On the turning away. . . .

[kiya]

Obligation is a bitch, y'know?

I'm none too sure I know where I'm going with this; at this point my guess is "around in circles". But obligation is a bitch. (So that's how that thing works. Neat. Well, that'll help keep me from Swamping The Free World In Text.)

So there's this song. The CD changer pulled it up about twenty minutes ago, and I've been playing it repeatedly ever since, because. . . because. I suppose I might as well put in a link to the lyrics while I'm playing with the features of this client thing, and see how that does. It reads okay in lynx, damfino about anything else. Anyway. I had the end couplet as my .sig in MacSOUP for something like six months after the WTC, as a sort of quiet protest against the nationalism and the brouhaha and . . . stuff.

Every so often I've toyed with assembling a hymnal. For my own faith, for whatever that's worth. This goes in there; who'd have thought Pink Floyd would do a hymn? I got hooked on this song something like the weekend after the bombing, as Kevin and I were driving around the Beltway at some godawful hour of the morning (I think that was the day we went out to dinner with rivka and wcg and a whole bunch of other people; Rivka'd invited us to an Orioles game, but all the games were cancelled for a while around then. . .) . Anyway, we were heading around the Beltway heading back to the in-laws' place, and listening to A Momentary Lapse of Reason and I caught the end of this, and turned it up and played it again, and spent about the next week metaphorically grabbing people, shaking them, and saying, "It's a fucking hymn! Pink Floyd did a hymn! Who'da thunk it?!" I got oneironaut to get a copy of it and listen to it, and the two of us spent a while saying, "It is a hymn!" to each other at random moments. It's good to know people who understand me.

I have, perhaps predictably, wandered a bit shy of where I was going. Anyway. Hymns. Music with essentially religious meaning for me, hitting bits of the divine. Something or other. This is one of them. It means a lot to me, as evidenced by the fact that I've, in the twenty minutes I've been writing this, been listening to it over and over.

Is it only a dream that there'll be no more turning away?

But there are days. . . sometimes. . .when damnit, I can't do it. Strength is finite, energy is finite, time is finite. Sometimes all of them I have to spend on me, or on the obligations I have contracted to.

Sometimes the sense of obligation to do something, even if that something is to wish I could do something that's actually useful, is the last straw that takes everything down on my head.

I guess it is a dream, sometimes. It'd be nice to have infinite strength, infinite energy, and infinite time, but there are times that looking after the turning away is something that I need to leave to other people.

I guess I can stop listening now, and let the music take me where it will.

Comments

[brian1789.livejournal.com]

It'd be nice to have infinite strength, infinite energy, and infinite time, but there are times that looking after the turning away is something that I need to leave to other people.


I interpret "no more turning away" as inherently collective... not that any finite individual must exhibit infinite qualities. But if many individuals tried harder...

[kiya]

Yeah, I do too, so long as I've not hit depressive state on the subject. I'm just one bird, and I know that.

That rant was sort of prompted by feeling that there were people who figured that the obligation was there, even if there wasn't the strength to carry through with the obligation: that To Be A Good Person One Must Always Care. And I put on the changer after the ballgame, as I was chewing on that argument, and it played this song first thing, right off. One of those weird state of mind confluences. (And there's a reason I think the CD changer is possessed by Eris.)

[linenoise.livejournal.com]

Back when Napster still existed, and I was using their client to play mp3s, I used to be greatly enamored of the "random play" button. It was possessed by....something. Dunno. But it used to pick songs that were way too apt. And then five minutes later pick 'em again. Musicmatch has a random play, but it doesn't work quite the same. Not possessed. I wish I still had a possessed player. Maybe I should put a cd-changer on my shopping list, to go with the nice component stereo receiver that I picked up recently.

In other news, welcome to LiveJournal.

[brian1789.livejournal.com]

(smile) a vaguely-creepy CD changer... uncanny, at least.

And IMO there are differing levels of "care"... there's care-and-must-respond, care-in-a-general-sense, care-but-act-if-called-upon, etc.

An obligation to always care-and-must-respond is more than finite humans can manage....