Running After My Hat

Wonder in the Interstices

March 27, 2015 by John 8 Comments

'Le Bestiaire,' a mural by de Renty and de la Nouvelle (1996)

[Image: “Le Bestiaire,” a mural painted by B. de Renty and Ph. de Lanouvelle (1996) on the side of a building on Rue de la Croix Nivert in Paris. (Click here to enlarge.) You can find other photos of the building around the Web; this one comes from a comment at the page cited below as a source for the Georges Bataille quotation. The mural itself may or may not still exist at that location (I couldn’t see it via Google Street View).]

From whiskey river:

As children, we have all suspected it: perhaps we are all, moving strangely beneath the sky, victims of a trap, a joke whose secret we will one day know. This reaction is certainly infantile and we turn away from it, living in a world imposed on us as though it were “perfectly natural,” quite different from the one that used to exasperate us. As children, we did not know if we were going to laugh or cry but, as adults, we “possess” this world, we make endless use of it, it is made of intelligible and utilizable objects. It is made of earth, stone, wood, plants, animals. We work the earth, we build houses, we eat bread and wine. We have forgotten, out of habit, our childish apprehensions. In a word, we have ceased to mistrust ourselves.

Only a few of us, amid the great fabrications of society, hang on to our really childish reactions, still wonder naively what we are doing on the earth and what sort of joke is being played on us. We want to decipher skies and paintings, go behind these starry backgrounds or these painted canvases and, like kids trying to find a gap in a fence, try to look through the cracks in the world.

(Georges Bataille [source: various sites, including this one])

…and (italicized paragraph):

The urge, starting out, is to copy. And that’s not a bad thing. Most of us only find our own voices after we’ve sounded like a lot of other people. But the one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.

The moment that you feel, just possibly, you are walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind, and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That’s the moment you may be starting to get it right.

(Neil Gaiman [source])

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Midweek Music Break: Angela Easterling, “Un coin à nous”

March 25, 2015 by John Leave a Comment

[Easterling either has a new album out (release date described variously as “Spring 2015” and “Summer 2015”), or it’s on its way: in either case, the title is Common Law Wife. Maybe coincidentally, most of her recent publicity photos feature her standing outside, in profile, wearing a plain white dress, shift, or slip — as though to suggest a wedding. I like the black veil, though.]

This isn’t the first time I’ve featured a song from Angela Easterling’s 2012 French-language album, Mon Secret. (That would have been in a post from a couple-three years ago.)

But I have been listening a lot to this song for the past couple months. The title translates, she says, to “A corner for us,” and there’s indeed something comforting, sheltering, enwrapping — nookish — about the experience of listening to it…

…even when you can’t understand French (as I can’t).

As in that earlier post, I depend wholly on the lyrics Easterling provided with the album. They were co-written by her and a friend, a native of France and university instructor of the French language, and I’m in no position to judge either the translation or Easterling’s pronunciation. I just know it sounds lovely, right, wrong, inappropriately interpreted or otherwise. From the accompanying and soloing string instrument — what is that, anyhow? a mandolin? a dulcimer, or steel guitar? — to the lilt of Easterling’s voice, this song, well, soothes.

[Lyrics]

Edit to add [2015-03-26]: After I posted this piece, I heard (via Twitter) from Angela Easterling herself — who advised me that “Un coin à nous” wasn’t truly original for the Mon Secret album. It had first appeared on her 2011 disc, Beguiler, as a song called “Pocket”… in English.

The lyrics to “Pocket” closely track the English translation of “Un coin à nous,” with one notable exception, right there in the line which provides the title:

Let’s go… The whole world is just us two. Let go.
There’s no one here but me and you…
Our little pocket in the corner of the night…
Where the shadow of the light is blue.

“Pocket’s” music has a bit less of the dreamy Continental feel of “Un coin à nous,” or maybe I’m just imagining I here more of a twang in the original. Either way, the song is a standout.

Here’s “Pocket”:

Summoning the World, Sending It Away

March 20, 2015 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: Domain Field (2003), by Antony Gormley. (Click to enlarge.) See the note below for more information.]

From whiskey river:

A Valley Like This

Sometimes you look at an empty valley like this,
and suddenly the air is filled with snow.
That is the way the whole world happened —
there was nothing, and then…

But maybe some time you will look out and even
the mountains are gone, the world become nothing
again. What can a person do to help
bring back the world?

We have to watch it and then look at each other.
Together we hold it close and carefully
save it, like a bubble that can disappear
if we don’t watch out.

Please think about this as you go on. Breathe on the world.
Hold out your hand to it. When mornings and evenings
roll along, watch how they open and close, how they
invite you to the long party that your life is

(William Stafford [source])

…and:

Every person needs to take one day away. A day in which one consciously separates the past from the future. Jobs, family, employers, and friends can exist one day without any one of us, and if our egos permit us to confess, they could exist eternally in our absence. Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for. Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us

(Maya Angelou [source])

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“The Evanescence of the World”

March 13, 2015 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: the twelve images from Monet’s Rouen Cathedral series, combined into a single image. Says Wikipedia: “The paintings in the series each capture the façade of the cathedral at different times of the day and year, and reflect changes in its appearance under different lighting conditions.”]

From whiskey river:

How can we ever know the difference we make to the soul of the earth? Where the infinite stillness of the earth meets the passion of the human eye, invisible depths strain towards the mirror of the name. In the word, the earth breaks silence. It has waited a long time for the word. Concealed beneath familiarity and silence, the earth holds back and it never occurs to us to wonder how the earth sees us. Is it not possible that a place could have huge affection for those who dwell there? Perhaps your place loves having you there. It misses you when you are away and in its secret way rejoices when you return. Could it be possible that a landscape might have a deep friendship with you? That it could sense your presence and feel the care you extend towards it? Perhaps your favorite place feels proud of you. We tend to think of death as a return to clay, a victory for nature. But maybe it is the converse: that when you die, your native place will fill with sorrow. It will miss your voice, your breath and the bright waves of your thought, how you walked through the light and brought news of other places. Perhaps each day our lives undertake unknown tasks on behalf of the silent mind and vast soul of nature. During its millions of years of presence perhaps it was also waiting for us, for our eyes and our words. Each of us is a secret envoi of the earth.

(John O’Donohue [source])

…and:

I realized it for the first time in my life: there is nothing but mystery in the world, how it hides behind the fabric of our poor, browbeat days, shining brightly, and we don’t even know it.

(Sue Monk Kidd [source])

…and:

The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all. I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water.

(Eugène Ionesco [source])

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What’s in a Song: “Goodnight, Irene” (3)

March 8, 2015 by John 15 Comments

Snippet from 'Goodnight, Irene' sheet music

[Image: snippet of “Goodnight, Irene” sheet music as commonly appearing around the Web. Yeah, John E. Lomax, co-author: like, Sorry about that, Huddie — you were a great chauffeur!]

My two earlier posts on this song (parts 1 and 2) packaged up, in short form, what I could learn of its early history. In this final installment, I thought I’d dwell on a few of the many versions of “Goodnight, Irene” recorded since Lead Belly first delivered it to John A. and Alan Lomax in the 1930s.

First up: let’s hear from Lead Belly himself.

As much as any song did, “Goodnight, Irene” (or as he first referred to it, simply “Irene”) became Lead Belly’s signature song. He never made much money from it — in fact, the Lomaxes were named as “co-authors” of the song at first, and as a result probably made more from it than Lead Belly himself. (He died in 1949 of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, more or less flat broke.) Nor did it become much of a “hit” in any version he recorded; I have no way of knowing for sure, but at a guess I’d say that the rawness of his performance style never had a chance of joining the Hit Parade.

After his final release from prison — the Lomax legend says it was thanks to their intervention with the authorities, almost certainly overstating their influence — Lead Belly went to work as a chauffeur for them. This gave him a chance to see much more of the wider world than he probably could have found on his own. Poet E.M. Schorb paints a good quick picture of this phase of Lead Belly’s life, in this excerpt from his poem titled “Leadbelly”:

Even the Lomax bros, even them white boys,
they know Irene—you driving them through
New York traffic, them folkloring in back and you
being their folkloring black chauffeur.
You drink sharp liquor in Harlem, play
with Woody Guthrie, Sonny Terry, Brownie
McGhee, the Headline Singers—radio too,
Hollywood and Three Songs by Leadbelly,
a French tour…

(Note: Schorb’s reference to the Lomax brothers isn’t 100% correct, since John A. Lomax was Alan’s father; to my knowledge, Leadbelly never chauffeured for John Jr. and Alan.)

As the poem indicates, among the performers he got to meet, befriend, and record with was the great blind blues harmonicist Sonny Terry. However, the 1943 version of “Irene” credited to the two of them together doesn’t — to my ear — feature Terry at all. (The album on which the song appeared did include Terry’s obvious contributions, and mentioned his name in the title; I’m guessing that’s the only reason his name is on this specific recording.)

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What’s the Matter?

March 6, 2015 by John 2 Comments

[Image: ‘Jeu injuste’ (‘Unfair game’), by Rémy Saglier (user “doubleray”) on Flickr.
Used under a Creative Commons license.]

From whiskey river:

The unreal is more powerful than the real.

Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it.

Because it’s only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die.

But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.

If you can change the way people think, she said. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That’s the only lasting thing you can create.

(Chuck Palahniuk [source])

…and:

Since a three-dimensional object casts a two-dimensional shadow, we should be able to imagine the unknown four-dimensional object whose shadow we are. I for my part am fascinated by the search for a one-dimensional object that casts no shadow at all.

(Marcel Duchamp [source])

…and:

Concerning the Atoms of the Soul

Someone explained once how the pieces of what we are
fall downwards at the same rate
as the Universe.
The atoms of us, falling towards the center

of whatever everything is. And we don’t see it.
We only sense their slight drag in the lifting hand.
That’s what weight is, that communal process of falling.
Furthermore, these atoms carry hooks, like burrs,

hooks catching like hooks, like clinging to like,
that’s what keeps us from becoming something else,
and why in early love, we sometimes
feel the tug of the heart snagging on anothers’ heart.

Only the atoms of the soul are perfect spheres
with no means of holding on to the world
or perhaps no need for holding on,
and so they fall through our lives catching

against nothing, like perfect rain,
and in the end, he wrote, mix in that common well of light
at the center of whatever the suspected
center is, or might have been.

(John Glenday [source])

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What’s in a Song: “Goodnight, Irene” (2)

February 28, 2015 by John 6 Comments

[Part 1 of this series is here.]

I’d heard The Weavers’ “sad, wistful” closing notes of “Goodnight, Irene.” I’d forgotten about the song for thirty-some years, but then decided (I did know of the song, after all) to make it the subject of a post here. A simple Midweek Music Break post, at that — not a full-blown What’s in a Song monster…

And finally, after researching it some, and researching it some more, I’d actually found and listened to a recording — the first — of Lead Belly singing it for John A. Lomax in 1933.

Here it is again, so you don’t have to go back to the earlier post just for it:

As I said at the end of Part 1, this confused the heck out of me. Far from the poignant I’ll see you in my dreams of The Weavers’ version, the narrator sounds as though he’s threatening to get her in his dreams. So much for the implied sigh, hmm?

Luckily for me, Lomax — who called the song simply “Irene” at the time, probably because Lead Belly did — transcribed the lyrics then. The complete song which Lead Belly eventually recorded went like this, per Lomax’s 1936 book, Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly:

Irene

[chorus]
Irene, goodnight, Irene, goodnight
Goodnight Irene, goodnight Irene,
I’ll kiss you in my dreams

Sometimes I live in the country,
sometimes I live in town
Sometimes I haves a great notion,
To jump in the river and drown.

Last Saturday night, I got married,
Me and my wife settled down
Now me and my wife have parted,
Gonna take me a stroll uptown

I loves Irene, God knows I do,
I loves her till the sea runs dry
And if Irene turns her back on me,
I’ll take morphine and die.

Quit your rambling, quit your gambling
Quit your staying out late at night,
Go home to your wife and your family
Sit down by the fireside bright.

I was wrong about that get, then: kiss, like The Weavers’ see, is all nice and sentimental. [But see the note, below.] So it was sad and dreamy after all—

But sheesh: chorus aside, the actual verses… We’ve got a guy who seems to have casually left his wife of less than a week, for what? for the life of a rambling man, maybe sometimes living with her and sometimes alone? But he still and presumably forever will carry a torch for her — to the extent of threatening suicide (by drowning, by morphine overdose) if he ever thinks she’s given up on him…

What the heck kind of song was this, anyway?

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Perspectives, Inside-Out

February 27, 2015 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: the caption at Flickr says only: “Reversed (original): OM AH HUNG, Mind Speech Body, blessing letters on the reverse of a Tibetan Buddhist Thankga, red ink, Seattle, Washington, USA: written in reverse so they are correct from the deities (sic) point of view.”]

From whiskey river:

But the real difficulties, the real arts of survival, seem to lie in more subtle realms. There, what’s called for is a kind of resilience of the psyche, a readiness to deal with what comes next. These captives lay out in a stark and dramatic way what goes on in every life: the transitions whereby you cease to be who you were. Seldom is it as dramatic, but nevertheless, something of this journey between the near and the far goes on in every life. Sometimes an old photograph, an old friend, an old letter will remind you that you are not who you once were, for the person who dwelt among them, valued this, chose that, wrote thus, no longer exists. Without noticing it you have traversed a great distance; the strange has become familiar and the familiar if not strange at least awkward or uncomfortable, an outgrown garment. And some people travel far more than others. There are those who receive as birthright an adequate or at least unquestioned sense of self and those who set out to reinvent themselves, for survival or for satisfaction, and travel far. Some people inherit values and practices as a house they inhabit; some of us have to burn down that house, find our own ground, build from scratch, even as a psychological metamorphosis.

(Rebecca Solnit [source])

…and:

Empty me of the bitterness and disappointment
of being nothing but myself
Immerse me in the mystery of reality
Fill me with love for the truly afflicted
that hopeless love, if need be
make me one of them again —
Awaken me to the reality of this place
and from the longed-for or remembered place
And more than this, behind each face
induct, oh introduce me in-
to the halting disturbed ungrammatical soundless
words of others’ thoughts
not the drivel coming out of our mouths
Blot me out, fill me with nothing but consciousness
of the holiness, the meaning
of these unseeable, all
these unvisitable worlds which surround me:
others’ actual thoughts — everything
I can’t perceive yet
know

know it is there.

(Franz Wright [source])

…and:

We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten our names. We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.

(G. K. Chesterton [source])

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What’s in a Song: “Goodnight, Irene” (1)

February 21, 2015 by John 5 Comments

I haven’t done a post in this series for a long, long time. This one, in fact, began life as a Midweek Music Break — or so I thought — a year ago. But then things happened…

[Image: an interesting excerpt from the 1910 census records for Harrison County, Texas. Click the image to view the whole width of the census page, squeezed into your browser window; click here to see it really enlarged.]

When I heard “Goodnight, Irene” for the first time, I had no idea what I was hearing. It was one of those random drive-by TV moments, back in the early 1980s — the dark middle period of purposeful TV viewing: that period during which you might catch a scrap of something wonderful as you monkeyed with the (circular) channel selector, but if you hadn’t known about the show in advance, well, sorry pal — it was already gone.

The show in question was a PBS documentary about a folk-singing troupe, The Weavers. I didn’t know much about them; they’d peaked in the public eye years before I started paying anything like real attention to music. (Among their founding members, in 1940: Pete Seeger — bottom left in the photo over there, with the banjo. Him, I certainly recognized, but only as a solo performer.) By the time the documentary was made, the surviving members were elderly, and the Carnegie Hall concert it featured would be their last performance together.

So anyhow, the show is playing on the TV. Because I’ve tuned to this channel late in the program, almost the very end, their last song — the bittersweet finale — is almost done. In fact, I catch only the very last chorus:

Good night, Irene
Good night, Irene
I’ll see you in my dreams…

Huge applause from the Carnegie audience; a jumble of emotions fluttering over the faces of the performers.

What a sweet and wistful song, I think to myself. And then for thirty years I forget all about “Goodnight, Irene.”

In all that time, I knew the song was out there somewhere; those closing lines had stuck in my head, see? But it was gone, until I decided to make it the subject of (so I thought) a Midweek Music Break here…

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All the Directions of Time

February 20, 2015 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: Clock with Blue Wing, by Marc Chagall (1949, oil on canvas). Translator Susanna Nied identifies this painting as the source or inspiration for Inger Christensen’s poem, below.]

From whiskey river:

A mysterious thing, this branching structure of life: one senses in every past instant a parting of ways, a “thus” and an “otherwise”, with innumerable dazzling zigzags bifurcating and trifurcating against the dark background of the past.

(Vladimir Nabokov [source])

…and:

One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer and which in a general way are naturally believed, surmised, and admitted by you, but which you’ll unconsciously deny when it comes to the point of gaining hope or peace from such an admission. In the diary you find proof that in situations which today would seem unbearable, you lived, looked around and wrote down observations, that this right hand moved then as it does today, when we may be wiser because we are able to look back upon our former condition, and for that very reason have got to admit the courage of our earlier striving in which we persisted even in sheer ignorance.

(Franz Kafka [source])

…and:

If I Stand

If I stand
alone in the snow
it is clear
that I am a clock

how else would eternity
find its way around

(Inger Christensen [source])

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