things I learned from him was that if you have a good attitude, it can affect others in a good way. He smiled. I told him that though he does not believe in God, he may have lived out all the good things of Catholicism without the BS. He laughed.
   I also reminded him of a Bill Moyers interview with Robert Bly we had both watched in the early 1990’s: A Gathering of Men. I reminded him that Bly talked about having fought with his father all his life, until he learned simply to be with his father. Dad acknowledged to me that I had learned this, and he indicated by his response that it was deep wisdom.
   I have a laptop with me, but I I did not load account information into it so I could email you, but I wanted to have connection, so I googled your name (because I can’t recall your blogaddress). You came up as the first hit!!!
   And though all I was planning to do was read your last posts since I last checked your blog on Saturday before I flew out here, I was so entranced by your practicing/performance of this song, Omerta, that I had to respond, even if more personally than I would normally do on your blog.
   After listening to you sing it, I immediately played it again. Then I clicked on your link to the song, and I could only listen for 20 seconds, because I missed your voice. The song is much better with your voice, and the cephalic-visual interpretation of the lyrics, and your finger-work on the guitar. So I’ve been playing it about as many times as you had by the time you had first been listening to it repeat for an hour. And I keep repeating it every time it finishes. You are with me, man.
   I have spoken every day since I’ve been in Colorado to both of my brothers, and I have laughed and laughed with them. Seeing your face singing this song with the great lyrics gave me something I did not guess I’d receive.
   “I thought I’d lost you my brother, I’m so glad you came. My regards to the ones that I love, I miss them, tell them I miss them.”
   I’ve had with me this wonderful book by an ex-priest/poet/philosopher/theologian of the Irish sort, sadly recently deceased at an early age. He studied in Tübingen, and his specialty is Heidegger. He was working on a book about Meister Eckhart when he died. The book I have with me is called Beauty: The Invisible Embrace. The entire book is a prose poem/philosophical treatise/spiritual advice resource. This passage jumped out at me last night:
   “There are times when life seems little more than a matter of struggle and endurance, when difficulty and disappointment form a crust around the heart. Because it can be deeply hurt, the heart hardens. There are corners in every heart which are utterly devoid of illusion, places where we know and remember the nature of devastation. Yet though the music of the heart may grow faint, there is in each of us an unprotected place that beauty can always reach out and touch. It was Blaise Pascal who said: In difficult times you should always carry something beautiful in your mind.”
   –John O’Donohue
   Your practice session of this song touched me in that wonderful unprotected place. I will carry with me the memory of this touch for a long time, like the light of Galadriel for use in dark times.
   And no, I don’t remember that you used to sing. You should do it more often. Something special happens when you do.
   And I will resolve not to wait so long to say or do the things that are important.
   Thank you, Conor.
8. Conor 04.30.08 / 8am

   I was caught completely off guard by this song. People have often told me that my concept of listening to music is bizarre, because I tend to look at it like a “homework assignment” sometimes. I’ll put on a band or album that I don’t like, but that I know I should come to understand, whether to deepen my understanding of the genre or to strengthen my own skills as a writer.

   Because of this, I’d had an album loaded onto my MP3 player, one called Viva Emptiness. Although I absolutely adore the dark, atmospheric, utterly hopeless song Criminals, I haven’t spent too much time with the CD as a whole. The Omerta track is the second to last; I guess I always put something else on before I got that deep into the disc.

   On Saturday night, I had off from work. Earlier in the week I’d bumped into an acquaintance, an American, who used to live in my building, but had to move out suddenly due to confusion about the lease duration. She’s since found an apartment with German roommates, and life is taking care of her, as I think it always will. She is a good person. She’d mentioned to me, when I ran into her, that there would be an all-night mass on Saturday evening, as it’s Easter for the Greek Orthodox Church. I said that sounded pretty trippy, and that I’d love to tag along. I successfully call off work and make plans to meet her on Marienplatz on Saturday so we can hop on the train together to go out to this church.

   The service starts at 10:00pm, and by 9:45pm, there was no sign of her. We’d agreed to meet at 9:25pm. Eventually I got a text from her saying she’s running very late, and that I should hang in there, which I did. Shortly after getting this message, something new to me came on on my MP3 player. Because of this “homework assignment” attitude, there are times when I keep one hand in my coat pocket, just to skip tracks I don’t know (and thus don’t care about). Sometimes you just want something familiar in your ears, or around your neck, something that can pierce the crust around the heart, making you feel safe for feeling weak.

   I had been thinking when the song came on, so I don’t remember it actually starting. I made it about 10 seconds in and was jarred awake, then immediately restarted the song. I remember what shook me so hard was the line “All I had I lost in the flood.” It struck me as religious and post-religious at the same time. I found myself listening to the song again and again, and eventually just set my MP3 player to loop that one track repeatedly.

   The song was to me about forgetting to be religious, which I truly was as a child, when I went to Catholic school. It was about watching my relationships with exes fall apart, because my relationship with myself had fallen apart long ago, or perhaps never actually been forged. The line “What is it I have been drinking?” played very well upon my Catholic guilt, and upon my anthropological education in terms of body rituals and spiritual tainting and purification.

   When my friend did show up, I didn’t want to leave. It meant I had to take my headphones off. But I did. We made it to the service, and it was nice. I lasted about an hour, maybe more, standing in that old hall made to look older, the Bishop of Wherever singing in what I’m still pretty sure was Latin with a very heavy Greek accent, smelling the incense, wishing I had thought to bring a candle with me like the entire congregation had. I used my MP3 player to record some of the singing, because the acoustics of the room were impressive. I haven’t even listened to the recordings yet, because I’ve spent all the time between now and then listening to “Omerta.”

   Around midnight or so, I peaced. My friend said she’d try to stick it out till dawn or so, and then also call it a night—or a morning, or whatever. The first thing I did outside the church was very quietly shut the so-loud-it’s-obviously-designed-to-shame-you-into-not-leaving-service-early door. The second thing I did was put on my headphones and start listening to “Omerta” again. I walked to the subway station, only about a block away, and then lingered outside, on a plaza with lots of pine trees, and sang the song to myself. I did this for probably half an hour. Then I realized this was crazy and got on the train.

   When I had to transfer trains on the way back home, instead of transferring, I just left the subway station. I surfaced at the border between the old part of Munich and the considerably younger university district. I decided to walk home, which took about an hour. I sang the whole way. The first couple times I came across a cluster of drunk students switching bars, I stopped singing as they walked passed in the other direction. Then I got sick of stopping my singing, so I stopped stopping it. Some people thought I was weird and some absolutely loved it.

   This song means a lot of things to me already. One thing it meant to me only in the fog of fiction was something of your father, who has always been, to me, your father more than my grandfather. It was a blurry association, because I don’t know the man, and he’ll die without us ever having known each other. So will I, I guess. Maybe his sadly delusional state of late has tipped the scales in the universe, and I this weekend was able to think more clearly because of it. Karmic insanity, if you will, in more ways than one.

   Tell him and I love him and miss him. Perhaps it will strengthen his blood, or perhaps our dreams mean nothing to each other. One never knows until after the flood.
9. Paul 05.01.08 / 8am

   Understanding beauty might be an assignment, but when it works, a window to another world opens.

   Understanding love is a duty. And when it is fulfilled, the window that has been opened by beauty creates a world even better than one could have dreamed.
10. Im Voraus » Blog Archive » I am learning to live The Life 05.27.08 / 4am

    […] played songs to each other long into the night. The guy knows Omerta like the back of his hand, although he doesn’t like the range of the vocalist—which is […]

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