But every beginning is only a continuation and the book of fate is always open in the middle.

-Wislawa Szymborska in "Love At First Sight"

[a] Till yesterday in the rain (How does rain murmur In that country of yours?) One could only hear The lone voice of a wood Thrush, calling out in its Flutelike voice, A question followed by An uncertain answer, Deep in the emerald summer Woods, over and over.

[b] This changed today, When two song sparrows Flew under the overhang Above the west window Chirping to one another, A melodic conversation as they ferried Bits of wet grass, a length of thread, Black twigs somewhere to the heights Beyond any line of sight.

[c] Two other sparrows, each of whom had Wondered if they were solitary Wood thrushes for so long, also met Today, under the rafters of clouds, In the overhang of rain, And sang out in a three note song, A new beginning from the book of fate, which was lying open at a poem.

Warning: This piece has scenes of graphic voilence

I unleashed my anti-Buddha nature today, and assassinated a lovely copperhead. My karma is thus weighed down by one more death, and consequently I will rotate once more in the great carousel of samsara.

All this happened in the course of a morning when I was over at VILLA sending some faxes out. The snakey was sitting in a bed of pine straw, and was nearly invisible. Since I usually tool around woods here, gathering "degradable sculptures", I usually keep a wary eye for these beautiful fellas (these are the predominant posionous snakes in these parts), and also for good measure wear my thick hiking boots. Usually they are quite shy, and try to crawl away from me more quickly than I from them.

But this snakey was different. Yes sir, it gave us (two others gathered around to look) the eye, and refused to budge from its bed. This was perhaps because it was a fully grown adult (about 3 feet long) and had just eaten lunch. This is when a lady guest currently staying at VILLA arrived, and gave a shriek after seeing what she called the serpent. So I had to get a shovel, and jab it into the snakey's neck just below its triangular head (easy clue to identify copperheads). Oh, it refused to perish for the ground was too soft, and the shovel dug into the dirt along with its body. So after I was sure I had stunned the snakey enough, I slid its wiggly body onto the shovel and carried it out to the parking lot and laid it out. And then completed the business of guillotining the head by running the shovel along the pavement with the snakey's neck held in between metal and cement.

A streak of poison, the opening of fangs, the detachment of head, the spurting of crimson blood, and the wriggling of the sleek body, yes, these followed. I was almost tempted to slip the body into a bag, bring it home, and somehow skin it. But under the watch of the ladies, I had to load up the body in the shovel and fling it into the woods for the Garuda bird.

...

It was only afterwards I realized what an unfortunate wretch I am. Only had I belonged to a Holiness Church, I would have bravely embraced the snakey, put it in my pocket, and used it to call upon the Holy Spirit every day, for as the Lord said in Mark 16:18, the King James Bible:

They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.

Instead, here I am writing out notes on what will soon become an apocryphal memory.

After my arrival some six summers ago to these United States, I fanatically attempted to educate myself in the musical traditions of the natives, i.e., in all manners of American music. There was a period of a time when I religiously followed a regime of listening to one new musician or band every weekend, and went to nearly all the free concerts that happen in the summers in this city. And it was in this process in which I discovered the music of Miles Davis, a magical discovery for me in the American sonic-scape.

This feeling was reinforced a couple of weekends ago when I saw the recently released DVD of the legendary concert Miles played at Isle of Wight way back in 1970. When asked to give a title for the set, he famously responded, “call it anything”. Miles’s playing in this DVD basically blew my hairy ass straight out of the chair. Or as the review in NYT described this madness:

"The 38-minute jam that Miles Davis and an electric sextet played at the Isle of Wight Festival in the summer of 1970 is like a pungent, musky, musical soupThe sounds floating through the rock-funk murk evoke the Three Witches' incantation from "Macbeth": "eye of newt, and toe of frog/wool of bat, and tongue of dog."

I was also thinking of his phenom records "Bitches’ Brew" and "A Kind of Blue" earlier this morning, as it happened to be one of those mornings I would have rather stayed in bed to daydream all day, and escape from the so-called life. But since I can't, I am opting instead for Miles's horn to guide my Dante-like, reluctant feet through the purgatory of today into a kind of blue paradise. So let's have some Miles.

Call It Anything live @ Isle of Wight 1970. What a mindfuck! Also look out a tripped out Airto Moreira all producing all those funky sounds with various Brazilian percussion instruments.

from the many videos on YouTube, here are two: So What with John Coltrane Time After Time