Crying in the wilderness

I made this giffy slide-show thingie to illustrate a piece of music which I can't include here, 'cuz it ain't on the internet anywhere. It's from an old Paul Winter album called Canyon, and it consists of a cello playing doomy, moody arpeggios while a man sings like he is hanging off the edge of the world.

It's a wilderness wail, a come-to-the-end-of-everything howl of sorrow and grief that is quite extraordinary, because it has no words. Not many could do that. In fact, I don't think I've heard ANYONE do it besides this guy, whoever he is.

This gif didn't turn out great. It purposely runs quite slowly to try to match the music. I cropped the 46 frames totally wrong, should've gone for widescreen and instead chose something closer to a square. I found some great images, but the gif program spat them back out at me with white margins, which they never had going in.

The photos are a collection of private and public ones, all on the theme of - what - angst? Aloneness? Mortality, and the great unfathomable? Maybe all of those things. 

I look at other people, and it's not that I think they're necessarily richer or smarter, but don't they just have it "better" than me in some indefinable way? Such as being a famous writer. There's one. No one knocked her guts out as much as I did, for so little reward. It just wasn't in the cards for me.

Other things worked out, but how mortal are we? We all hang by a spiderweb. We had a death in the family on Friday, not really close family but very much a part of the circle for years. He had been off the scene for several years when his wife became estranged from my daughter-in-law. But family is family, is it not? - the only glue I've had in my life. Oh, yes, I know these are universal things, we all die, but isn't it terrifying just the same? We don't know when or how, or who. I would like to go first, but I see how selfish that is, and how unlikely.

So if you watch these images, sort of badly-cropped because I wasn't thinking, try to imagine a man crying in the wilderness, his voice rising and falling, lamenting in grief, while a cello moans and keens in the background.

It's how I'm feeling right now.

POST-BLOG. OK, it's the next day and I see these images totally differently. I think it's one of the best gif slideshows I've made. Who knows how I will feel about it tomorrow.