Month: January 2022

The Irish Riddle

Or how a cryptic song from the eighties can take us places

I have always been intrigued by Nik Kershaw’s The Riddle. I first heard it when I was ten or eleven years old. My ears were still completely deaf to English back then but the words (as far as I could tell), the groove and the music were interlocking perfectly.

Photo by Evgeni Tcherkasski on Unsplash

I would get to know more about it years later, and the more I knew, the less it made sense. Its lyrics were, and still are cryptic beyond redemption. Nik called it The Riddle for a good reason. Here, listen :

I got two strong arms
Blessings of Babylon time
To carry on and try
For sins and false alarms
So to America the brave
Wise men says

Near a tree by a river
There’s a hole in the ground
Where an old man of Aran
Goes around and around
And his mind is a beacon
In the veil of the night
For a strange kind of fashion
There’s a wrong and a right

Kershaw would explain later that the lyrics were randomly put together to match the music but had no hidden meaning, or any meaning at all for that matters.

But what if they did?

First trial at solving the riddle

I bet the key to this riddle would be lost somewhere in the Old Man of Aran’s mind. Let us focus on the lyrics again… An old man or Aran… Ah! The Aran Islands, off the west coast of Ireland! Nick would deny it of course, but again, what if? Why not?

So now we have a place. We still need an old man, and I think I have a decent candidate: Saint Enda of Aran, a warrior king turned to monastic life an founder of the first Irish monastery, on the island of Inishmore, the largest of the three Aran islands. He is even linked to an old well near Galway, St Edna’s well, which seems a good enough candidate for the hole in the ground where the old man of Aran goes around and around. The trail however seems to end there. No trace of a river. And the beacon seems quite dim from the distance. As for the fashion, I see none, that is unless the monastic life counts as fashion.

Wrong path? Unless…

Let us call a friend

Seamus Heaney. Irish Poet who was awarded the 1995 Nobel prize for literature, for Death of a Naturalist, a collection of thirty four short poems, one of which happens to be called Lovers on Aran.

The timeless waves, bright, sifting, broken glass,
Came dazzling around, into the rocks,
Came glinting, sifting from the Americas

To possess Aran. Or did Aran rush
to throw wide arms of rock around a tide
That yielded with an ebb, with a soft crash?

Did sea define the land or land the sea?
Each drew new meaning from the waves’ collision.
Sea broke on land to full identity.

I can see a link with the two strong arms and America the brave in Kershaw’s The Riddle. The link to the Aran Islands is obvious, and the beacon would be the poet himself, or his mind actually, to match the lyrics. Or would he. You see, there is another poem in Heaney’s collection which qualifies, one called Synge on Aran. Synge, as John Millington Synge, another Irish poet and writer who would spend time in the Arans and write The Aran Islands, among other works. He would stay in the Arans in the first place at the advice of Yeats, yet another Irish poet, writer and Nobel prize laureate, for the few who have not heard of him yet.

As for the key to decipher Nik’s cryptic song, well, would anyone care to take over solving the riddle? I need to rush, I have some Irish literature to attend to.

Let the board sound

Rabih

On a gem hunt in a sea of nonsense

Photo by Conscious Design on Unsplash

I have been dragged to a “writing” platform by a colleague who recently uncovered one of my quirks: I write stuff. The platform also catered for another quirk: I read stuff. And boy were there stories to read on it.

Here’s an excerpt:

10 Things I Wish I knew Before Starting my Writing Journey
7 Habits That Will Make Your Writing Better
3 Writing Tricks for Viral Stories

That’s half of the stock. The other half is made of rants on Better-Writing-to-Make-Bucks stories and berating members who write on such topics.

A couple of days into the adventure had me convinced I would not be missing out on much if I left at that point. Then, I happened to come by an article which did not belong. An orphan whose parents were neither prophets of the New and Enlightened Writing Order nor reactionaries of the Ancient and Accepted Ritual of Writing.

It was a relatively short poem about the Tonga eruption. Words and rhymes in-between homage and praise, through sadness and hope. It was moving to say the least, and it sent me on a gem hunt, since gems seemed to exist on this platform after all. I would find many of them, written by wonderful people…

A poet who likes things that shine
An author who writes short random thoughts and stories
A retired long-haul trucker who exchanged his rig for pen, paper, and keyboard
A guy who writes to silence them voices in his head
An avid beekeeper

… As they would put it. And many more master gem cutters, too many to list in this story without it becoming a list.

So, dear lapidaries, if you happen to be reading this story and recognize yourselves, let me know if I can link back to your stories. I know you are not the safe and coffer types. Your colorful gems must be shared.

As for you dear reader, if I may, try to look for real gems in this sea of advice on squeezing bucks out of your creativity. Only the gems can feed our imagination and help us write better stories. Marketing fad cannot yield beauty, only promises of elusive followers and the quick buck. Or the lack thereof.

Let the board sound

Rabih

The original version of this story can be found here.

Fall in love

Fall in love
Fool yourself
If you should
Wound yourself
Wreck your heart
If you could
Break the spell
Fight the crave
If you would
Heal the wound
Save yourself
Fall in love …
Heal your heart
Save your soul
Fall in love…

Photo by Sasha Freemind on Unsplash

Let the board sound

Rabih

La route du succès

Nos succès sont collectifs.

Ce sont d’abord les nôtres évidemment, mais également ceux de nos parents, de nos familles, ceux de nos maitres, de nos professeurs, les succès de ceux qui nous ont appris, qui nous ont encouragés sur le chemin, de ceux qui ont eu foi en nos projets, qui ont cru en nous. Ce sont les succès de nos communautés, de ceux qui étaient avant car nos réussites honorent leur mémoire, de ceux qui viendront après, songez à Gibran dont le Liban est si fier, à De Gaulle qui a façonné la France d’après-guerre. Ce sont les succès du pays qui nous a vu grandir, et peut-être de celui qui nous verra mourir.

Ils appartiendront aussi à ceux que nous avons vu tomber et pour qui nous avons eu un mot d’encouragement, un sourire de compassion. Nos succès les porteront vers les leurs.

Mais dans les longues nuits qui les précèdent, où l’on tente et retente en vain, où l’on tombe sans parfois se relever, dans la solitude de ce chemin sans lumière, chers amis, ne détournez pas vos regards, faites que nos échecs soient solidaires.

Let the board sound

Rabih

Make a difference

You’re searching in the dark, you’re wandering for light
A blaze to which you’d walk, of which you’d feel the might
You’re writing in the shade, you barely see the mark
Of words through which you write a candle in the dark

These words which have laid there before the dawn of time
While waiting for a soul to pull them into rhyme
To keep from oblivion these tales of fireflies
And out of nothingness, to gift them to the skies

A craft many embrace but only few can tame
A true craftsman of words in this fine art has aim
He writes to heal the world, he writes to end the stray
With a handful of words, he’s got this much to say:

“Create, you will be blessed if your word people liked
Create, you will be whole even if you’re disliked
The curse? There’s only one, it’s called indifference
The cure? There’s hardly one, to make a difference.”

Let the board sound

Rabih

Rêve éveillé

Bleu. Rouge. Bleu. Rouge… Un bruit continu, une modulation assourdissante… Des cris, indistincts, paniqués… Le noir, le silence, puis, un plafond blanc qui s’enfuit… des visages qui lui courent après, et du noir, encore…

Je me réveille. 4 heures du matin. Encore un cauchemar me dis-je. J’en ai la gorge sèche. Trop engourdi pour aller à la cuisine, je cherche des yeux quelque chose pour oublier ma soif. Un puzzle m’attire irrésistiblement, la création d’Adam, chapelle Sixtine. 206 pièces.

Pas trop compliqué, ça me prendra une petite heure, le temps de me rappeler au souvenir de ce brave morphée. Je commence par les coins comme tout passionné de puzzle qui se respecte, je m’applique, mais ça n’avance pas. Une horloge tinte dans le lointain, 4h30.

“Résous-le!”

Une voix intérieure résonne dans ma tête, comme une explosion. “Résous ce puzzle!” Un sentiment d’urgence m’envahit soudain. Où avais-je la tête? Il faut conclure au plus vite! Il va où le cubitus? Aurais-je interverti les tibias? Et cette rotule qui ne s’imbrique pas sur ce genou?
Morphée finit par se manifester alors que je pose la dernière pièce du puzzle, celle où l’index du bon Dieu rencontre celui de sa fragile créature. Mes yeux se ferment juste à temps…

Je saurai plus tard à ma sortie du coma que le chirurgien orthopédiste aura fait des miracles sur une grande partie de mes 206 os et que je lui dois de pouvoir me tenir à peu près debout aujourd’hui malgré la gravité de mon accident. Je fais deux bons centimètres de moins à cause de mes tibias passés au moulin et je ne serai jamais champion de course à pied, mais je marche encore et je peux même courir dans mes bons jours grâce à lui également. La rotule est toujours aux abonnés absents, mais heureusement, les cubitus tiennent encore la route. Des miracles je vous dis. Ma moto quant à elle n’est plus qu’un lointain et douloureux souvenir, cédée avec hargne à l’épaviste au poids de ferraille par ma mère, qui depuis garde un cierge allumé à l’intention de son grand garçon à Saint-Sulpice, que Dieu me la garde.

Depuis ce jour, une pensée me hante, celle de la dernière pièce de puzzle où se rejoignent l’humain et le Divin, le mortel et l’Eternel, à travers leurs indexes qui se frôlent. Voyez-vous, de tout mon corps, les os de mes membres supérieurs ont le plus souffert et à un moment de ma jeunesse, j’avais arrêté de compter les opérations qui m’ont finalement permis de pouvoir tenir une fourchette à peu près correctement. Les seuls os à en avoir réchappé sont ceux de mon index gauche, celui-là même que le bon Dieu semble toucher dans la fresque de la chapelle Sixtine. Et j’y ai vu un signe, un appel à utiliser ce rescapé de l’hécatombe pour transmettre le don de vie qui aurait dû m’être refusé.

J’ai donc repris mes études de médecine, abandonnées dans une vie antérieure pour l’amour d’une créature à deux roues et me suis spécialisé dans les greffes, pour redonner la vie à ceux qui allaient en être privés par la faute d’un cœur trop fatigué ou d’un poumon trop faiblard, vie qui leur est involontairement donnée en cadeau par des têtes brulées qui ne réalisent pas la chance qu’elles ont d’être jeunes, en bonne santé et de pouvoir croquer la vie à belles dents, et qui décident un beau jour d’aplatir leur électroencéphalogramme pour une dose d’adrénaline dans un bolide à 8 cylindres.

J’ai eu la chance d’en réchapper, d’autres ne l’auront pas. Alors de grâce mes amis, prenez soin de ces cadeaux que sont votre jeunesse et votre santé, d’autres n’ont pas eu ces privilèges …

Un ex-jeune rescapé des kilomètres/heure

Let the board sound

Rabih

PS: cette histoire est purement fictive, toute ressemblance avec des personnes ou situations réelles est fortuite.

Why on Earth Would You Listen to Classical Music

Or why not actually. All it takes is the right hook.

A fellow author recently sent me an article about a musical experiment which took place in 2007, where a world-renowned violin virtuoso would pose as an ordinary busker in a metro station, playing well known classical pieces from Bach or Schubert on his 300 year-old 14 million dollar Stradivarius violin, hoping to get recognized, or at least get some attention from the crowds. Out of the 1097 people passing by during the 40 minutes this experiment lasted, 27 put money in his violin case, 7 took the time to listen to what he was playing for more than a few seconds and only one person recognized him.

Photo by Michelen Studios

How unfortunate might you think, but think again before you forsake your humanist ideals and embrace the claim that mediocrity is humanity’s common denominator. Why would have people stopped in the first place? Chances are they had already been through the ordeal of mediocre shows in their favorite metro station and they would not have stopped for what they though was one more, because that’s what it was supposed to look like on first sight, regardless of what it actually was. Or perhaps they were in a hurry, as most commuters are.

And what if classical music on its own is not enough to hook people? It is after all quite elaborate and can take inattentive people off guard. What if it needed something extra, like a hook? A twist to get their attention and slowly bring them to the inner circle? You see Bach’s music is classified as Baroque, a savant and sophisticated form of quite organized music, which could seem a bit rigid to the untrained ear, and boy are our ears untrained. Besides, your ears might recognize a classical piece of music they’ve heard before but still, you would struggle to put a name on it since most have cryptic names. Some of them, the happy few, end up being known by a moniker, like Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata or Chopin’s Waterfall Etude or his Grande Valse Brillante, but most keep their original name, which sounds like Etude in C sharp major op 5 N° 12 for instance. A mouthful. A turnoff.

I bet however that a Paganini piece would have gathered more people around it, maybe not so much for the music itself but more for the show around it. Here you are, that’s your hook. You see, in his time Paganini was a violin virtuoso, as much a great showman as an astounding musician, whose strategy was to demonstrate his musical abilities through the most technically demanding compositions, awing his audience by speed, dexterity and showmanship even more than by music itself, which removes nothing of the intrinsic beauty of his compositions by the way, quite the contrary actually. Check Paganini’s Caprice N°5 being performed on stage, you will see what I am talking about.

Rock stars have always had a magnetizing effect on the crowds and Paganini was the Rock star of his era. Talking of rock stars, many centuries later, Yngwie Malmsteen would take Paganini’s style to the electric guitar through what some would later call neo classical metal, and carve a name for himself following the footsteps of the virtuoso violin master.

I credit him for putting a guitar on my lap 25 years ago. I also credit him for hooking me to classical music in a way. Him, and my dad. And a couple of years spent in Abu Dhabi, but that’s another story.

Let the board sound 

Rabih

Ecrire pour faire une différence

5959 jours, passés comme un songe. Les premiers jours, on est tout ouïe, à l’affût de la moindre nouvelle, de la moindre rumeur. Puis le temps aidant, on réussit à s’affranchir aurais-je dis il y’a encore quelques mois, des actualités de ce lopin de terre coincé entre la rage de vivre au jour le jour et les jours sans lendemains. C’est vous dire au bout de 5959 jours à quel point l’actualité politique et économique du Liban m’était devenue étrangère à défaut d’étrange, non pas par rejet de mes origines mais par réflexe d’auto-préservation, car prendre sur soi les soucis du vieux pays alors que l’on surnage dans une France que l’on essaie de faire sienne pour survivre à la séparation, ferait ployer le plus serein, rendrait fou le plus sage.

Photo by Joe Kassis

C’est donc relativement immunisé des actualités libanaises que je me suis lancé il y’a quelques mois dans cette entreprise un peu folle qui consiste à écrire des articles sur tout et n’importe quoi en espérant que quelqu’un dans ce vaste monde y trouvât une idée intéressante. Contre toute attente, je me suis retrouvé un beau jour à écrire sur le vieux pays et je me suis surpris à suivre l’actualité de ce coin du monde de manière plus qu’assidue, notamment à travers les colonnes d’un quotidien francophone qui a l’amabilité de publier certains de mes articles dans sa rubrique Courrier.

Et je suis, ma foi, assez surpris de ne pas être surpris justement par ce que je lis: nos politiciens gèrent toujours le pays comme une épicerie, ou plutôt comme une ferme dont nous serions le bétail, et ce, malgré une différence de taille survenue au cours de ces 5959 jours, à savoir une épée de Damoclès plus que jamais suspendue au-dessus de leur trône, celle du citoyen qui n’a plus rien à perdre, et qui a donc tout à gagner d’une révolution, et Dieu sait le sang que les révolutions répandent avant de répandre les bienfaits qu’elles promettent aux peuples qui se soulèvent, quand elles sont assez magnanimes pour le faire.

Quant à moi, je persévère dans cette entreprise un peu folle d’écrire sur tout et n’importe quoi durant ces longues nuits d’hiver de ma patrie d’adoption, en sirotant un Ron du Venezuela, un trait de cognac ou un café agrémenté d’une écorce d’orange, en ayant l’outrecuidance de vouloir faire une différence dans ce monde, ou tout au moins de l’espérer, pour l’amour de mon pays d’origine, le Liban.

Let the board sound

Rabih

On a girl with character and a muscle car

An apple red 1974 Dodge Challenger, rushing through the turns in a futile tentative to reach the summer sunset, before the night sets in. The girl driving it was not running away. She was speed-driving an oppressing feeling of inevitability off her chest and onto the asphalt, racing the race of her life in an attempt to beat the chequered flag before it signaled the end she was dreading. It was 6 PM already and the stakes were growing higher by the minute. She was driving towards the capital, with 2 hours to go according to the GPS, but much less according to her plans: the tuned and well looked after muscle car had a top speed of more than 200 kilometers per hour and the girl could not care less about speed tickets or traffic. She was planning on cutting through anything or anyone standing in her way.

Photo by Traf

The sun had already set by the time the car finally came to a stop. 37 minutes to departure. That was 7 minutes before the gates would close, but it was already too late for her. Even with all the time in the world, she would have never been able to reach them without a couple of much sought after passes: a European or American passport or visa and a valid plane ticket, both of which she did not have. Fortune favors the bold. She reached to her chest, grabbed a golden medallion and the picture hidden inside, put it to her lips, took a deep breath and started running the fastest sprint ever run. 372 meters, through revolving doors, a couple of stairs, three border police checkpoints and all the crowds trying to flee this god forsaken land. She had already 12 cops on her soles by the time she reached the departures gates, with 3 minutes to spare. And then she saw him, right at the other end of the terminal, the last passenger boarding, and too far to hear her over the crowd. All she could do was stare at his back while she still could, before she would be taken down by 12 angry men. Right at the last second, in a fortunate twist of fate, or maybe thanks to providence, he turned back, as if to wish this land farewell one last time. Their eyes crossed, and what he could not have heard in her silent voice, he saw in her big brown eyes. He knew right at this moment that his life would never be the same. He dropped his bags and rushed to her through the crowd.

Nothing else mattered.

To Rita, to the love of my life

Let the board sound

Rabih

Philosophy, computers and geeky brain teasers

You ought to be careful when combining absolutes with words like true, false and not. The mixture is trickier than you might think.

Here’s a brain teaser to illustrate my point.

“There is no absolute truth”

You might have heard this statement before, and you might even hold it to be true at face value. I personally think it is very carelessly phrased: if we hold it to be true, then we must draw the logical conclusion to which it leads us: the statement that there is no absolute truth cannot be an absolute truth either. Postulating that absolute truth does not exist implies the possibility of its existence.

An answer to this paradox might be found in the first principle of René Descartes, a 17th century French philosopher:

Cogito, ergo sum

I think, therefore I am

It implies that there is at least one absolute truth out there, that of one’s existence, since doubting your own existence implies the existence of a medium where the thought of doubt is occurring, which is yourself. It gets geekier dear reader, keep reading.

If we go further down the road, we might lead ourselves out of philosophy land and into computer science territory: TRUE, FALSE, and logical operators like AND, OR and NOT are in fact the cornerstone of modern technology in the broad sense: phones, cars, SpaceX rockets, particle accelerators and anything in between rely on some kind of computing capacity, which is built on top of FALSE and TRUE values and logic operators, through a specific algebra, the Boolean algebra, into microprocessors. Wait wait wait wait! Don’t rush through the door. I know I just said algebra, but I also mentioned Boolean which is the fun part.

Photo by Markus Spiske

Boolean algebra is a binary or base 2 algebra. This means that you can only use two figures, 0 and 1, to represent all numbers from 0 to infinity. The numbers 0 and 1 are still written as 0 and 1 in binary but 2 can only be represented as 10, 3 thus becomes 11 and 4 is written as…100. Any decimal number becomes a sequence of zeros and ones in binary mode, and all that computers do is storing these zeros and ones in their memory registers as representations of the TRUE and FALSE values of the Boolean algebra, and perform operations on them: AND which is equivalent to a multiplication, OR, which is equivalent to a sum and NOT, which is equivalent to an opposite, among other operators.

For example, NOT(1) is always 0 and never 1, or in other words, NOT (TRUE) always yields FALSE, never TRUE.

Which could be a way of saying that the statement “There is no absolute truth” is always false, never true, at least as far as computers are concerned. Wouldn’t you agree?

To Wassim

Let the board sound

Rabih