We all enter this
horrific, undiscovered
space. Monday morning!

Every other day, every other day
Every other day of the week is fine, yeah
But whenever Monday comes, but whenever Monday comes
A-you can find me cryin´ all of the time

Songwriters: John Edmund Andrew Phillips Monday Monday lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group

Say all you should say
Say it loud and say it clear
Let the whole world hear

Adapted from the song I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free written by Billy Taylor and Dick Dallas. Taylor’s original version (as “I Wish I Knew”) was recorded on November 12, 1963, and released on his Right Here, Right Now! album (Capitol ST-2039) the following year. (Wikipedia)

Possibly the best known recorded version is by Nina Simone which I enjoy but I did find a wonderful instrumental arranged by Don Shirley (with one of the best bass rip/intros ever), the concert pianist portrayed in the movie The Green Book.

I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free

I wish I knew how it would feel to be free
I wish I could break all the chains holding me
I wish I could say all the things that I should say
Say ’em loud, say ’em clear
For the whole round world to hear

I wish I could share all the love that’s in my heart
Remove all the bars that keep us apart
I wish you could know what it means to be me
Then you’d see and agree
That every man should be free

I wish I could give all I’m longing to give
I wish I could live like I’m longing to live
I wish that I could do all the things that I can do
Though I’m way overdue I’d be starting anew

Well I wish I could be like a bird in the sky
How sweet it would be if I found I could fly
Oh I’d soar to the sun and look down at the sea
And I’d sing cos I’d know that
And I’d sing cos I’d know that
And I’d sing cos I’d know that
I’d know how it feels to be free
I’d know how it feels to be free
I’d know how it feels to be free

Had Mozart not been …
Lesser world, I think, but how?
Just glad he was here!

I will tell you that had I been able to write or compose the opening notes of Mozart’s Piano sonata 11, just the opening notes, the first 8 bars or whatever that play and then repeat (Piano Sonata No. 11 in A major, K. 331 – I. Andante grazioso,)I feel I could die a happy man.

That that accomplishment would be enough for me.

To top it all off, I will tell you that it wouldn’t matter if anyone knew I had written it or not as long as it was part of the human collective experience.

I like to imagine this when I feel the frustration of life and work and and overall lack of fulfillment.

Not sure what I want or wanted to accomplish with my life.

I know I am not going to compose any music.

If Mozart had not been born and not left us the library of his composition, would the world notice?

If we never had Mozart, how would we notice he was not there?

Still I will persist and accept and say that the world would have been a lesser place without Mozart.

I am not going to argue the point.

I am not going to try and compose any music.

I am just going to listen to Mozart and the Sonata #11 anytime I want to and enjoy it.

humanity searching
escape bland neutrality
where we find ourselves

In a recent article, The Clockwork Condition: lost sequel to A Clockwork Orange discovered, Alison Flood writes:

Burgess writes in the manuscript of how the 1970s are a “clockwork inferno”, with humans no more than cogs in the machine, “no longer much like a natural growth, not humanly organic”. Humanity is “searching for an escape from the bland neutrality of the condition in which they find themselves”, he says, in a work that he envisaged as a philosophical piece of writing structured around Dante’s Inferno. Burgess had planned sections with titles including “Infernal Man”, trapped in a world of machines, and “Purgatorial Man”, trying to break out of the mechanical inferno.

He had hoped that surreal photographs and quotations from other writers on the topics of freedom and the individual would supplement his text, but as the project grew more ambitious, he found himself struggling to complete it as his popularity as an author grew.

“Eventually Burgess came to realise that the proposed non-fiction book was beyond his capabilities, as he was a novelist and not a philosopher. It was then suggested that he should publish a diary under the title The Year of the Clockwork Orange, but this project was also abandoned,” said Biswell.

“Instead he wrote a short autobiographical novel, that also features clockwork in the title – The Clockwork Testament. Published as an illustrated novel in 1974, the book engages with the same thematic material he had intended to use in The Clockwork Condition, such as good and evil, original sin, and the problems of modernity and violence.”

So many authors on the theme of escape, I have to ask, is life really that bad?

Is the grass always, ALWAYS greener on the other side of the hill?

On the search of self discovery, our heros always seem to find that that the road leads home.