Stone Music
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- January 29, 2014
Stone Music
“It is song about a camel. The camel is angry. It is asking the owner why he bought a pickup truck.”
I feel that if the came camelis angry, the camel should do something to try and persuade the owner with kindness and such affection so that maybe the owner would budge and not have bought the car.
im only here to write poems so who ever doesnt like it, too b… (more)
im only here to write poems so who ever doesnt like it, too b… (more)
if the owner bought a pickup truck, why do you have a camel? ’no point in having something if you are not going to use it.
“It is a song about a war.”
“It is a song about traveling.”
“It is a song about love. There are so many songs about about love.”
We are sitting in a shack outside of the ruins of Petra, Jordan, listening to Bedouin music.
Petra: the hidden heart of Nabatea—a 2,300-year-old empire, a crossroad of antiquity, of fabulous monuments, of palaces and grand avenues chiseled into a sandstone canyon far above the Rift Valley of Jordan. Towers. Columns. Stairs. Altars. Pediments. Aqueducts. Palaces. Petra is a city scooped from living rock. Its architecture rivals the majesty of Rome, the clean beauty of classical Greece—just two of the many empires with whom it traded. The Nabateans were once nomads, proto-Arabs. For centuries they monopolized the incense trade. Their gods are depicted as cubes, as pure geometry, as triangles, as abstract squares. (Al Qaum, the warrior god, a night deity who protected the caravans, was a guardian of all sleepers, whose wandering souls took the form of stars.) They held wine-soaked feasts for their dead. In Mada’in Salih, Saudi Arabia, they carved gigantic tombs from bergs of rock that stand like colossal Fabergé eggs in the barren deserts. Awesome. Imposing. Monuments to raw power. To monomania.
im only here to write poems so who ever doesnt like it, too b… (more)
im only here to write poems so who ever doesnt like it, too b… (more)
this is describing what this place looks like. i bet its truly beautiful when you actually look at it in a way where things look better than what they really are.
I also feel he calls this stone music because the empire of Petra is 2,300 years old so therefore stone music means old.
This journey is important because in this city of Petra Jordan , Paul Salopek is actually learning something about this Bedouin Stone Music. How Paul Salopek is learning something is because Petra Jordan is a city of many monuments palaces e.t.c and he came and picked that city on his Journey to learn something.
Also this is important because the Bedouin music he wants to learn more about.
This is important because i want to know what he eats.
im only here to write poems so who ever doesnt like it, too b… (more)
im only here to write poems so who ever doesnt like it, too b… (more)
how does that have to do with what he eats? maybe you’re trying to say that your curious with what they do to the dead body when someone dies?
Qasim Ali sings the blues, Bedouin style, at Petra, ancient heart of the Nabatean empire. Photograph by Paul Salopek
In the tin shack, Qasim Ali tightens the string on his rababa. He plucks it, listening.
The rababa is perhaps the oldest stringed instrument in the world: a Bedouin fiddle. Qasim draws the bow across the single string. He sings a sad song about an old man abandoned by his sons in the desert, a lament of ingratitude, of fecklessness. (You can play Qasim’s song above.) The sky outside is lidded with clouds. A cold rain has fallen. Inside the shack a wood stove ticks with heat. The air is yellowed by a naked bulb, by a nimbus of cigarette smoke. Other men sing along. They are all Bedul, a Bedouin tribe that migrated into the region just 200 years ago, from where nobody knows. Yet their music sounds older than the ruins around us. Nomad chords. Repetitive, sinuous, smoothed and eroded by time like the red Umm Ishrin sandstone from which Petra is carved: Paleozoic rock that flexes like a muscle along the Rift Valley, the crack that stretches southward beyond the rim of the world, all the way back to the beginning, to our journey’s start in Ethiopia.
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