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Columns
Songs
Humming songs. Feeling songs. Hearing songs.
Getting songs. Talking by way of music. It is a
tried and tested tell-me-what-you-feel method. A
husky female voice sings ‘Who’s taking care of
you’ and tells me a story. The words are part
one, the sounds part two. They work their way
deep inside me. Reach a place where doors
normally stay closed. Music opens the soul. It’s
a cliché , but clichés may be said. And must
sometimes be silenced. I enjoy clichés. In every
respect. Nobody wants a cliché, but they are
pretty when you hold them against the light.
Transparent and fragile like a child with an
endearing smile. Sugarsweet love-songs slide by
hundreds of Christmas lights. Candles are lit.
The open fire is lit. And songs. They carry me
along Mediterranean roads. Far away from the
cold. Far away from shawls and fur collars. Cold
gets no chance to nestle in the billowing waves
of music. Why would cold lodge in coloured tones?
In coloured words? In sound that merely caresses?
Precisely. Cold doesn’t feel at home there. It
rather goes next door. Or two houses down. Cold
doesn’t get hold of a warm heart. Melting cold.
I love it. Water trickles down between the
cracks of life. Life that shows itself in its
full glory each day. To the one who wants to see.
What real is separated from fake. Where
sometimes – if chance allows – equality is
shared. And passion.
‘Who’s taking care of jou’? A perfect question.
I am not asked this every day. I sit on the
imaginary front seat of a car. The elongated
couch in one of those American limos. Wide
enough for arms to get around shoulders. On its
way to nowhere, to somewhere, to off and away.
And when I cry about the truth of answers I find
songs. They tumble over each other. Each one
even prettier and more intense than the other.
‘It converts me’. That’s what she sings. And
it’s right. In the right place. Correct answers
and forceful questions. And when she sings
‘Don’t blame my heart but my youth’, then I’m
converted. Songs!
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Written on 20 December 2011 |
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