I live my life through songs, few notes here and there, stacking impression over impression with drifts my life bestowed on me.
Soon after I got into the world of music as introduced by my late father with his big cassettes library and a certain French radio station called Nostalgie, I started to develop a good taste for 80s music, it seemed to fit a nostalgic, melancholic and hopeful feel, all in the same blend.
The first Italo-disco/Euro-disco song I heard of the 80s must have been I like Chopin by Gazebo.
Maybe it’s most impressionable play, could be my first play as well, was on a rainy day in Lebanon, sometime in the 90s, 1994 if I had to guess.
My dad was driving us back home, we were passing through a village called Brummana, I still remember the feel, how the music was melding with the rain drops, the car rain wipers and the orange night lights thrown on that mountainous road.
I witnessed a twist of reality, some stillness in a live movie of minor emotions. I felt home.
I since associated Europe with this melancholic/hopeful impression, because after that first experience, I looked up the song and learned that is was coined Italo-disco.
Soon after, I started hunting those Italo-disco and Euro-disco songs by fishing on the radio for what
sounded to fit this category.
I recorded those songs on the many empty cassettes I previously bought and it took me a few months to have a small library of my own, with a good set of favorites – all missing the first few seconds of the song.
Nathan Algren: There is Life in every breathKatsumoto: That is, Bushido.
The Last Samurai (2003)
Humans abuse the term Bushi-do, which literally translates to the “Warrior Way”, in many fortunate and unfortunate manners not related to it’s initial intentions.
Now, the word “way” (do) is not a simple word in the Japanese culture 1)(as my few years in the Karate world have taught me), it falls more into a “way of life” or a “philosophy of life”, so it is more like an internalized state of being, very simplistic, pointed inwards yet very complex to properly ingest.
I do not claim to be a warrior, am just another guy on his journey.
My last stop on this journey dropped me in Munich, Germany in 2016.
As soon as I landed, I felt it, my breath changed and my “way” had to go through a reform, I was forced to alter my views and my lifestyle. I came to internalize “Life in every breath”, thus started a new beginning.
What kind of man, what kind of man am I?
Fancy – Flames of Love (1988)
I try to walk where I just fell,
I try to break a secret spell,
In your eyes I feel the flames of love.
I did not choose the above song intentionally, it chose me because of my musical tendencies and likes.
Coincidently, Fancy is a Munich born German Euro-disco singer with a few hits in the 80s, one of which is this catchy song, Flames of love.
What I love about this song is that it envelops both my melancholic perspective on life and my younger views on Europe, and now Germany. I know that I am casting my impressions on a country I have only lived in for a few years and must admit to have developed a small crush on, even though I have yet to see it’s many facets.
I glimpse a yearning in the flow of my days here, something I never witnessed before.
Little flashes I get from the German ladies I dated, the German friends and strangers I met and what the German lifestyle handed me, all left me with a duality I thought I needed to solve, but as it turns out, I needed to embrace and enjoy.
“What kind of man, what kind of man am I?”
The individuality of the German way of life keeps selling me this question.
Granted, I am at a phase of my life where I want more, I want my full potential.
But then again, I cannot take full credit for that yearning, not that my life here is not enough, but that my doorbell is constantly ringing, urging me to go out, take on the up-the-mountain trip.
“I try to walk where I just fell, I try to break a secret spell”
From the moment I learned my first German word and the first time I witnessed my first German cultural shock, I had to learn to walk where I just fell.
There seemed to be a missing ingredient to properly integrate (language plays a big role), to correctly understand the shaping of the German way of life.
What I can only describe as a unique blend of history, losses and rebirths, a crisis of sub-identities and the drug of a dreamer, a dreamer whose previous generations redrew a resurrection into a great place to live.
“In your eyes I feel the flames of love”
The most unfortunate people in the world are in my eyes the ones lacking a life opponent.
Germany has come to be an amazing country to live in, the standard of living here is very high and one can rejoice an easy flowing life. But here’s the kick, you need opponents to know who you truly are, and when you don’t have these opponents you tend to either create them or as it seems to be a more frequent alternative, chase them in your surroundings.
I have come to the opinion that most Germans are very hedonistic, but at the same time owning a big chunk of realism, they work hard, dream big and have the craziest of fun (complain a lot as well).
It’s a crushing struggle, but seems to works for them.
As humans, we naturally grow into tendencies, abstractions and givens we were born in, shaping our normalities, a one and only perspective, a sole way it makes sense to live.
I struggle to live as a hedonist, I feel it is a privilege of the cursed, and I do not seek to be cursed.
Even though; I admit, I did my share of hedonism since moving here, I barely fare in comparison to a “proper” German hedonist.
What I love about this lifestyle though, is the “flames of love”.
An utter lust for life expressing itself time and time again in the eyes of what people think are very cold German eyes.
The eyes are not cold, this is exactly the secret spell.
Flames of love, flames of love,
I’m drowning in the sea of love
And enough is never enough.
When I find myself deep in your eyes
Over and over again – Flames of love.
- which was re-coined Karate-do from Karate-jutsu and other names before that as soon as it landed in Japan from Okinawa (“Jutsu” vs. “Do” | Iain Abernethy)
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