Shuffle Synchronicities: Volume 1 - #66
"I Mind" by James Blake - 03/09/21
“I Mind” by James Blake
When I first looked up this James Blake song’s lyrics it said that it was just the phrase “I mind” over and over.
But then on Genius.com it points out that another voice is saying something else.
Which complicates what I was planning on writing about.
But also improves it?
I mind
I mind
I mind
Originally, I was thinking about how yesterday I deleted the dating apps and felt so much better. Especially after I started to re-read Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now.
There was a passage I read about the state of mind of waiting or envy or desire for the future that really resonated.
“Waiting is a state of mind. Basically, it means that you want the future; you don’t want the present. You don’t want what you’ve got, and you want what you haven’t got. With every kind of waiting, you unconsciously create inner conflict between your here and now, where you don’t want to be, and the projected future, where you want to be. This greatly reduces the quality of your life by making you lose the present.”
I felt Tolle’s sonorous pacifying words leading me into presence, into Being, into the Now.
And thought, this will last again forever!
This song seems to be about that process of meditating/living in the Now of “I mind.”
But then falling into desire.
Desire for:
(Pussy)
LOL
I mind
(Pussy)
That constant back and forth between Being and Desire now reminds me of a Lydia Davis story called
new year’s resolution
I ask my friend Bob what his New Year’s resolutions are and he says, with a shrug (indicating that this is obvious or not surprising): to drink less, to lose weight… He asks me the same, but I am not ready to answer him yet. I have been studying my Zen again, in a mild way, out of desperation over the holidays, though mild desperation. A medal or a rotten tomato, it’s all the same, says the book I have been reading. After a few days of consideration, I think the most truthful answer to my friend Bob would be: My New Year’s resolution is to learn to see myself as nothing.
Pussy
I mind
Pussy
I mind
Pussy
I mind
Pussy
I mind
Is this competitive? He wants to lose some weight, I want to learn to see myself as nothing. Of course, to be competitive is not in keeping with any Buddhist philosophy. A true nothing is not competitive. But I don’t think I’m being competitive when I say it. I am feeling truly humble, at that moment. Or I think I am--in fact, can anyone be truly humble at the moment they say they want to learn to be nothing? But there is another problem, which I have been wanting to describe to Bob for a few weeks now: at last, halfway through your life, you are smart enough to see that it all amounts to nothing, even success amounts to nothing. But how does a person learn to see herself as nothing when she already had so much trouble learning to see herself as something in the first place? It’s so confusing. You spend the first half of your life learning that you are something after all, now you have to spend the second half learning to see yourself as nothing. You have been a negative nothing, now you want to be a positive nothing.
I mind (ooh)
I mind
(Pussy)
I mind
(Pussy)
I have begun trying, in these first days of the new year, but so far it’s pretty difficult. I’m pretty close to nothing all morning, but by late afternoon what is in me that is something starts throwing its weight around. This happens many days. By evening, I’m full of something and it’s often something nasty and pushy. So what I think at this point is that I’m aiming too high, that maybe nothing is too much, to begin with. Maybe for now I should just try, each day, to be a little less that I usually am.
Pussy
I mind
Pussy
I mind
Pussy
I mind
Pussy
I mind
What Davis seems to be saying is that in the ebb and flow between Being and Desire, between “I mind” and “Pussy”, almost all of us will not be able to stay in the former forever, but we can for now try to be a little less in the latter than we usually are.
And, for what it’s worth, Blake ends on “I mind.”
Okay, that’s the sixty-sixth Shuffle Synchronicities.