Saturday, 24 December 2016

a warning to the curious

howard has been busy again - tracks from  david crosby, balam acab, alemu aga, woods, and MoB mainstay pharoah sanders. it begins with the ethiopian debussy (emahoy tsegué-maryam guèbrou). as a nun of the ethiopian church she was concerned about the poverty of her fellow adherents and made efforts to ameliorate it.

horsemouth is hiding out at his parents in the country.

as usual the transition to leisure does not bring immediate happiness - there is a period when horsemouth still thinks he should be productive and be ‘getting on with it’, if at least only culturally productive (this is the logic that facebook taps into - this is why it can make people miserable).

(ah the smell of bacon - horsemouth no longer eats it but it still smells good)

that having time to think does not bring happiness (like you think it would when you are busy over-working yourself) is one of the insights of thoreau and montaigne (and many others who have tried it). for the desert fathers and the solitary monks the noonday devil would appear suggesting that they’d got it all wrong.

horsemouth is privileged to have led a life free from the constant battle for survival but it has made him over-reflective and a bit of a solitary. horsemouth has savings - he’s quite a few pay cheques away from the street - he’s free to up sticks and wander off whenever he feels like it (but at some stage he’ll probably be back and having to work again). horsemouth dreams of small scale fuck you money (as the stockbrokers put it) - never have to work again money.

 what would horsemouth do then? probably go back to work.

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