Saturday and no night fever

Hello,

Have you heard of a hurricane? That's what my house looks like today: as if a hurricane had passed by. I am trying to gather my courage together and get cleaning but I always find a million excuses not to get started at once, one of those being updating my blogs.

I write 2 blogs at the moment: this one, Luce Perpetua, Lux Perpetua, Lumiere eternelle, eternal light, luz eterna, or one of these denominations. This name might appear to be related to a Requiem Mass:


Requiem æternam dona eis, Domine,
et lux perpetua luceat eis.
Te decet hymnus Deus, in Sion,
et tibi reddetur votum in Ierusalem.
Exaudi orationem meam;
ad te omnis caro veniet.
Requiem æternam dona eis, Domine,
et lux perpetua luceat eis.




Grant them eternal rest, O Lord,
and let perpetual light shine upon them.
A hymn becomes you, O God, in Zion
and to you shall a vow be repaid in Jerusalem.
Hear my prayer;
to you shall all flesh come.
Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord,
and let perpetual light shine upon them.




Although Lux Perpetua might refer to a Requiem Mass, this title has more to do with: Eternal light shining upon all of us. Here and thereafter.

Well, enough philosophy for the time being. I am here, this weekend, at my little house with my cat. My husband is away this week and I really don't like to be alone. I can hear a little movement coming from the street and the market holders packing up after a day's work.

I have been busy trying to tie up projects. We spend our lives acting as if we were immortals but we are constantly facing our own mortality. Life is full of distractions, some prosaic activities keep us busy and mentally healthy, such as cleaning our houses, looking after our personal hygiene, going shopping, eating, cooking, drinking and chatting to friends. These are occupations for our bodies and minds, not occupations for our spirits, this eternal flame that shines within us.

Facing my own mortality and the reality that our time on earth is nothing but a fleeting moment, I decided to accomplish something for posterity. I still keep my 'down-to-earth' occupations (rather reluctantly) but I am trying to nourish my spirit and leave a little bit of legacy of who I am, what I love, how I think. I am aware I am of no great importance in the world, but I am still a living being, with the right to exist, feel, doubt, believe, suffer, create and love.

I love music and many have told me my voice is special, though I am not a very self confident person and often wonder how kind people are being to me by complimenting me so. In any case, I have never properly recorded anything, so I am trying to record a CD.

Yesterday I went in a recording studio, I got some backing tracks online (that's what I can afford at the moment) and had an attempt at recording.

At the beginning I felt almost completely lost as if I had completely forgotten how to sing. After over an hour of not very successful attempts, things started to work a little better. I still need to perfect some of it but most of it was ok I guess. I forgot to bring some of my music and I had some memory blanks for madame Butterfly and although I was vocally ok with it, I still need to revise the text.

Amazingly enough, I didn't sing anything half as well as I sang Mozart and Puccini, making me believe I should stick to those 2 composers, Mozart being my favourite for vocal works.

I need, every now and again, to come back to my essence and to whom I am, because it is so easy to get lost in activities, to get lost in our beliefs as we are constantly challenged by the world, its beliefs, its demands. It is difficult to stay truthful to yourself, so difficult not to harden up by so many disappointments we accumulate through life, so many losses, so much injustice, such ugliness.

Amongst these moments of distress, what pulls me back to finding some beauty here on earth, is music. More than anything, those marvellous musicians and masters from the past, through their genius, are a constant reminder of how close we are to heaven whilst on earth, by appreciating beauty.

How beautiful it is to see a flower blooming.

How beautiful true love is.

How beautiful truth is.

How beautiful good music is.

In an attempt to numb human consciousness, our world makes us listen to rubbish music, eat rubbish food, nourish our bodies mind and soul with nothing.

Panis et Circensis.

'Give them bread and circus.' This little message from one of the biggest world Empires of all times has never been so engrained and so popular as it is nowadays.

The only thing that differs us now from them is that the circus in no longer the Colosseum but Television which invades our homes and our brains and the bread is the fast food, fast rubbish culture, where we eat chemically modified food. We ingest in body and soul things that instead of nourishing us, poison us, empty us, turns us into non-persons, incapable of feeling, of analysing, of thinking.

We are all free to think, in our democracy, as long as we think we are thinking what they want us to think.

One of the main tool of this panis et circensis business is ignorance and lack of critical sense. We gob every information without checking the source, nobody reads anything. Everybody seems to have firm opinions about everything and the stronger the conviction the weaker the knowledge. Knowledge became inversely proportional to conviction. How wrong are we?

The role of education nowadays is to provide students technically good enough to perform specific tasks without being educated enough to comprehend the meaning of these tasks. Automats, robots, non persons are living on earth, all with strong ideas and opinions about what they most completely ignore.

I often read on Facebook those pearls of wisdom with an alleged source. Most of it wasn't written by whom they said it was. One of them was a free translation of the lord's prayer, supposedly the original version in aramaic. Although quite interesting, this version has nothing to do with the Lord's prayer in Aramaic. Who reads Aramaic today anyway?

Most of us have to trust the few scholars left that can translate anything. Our ancestors have left a legacy from the past, from philosophers, scientists, poets, writers, composers, a legacy of art, of wisdom, of critical thinking. A legacy that makes us understand who we were and therefore who we became.

If we do not know where we came from we will never be able to move forward. I am afraid, more than ever, the 21st century seems to have reinvented itself, by creating a rupture with what the world has been for thousands of years and re-creating a new world. I fear the order of this 'new found world' is based on equivocal statements and ideas.

I am afraid this new generation will erase the old world for a world that is based on wind. Based on strong opinions about nothing. And if someone rises and tries to disclose the truth, as in Plato's myth of the cave, nobody will believe him or try to see it. They will still be looking at shadows pretending they are real. This man might even be killed. How can you stare at shadows when you have seen the light? You can't, not even at the cost of your own mortal life.

I don't mean to criticise people for being who they are, I would like that more people had the courage to stand up in the darkness and dare to look at the light. Even if no one else will dare turn and no one else will dare believe, at least this world will not die in the hand's of blindfolded people that think and believe those shadows are all there is to see.

Have a lovely Saturday,

Many blessings may come your way.

Gisele