The intertidal zone

I wrote to a friend the other day that I didn’t think music crucial for my survival. I might have to revise the comment. A couple of times this week music has moved me to awe and tears. I think those are necessary elements in a life…

The first was after a workshop with Stephen Taberner when twenty of us practised ’sobbing manfully’ as a prelude to grasping the rudiments of Georgian singing in three deep and soulful parts. The following night we heard his trio ‘The Secret Lunch‘ in Chicks Hotel at Port Chalmers and were wooed into putty by their skin-stirring harmonies, eccentrically wondrous lyrics and musicianship.

Then I found Stephen combining music with a spot of social activism, stirring up shoppers in the most decent way possible: with one song, many singers. Coincidentally a friend alerted me to Il Travatore bursting forth in a Spanish marketplace which led me along the youtube path to the Antwerp railway station. This is where the tears spilled. Such delight and vigour penetrating the mundane, transforming the moment, the day, binding the crowd into one appreciative whole … Who knows where that will end and what further creative acts have already been engendered by such generous outpouring of talent and joy.

This small cry of pleasure, for one.

I’ve started setting up Skybooks, where dynamic, literary, heartening writing will be solicited, selected, edited and turned into stunning ebooks. My confidence waxes and wanes — not in the work itself or in its writers, and not in my ability to recognise that work and present it in its finest light — but in my capacity to approach and interact with the mysterious entity called ‘business’. When I sidle up to business-savvy souls, who have something I need, I’m often so daunted by the coded (and ugly) language of that other reality, that I simply sidle away again. Seth Godin’s daily blog-bridge helps coax me across when I’d rather rather stay on the dreamy, creative side of the river. Today he offers no false reassurances — every outcome is necessarily mixed; nothing is ever entirely okay — but he underscores my conviction, too, that Skybooks is more than a good idea; it’s important and worth seeing through. In fact, it amounts to a kind of glad duty: finding and launching ‘work that matters’.

When something touches us all (a wondrous feat or a dire tragedy) we remember that we’re all of one tribe: the tribe of those living on tiny, fragile Earth early in the 21st century.

These members of the 2007 Iowa International Writers family hail from Turkey/Bulgaria, Egypt, Malta, Hungary, and B from Haiti. Two years ago our Burmese sister’s province was ravaged; now it’s Haiti’s turn. Another day, another year, it might well be ours.

Claire’s provided a beautiful dedicated moment/space on her site, with possible ways to act.

(I’m pleased to learn that B is in the US with her children but she awaits news of her wider family and friends.)