Van Morrison & The Eternal Now.

I was listening to Van Morrison last night. I have not listened to much Van in the last few months because of being annoyed with his attitude over this COVID-19 pandemic. When thousands of people are dying from it every day and him complaining about not being able to play live. When he wrote, ‘Just like Greta Garbo, I want to be alone’, I do not think he meant it. It seems that Van cannot handle isolation very well. Anyway, I do not want to bang on about that. The reason I started listening to him again last night is because of the book I have been reading called The Power Of Now by Eckhart Tolle. As I said the other day, I first became aware of the name Eckhart Tolle at a Van concert a few years ago when Van’s daughter Shana mentioned his name. The book is all about the importance of living in the presence of the Now, because NOW is the only time that exists.

I put the book down for a few minutes to mull over what was being said, because some concepts are quite hard to grasp and I remembered the concerts on Cyprus Avenue five years ago and in particular the very last song On Hyndford Street. In that song Van was saying the very same things as Eckhart Tolle was saying in the book. I had to go on Youtube and find the video. The song starts slowly with Van reciting the words and even making a couple of jokes, but as the song develops, it is almost as if he is drawing the audience into a guided group meditation. He was singing about ‘bringing in the eternal presence of the NOW, bring it on in’, the eternal now, in the eternal moment, And it's always being now, and it's always being now, It's always now, Can you feel the silence?

Viaducts Of Your Dreams.

I have shared the video to this blog page in case you have not seen it before. Anyone who was fortunate to be there on that magical day will never forget it, that is for sure. Everyone left that concert feeling wondrous and all lit up inside. There are other Van songs which are on the same theme such as Take Me Back where he sings about being close to the One. At this very moment I am listening to The Philosophers Stone album that I haven’t played for at least a year. There is a song on it called Song Of Being A Child which is on the same subject of being in the eternal moment of now. ‘When the child was a child, It didn't know it was a child. Everything for it was filled with life and all life was one’. I’m sure you yourself might be able to think of other songs. Incidentally, when reading the words of that song I remembered that Van only wrote the last verse. The rest of it was a poem by the Nobel prize laureate Peter Handke. An interesting fact is that a photo on the inside cover of Van’s Back On Top album is also on the cover of a novel by Peter Handke called My Year in The No-Man's-Bay. Coincidence? Probably, but I wonder how Van stumbled across the poem by Handke.

Anyway, that will do for today. Whatever we think about Van’s antics over lockdown, there is no doubt that he has produced a fabulous body of work, and that is perhaps what we should concentrate on.