Die Winterreise XXIV: The Hurdy-Gurdy Man~

to overtone and underscore the mood and the many faces of it, the chasms and the chases of it, those halfheartedly-run races, traces of joy sown amid the sorrow and the sadness; and if that there organ grinder has a job-opening for a more-or-less reliable monkey, well then I'm his boy. Not to fit too fine a face to the farce, but such is indeed life in this little village here, the ass-end of nowhere where I’ve ended up. That’s me! Take me with you please, time for some new material to tie to your tatters, and let a new tune rattle... 
 

and so now at the last we walk widdershins among the lost; no more sense to make of it, truth to tell or to take of it, by the stream or the lake of it... Never mind—enough of that! Suffering from a surfeit of sorrows both latent and manifest, not likely to look away nor to even find respite if I could—and this was nodoubt how the blues was invented oh so long ago, as once more I write between the lines. And does such an action engender confusion, or rather offer any clarification? Taking my time, learning a new way around the shame old stuff, reliable misery, to be sure. Better the despair that we know, rather than the unfamiliar? All the salt water we can wring out of the same sad situation. In no sense frivolous, even though sometimes a little on the funny side, this sidewise slide, these questions of culture that we insist upon asking although we already know—an answer sure not to please us, like the dogs snarling around the old man, or the winter’s ice to freeze us... And good example—sometimes we make a wrong turn and have to dig out of a ditch, or just remake the miles we’ve lost, at such and such a ways a way... But at times, we might even get a right good song out of it—



© james oliver wright, 2011