What are you listening to?

Another legend gone. Rest in peace Gordon Lightfoot (1938 - 2023).

Gordon Lightfoot - "Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald"​

"The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" is a 1976 hit song written, composed and performed by Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot to commemorate the sinking of the bulk carrier SS Edmund Fitzgerald on Lake Superior on November 10, 1975. Lightfoot drew his inspiration from Newsweek's article on the event, "The Cruelest Month", which it published in its November 24, 1975, issue. Lightfoot considered this song to be his finest work.
The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they call Gitche Gumee
The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead
When the skies of November turn gloomy
With a load of iron ore twenty-six thousand tons more
Than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty
That good ship and true was a bone to be chewed
When the gales of November came early

The ship was the pride of the American side
Coming back from some mill in Wisconsin
As the big freighters go, it was bigger than most
With a crew and good captain well seasoned
Concluding some terms with a couple of steel firms
When they left fully loaded for Cleveland
Then later that night when the ship's bell rang
Could it be the north wind they'd been feelin'?

The wind in the wires made a tattle-tale sound
When the wave broke over the railing
And every man knew, as the captain did too
'Twas the witch of November come stealin'
The dawn came late and the breakfast had to wait
When the gales of November came slashin'
When afternoon came it was freezing rain
In the face of a hurricane west wind

When suppertime came, the old cook came on deck
Saying, "Fellas, it's too rough to feed ya."
At seven PM a main hatchway caved in
He said, "Fellas, it's been good to know ya."
The captain wired in he had water comin' in
And the good ship and crew was in peril
And later that night when his lights went out of sight
Came the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

Does anyone know where the love of God goes
When the waves turn the minutes to hours?
The searchers all say they'd have made Whitefish Bay
If they'd put fifteen more miles behind her
They might have split up or they might have capsized
They may have broke deep and took water
And all that remains is the faces and the names
Of the wives and the sons and the daughters

Lake Huron rolls, Superior sings
In the rooms of her ice-water mansion
Old Michigan steams like a young man's dreams
The islands and bays are for sportsmen
And farther below, Lake Ontario
Takes in what Lake Erie can send her
And the iron boats go as the mariners all know
With the gales of November remembered

In a musty old hall in Detroit they prayed
In the Maritime Sailors' Cathedral
The church bell chimed 'til it rang twenty-nine times
For each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald
The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they call Gitche Gumee
Superior, they said, never gives up her dead
When the gales of November come early
 

Become

Keep you close to me
Oh sweet remedy
Bright and crystalline

Take it as it comes
Holy morning sun
Rubies on my tongue
La la la la

Become light
What’s inside
All around

Time goes by
Don’t you cry
Become light

Love is like a fire
Light it, it goes higher
Keep you close to me

Love is like a fire
(Time goes by)
Light it, it goes higher
(What’s inside)
Keep you close to me

Become light
Time goes by
What’s inside
Become light

The part that says "love is like a fire" made me remember a quote by P.D. Ouspensky from In Search of the Miraculous: "If creation, the birth of ideas, is the light which comes from love, then this light comes from a great flame. In this everlasting flame in which all mankind and the whole of the world are burning, all the forces of the human spirit and genius are developed and refined; and perhaps it is precisely from this flame, or with the help of it, that a new force will spring into being which will lead those who follow it away from the shackles of matter."
 

Jethro Tull – "Ginnungagap"​


This first and elemental flesh
Both man and woman – falls awake
From void and darkness, frost and flame
From sleeping Ymir, a world to make

The wordless voice, the scream, the howl
Pure essence fills new earth and sky
Ancestral form of myth and legend
Giants, gods to glorify

Father, mother to them all
The bleak betrayal comes to pass
As daughters, sons, bad families
Are cut from stone to break like glass

I dream of spaces, emptiness
Deserts golden, endless dome
Dome of blue with white clouds scudding
Folded origami, home

Home to all creation, vistas
Of foreign lands. We conjure ghosts
Of pre-birth state, primal recall
The calm amongst the heavenly hosts
 
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