[Image: “Autumn Grasses,” a two-panel folding screen by 19th-century
Japanese artist Shibata Zeshin. Click image for more information.]
From whiskey river (which has been on a William Stafford binge for a few weeks, not that you’ll find me complaining):
Assurance
You will never be alone, you hear so deep
a sound when autumn comes. Yellow
pulls across the hills and thrums,
or in the silence after lightning before it says
its names — and then the clouds’ wide-mouthed
apologies. You were aimed from birth:
you will never be alone. Rain
will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon,
long aisles — you never heard so deep a sound,
moss on rock, and years. You turn your head —
that’s what the silence meant: you’re not alone.
The whole wide world pours down.
(William Stafford [source])
Not from whiskey river:
Autumn Grasses
In fields of bush clover and hay-scent grass
the autumn moon takes refuge
The cricket’s song is goldZeshin’s loneliness taught him this
Who is coming?
What will come to pass, and pass?Neither bruise nor sweetness nor cool air
not-knowing
knows the wayAnd the moon?
Who among us does not wander, and flare
and bow to the ground?Who does not savor, and stand open
if only in secrettaking heart in the ripening of the moon?
(Margaret Gibson [source])
…and:
Forward, Mannion watched the depth gauge go below six hundred feet. The diving officer would wait until they got to nine hundred feet before starting to level off, the object being to zero the dive out exactly at the ordered depth. Commander Mancuso wanted the Dallas below the thermocline. This was the border between different temperatures. Water settled in isothermal layers of uniform stratification. The relatively flat boundary where warmer surface water met colder depth water was a semipermeable barrier which tended to reflect sound waves. Those waves that did manage to penetrate the thermocline were mostly trapped below it. Thus, though the Dallas was now running below the thermocline at over thirty knots and making as much noise as she was capable of, she would still be difficult to detect with surface sonar. She would also be largely blind, but then, there was not much down there to run into.
(Tom Clancy, The Hunt for Red October, on the so-called “deep sound channel“)
Finally: Wikipedia describes Mike Oldfield — who debuted with the hit Tubular Bells album in 1973 — as follows:
…an English multi-instrumentalist musician and composer, working a style that blends progressive rock, folk, ethnic or world music, classical music, electronic music, New Age and more recently dance. His music is often elaborate and complex in nature.
(The concluding sentence a bit superfluous after what preceded it.)
In the early 1980s, Oldfield had a productive period of collaboration with Scottish singer Maggie Reilly. Oldfield’s 25-minute long “Taurus II” (on his 1982 Five Miles Out album) features a little Reilly-rendered song buried within it — a lullaby, really — which is often referred to as “Deep Deep Sound.” (You can find the three-minute clip on YouTube, in one of those not-especially-interesting videos with just a still image superimposed over the music.) The song’s lyrics go like this:
Hush now baby made a start
There’s a jewel in your heart
And a star that shines for you
Watching everything you do
Don’t you cry though it may seem
You were born into a dream
There’s another race to run
You were not the only one
Standing in the morning sun
Waiting though it had begun
May you never run aground
Or call into the deep deep sound
Stormy weather turns to blue
Here’s a song to take with you
The biggest Oldfield/Reilly hit*, however, was 1983’s “Moonlight Shadow.” This too seems to go along with today’s theme — and to usher us into a weekend (lyrics below):
Lyrics:
Moonlight Shadow
(by Mike Oldfield; vocals by Maggie Reilly)The last that ever she saw him
Carried away by a moonlight shadow
He passed on worried and warning
Carried away by a moonlight shadow
Lost in a riddle that Saturday night
Far away on the other side
He was caught in the middle of a desperate fight
And she couldn’t find how to push throughThe trees that whisper in the evening
Carried away by a moonlight shadow
Sing a song of sorrow and grieving
Carried away by a moonlight shadow
All she saw was a silhouette of a gun
Far away on the other side
He was shot six times by a man on the run
And she couldn’t find how to push throughI stay, I pray, see you in heaven far away
I stay, I pray, see you in heaven one dayFour AM in the morning
Carried away by a moonlight shadow
I watched your vision forming
Carried away by a moonlight shadow
Stars move slowly in a silvery night
Far away on the other side
Will you come to talk to me this night
But she couldn’t find how to push throughI stay, I pray, see you in heaven far away
I stay, I pray, see you in heaven one dayFar away on the other side
Caught in the middle of a hundred and five
The night was heavy and the air was alive
But she couldn’t find how to push through
Carried away by a moonlight shadow
Far away on the other side
__________________
* The term “hit” doesn’t of course mean the same thing for a hard-to-categorize musician like Oldfield that it does for most other performers with whom you might associate the term.
DarcKnyt says
Ah, autumn!
This is my absolute favorite time of year. I didn’t fully appreciate autumn until I left a place which didn’t have one, where winter was what most other places call autumn. When I came to a place with distinct seasons I fell in love anew with autumn and the crisp, clear air, the cool mornings and chilly nights and mild days, the scent-filled way of it, the color bursts and falling leaves and sort of slowing way of the world.
I’ve been looking forward to it all year.
Froog says
I love (by which, of course, I meant hate – although I can’t help being also rather awed by the shamelessness of it) the way Clancy just lifts whole phrases, sometimes whole passages out of encyclopedias, technical handbooks, CIA briefings, etc. “Isothermal layers of uniform stratification” indeed!
You’re even more, ahem, wide-ranging than usual in this one, John. I was a bit disappointed you didn’t work in something about Viv Stanshall.
Seoul loathe, says ReCaptcha. Hm.
Jules says
Ah: Stafford. Must get more of his collections.
John says
Darc: I had the opposite experience, spending the first several decades of my life in an area with wonderful autumns, and then moving to an area where you can miss it if you blink at the wrong moment. The one wonderful element which you might not get to experience is the smell of piles of leaves burning by the curb; I understand the fear of out-of-control fires but really regret that burning leaves has been outlawed in so many areas. Not once in the many years I lived there did I ever hear a credible story about a leaf-fire causing a larger one. (Maybe I was just lucky.) (Or maybe my bad hearing just saved me the disappointment. :)
Froog: I’d never encountered the name Viv Stanshall until I was rummaging about on the Web for this post — in connection with “Tubular Bells.” And then I promptly forgot it, until reading your comment and following it up with even more rummaging about.
What an interesting character. It turns out that his, uh, his work touched my life, briefly. My best friend for a couple years in high school — now a brother-in-law — used to have exotic taste in music; he owned an album by Captain Beefheart, for instance. And another one by Stanshall’s Bonzo Dog Band. Tom strove mightily to convince the rest of us that the Bonzos deserved a careful listen, but I think none of the rest of us could get past the group’s name. Ah, the idiocy of adolescent bigotry.
John says
Jules: There HAS to be a single “collected poems” or “Stafford’s Greatest Hits” book out there. And if not, well, you’d be just the person to tackle the project. In your spare time, of course!
Froog says
If you search on my blog, John, (though, why would you do that when you can just search on YouTube?) you may find a rather wonderful version of Monster Mash by the Bonzos. They have many other marvellous things as well. Neil Innes, the main musical input in the ensemble, was later involved in the Pythons and then had his own utterly marvellous but now ‘lost’ TV series The Innes Book Of Records (to which you can find a reference on my Barstool blog, and a clip too).
When I was at college, Viv Stanshall was celebrated for these two lines: “Two slightly distorted guitars.” and “If I had all the money I’d spent on drink, I’d spend it on drink.”
The Querulous Squirrel says
The whole wide world pours down. It’s raining here. The leaves are turning. It is the most beautiful time of the year.
John says
Froog: As you may know by now, Mr. Innes has a budding Web site of his own. Not much there at present, but there is news of an upcoming UK tour; apparently you took your holiday just 3-4 months early!
Squirrel: Lovely. And yes, your neck of the forest is indisputably THE place to experience autumn.
Some years ago, I drove up to New England from NJ one October. But something was wrong — no (few) leaves. Some sort of freak early ice storm had come through, and the weight of it all had not only stripped the leaves from the trees but in many cases stripped the branches themselves off. Eventually I got to a part of Massachusetts east of the Berkshires which hadn’t been clobbered, and loved the experience. But what came before almost broke my heart.
Froog says
Darn.
Innes is said to be embroiled in nasty rights disputes with the Beeb (and possibly others as well) that are likely to prevent most of his TV stuff ever being seen again. A lot of the stuff from Rutland Weekend Television and The Innes Book Of Records has made it on to YouTube after getting some re-runs a few years ago on the cable channel UK Gold – but The Rutles may be lost forever. Very sad.
Froog says
I was just browsing through some old post comments of yours in search of something…. and felt compelled to share the ReCaptcha:
Special bumbler
That sounds like a job title for us!
John says
Froog: “…in search of something” — ha!
Yes, Special bumbler is awfully close to the bone. :)
(Good grief: the selection offered me for this comment is fluster Smithsonian.)