For years, just few days before the Christmas Day, I used to receive a little card from Glen and Carolyn with their warm greetings...
You can see below a sequence of them, those left in my archive.
You can see below a sequence of them, those left in my archive.
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| A musical card with Christmas melodies... |
The point is that I'm a professed atheist - Glen knew it - and I know he wasn't a Christian catholic, but a persuaded Buddhist...
So I'm asking now why I've received so many cards of this kind from him and I never have asked him the reason of it...
Anyway, this is just a pretext to send my Christmas greetings to everyone of you, whatever you believe into.
no©2010 Luca Ferrari
no©2010 Luca Ferrari
In England the religious / Christian dimension becomes a focus for a more fundamental sense of goodwill at the dark heart of the year. Here on the Winter Solstice we might look forward to the return of the light, but it's also the beginning of a long cold winter. Culturally this includes all manner of Folklore bound up with the Christian mythos which carries its own purpose even with respect of atheism, which must also celebrate the human aspect of spirituality with respect of the music, the stories, the general culture however wary we might feel about it otherwise.
ReplyDeleteThe music of the Third Ear Band is infused with many layers of spirituality, but, crucially it doesn't preach nor proselytise, thus might be all be free to take our own trip & savour the freedoms thus inspired.
Third Ear Band's spiritual vision of Life is disorienting still now because is a deep mass (how much deep?)of pagan, buddhist, folk cultures. A syncretic poem of spituality conceived to help the knowledge of the World. This dimension (esoteric?) of their poetics is never been well investigated... For example, take "Egyptian Book of the Dead": is it the soundtrack of the original Egyptian book - the part where soul is weighed...?
ReplyDeleteThe main difficulty with Glen (the one of the band really involved in all these kind of knowledges)is he didn't talk too much about it. All was well-hiden in him, not much surfaced, so it was not easy for me can understand his real feelings about...
How many of us are like that I wonder? I think of it as a sort of Aesthetic Atheism which takes an interest in the imagery of such things (Dragon Lines, Stone Circles, EBOTD, Alchemy, etc.) without getting caught up in the belief systems and dogmas that lie behind them. Glen's lyrics on the Hydrogen Jukebox CD give us a fascinating insight into his thinking but as with similar minds (Sun Ra & Daevid Allen?) we don't get any sort of alignment to anything resembling orthodox belief systems, rather a broad concern with the aesthetics of human spirituality.
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