Out of the cradle endlessly rocking

These last few days have been a great week in learning lessons for me. Life lessons. About love, about friendship ... and betrayals. It is known that for there to be betrayal, there would have to have been trust first. Everyone suffers some bad betrayals in their lifetime. The trick is not to let it destroy your trust in others when that happens. Don’t let them take that from you. Emotional pain is worse than physical pain, and the worst emotional pain, I think, there are two : unrequited love and betrayal. The scars are deeper, and they last longer. Betrayal is the thing never easy to handle and there is no right way to accept it. It was like being left alone in the desert without water or warmth .. by your good friend. And the more successful you are, the bigger the probability of being betrayed. In Indonesia, we have the saying : The wind blows harder in the heights. ............................................................................................................................................ These last 2 days I have been re-reading Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. A great work which I already put aside for so many years, giving way to my other Shakespeare favorites : A Midsummer Night's Dream or Romeo & Juliet. Julius Caesar is the perfect masterpiece dealing with betrayal, being murdered by his most loyal and trusted friend, Brutus. “For Brutus, as you know, was Caesar's angel: Judge, O you gods, how dearly Caesar loved him!" And of course those phrases which appear thrice, which should always remembered by all of us in this mortal life: "Yet Brutus says he was ambitious, And Brutus is an honourable man" . Grab the original speech, or browse it at google. You'll feel the power of repetition. It is perhaps the cleverest, and most powerful speech ever written in history. And alas, several times in my life I have forgotten it. ............................................................................................................................................ This little grey matter in my head has not only absorbed the entire Julius Caesar for the last few days. I've also re-read many poems of Walt Whitman, and one of them is Out of The Cradle Endlessly Rocking, which inspired me to doodle some notes which turned out to be a new, short piano piece with the same name. The poem describes a young boy’s awakening as a poet, mentored by nature and his own maturing consciousness. He watches a pair of birds nesting on the beach near his home, and marvels at their relationship to one another. One day the female bird fails to return. The male stays near the nest, calling for his lost mate. The male’s cries touch something in the boy, and he seems to be able to translate what the bird is saying. Brought to tears by the bird’s pathos, he asks nature to give him the one word “superior to all.” In the rustle of the ocean at his feet, he discerns the word “death,” which continues, along with the bird’s song, to have a presence in his poetry. I don't put any bird's song in my music, I just took these lines as the base of my inspiration : ........................................................................................................................................... O you singer, solitary, singing by yourself—projecting me; ................................................ O solitary me, listening—nevermore shall I cease perpetuating you; ................................. Never more shall I escape, never more the reverberations; ............................................. Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me, .......................................... Never again leave me to be the peaceful child I was before what there, in the night, ....... By the sea, under the yellow and sagging moon, ............................................................. The messenger there arous’d—the fire, the sweet hell within, ........................................... The unknown want, the destiny of me ............................................................... ........................................................................................................................................... And while I write the music, I discovered that the pain of unsatisfied love and betrayal feels the same. They even strike the same spot in our brain, I think. And as a person bearing Tourette & Asperger Syndrome, they both give the same effect in my emotional situation, which confuses my feelings. So, as I am baffled by my own feelings these days, I hope I can understand it clearer through my music. Or perhaps the listener would understand my feelings better.