Calypso

Blogs have formed a large part of my reading over the last year. Some brilliant ones have sadly gone defunct, some evolved, some barely register in my brain. Some are awful, some are rip-roaringly funny.

I've recently come across a particularly painful one, in which the author is constantly lamenting the lack of comments on what he perceives are his more intellectual posts. He's obsessed to the extent of threatening to stop blogging because the silence hurt too much. Suggestions from certain commentators on his writing style were badly received, to say the least.

My.

People who choose to make their thoughts public by putting them online and inviting, no, even expecting, comments thereon need to understand that unlike in the real world, you are opening a window into your mind/heart solely via your words. Sans bling bling advertising in the form of your mannerisms, appearance, knack for physical comedy or actions.

Catching someone's attention enough to continue reading your writing, what more leave a comment, depends solely on how good you are at combining individual words into kick-ass sentences that leap from the screen and grabs the reader by the eyeballs...no, actually, by the heart.

As I've said, I love words. I love how certain arrangements can touch you to your very core, get under your skin and rip your heart out. Writing is a craft. And it's all in the delivery.

Emily Saliers (the woman must have a Muse hidden somewhere inside her guitar case) put it best in a song that was inspired by her reading the Diaries of Virginia Woolf. In case it isn't already glaringly obvious, I'm very into lyrics. Heh.

They published your diary
and that's how i got to know you
the key to the room of your own and a mind without end

and here's a young girl
on a kind of a telephone line through time
and the voice at the other end comes like a long lost friend

so i know i'm all right
life will come and life will go
still i feel it's all right

cause i just got a letter to my soul

Getting a letter to your soul. That's what good writing does for me. That's just so amazing, to have the words of someone who lived in a different age reach through a "telephone line through time" and touch your soul, as the classic books do.

Delivery, delivery, delivery.

Anyway. What has this got to do with the title of this post? I've always thought that Calypso was one of the Greek Muses, which therefore would be like, so relevant and apt. But no, that was Calliope.

Never mind. Calypso is also the name of a song by Suzanne Vega, one of the world's best songwriters in my book. A very simple, hauntingly lyrical melody.

My name is Calypso
And I have lived alone
I live on an island and I waken to the dawn

A long time ago
I watched him struggle with the sea
I knew that he was drowning and I brought him into me

Now today
Come morning light
He sails away
After one last night
I let him go.

My name is Calypso,
My garden overflows
Thick and wild and hidden
Is the sweetness there that grows
My hair, it blows long
As I sing into the wind

I tell of nights
Where I could taste the salt on his skin
Salt of the waves
And of tears
And though he pulled away
I kept him here for years

I let him go

My name is Calypso
I have let him go
In the dawn he sails away
To be gone forever more

And the waves will take him in again
But he'll know their ways now
I will stand upon the shore
With a clean heart and my song in the wind
The sand will sting my feet
And the sky will burn

It's a lonely time ahead
I do not ask him to return
I let him go

The reason why this tune has been playing in my head for the past few days is some of the stuff here. I like the writing style a lot. Simple. Yet evocative.