High Hopes by Pink Floyd: Did they see the global disaster coming?

When art tells reality and predicts the future with poetry, imagination and music (all in a broader sense), it fulfills its highest role.  The Division Bell is my favorite Pink Floyd’s album, contrary to many people’s opinions out there. The song High Hopes describes the world we knew, and to push the interpretation further, the world before the pandemic maybe:

Beyond the horizon of the place we lived when we were young
In a world of magnets and miracles
Our thoughts strayed constantly and without boundary

And the global sanitary shift started the division of our life into old and new normal, taking our dreams away:

The ringing of the division bell had begun
Along the Long Road and on down the Causeway
Do they still meet there by the Cut
There was a ragged band that followed in our footsteps
Running before times took our dreams away
Leaving the myriad small creatures trying to tie us to the ground
To a life consumed by slow decay

Back then the grass was greener and the memory of our old life brings light images to our minds:

The grass was greener
The light was brighter
When friends surrounded
The nights of wonder

 

Yes, we all dreamed bigger because we thought the world was somehow safe and ambition was indeed unsatisfied, actions were endless, restless global movements:

Looking beyond the embers of bridges glowing behind us
To a glimpse of how green it was on the other side
Steps taken forwards but sleepwalking back again
Dragged by the force of some inner tide
At a higher altitude with flag unfurled
We reached the dizzy heights of that dreamed of world

Encumbered forever by desire and ambition
There's a hunger still unsatisfied
Our weary eyes still stray to the horizon
Though down this road we've been so many times

The grass was greener
The light was brighter
The taste was sweeter
The nights of wonder
With friends surrounded
The dawn mist glowing
The water flowing
The endless river
For ever and ever

It is a beautiful song, deep and rich with meanings like all Pink Floyd’s and to keep the pleasure ongoing, that’s the link to the musical video:

The sky is my mirror

photo by dailystar.com.lb

It is cloudy today
Heavy clouds full of rain
The sky looks like me today
Sometimes covered, sometimes uncovered
Shy sunlight in the groovy blues

Shall I dance for this matching?
No big, no small, only a coincidence 
That the sky looks like me today
Or is it a self-projection? 

Thinking is blurry, like the sky
Repetition kills the mind
Eye folded spirits on survival mode 
Waiting for another unknown 
Waiting for the misfit rain 
Feels chilly warm 

A wintery spring day in the pausing world
Life goes on in silence 
In the groovy sky looking like me

A lion in a cage

photo by pxhere.com

Smoking is fading away
And all i can think of is smoking
Emotions on a roller coaster
From agitation to numbness
The smell of coffee sends madness to my soul

Smoking is fading away
For the lion in a cage
Taken into captivity by the invisible
Is the devil always invisible?
Life is lighter with the devil
Suddenly time is stretching out
Energy turned to a furious ocean

Thoughts are running in my head
Into one direction
Even a poison can be sweet 

The lion in a cage is dreaming
Of colorful smokes going up my head
Innocent souls can never understand
How to be possessed by the devil

 

 

 

The paradox

photo by @dvjkaa

Where do we go from here
When the mind is not clear
The night is long
But the sun is shining bright
The storm is within
And birds are singing
Darkness isn't that dark

Where do we go from here
When streets are empty
Faceless people behind windows
Staring at the sky
Feeling the heat of the sun
Waking up their souls
Motionless bodies

Where do we go from here
When streets have no name
When death has no face
When spring feels like winter

Tomorrow is another today
Humming the same song
Playing the same games
Doing the same things
Repetition makes absurdity

Outside the sun shines
Inside the heart is cries
Scream into the scary silence
Run into the wilderness of your dreams 
Maybe foolishness is what we need 

Bewilderment etc.

 

So we thought we would wake up to the world we know

But we woke up to stillness and void

We woke up to the only inevitable truths: change and death

We woke up to the fading artificial beauty

Who cares?

We woke up to invisible enemies: illness and surveillance

We woke up to an invisible invasion

We woke up to our illusion

Wasn’t strength our identity?

We woke up to our vulnerability and breathlessness

We woke up to solitude and silence

We woke up to uncertainty

My dear ones, did you think you would wake up to the world you know?

Hello and welcome to a new world order

A different definition of writing

Writing is not only about expressing ideas or telling a story. Whereas the aforementioned is true, writing goes beyond this, even for philosophy writing too.

How can writing be defined?

Writing is about creating moments. A moment is created when meeting a person, an event, an idea even if it is an internal subjective one. It’s like being hooked and digging deeper. Writing is about the perpetuation of that moment, which can go through fluctuations along the writing exercice.

On parallel, the reader will be hooked on that moment and will go through fluctuations as well. Being emotional or rational, or both ideally, the fluctuation of both the writer and the reader, will propel them into the ongoing moment crafted by writing.

That moment is like a runway show: colours, shapes, emotions, concepts, themes will showcase for the writer and the reader. Often, the writer is hooked but not the reader; maybe a different reader would be. That’s the risk of creativity specially in writing.

The worse kind of writing is the one that stops the moment. Or the one that doesn’t create any moment. The writing that doesn’t pick up what’s left and go further with it, is the kind of forgotten books shortly after reading them.

Writing means a constant search for the upcoming word and idea.

Meeting a new “other”, might be a person or a place, an idea or a picture, an event or a book etc., is the ultimate goal of a writer.

If not, what would writing be?

100 words or less

The heart is broken and words are useless.

It’s not depression but deception.

Death has no name. Fear has a new face and the enemy is inhaled. Hold your breath!

Solitude is confusing and silence is scary.

Towns have become ghost towns. Humanism is missed.

Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder.

Can beauty save the world?

 

 

The Prophet by Khalil Gibran

 

My hometown famous writer, Khalil Gibran (1883-1931), was a Lebanese-American writer, poet and a painter, also considered a philosopher although he rejected this title. Gibran’s life has been described as one “often caught between Nietzschean rebellion, Blakean pantheism and Sufi mysticism”. He wrote about love, happiness, religion, justice, soul, death, life and so on.

He wrote his most famous book, The Prophet in 1923, while in New York. I personally think it has been very much inspired by Nietzsche’s Thus spoke Zarathustra. The Prophet is divided into chapters dealing with love, marriage, children, giving, eating and drinking, work, joy and sorrow, houses, clothes, buying and selling, crime and punishment, laws, freedom, justice and all topics of human questionning.

I picked this paragraph of it for all of us to meditate upon:

This book is a must-read. I would love to know how do you interpret this prose poetry. Please leave you comments down below

Ode to dancing

The sound vibrates from the heart of the earth all the way to our spine; extend your arms and feel the energy. That same cry of the universe celebrates its birth, and still on lingering intensely through our bodies. OM, life is singing, the sky is thundering, the ocean is roaring and the wind is blowing. Everything moves to the sound of life, from planetary rotations to Sufi whirling, from falling leaves to flitting butterflies. Fast and light, slow and heavy, spinning to party, spinning to pray, spinning to music, this is the highest ode to life. Rumi (Jalal ud-din), the Persian and mystical poet wrote once:

“Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion”.

Sufi spinning is an active form of meditation performed within a worship ceremony. This is sought through abandoning one’s ego or personal desires, by listening to the music, focusing on God, and spinning one’s body in repetitive circles, which has been seen as a symbolic imitation of planets in the Solar System orbiting the sun. The influence of the Persian poet Rumi (Jalal ud-Din) on Sufis is significant. It was his meeting with the dervish Shams-e Tabrizi on 15 November 1244 that completely changed his life. From an accomplished teacher and jurist, Rumi was transformed into an ascetic.
Shams had travelled throughout the Middle East searching and praying for someone who could “endure my company”. A voice said to him, “What will you give in return?” Shams replied, “My head!” The voice then said, “The one you seek is Jalal ud-Din of Konya.” On the night of 5 December 1248, as Rumi and Shams were talking, Shams was called to the back door. He went out, never to be seen again. It is rumoured that Shams was murdered with the connivance of Rumi’s son, ‘Ala’ ud-Din; if so, Shams indeed gave his head for the privilege of mystical friendship. Later, Rumi believed passionately in the use of music, poetry and dance as a path for reaching God. For Rumi, music helped devotees to focus their whole being on the divine and to do this so intensely that the soul was both destroyed and resurrected. It was from these ideas that the practice of whirling Dervishes developed into a ritual form. Rumi wrote:

“The lover’s cause is separate from all other causes
Love is the astrolabe of God’s mysteries”.

If religion, any religion, isn’t of that beauty, then it is not a religion and doesn’t deserve to be one!