Via Negativa

March 14, 2006August 1, 2015 by Abdul-Walid

The Mayor of Niafunke

Gwari women in the Sahel (photo by Abdul-Walid)
“What is wrong, my love? It is you I love.
Do not be angry, do not cry.
Do not be sad because of love.”
– Ali Farka Toure, “Diaraby”

I was in Ghent last week when I heard that Ali Farka Toure had died. I was calm and sad. I went into the living room and told my hosts that a great man had left life behind. Though they were fans of world music, they had not heard of him. But perhaps they saw in my eyes something of his spirit, because when I came down to breakfast the next morning, no one was in the room but Ali Farka Toure was singing. My hosts had gone out and bought Talking Timbuktu that very morning. It was a rainy day in Flanders, but in Northern Mali, and all across the Sahel as far as Abuja, a great dust storm was whipping around the funeral cortege of the late mayor as it moved towards Niafunke.

I first started listening to Ali twelve years ago, when Talking Timbuktu was released. Two years earlier, a friend of mine had driven me to a record shop and, in great excitement, had bought me a new disc. That CD was called Meeting by the River, and it featured Ry Cooder on a modified slide guitar and Vishwa Mohan Bhatt on a modified vina. As I listened to those musical dialogues, I was awed by the depth of the relationship between the two master musicians. So, looking for lightning to strike twice, I bought Ry Cooder’s next album when it came out.

It was an amazing audio document. There was no surprise at all when it went on to win a Grammy that year. And it caught the crest of something called “world music,” introducing many people to the musical riches of far-off places like Mali. For me, it was the sound of the spirit: Talking Timbuktu made me homesick for Africa, though the music it contained had nothing directly to do with the part of Africa I came from. In fact, a Nigerian friend used to tease me – “You’re listening to that Hausa music again!” What he meant was that the music evoked the agrarian, Sahelian world that both Northern Nigeria and Northern Mali had in common, the world of syncretic Islam and the cultures of the Mande, the Fulani, the Peul, the Hausa. It had, in other words, nothing at all to do with me, a Southerner, a Christian, a Yoruba.

And yet, playing “Soukoraï¿½? (track two) over and over again, I found in it something that had everything to do with me. I didn’t know what the words meant – still don’t – but I knew there was something in the music that was deeply relational. I was hooked. A sizable proportion of my income began to go toward music from all over the world. Much of that music was from Africa, especially Mali: Oumou Sangare, Habib Koite, Afel Bocoum, Kandia Kouyate, Salif Keita, Toumani Diabate and, of course, the great Djemilady Tounkara. It was the league of heroes. A private passion was born.

When, a few years later, the opening bars of “Diarabyï¿½? (track ten) became a signature riff on the public radio show The World, I was pleased and irritated at the same time. This was my album being broadcast to millions daily, without due attribution or respect, used as the theme for a geography quiz – and not a particularly difficult one, either. How dare they cannibalize a masterpiece for such a humdrum purpose? I had all the intolerance of a fresh convert, but in truth I secretly grew to love this modest representation of my world in the wider world. Ali’s music was everywhere. Maybe even in the White House, it had climbed in through the windows and shot the President precisely where he most needed it.

I was living in London at the end of the last century and that was when Ali Farka Toure released Niafunke, named after his home village. I bought it right away, along with Afel Bocoum’s Alkibar, which had been recorded at the same time, in the same village, by the same crew. Both were gorgeously produced, released on the Nick Gold and Jerry Boys label World Circuit.

I loved Niafunke, but wondered – could anything really compare with Talking Timbuktu? Was there any sound on God’s earth that could measure up to the final bars of “Gomni,” when Ry Cooder and Ali Farka Toure restate the song’s theme in an almost unparalleled harmonic union of guitar lines that makes the hairs stand up every single time? Could the pained longing expressed in “Ai Duï¿½? have an equal on any other album?

I had my answer soon enough, when Ali Farka Toure came to play at the Barbican. Ticket prices were steep, by my impoverished student standards: â‚¤20 per person, and it was double for me because I had invited a friend along. But what a night! Before the concert, Habib Koite had been playing in the lobby, which was apt preparation. The hall was packed. Ali Farka Toure, dark and authoritative, cracked jokes from the stage and put us at our ease before the concert started. And then, the wall of sound: Hamma Sankare was a monster on the calabash, that humblest of percussion instruments; Afel Bocoum, appearing with his mentor of thirty years, was in fine voice; and the master himself, from whose guitar glistening chords unfurled on song after beautiful song. Occasionally, he would take the stage alone with his njarka and do what can only be described as calling out to the spirits. And they came, filled the Barbican to the rafters. The Londoners were awed, shaken. This was “early music” in the best sense of the word, sounds that took us back to something we might once have known.

Soon after, I finally penetrated the mystery of Niafunke. It had become clear to me that the somewhat glossy perfection of Talking Timbuktu had been jettisoned here in favor of a rawer energy. The grooves were similar, but the guitar crackled with electricity. The ambience of the recording was noticeably warmer: it was recorded in an abandoned schoolroom in Mali, not a high-tech Los Angeles studio. In fact, if there’s any flaw with Talking Timbuktu, it’s this relative lack of ambience. But to speak of Talking Timbuktu and Niafunke in this way – not to mention The Source and In the Heart of the Moon – seems almost sinful. These albums all deserve six stars out of five. Soul runs through them all. I just don’t get those “world music” snobs who dismiss albums like Talking Timbuktu because a white guy plays on it, or because it’s not tinny and scratchy like the recordings from the seventies for Radio Mali. Who cares who plays on it? As Duke Ellington said, “If it sounds good, it is good.”

In those days, I played Niafunke everyday, along with my other favorite at the time, the album of kora duets by Ballake Sissoko and Toumani Diabate called New Ancient Strings. Once, I was sitting in the university library listening to Niafunke through my oversized headphones, when a young European woman I had been trying to attract came over and sat with me. What a wonderful opportunity, I thought.

I placed the headphones over her ears and cued up track four, “Saukare.ï¿½? Ali Farka Toure learned this song in 1946, at a wedding, and it has a deep, alien sound, nothing like one might hear growing up in, say, Trondheim. In retrospect, this was most certainly not the song to draw a first-time listener to the man’s music: it’s just Ali singing, accompanied by the njarka, a single drum, and a chorus of two other voices as unsweetened as his. In any case, I explained to this Norwegian with her bright blue eyes that the song was about an ardent groom, that he was promising to bring his bride the finest bull in the herd as proof of his love. I suppose I thought this was just the thing to make her fall madly in love with me, but it didn’t seem to have the intended effect. She listened to the song politely, completely mystified. After that, we would exchange awkward hellos whenever we encountered each other in the hallways of the school.

Since then I’ve learned to temper my enthusiasm, at least in public. In private, different rules apply: “Roucky” from the 1993 release The Source still makes me feel like I’m in the best church possible; “Sambou Ya Ya” from the new release In the Heart of the Moon still speaks deathlessness into my skeptical spirit; “Gomni” – the version on Talking Timbuktu – still makes me cry. They are the work of a man who, in his generosity, in his fierce superstitions, was utterly unlike me. And yet, if I am not in such music, I am nowhere at all.

The day Ali Farka Toure died, and a day before I found out about it, I happened to hear his music. It was a Belgian television show about AIDS in Kenya, following the story of a woman who, after living in the Netherlands for a long time, went back home to help educate her fellow Kenyans about the disease. “Why Ali Farka Toure?” I asked my wife, greatly annoyed. “It makes no sense, using West African music to illuminate an East African film! They’re always trying to pull this crap, thinking no one would notice.” My wife, a genius at handling my overreactions, said nothing.

I kept watching the film, which used fragments of different songs from Niafunke: here a bus journey in the dusk, there a scene from a mountain looking out over the slums outside Nairobi. Eventually, I had to admit that it was a perfect fit. The music went along with the images, because both were about what all good art is about: being there, being present to what is, serving mystery and the visible. I like to think that the sound of “ASCO” entered my ears that evening at the very moment that Ali Farka Toure’s spirit was leaving his body, a thousand miles away.

The great Sahelian dust storm has settled for now. Ali Farka Toure, monsieur le maire de Niafunke, is gone. But his way of being in the world will continue to speak life to many, and this surely is one way of not dying.

—

ALI FARKA TOURE: a recommended playlist
(all available on iTunes)

1. Roucky (The Source)
2. Gomni (Talking Timbuktu)
3. ASCO (Niafunke)
4. Saukare (Niafunke)
5. Sambou Ya Ya (In the Heart of the Moon)
6. Cinquante Six (The Source)
7. Soukora (Talking Timbuktu)
8. Diaraby (Talking Timbuktu)
9. Howadolo (In the Heart of the Moon)

Also, don’t miss the tribute by Lucy Duran and Andy Kershaw on BBC Radio 3.

Used by permission. All rights reserved by the author.
See also The grass snake.

—Abdul-Walid of Acerbia

March 13, 2006September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

The owl’s insomnia

Standing in the shower on the morning after we went to see the snowy owl, I found the words to one of Rafael Alberti’s many poems called “Canción” running through my head:

Si my voz muriera en tierra,
llevadla al nivel del mar
y dejadla en la ribera.

Llevadla al nivel del mar
y nombradla capitana
de un blanco bajel de guerra.

Oh mi voz condecorada
con la insignia marinera…

I couldn’t quite remember the last few lines, so after my shower, on my way out to the porch, I grabbed my bilingual edition of Alberti’s poems, selected and translated by Mark Strand: The Owl’s Insomnia (Atheneum, 1982).

Insomnia? Well, perhaps so. What else might explain the amazing persistence of this Arctic vagrant, a veritable capitana de un blanco bajel de guerra shipwrecked in Central Pennsylvania on one of the mildest winters on record? For a month and a half he has sat implacably at one of several locations along a stretch of interstate highway near Rockview state prison, with meal breaks presumably consisting of meadow voles and other rodents. With all the traffic roaring past, not to mention the steady stream of admirers like us, one can well imagine he might be suffering from some form of insomnia – whatever that would mean for an owl. For most of this time here there’s been no snow cover to speak of, though the ground inside cloverleaf interchanges might be nearly as barren as the frozen tundra.

This past Saturday, the temperature was in the low sixties, and the owl huddled in the meager shade afforded by the concrete entrance to a culvert, described as his favorite spot in the birders’ listserve. I felt as if we had come to pay our respects to some avian anchorite of great holiness. My brother pointed out the heavy bars on the culvert, no doubt intended to seal off a potential hiding place for escaped convicts. The owl’s eyes were never completely open, nor did they ever appear to shut all the way. He slowly pivoted his head as other cars parked on the shoulder of the exit ramp and more visitors emerged. We were at first surprised by the demographics, which included two different sets of mother-with-daughter-aged 10-12. “Hedwig!” Steve exclaimed, ever the authority on popular culture. “They’re here to see Hedwig!” Apparently a snowy owl by that name is featured in the Harry Potter books and movies.

A raven suddenly flew in low over our heads, and we noticed a pair of horned larks fluttering around on the cloverleaf tundra within fifty feet of the owl. Less than a mile away, the state’s official execution chamber awaited its next victim and hundreds of modern-day slaves toiled indoors and out, under the assumption that Arbeit macht frei. It was eerie. During the whole twenty minutes we kept up our vigil, the owl never stopped looking like an apparition:

sobre el corazón un ancla
y sobre el ancla una estrella
y sobre la estrella el viento
y sobre el viento la vela!*

__________

*Here’s my translation of the poem by Rafael Alberti.

SONG

If my voice should die on land,
carry it down to the sea
and leave it on the shore.

Carry it down to the sea
and make it captain of a white
ship of war.

Oh my voice, decorated
with the emblem of a sailor:
over the heart an anchor,
and over the anchor a star,
and over the star the wind,
and over the wind the sail!

March 12, 2006September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

A farewell to ice

In memory of Tom Fox
peace worker
blogger
American hero

“There are no words.”
– Tom Fox, last blog entry

March 12, 2006 by Dave Bonta

March rain

It’s raining.
Downspouts gargle furiously
around frogs of ice.
The barn cat listens & licks her pregnant belly.

It’s raining, the first warm rain of spring.
Sap rises, & the green nibs
where bulbs will write
their deathless names in the air.

It’s raining, it’s pouring.
Worms poke through the muddy ruins
of once-grand palaces of frost.

It’s raining.
Under the bark of a log,
the ant queen resumes her slow march.

March 10, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Dump in the woods

Same pics, different day

It was in a month of Sundays, shirking from work, that I drove a shovel’s metal moon deep into the old farm dump & came up full. Squat bottles lay nested in circles like dinosaur eggs, or children at play suddenly engulfed by the pyroclastic flow from a backwoods Vesuvius.

To be human is to be the object of a bear’s withering scorn. You won’t read this in any philosophical treatise, but it’s true. I have found survey tape ripped from trees, hunters’ blinds torn apart, an abandoned plastic jerry can stippled with tooth-marks. We must seem slow & skinny & hairless & weak. But worst of all, we are heedless. We dump in the woods. A bear could be watching me right this minute, blinking myopically as the moist wings of her nostrils flutter open & shut.

Springs hope eternally for one last go-round before the ground swallows them, one more, rusty bump & grind of their hurdy-gurdy epithaliamium, muffled now under sheet music of leaves.

Hush-a-bye, don’t you cry,
Go to sleep little baby,
When you awake, you will have cake,
And all the pretty little horses.

Way down yonder, down in the meadow,
There’s a poor little lambie,
Bees and butterflies pecking out its eyes,
The poor little thing cried mammy.

Good god, what hullabaloo used to qualify for a lullaby! No wonder the old toys still make a break for it whenever a flood interrupts their uneasy sleep.

Heaved from the bed of a pickup, the microwave oven bounded down slope and came to rest against a clump of witch hazel with its door ajar. Now at last it was free to welcome all comers, including metal forks & spoons & anything with an ounce of water in it, all the one-time occupants of Noah’s Ark. Scattered nearby, plastic bones of the microwave-safe leviathan slowly crumbled under the sun’s ultraviolet rays.

Glass is forever, chant the moss plants as they crowd in for another mass betrothal.

After Ma Bell gave birth to the first transistor, an engineer quipped: Nature abhors a vacuum tube. But it’s not so. All circuit boards face an equally grim future as viscera: the glass & metal organs of some monstrous creature of habit, abstract & imperishable.

I peer down at the rusty bucket as into a crystal ball, seeing clear to the other side of a slightly squashed world where blue geese rise from rice stubble on wings of zinc.

March 9, 2006September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Why I love trash

Until I was five, we lived on an old farm in central Maine, near the town of Waterville. It was a great place, with a couple of derelict barns to explore, an old field, some woods – in short, not too different from where I live now. But one of the things I really missed after we moved down here were our visits to the Waterville town dump. Every month or so Dad would load up our red Volkswagen bus with everything we couldn’t compost, and Steve and I would clamor to go along. Once there, we’d race around looking for cast-off treasures. I think there was even a special area for this, where people would pile all the half-decent stuff that they no longer wanted or had room for, in case someone else might care to pick it up. It was the original Freecycle network. I don’t remember if we ever found anything really good at the dump, but the possibility was always there. This early childhood experience imprinted me with a strong notion that trash was fun.

You can learn a lot about a people by studying how they relate to their trash. My brother Mark, the geography prof, once described a field trip he’d led through East Texas. As soon as you drive into a town you can tell who lives there, he said. Tejanos like lots of flowers in their yards, and the shrines to the Virgin of Guadalupe are a dead giveaway. African-American yards tend to be neat but minimalistic: bare dirt swept with a broom, just like in West Africa. And Anglos? “You can tell the white neighborhoods by all the trash.”

So as hateful as the term “white trash” might be, like most stereotypes it didn’t come out of a vacuum. When we moved back to our ancestral homeland of Pennsylvania (albeit a little farther west than any of my grandparents had lived), we quickly and unthinkingly fell into the pattern of taking all our trash out to the old farm dump. It was just what people did back then. Dumps were usually located in the nearest patch of woods to the house; our neighbor Margaret’s old dump was less than a hundred feet from her porch. Our dump had been established maybe a hundred yards from the house, just beyond the powerline right-of-way. Two things about its placement seem baffling today: they threw their trash on what I think was originally an old charcoal hearth from the early nineteenth century, located right where the stream that drains the whole watershed emerges from the ground. Every hard rain, smaller pieces of trash floated downstream, along with god knows what seeping poisons. And the other weird thing was that the dump was right next to what had been, for three generations, the Plummer family picnic grove.

So on the one hand, before the environmental movement took hold in the mid 1970s, we rarely gave a thought to the toxic effect of some of the stuff we pitched out, such as batteries or almost-empty cans of Raid. But on the other hand, we didn’t necessarily regard trash as something to be shunned and avoided. Like many farm kids, my brothers and I actively sought out abandoned dump sites and attacked them with shovels, hunting for old bottles. Dad closed our own dump around 1975 and started taking our trash to the local landfill – a joyless place. But we continued prospecting in the dump for years, rewarded by the occasional, unbroken bottle from a hundred years ago, the glass wavy, spotted with bubbles and aged to a mellow purple. And though several large trees have fallen across it, and we’ve covered as much of the dump site as we can with dirt from various construction projects, ancient plastic toys and detergent bottles still do wash out and migrate downhollow during the occasional flood.

Raised without television, we were deprived of the allegedly educational benefits of Sesame Street. But thanks to an elementary school music teacher, I did learn the tune and some of the words to Oscar’s theme song:

I’ve a clock that won’t work
And an old telephone
A broken umbrella, a rusty trombone
And I am delighted to call them my own!
I love them because they’re trash

I still feel that way to a degree. While I no longer bring trash home, now that I own a camera, I have begun collecting again. Chris Jordan’s photos of landfills and recycling centers, mentioned in my post last Friday, made me think there might be some value in building my own photo exhibition of “intolerable beauty.” But while Jordan focuses on trash in the aggregate, in all its teeming splendor, I am more attracted to single pieces and small groups. And whereas Jordan’s perspective is unapologetically urban, I am much more interested in looking at trash as part of a human-impacted, semi-wild landscape.

To me, litter is a form of found art. When an object is discarded, it becomes free: free for the picking, yes, but also existentially free, no longer bound to one, narrow, utilitarian role. A well-situated dump is like a sculpture garden.

Old dumps are attractive in the same way that ruins are. Ask any volunteer at an archaeological dig: as things corrode and decay, they gain charisma. A great deal of our visual intake on any given day consists of the too-bright, too-good-to-be-true allurements of kitsch culture and advertising. But let those cheap plastic toys sit out in the sun for a few decades, let the tawdry billboards in “blighted” neighborhoods peel and flake and attract graffiti, and such objects – designed as trash – can attain a wholly unintended picturesque quality – even a hint of redemption.

Two very different types of people are attracted to the environmental movement: fans of cleanliness and order, who shudder with horror at all forms of pollution, and those of us who feel most at home in the apparent chaos of wild nature. Though able to form alliances around many issues, our priorities do sometimes divide us. For example, like Ed Abbey, I regard roadsides and especially highway median strips as the perfect place to store our trash, and view people who “adopt” sections of highways as part of the problem, not part of the solution.*

Litter is like a weed: obnoxious because it’s in the wrong place, because its virtues are under-appreciated, and/or because it is simply too numerous, and threatens to overwhelm the native inhabitants. A single, stray tire, rusty old bucket or whiskey bottle out in the middle of the woods hardly seems like litter at all.

Like Chris Jordan, I’m deeply troubled by our consumer culture and its effects on the planet. But I am less troubled than he seems to be by the potential of trash to entrance us. As mortal beings, ultimately we are what we throw away, and I think it’s good to be reminded of that. Time can ravage, but it can also illuminate with a wholly unexpected grace. It’s the “out of sight, out of mind” attitude that really enables the thoughtless impulse to throw the old stuff away and buy new – and at the same time leads us to disregard the harmful effects of anything we can’t see at all. We’re an intensely visual species.

Learn to appreciate the patina of age, and you’ll soon find yourself haunting junk shops and yard sales rather than the mall, and when you do have to buy new, saving enough money to buy high-quality stuff that won’t end up in the landfill. Or you may become like me (quel horreur!) – satisfied with the images alone, returning from the dump with a full memory card and a renewed appreciation for the stuff you already have. Hey, you say to yourself, that doesn’t look half-bad! At least it still works. Sure, it’s got some nicks or rust spots, but a little bit of elbow grease and it’ll be as good as new. Better, in fact.

__________

*Here’s my standard, anti-anti-litter rant, provided free of charge as a public service: We don’t need “cleaner” highways, we need fewer highways. Perhaps if they didn’t look so neat and uncluttered, people wouldn’t be so enthusiastic about building new ones. And what happens to the trash you “clean up”? Doesn’t it simply abet the spread of landfills, which are almost invariably located well out of sight and smell of major roads and population centers, often smack in the middle of wild areas? If you must indulge your neatnik impulse, why not adopt a railroad?

March 8, 2006September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

More on love

Thanks to everyone who took part in the discussion about love, sex and Brokeback Mountain in the comment thread to Monday’s post, which in many ways has turned out to be more interesting than the post that spawned it.

Now one of the participants, Zhoen, has fleshed out her thoughts about love and the body in a brief essay called, simply, Body. Hers is a very embodied kind of thinking, moving from story to story and avoiding didacticism – a model of the blogging art. Do stop by.

March 8, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Yum

March 7, 2006September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

The grass snake

This morning was so clear, so blue. The bluebirds began singing long before the sun came up, when Venus was still ablaze over the eastern horizon. I sat watching her inch sideways through the trees, fading into the dawn sky.

I didn’t write anything substantial this morning, but I knew I could’ve – and sometimes just that knowledge, that feeling of the writing spirit close at hand, is sufficient. It was too hard to stay indoors. All the melancholy pictures that I’d taken yesterday afternoon, under a flat, gray sky, had to be taken over again! But before I did that, I’d need some fuel.

Going into the kitchen for breakfast, I felt an odd impulse to listen to a few songs by Ali Farka Toure while I ate. Sure, he’s one of my favorite musicians and singers, but I almost never listen to anything during breakfast – no radio, no music. I don’t want to derail my own train of thoughts. But this morning, I wanted to hear his evocation of the grass snake, “Sega,” on the one-string West African fiddle (njarka). The next song on the Talking Timbuktu CD, the Tuareg blues song Amandrai, also complemented my mood. But it was the conjuring sound of the njarka I had most wanted to hear.

Ali Farka Toure’s music has deep spiritual roots, born of a classic shamanic initiation type of crisis – this despite his Sunni Muslim beliefs. (Islam in Mali tends to be very tolerant and syncretic.) Years ago, when I was reading a translation of a French anthropological text on the Gimbala spirit possession cult of the bend of the Niger, I was surprised to find Ali Farka Toure included as an informant. In some album liner notes I just discovered online, he describes his entry into the world of spirits and music:

I knew the spirit who gave me the gift very well. And I remember that night in Niafunke [Toure’s home village]. A night I’ll never forget. I was about thirteen years old. I was chatting with some friends. I had a monochord [single string guitar] in my hand. I was wandering playing ordinary songs, just like that. It was about 2.00 am. I got to a place where l saw three girls standing like steps of stairs, one higher than the other. I lifted my right foot. The left one wouldn’t move. I stood like that until 4.00 am. Next day l walked to the edge of the fields. I didn’t have my instrument with me. I saw a snake with a strange mark on its head. Only one snake. I still remember the colour. Black and white. No yellow, no other colour, just black and white. And it wrapped itself around my head. I brushed it off, it fell and went into a hole and I fled. Since then l started to have attacks.

I entered a new world. It’s different from when you’re in a normal state; you’re not the same person you know. You don’t feel anything anymore, whether it’s fire, water or if you are beaten. I was sent to the village of Hombori to be cured and I stayed there for a year. When l felt better, I returned home to my family. There I began playing again and I was very well received by the spirits. I have all the spirits. I possess all the spirits and I work with them. I was born among them and grew up among them.

Ali Farka Toure became adept at crossing between worlds, mastering many languages and translating traditional music into modern idioms. He adapted to the international concert scene with great ease. At the same time, however, he remained firmly rooted in his home ground, and considered himself first and foremost a farmer.

He pioneered the adaptation of Sonrhaí¯, Peuhl and Tamascheq styles to the guitar. Even today, few have followed his path. His charismatic person, his fine voice and intricate flowing guitar technique, his good looks and enigmatic character, have all contributed to give him prestige. He remains uncompromisingly wedded to his traditional music, refusing to “go commercial”. His songs celebrate love, friendship, peace, the land, the spirits, the river and Mali; all expressed in dense metaphors.

What was it that made me decide to listen to Ali Farka Toure this morning, on the very day of his death? Something in the air, perhaps, something in the sky. When my brother Steve emailed the news a few hours later, my other brother, Mark, replied with some amazement that Ali Farka’s name had come up in class the night before – a mere couple of hours after his death. “That sort of thing is always happening to me,” he said. Maybe this was a worldwide phenomenon: fans of the great Malian bluesman suddenly feeling odd compulsions to listen to his music as they breathed in the atoms from his dying breath, like particles of dust from the ever-shrinking Sahel blown high into the jet stream, encircling the globe, adding a faint blush to the dawn sky.

March 7, 2006 by Dave Bonta

What is the via negativa?

R. S. Thomas knew.

VIA NEGATIVAWhy no! I never thought other than
That God is that great absence
In our lives, the empty silence
Within, the place where we go
Seeking, not in hope to
Arrive or find. He keeps the interstices
In our knowledge, the darkness
Between stars. His are the echoes
We follow, the footprints he has just
Left. We put our hands in
His side hoping to find
It warm. We look at people
And places as though he had looked
At them, too; but miss the reflection.

Found via Janus at the door. R. S. Thomas was the preeminent Welsh poet of the second half of the 20th century. He was an Anglican clergyman, an ardent Welsh nationalist and a conservationist. A discussion of the apophatic dimension of his work may be found here.