[Image from Where the Wild Things Are, by Maurice Sendak. Today seems like a good day to open with this, since it marks the official release of Spike Jonze's film version.]
From whiskey river:
Threat
You can live for years next door
to a big pine tree, honored to have
so venerable a neighbor, even
when it sheds needles all over your flowers
or wakes you, dropping big cones
onto your deck at still of night.
Only when, before dawn one year
at the vernal equinox, the wind
rises and rises, raising images
of cockleshell boats tossed among huge
advancing walls of waves,
do you become aware that always,
under respect, under your faith
in the pine tree’s beauty, there lies
the fear it will crash someday
down on your house, on you in your bed,
on the fragility of the safe
dailiness you have almost
grown used to.
(Denise Levertov [source])
Not from whiskey river:
Threshing
The sky’s light behind the mountain
though the sun is gone — this light
is like the sun’s shadow, passing over the earth.Before, when the sun was high,
you couldn’t look at the sky or you’d go blind.
That time of day, the men don’t work.
They lie in the shade, waiting, resting;
their undershirts are stained with sweat.But under the trees it’s cool,
like the flask of water that gets passed around.
A green awning’s over their heads, blocking the sun.
No talk, just the leaves rustling in the heat,
the sound of the water moving from hand to hand.This hour or two is the best time of day.
Not asleep, not awake, not drunk,
and the women far away
so that the day becomes suddenly calm, quiet, and expansive,
without the women’s turbulence.The men lie under their canopy, apart from the heat,
as though the work were done.
Beyond the fields, the river’s soundless, motionless –
scum mottles the surface.To a man, they know when the hour’s gone.
The flask gets put away, the bread, if there’s bread.
The leaves darken a little, the shadows change.
The sun’s moving again, taking the men along,
regardless of their preferences.Above the fields, the heat’s fierce still, even in decline.
The machines stand where they were left,
patient, waiting for the men’s return.The sky’s bright, but twilight is coming.
The wheat has to be threshed; many hours remain
before the work is finished.
And afterward, walking home through the fields,
dealing with the evening.So much time best forgotten.
Tense, unable to sleep, the woman’s soft body
always shifting closer –
That time in the woods: that was reality.
This is the dream.
(Louise Glück [source])
…and:
…we forget where we are. There is no such thing as a freak accident. “God is at home,” says Meister Eckhart, “We are in the far country.”
We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all. We sleep to time’s hurdy-gurdy; we wake, if we ever wake, to the silence of God. And then, when we wake to the deep shores of light uncreated, then when the dazzling dark breaks over the far slopes of time, then it’s time to toss things, like our reason, and our will; then it’s time to break our necks for home.
There are no events but thoughts and the heart’s hard turning, the heart’s slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times. The god of today is a tree. He is a forest of trees or a desert, or a wedge from wideness down to a scatter of stars, stars like salt low and dumb and abiding.
(Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm)
Finally: “Lost in the Trees” is the name of a musical group, or project — a musical something (his recording company calls it a “folk orchestra”): the brainchild of a guy I would not be surprised to see one day receiving a MacArthur Fellowship. His name is Ari Picker, formerly of a North Carolina-based indie band called The Never. I know nothing about The Never. All I have to go on is how Picker described them in an interview: “The Never was much more on the rock ‘n’ roll page. More Beach Boys harmony stuff.” Which doesn’t sound awfully promising for an ambitious young musician.
Indeed, Picker himself left The Never to attend Boston’s highly respected Berklee College of Music. There, he began formalizing what he apparently had been secretly working on for years, alone: “an eerie mix of lonely bedroom folk songs, lo-fi sound collages, and film score compositions.”
If this sounds even less promising, I offer for your consideration this sample — all the above, infused heavily with what Picker has evidently learned of classical music. It’s a number called “All Alone in An Empty House,” from (his? their?) album of the same name released last year. I haven’t found lyrics for it anywhere yet — when I do, I’ll post them. In the meantime, this should hold you. First, there’s a video:
And second, here’s the version from the album itself (especially for those of you who might lack YouTube access):
[Below, click Play button to begin. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left -- a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 5:34 long.]
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
___________________
P.S. I’m so glad the film of Where the Wild Things Are seems — so far — to be getting generally positive reviews (Metacritic; Rotten Tomatoes); I’d feared a disaster.
WtWTA seems fantastic. I’ve never read Sendak’s classic, so I’m unfamiliar with the story at this point, but I love the movie’s visuals.
Ought to be a lot of fun.
Ugh, I can’t stream audio at the moment either, it seems.
The Denise Levertov really struck a chord with me. The house where I grew up was surrounded by fir trees (it was only a subsidised rental from the local authority, but it was quite a big old place, with a large, terraced garden). I’d never really considered what a shallow root system those tall trees have. Not until a day or two before Christmas in ’80 (or was it ’81?), when a huge storm brought down half a dozen of them. One of them landed on the roof directly over my bedroom at about 2am. Fortunately it was too close to the house to have built up much momentum in its fall, though it did slither sideways off the house, taking a bunch of roof tiles and a small piece of the corner of the house (the corner of my bedroom!) with it. That makes a hell of a noise, I can tell you. It was probably the most completely terrified – and confused – I have been in my life.
Another tree fell across the front of the house, flattening my brother’s car in the driveway (and only about half an hour after he’d got out of it).
Another two or three fell on the lawn – releasing such energy that the damp earth momentarily liquefied: there was an intricate pattern of shockwave ripples, three or four inches high, petrified into the surface of the lawn – which we never quite managed to roller completely flat again.
I have a soft spot for the Sendak too. I’d never encountered it in my childhood – but it was used as the basis of the first lecture of the year from my delightfully quirky mentor on my teacher training course.
Whooooa to the Dillard. And what a lovely job of taking these poems and showing us how they fit together.
I think I’m going to wait till the oh-that-was-a-cute-movie crowds die down till I see WWTA, but I’ve also been reading the reviews with great interest. I was scared before; now I’m excited. But I’m weirdly emotional about the film, since Sendak’s books mean so much to me. I almost want to see it in an empty theater — for many reasons, but mostly ’cause if I weep I won’t be so embarrassed.
I meant to mention this in my kicks today, but our wireless connection went down and I had to hop in my car at 10 p.m., drive to the nearest Starbucks, and pay 4 bucks to finish the kicks post really fast on *their* connection. (And get back BEFORE SNL started, of course. Saturday night tradition.) Heh. That was a first for me.
Darc: I’m looking forward to it. We don’t see a lot of movies in the theater, for various reasons, but to get the whole picture-book feel this one may have to be on our list. When you see it — whenever you do — let me know what you think! (Well, you could borrow the book from the library…)
Froog: Streaming audio — not a problem. Recall the click-on-the-right-square-bracket trick, as in the phrase “…clip is 5:34 long.]”
LOVE the image of the momentarily liquefied lawn.
The first new car I ever owned was a 1985 Toyota station wagon. White. (It looked like a refrigerator lying on its back.) Boy, did I love that car. I usually introduce stories about it in a manner something like, “Well, before the second tree fell on it…”
The events occurred while we were in the first house I shared with The Missus, surrounded by giant pines. (The sort, whatever they’re called, with no branches until 30 feet or so up their very straight trunks.) A lightning storm brought the first tree down across the roof and onto both our cars. (As you say, a hell of a noise. We didn’t find our indoor cats for hours.) That tree was on a neighboring property, and the neighbor’s insurance company paid for repairs to the house and both cars because they’d known the tree was weakened by construction.
The second tree came down something like a year later. Missed the house. Missed the Missus-to-be’s Jeep. Landed smack on the hood of my car: clearly meant to be personal. And, alas, this tree had not been on a neighbor’s property… What a shame. The car had 210K miles on it, and had shown no signs of ever quitting.
The house we’re in now has the same sort of pines on two sides of the house, and two pecan trees about equally tall on a third. (When the pecans shed their “fruits,” we can’t walk the Yorkie on that side of the house: they’re falling from so far above, by the time they hit ground level they’re like the urban legend about dimes dropped from the Empire State Building. Projectile pecans. Yorkie-stunning pecans.)
This house also has a garage, which reassures. But it houses a car with nothing like the same emotional investment as that Toyota.
Jules: Annie Dillard’s writing rubs some people the wrong way, but I’ve loved it for a loooong time. Although I’ve probably not read EVERYTHING she’s written, the half-dozen or so books I have read ensured that her name would go into the “Pantheon” category of links (over at the right) when I first opened RAMH‘s doors.
That story about preparing your weekly “7 Kicks” post speaks volumes, you know. Yeah, it’s a funny story (who doesn’t love hearing about other people’s neuroses? :)) — but then a plain-old blogger stops, thinks about what he’s just read, and says: Damn.
reCaptcha seems to have caught the Annie Dillard spirit, too: wingless procilivity.