We’re given music. (And it does feel like a gift.) We’re given, specifically, a small, moving swell of music, like a warm gentle wave; a few notes from the second movement of Beethoven’s Emperor piano concerto. And then we return to the quiet world of this ridiculously beautiful expressive boy, to the sound of his breath, and of his madly pedaling feet.
“We are privileged to live at a moment when a new story is being written about how we understand ourselves in the world. The old story said we were all separate from one another, from the natural world; even our bodies separate from our minds. The new story is revealing something quite different.”
Some thoughts on solitude, connection, and the Internet’s influence on artists’ communities.
But these people are working on something, they’re building something that defies understanding. In rusts and greys, the vast spaces of dried grass and gloomy sky are weighed down by small clusters of human clutter. And by people operating on a singularly American level of absurdity to respond to the lucid invitation to live and to create, in the very midst of the desert.
A collection of all the articles we’ve published over the past month, for those who like to savor their Magpies’ tidings as an issue.
“There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.”-G.K. Chesterton
Music continues to shape the collective consciousness of my people. Music binds us. It alters moods and speaks to us, and sometimes, it is the only healing for our aching hearts. The songs on this ‘Surviving the Fuckening Mixtape’ are carefully curated for listening on a bad day, or just about any day when things don’t seem to be going right.
I like the warm dusty tar soft on my feet. I like staring straight up into the vast reeling sky, into the fast wheeling birds. I like when the birds land and speak to me with gentle soothing voices. I like the soft sounds they make when they all settle together. I like to watch people from my roof, to see them washing over the sidewalk in waves—coming together, breaking apart.
When the plague comes I don’t go into the city any more, because it’s all shut down. The crowds on the sidewalk below are sparse and their waves veer away from each other.
That light and the memory of it: to glide along without friction in the warm spring air and take in that peculiar beauty shining all about is to find yourself suddenly in a higher order of landscapes, a place made more real and more present through the congruence of your solitude and its primeval majesty that demands no more than your awareness and of which you ask only that you be allowed to move slowly through it without intrusion or interruption.
The late afternoon light was too beautiful for that moment; out of place in the dreariness of that corner of Abidjan, tucked away among the drab offices of the business district. It reminded me of summer nights in Cape Town when the sun is so seductive you can’t bear the thought of going indoors.
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