Leaving on a jet plane

"Travel is very useful and it exercises the imagination. All the rest is disappointment and fatigue. Our own journey is entirely imaginary. That is its strength.
It goes from life to death. People, animals, cities, things, all are imagined. It's a novel, simply a fictitious narrative. Littre says so, and he's never wrong.
And besides, in the first place, anyone can do as much. You just have to close your eyes. It's on the other side of Life."

Celine.

You just have to but some distance between you and it, whatever it is. Melancholia is the still inside centre of a vortex of speed and distance, movement and whirring change. Each adjective having it's own entropy. I'm on my way back to the Island of the day before.

Melancholia; People tend to be uncomfortable with anything that hasn't got a pulse.

My brother told me about the tape about two years ago. It's been knocking round his room for twenty odd years. He must of kept it with out really knowing why at first, through primary school, teens, twenties, early thirties, he told me about it two years ago last Christmas when we were both drunk and brought it down for me from home a month ago. It took me a few weeks to play it.

My dad recorded five songs on the Hitachi cassette recorder that used to live in the Front room. I've now played the tape so much that I'm starting to focus on him drawing breath and that's even more haunting than the songs themselves.

I remember my dad playing leaving on a jet plane, it's popped into my mind at odd times all throughout my life, I had my own version in my head all these years that I didn't know there existed a recording, or maybe it's this recording I remember. That's the trouble with memory, it doesn't so much play tricks on you as invent it's own sympathetic magic.

Now it's these five songs that chase each other round my head all day long until I come home from work and start playing them over and over in real time trying to extract something that I can 'make' make sense.