Pink Floyd and The Incredible String Band.
The Incredible String Band.
This time we continue Prydwyn Piper’s notes on the penultimate track on the album, “Douglas Traherne Harding”, these notes appearing in the book “An Incredible String Band Compendium” edited by Adrian Whittaker.
[continuing Harding’s “no head” scribbles]
“”It took me no time at all to notice that this nothing…was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing. On the contrary…it was a vast emptiness vastly filled, a nothing that found room for everything – room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills, and far above them snow-peaks like a row of angular clouds riding the blue sky. I had lost a head and found a world.””
“The remainder of Harding’s book is in large part an exploration and explanation of this basic revelation, culminating with his happy discovery of Zen some years after his original “experience of headlessness”.
“I enjoyed reading all the Traherne – I did always have a soft spot for old Christian mystics (like Mother Julian of Norwich), but once I had read On having No Head I realised that however much Traherne Mike may or may not have read circa 1968, all of the quotes which he used in Douglas Traherne Harding appear in On Having No Head.
More from these notes next ISB time.
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