Month: March 2005

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

—Elizabeth Bishop

And it’s clean and sweet and subtle.

They thought, in their infinite sadness and desperation, that grass would not grow on their soil for seventy-five years.

However, two years later, the world was back. Slowly, painfully, maybe against all odds. It was back.

I’d say I want my life back too…

…If it weren’t for that single blade of grass growing in the middle of my heart.

Anyone that might read newspapers, or go to work over a period of 20 or 30 years, and for those of us who act within a commercial culture, even before we turn on satellite news from around the world – a reasonable person might despair. If all that is open to us is the information on offer, then life is too hard. So, perhaps a reasonable response is simply to give up. There’s nothing we can do.

In terms of the EP Happy With What You Have To Be Happy With, the Japanese title of the EP is Shoganai, which in Japan has a very, very different resonance. A French translation might be c’est la vie. An English approach would be that’s life. But neither of these quite have the flavour of the Japanese, which is more or less along the lines of two atomic bombs have gone off… that’s life! Well, it’s a bit more than that’s life! It’s shoganai.

Q: It’s fate?

RF: Well, that’s another expression. But if two bombs went off down the road from me, I think I might say a bit more than that’s fate! In Japan shoganai is a wonderfully multivalent word which covers just about every circumstance: from someone I love has just been crushed on the subway to there is no hope whatsoever. It can be a very powerfully emotive word in Japan. You have a sense of hopelessness and despair – a reasonable person might despair.

On the other hand, hope is unreasonable. And love is greater than this.

Robert Fripp is a genius. Thank you, mystery guy.