[Video: The (very recently) late B.B. King with Muddy Waters, recorded at a joint concert in 1973]
From whiskey river:
I thought how lovely and how strange a river is. A river is a river, always there, and yet the water flowing through it is never the same water and is never still. It’s always changing and is always on the move. And over time the river itself changes too. It widens and deepens as it rubs and scours, gnaws and kneads, eats and bores its way through the land. Even the greatest rivers — the Nile and the Ganges, the Yangtze and the Mississippi, the Amazon and the great grey-green greasy Limpopo all set about with fever trees — must have been no more than trickles and flickering streams before they grew into mighty rivers.
Are people like that? I wondered. Am I like that? Always me, like the river itself, always flowing but always different, like the water flowing in the river, sometimes walking steadily along andante, sometimes surging over rapids furioso, sometimes meandering with hardly any visible movement tranquilo, lento, ppp pianissimo, sometimes gurgling giacoso with pleasure, sometimes sparkling brillante in the sun, sometimes impetuoso, sometimes lacrimoso, sometimes appassionato, sometimes misterioso, sometimes pesante, sometimes legato, sometimes staccato, sometimes sospirando, sometimes vivace, and always, I hope, amoroso.
Do I change like a river, widening and deepening, eddying back on myself sometimes, bursting my banks sometimes when there’s too much water, too much life in me, and sometimes dried up from lack of rain? Will the I that is me grow and widen and deepen? Or will I stagnate and become an arid riverbed? Will I allow people to dam me up and confine me to a wall so that I flow only where they want? Will I allow them to turn me into a canal to use for their own purposes…? Or will I make sure I flow freely, coursing my way through the land and ploughing a valley of my own?
(Aidan Chambers [source])
Not from whiskey river:
Oblivion
I poured a whiskey and soda
watching the tree outside dissolve:
light going backward pushed to corners
to the white sliver of wood
around the door.Where was that river seething with light?
I recall the banks menaced by wasps
swollen on summer sap, a cement hollow
stuck with their strange cradles
a woozy stench of damp clay
the blunt poison of water snakes.I do remember someone
close warm flesh pushed to the sand
the ocean a dark noise
echoing gulls and a wail of forlorn love
moonlight like yellowed keys
on his antique piano
music across the water our song
tides pulled awful and endless
as the spine of memory.The light is lost
my glass is hollow:
the door is luminous
like a firefly at midnight.
(Rachel Sherwood)
…and (quoting from Anne Cameron’s Daughters of Copper Woman, in which “an old Nootka woman describes how her forebears would navigate their oceangoing canoes”):
Everythin’ we ever knew about the movement of the sea was preserved in the verses of a song. For thousands of years we went where we wanted and came home safe because of the song. On clear nights we had the stars to guide us and in the fog we had the streams and creeks that flow into and become Klin Otto…
There was a song for goin’ to China and a song for goin’ to Japan, a song for the big island and a song for the smaller one. All she had to know was the song and she knew where she was. To get back, she just sang the song in reverse.
(Bruce Chatwin [source])
…and:
The Dry Salvages
(excerpt)I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god — sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
The only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities – ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons, and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.
His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom,
In the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard,
In the smell of grapes on the autumn table,
And the evening circle in the winter gaslight.The river is within us, the sea is all about us;
The sea is the land’s edge also, the granite,
Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses
Its hints of earlier and other creation:
The starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale’s backbone;
The pools where it offers to our curiosity
The more delicate algae and the sea anemone.
It tosses up our losses, the torn seine,
The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar
And the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has many voices,
Many gods and many voices.
(T.S. Eliot)
…and:
#84: They say time is like a river, and you may find yourself nodding in agreement: the analogy is obvious. But the differences are obvious, too — chief among them, that you can watch a river from a vantage point of safety.
(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)
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