Monday 29 December 2008

Songbook 1



My favourite song is Sleep by The Dandy Warhols, incidentally my favourite band - if you haven't listened to them then I seriously recommend it. The layering of instruments and vocals is really beautiful and proof of their musicianship. It's a haunting song which manages to simultaneously make you think about sad times and good ones.

An explanation


It Was All One Stream or technically "...it was all one stream" comes from Virginia Woolf's brilliant book To The Lighthouse.

It's spoken by Mrs Ramsay, a woman who is mother to eight children and wife to the distant and logical Mr Ramsay. Mrs Ramsay symbolises a few ideas in Woolf's book namely Woolf's own mother, beauty and creativity - but the thing which has stayed with me most is the attitude to life which she embodies.

In Lighthouse I interpret the stream as a metaphor for human unity. I quite like to envisage everything and everyone in the same stream, drifting and floating but travelling with some purpose, sometimes drifting all alone, sometimes bumping into others - some who stay with us for the duration of our journey - some who find an alternative current and float away. Sometimes finding obstacles which we can easily overcome, other times coming crashing in on the sharp rocks which take us a little longer to get over but ultimately the stream babbles on and we all go along with it and we enjoy it.

I think that sums up the view I like to take on life, I am unashamedly an eternal optimist but that is not to say I think life hands us everything on a plate. It regularly takes hard work to get where you want to be but I also believe in karma and if you put good into the world you will always be rewarded.

I am hoping that I will always keep this philosophy in mind even when writing my blog, which, at the moment appears to me to as a rough bit of the stream which I am yet to overcome but I hope will be quite a therapeutic exercise in arranging my thoughts as well as a great place to practice and publish my writing.