Freddie Mercury

Sometimes it is far too painful to write about a person, and sometimes all words have been already said. Freddie, lover of life and singer of songs, 5 September 1946 – 24 November 1991

Singer, performer, guitarist, musician, lover, friend, genius, shy, vulnerable, provocative, sexy beyond words can describe and a true candle in a world of so many dark places.

A man who could sing almost any music style (a unique characteristic), something that cannot be developed, a unique charisma, which consisted not only by being able to sing from the most powerful rock to the sweetest ballad or the operatic aria(with a full-voice range of 3 octaves!!!!) but also by being an amazing showman, his natural gift, his quality. A true genius, it has proven really hard to find another musician to combine his remarkable composition with a marvelous interpretation. Freddie was and will forever be one of the smartest and most envied voices in the history of music. With more than 680 live performances with Queen his vibrant, sensitive and most sensual voice and personality changed between each performance and especially in the live ones. It is my particular joy and my 'weakness' as if to say, to see and listen to Freddie's live appearances.....I prefer and adore his live performances which are always a tone down than his recordings, much more personal and provocative.

They say.....not a kind of magic but a picture says a thousand words.

Well here goes my attempt at 18.000 words.......for someone who really made me realize what the phrase 'I do not want to live in this world without you' means, for a light that went out too soon but also ......for the show must go on just like he did.

One big final bow........and the show must go on.

Queen Live @ Wembley 1986 - Its a kind of magic

Turandot

One of the operas by my beloved Giacomo Puccini and probably one of the underestimated operas in the history of the 'sport', Turandot, his final masterpiece with the aria 'Nessun Dorma', after which the composer died and the opera was left to be delivered to its end by Franco Alfano, who, in contreverse to Puccini's legacy, gave the opera a 'happy ending' with the supposed 'lovers' staying together in the end.
Turandot, a princess of China, denies marrying anyone unless he answers 3 riddles, by pain of death. Many royal descendants found death for not finding the corect answers, but then comes our hero, a young prince, who finds his long lost dying royal father
accompanied by a girl, Liou, who has loved him (the prince) all her life and willingly gives her life up to keep his secret, his name , from Turandot and subsequently save him from death. Our prince answers the 3 riddles (Hope, Blood and Turandot being the answers) and offers to the princess a chance to escape marriage if by morning she discovers his name. Turandot tortures Liou who commits suicide after a uniquely beautiful aria where she sings of Love and its beauty (in the original performance the Great Arturo Toscanini in La Scala laid down his batton and stepped down as the curtain lowered slowly - the composer died here "Qui finisce l'opera, perché a questo punto il maestro è morto" - I was fortunate to see the original programme in the stairs of La Scala only a few months back ).

In the end Turandot discovers love and when she discovers the Prince's name she procclaims to the world that his name is 'Love' thus saving him from death. In the great performance in the Theater of Herod Atticus the director understood and tried to honour the Master's legacy....Turandot after procclaiming the PRince's name removes her wig thus revealing her true hair, silver as that of a very old woman. Turandot dies after being relieved of the pain of her defiance of love, she finds love and dies because so many years have passed since her youth. A trully magnificent performance and what a setting for that performance to be delivered.

Nessun Dorma.......forever.....one final big cheer for the composer.

Oh f@ck me....

All I need to say is :

The universe was made on purpose, the circle said. In whatever galaxy
you happen to find yourself, you take the circumference of a circle,
divide it by its diameter, measure closely enough, and uncover a miracle
-- another circle, drawn kilometers downstream of the decimal point. There
would be richer messages farther in. It doesn't matter what you look like,
or what you're made of, or where you come from. As long as you live in
this universe, and have a modest talent for mathematics, sooner or later
you'll find it. It's already here. It's inside everything. You don't have
to leave your planet to find it. In the fabric of space and in the nature
of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the
artist's signature. Standing over humans, gods, and demons, subsuming
Caretakers and Tunnel builders, there is an intelligence that antedates
the universe. The circle had closed. She found what she had been searching
for."

Nothing more is needed!

I sing the body electric

I look around the office floor and see so many people......many of them I've spent years working with, laughing with, trying with, pushing it with....

Two of my favorites are leaving this week.....so many things changing in life.....but then that's what its all about, changing....

Life is about changing and coping with change and loss but also about traveling this journey with dignity and respect and when you loose this dignity and respect having the courage to stand straight and re-claim them.

I was fortunate to have two great teachers in high school. As with all inspired people, who wish to inspire others and help them grow, they only stayed a semester, school management found some silly excuses and let them go.

One of them introduced me to the Kahlil Gibran and the Prophet as well as The road less travelled and the other to what ancient greek tragedy is all about, and especially Sophocle's Antigoni.

Now this ancient greek tragedy is about algos, greek name for extreme pain of the soul and the mind. Pain and how to rise to the best you can be under it , pain and how to still perform the duty that you bare upon yourself, duty that you choose because you choose who you are or who you become under it anyway.

It was for many years and still continues to be a belief of mine that life is mainly a solitary journey. Sometimes this solitude becomes unbearable but I think it is at those times that one really grows.

They say that time heals all wounds, thats crap in my book. Time heals some wounds, the ones that aren't really so deep even if at the time of the experience you felt as if you were going to die.

Well time does not heal all wounds. As time goes by I ache more and more about people I have lost and can never get back with, as time goes by I regret not remembering more moments with these people, as time goes by I regret remembering only the bitter end and not the wonderful beginning.

Love is such a selfless thing, I realize it more and more as I grow up. My love for my grandfather and my grandmother has not diminished one bit and many years have passed since their passing.

My love for my mother grows and becomes more mature and more desperate as time goes by.

The people who knew me when I was 'innocent', meaning not yet stricken by the hardships of life.....I miss them.

I was talking with my mother the other day and she told me I was a child that would always be asking a question , why this why that......and I recall now my curiosity about everything and my solitude even in my childhood.

A solitude based on 3 decades of evolving , how do you blend that with someone truly and honestly? I have yet to meet someone similar to me.....not that I consider this possible but it would be nice.......

My past relationships, that is what they are, past and even though many wonderful and also not so wonderful memories are left of them, they have a place in my heart and in my past.

I know I will never be the girl that spend countless sleepless nights and then went straight to work because of love. I am older now, I am more mature now, I am more hurt now.

I do not regret those nights , they are wonderful memories and at last I can remember them without pain.

But I am not the same person anymore, and I especially miss a big part of my sensuality that is gone for a long time now.

I have some idea about why this is happening.

And I also know that my soul and body are still mending.

I need a holiday as Bilbo said. And I wish I could take that long holiday.

Sometimes in the darkest hours of the night I feel so.......exhausted, like I have no more courage left. And where to find it?

Well as Freddie said 'The Show must go on'

So, my beloved self, get a grip, hold on tight and endure. More than anything endure. Things will get better :-)

"I am loved by thousands, but I feel like the loneliest man in the world." Freddie

"Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius."
Sir Edward Gibbon

"Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god."
Aristotle

"Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where moult the wings which will bear it farther than the suns and the stars. He who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from traveling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions. "In the morning - solitude;" said Pythagoras; that Nature may speak to the imagination, as she does never in company, and that her favorite may take acquaintance with those divine strengths which disclose themselves to serious and abstracted thought. 'Tis very certain that Plato, Plotinus, Archimedes, Hermes, Newton, Milton, Wordsworth, did not live in a crowd, but descended into it from time to time as benefactors: and the wise instructor will press this point of securing to the young soul in the disposition of time and the arrangements of living, periods and habits of solitude."

-- from Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Conduct of Life"

SOLITUDE
Happy the man, whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breath his native air
In his own ground.

Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,
Whose flocks supply him with attire;
Whose trees in summer yield him shade,
In winter, fire.

Blest, who can unconcernedly find
Hours, days, and years slide soft away
In health of body, peace of mind;
Quiet by day.

Sound sleep by night; study and ease
Together mixed, sweet recreation,
And innocence, which most does please
With meditation.

Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;
Thus unlamented let me die,
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lie.

Alexander Pope

P.S. I was wrong. It took more than a month.

Congratulations Brian May!!!

Congratulations Brian May for not only being one of the greatest guitarists of all time, not only being one of Queen but also being a great astrophysicist and completing your doctorate thesis more than 30 years after starting it "A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud"!!!!!

May 14 2008!!!!!!! YOU ARE GREAT!!!!

Congratulations for resisting and enduring and conquering the difficulties of being a genius and a loner.

You inspire us!!!!!!

P.S. Photo1 is Brian with his home-made guitar the 'Red Special' which he built with wood from a 19th century fireplace.

For a decade of love and friendship

I have lots of stuff to write, about Turandot and about so many other things but what comes to mind today is something utterly different.

Everyone of us is born into a family and for better or for worse that's what he has to work with.

But in the course of life, if you're lucky, as my beloved MacGyver said, you get to share some of it along the way with some friends who do become your family.

Those who know me know that I am mostly a solitary person, by choice and by necessity. However there is a person, only one, who has known me now for almost more than a decade.

This one person who knows who he is, he has seen me at my best and worst, he has witnessed some of my darkest but also some of my brightest moments and even though we have had some rough times he has always been there all these years, like a steady rock in the storms of my life.

Whatever his role has been over the years, and he has had many, friend, lover and so much more he is now and will, I am sure, continue to be until we both die one of my own, my family.

He has the unsurpassed ability to accept me for who I am and more than that I think love and appreciate what I am as I do for him, for he is truly an amazing person.

So this is for a decade of friendship and love......thanks.......:) Thanks for holding me up when the world threw me in pieces and thanks for being happy with my happiness......

I could ask for nothing more.....for Daylight that has kept me in my senses more times than I dare to remember.......