I got lucky by being in a great Brabant landscape, in the first place, and a heavy rain in the second. Because I only have a point and shoot Cybershot thingy, the way to make a long exposure is to push the film-speed (there is no film, I know, but we can recreate the conditions) down to ASA400. The point of that was to catch something of the rain, but it also had the secondary effect of blurring everything slightly, since the grass was blowing in the wind, and since I was holding a camera no heavier than a slice of toast and honey in my unhandy German bands.
But being in the right place was half the battle. That's what all art is about, after all. That's what you're seeing when the trees in the distance seem to fade away. That's called aerial perspective, and it was an effect artists like Leonardo were at pains to reproduce in works like the Mona Lisa. But in real life, it's all a question of where you're standing. Painters use it to try to fake an effect which our eyes see by themselves.
Click on the image to biggify, and feel free to d/l to zoom right in and get that Impressionist feel, where every plant and nettle looks like a brush-stroke.
And since it's all about photography and painting, I'm dedicating it to nn, snapper of my tattoo ordeal, who has a painting jury later today. G'luck, kid.
I suppose it shouldn't, but it surprises me that with the sheer number of songs that are written every year and come to our notice, so few contain a word or a string of words that cause one to pull up short and think, That's exactly the right way to put it or, I never saw it that way before. Oh, I know that's not what people are always looking for, or even ever -- how else to explain prog-rock? But it's what causes a song to get its hooks into my memory.
Having said that, if I were to make a playlist of songs I think worthwhile, they would all be selected on that criterion: that the words say something to me in a new way. And there would be thousands of them. There are an awful lot if you're listening for them, even though as I started out by saying, it's not much more than a drop in the ocean.
I'm busy compiling a post, which will be quite lengthy because filled with quotes, which illustrates this idea within the despised genre of country music, but that's for later. A good example of one that's just plain powerful is Love is Everything by Jane Siberry, a Canadian singer-songwriter who now apparently wants to be known as Issa. She's an intriguing character I'd never heard of, until she was chosen to provide two tracks for the kd lang covers album Hymns of the 49th Parallel, dedicated to Canadian artists. Only Leonard Cohen was as highly-rated, and one of his was Hallelujah, which everyone thinks is a Jeff Buckley number. But I digress.
The lyrics are below. The lines that caught my attention:
Love is everything they said it would be Love made sweet and sad the same But love forgot to make me too blind to see You're chickening out aren't you?
The first line is probably the only occurence of that sentiment in popular music, where a singer looks back on a love and finds it good. The second line provides a reason why. But be careful, that line is a twin-edged blade. If sad is the same as sweet, then sweet is also sad. Doesn't that turn out to be the case? It does in hindsight, because any feeling looked back upon, even a sweet one, is now beyond us, lost and gone. The melancholy among us have learned to regard all emotions that way, not solely with hindsight. While the rousing slogan "This too shall pass" is never true for pain, it is always true for pleasure.
In the third line Issa, as she does in the first, takes a cliche and turns it into something else. Love is blind, we say, but love is not blind when it is ending. Any fool can see when, and pinpoint when, the point of no return is reached, even though we never admit it until it's much too late, and until we've lost not only the love we received, but also the love we gave, and all dignity and honour in the interim. There's at least half of the output of all popular musicians and songwriters that's an attempt to deny the obvious, the whole Come Back Baby school of lyrics. Melancholists reject that whole school of thought; acceptance is a large part of melancholy, and what distinguishes it from mere sadness. And this song rejects it, too: Love forgot to make me too blind to see.
There's more of that strain of naked truthfulness at the end of the song, when the lover is asked to look back and make a reckoning of how he/she loved. It's brutally truthful:
And find it in your heart to kneel down and say I gave my love didn't I? And I gave it big...sometimes And I gave it in my own sweet time I'm just leaving
Lyrics later, but first a performance by Jane Siberry herself, which is new to me. I can see why kd lang would be attracted to the song, which benefits, I'm sorry to say, from not being given the big torch production treatment kd brings to everything.
Here's the whole song:
Love is Everything Jane Siberry Maybe it was to learn how to love Maybe it was to learn how to leave Maybe it was for the games we played Maybe it was to learn how to choose Maybe it was to learn how to lose Maybe it was for the love we made
Love is everything they said it would be Love made sweet and sad the same But love forgot to make me too blind to see You're chickening out aren't you? You're bangin' on the beach like an old tin drum I cant wait 'til you make The whole kingdom come So I'm leaving
Maybe it was to learn how to fight Maybe it was for the lesson in pride Maybe it was the cowboys' ways Maybe it was to learn not to lie Maybe it was to learn how to cry Maybe it was for the love we made
Love is everything they said it would be Love did not hold back the reins But love forgot to make me too blind to see You're chickening out aren't you? You're bangin' on the beach like an old tin drum I cant wait 'til you make The whole kingdom come So I'm leaving
First he turns to you Then he turns to her So you try to hurt him back But it breaks your body down So you try to love bigger Bigger still But it...it's too late
So take a lesson from the strangeness you feel And know you'll never be the same And find it in your heart to kneel down and say I gave my love didn't I? And I gave it big...sometimes And I gave it in my own sweet time I'm just leaving
could ever come to be considered a genuine work by Johannes Vermeer:
is the subject of an outstanding article by Errol Morris in the New York Times blogs, though it's about as far from the usual blog post as Middlemarch is from a Twitter update. Morris bases his story on two books which have appeared in the last year on the case of Han Van Meegeren, who produced the top painting and sold it to Goering as a Vermeer, but not before receiving the authentication of the art establishment of the time.
It's in seven parts, the last of which has just appeared.
I took this post down to tinker with it, which means that two comments appear to have vanished. Apologies. I didn't know that would happen. Feel free to comment again, or whatever.
There’s an arrogance that comes with age, that says “to attain my level of wisdom, you need to have walked in my shoes for as long as I have”. I’ve been guilty of it here. It’s the assumption that more experience is better experience; that only a long journey will arrive at a destination. It ignores the fact that journeys short and long are made up of a thousand interim arrivals, and that every road is no more than a long line of destinations.
When this song came up on shuffle play, the first feeling was amusement, because we go back more than 30 years to a time that seemed to me then to be a culmination, and which was in one way at least. Listening to the song all the way through, the old feelings resurfaced from that time, and reminded me that though life does go on in some ways, in others it stops dead-still: when she left and took the baby with her, it was the end of something, and in all the time since, I have not learned any lesson that could add to what I learned then. Age has given me no useful perspective on that time. Experience has taught me nothing about dealing with those feelings. Wisdom is powerless in the face of raw hurt that is only ever buried, but never soothed.
When I was a young man, I was foolish, oafish, careless, thoughtless, hot-headed, wrong-headed, self-centred, oblivious. I still am those things, perhaps to a lesser extent, or in less damaging ways. But I have no grounds for looking down on that younger man. The passage of 30-odd years hasn’t made me any better at “trying to understand how our lives had led us there”.
Here are the lyrics to the song, and then a video of a live performance by Jackson Browne, who looks much older than he did back then (he too was only a boy, what did he know?) but sounds exactly the same.
Late for the Sky
The words had all been spoken And somehow the feeling still wasn’t right And still we continued on through the night Tracing our steps from the beginning Until they vanished into the air Trying to understand how our lives has led us there Looking hard into your eyes There was nobody I’d ever known Such an empty surprise to feel so alone Now for me some words come easy But I know that they don’t mean that much Compared with the things that are said when lovers touch You never knew what I loved in you I don’t know what you loved in me Maybe the picture of somebody you were hoping I might be Awake again I can’t pretend and I know I’m alone And close to the end of the feeling we’ve known How long have I been sleeping How long have I been drifting alone through the night How long have I been dreaming I could make it right If I closed my eyes and tried with all my might To be the one you need Awake again I can’t pretend and I know I’m alone And close to the end of the feeling we’ve known How long have I been sleeping How long have I been drifting alone through the night How long have I been running for that morning flight Through the whispered promises and the changing light Of the bed where we both lie Late for the sky
About the Banner « Burns Banner: "In partnership with artist Stephen Raw, the Scottish Poetry Library is inviting the Scottish Diaspora and those closer to home, to paint a letter which will go into a ‘BurnsBanner’. Showing two verses of ‘A Man’s a Man for A’ That’, this huge artwork, situated in the centre of Edinburgh, will become a spectacular creation celebrating Robert Burns 250th anniversary. The BurnsBanner is due to be unfurled during the Edinburgh Festival in August 2009 and forms one of the events for ‘Homecoming Scotland’. This project is funded by the Scottish Arts Council."
For a few days now I’ve had in my mind the lyric to a touching song sung by Bonnie Raitt, and now this week comes news that throws it all into perspective.
The song was written by Maia Sharp, Liz Rose and Stephanie Chapman, and I can see Bonnie being attracted to it because it expresses something I think you feel as you get older: no more upheavals, let’s just keep things as they are. No matter how unsatisfactory it all may be, at least we know where we are, and we also know by now that the alternative could be a lot worse.
In that sense, we’re all conservatives. The core of the lyric going like this:
I can feel you fading But until you're gone I'm taking all the time I can borrow The getting over is waiting But I won't move on And I'm gonna wanna feel the same tomorrow
I know the truth is right outside But for the moment it's best denied I don't want anything to change
She’s singing about a love affair, which is what struck a chord. Yes, it’s going to end, we both know that, but I’m going to forget that fact for now and just be in the here and now. Denial is a powerful force.
Then this week those lines acquired a new poignancy for anyone listening to that song from now on. Bonnie’s big brother Steve died, after spending a long time fighting cancer. The story is here. The comments are particularly touching, showing for once someone who was not only reported to have touched a lot of people.
Here’s a video of Bonnie singing the song with Norah Jones:
Some time ago I posted about two versions of Joni Mitchell’s song Both Sides Now, one recorded when she was a slip of a lass, and the other much later, by which time experience had given the song a whole new meaning that, I suggested, the younger Joni could never have even imagined.
There’s a similar youth-age split in the lyrics of the 1982 song Chinese Cafe. Here they are:
Caught in the middle Carol we're middle class We're middle aged We were wild in the old days Birth of rock 'n' roll days Now your kids are coming up straight And my child's a stranger I bore her But I could not raise her Nothing lasts for long Nothing lasts for long Nothing lasts for long
Down at the Chinese Cafe We'd be dreaming on our dimes We'd be playing "Oh my love, my darling" One more time
Uranium money Is booming in the old home town now It's putting up sleek concrete Tearing the old landmarks down now Paving over brave little parks Ripping off Indian land again How long how long Short sighted business men Ah nothing lasts for long Nothing lasts for long Nothing lasts for long
Down at the Chinese Cafe We'd be dreaming on our dimes We'd be playing "You give your love so sweetly" One more time
Christmas is sparkling Out on Carol's lawn This girl of my childhood games With kids nearly grown and gone Grown so fast Like the turn of a page We look like our mothers did now When we were those kids' age Nothing lasts for long Nothing lasts for long Nothing lasts for long Down at the Chinese Cafe We'd be dreaming on our dimes We'd be playing
"Oh my love, my darling I've hungered for your touch A long lonely time And time goes by so slowly And time can do so much Are you still mine? I need your love I need your love God speed your love to me"
The recurring phrase Nothing lasts for long appears in two senses. At the end of the second verse, in reference to “short sighted businessmen” it appears to come from the mouth of the young idealist of the first verse. Maybe she’s thinking the short-sighted businessmen won’t last for long, together with the rapacious damage described.
Elsewhere in the song, though, the phrase is one of infinite regret, and the regret for the loss of time is infinite because the loss is: Time doesn’t go anywhere, it just goes. This could only have been written by an older person (at the time of release Joni was, significantly, 39 years old); young people think time is endlessly abundant. That’s why you’ll never get one to show up for an appointment on time. Older people know that it was only moments ago that they too were young, with endlessly abundant time on their hands – looking like their mothers did then.
The two songs referred to within the lyrics express different sentiments to regret. Unchained Melody is from the soundtrack of the film Unchained, in which a prisoner must decide whether to risk all on an escape attempt, or serve the rest of his sentence quietly but continue to be separated from his wife and child. The longing expressed in the lyrics has made it a pop standard: it’s said to be one of the most-covered songs of the 20th century.
Carole King’s Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow is again more of a young woman’s sentiment, while the ironic answer to the question posed is given: Nothing lasts for long.
***
By coincidence, I happened to come across a striking passage on the question of regret, by the Roman historian Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus, better known simply as Plutarch. In a letter to his wife Timoxena following the death of their daughter - also called Timoxena – Plutarch counsels her to resist the grief-mongering of the women around her, and has this to say about grief, which is of course the ultimate in regret:
Try also often to carry yourself back in memory to that time when, this little girl not having been then born, we had nothing to charge Fortune with, and to compare that time and this together, as if our circumstances had gone back to what they were then. Otherwise, my dear wife, we shall seem discontented at the birth of our little daughter, if we consider our position before her birth as more perfect. But we ought not to erase from our memory the two years of her life, but to consider them as a time of pleasure giving us gratification and enjoyment, and not to deem the shortness of the blessing as a great evil, nor to be unthankful for what was given us, because Fortune did not give us a longer tenure as we wished.
Nothing lasts for long enough, you might say. But as he advises his wife, which what would probably require a huge effort of the will, she must not grieve overmuch because to do so would be to cheapen the joy the little girl’s presence had brought. Since they were happy before her arrival, they must now also be as happy after her departure, otherwise her presence will have been experienced as a bad thing.
It’s an extraordinary piece of advice, quite compelling on examination, but I shouldn’t think it would be very easy to put into practice. The world is full of advice to look on the bright side, remember the good times, don’t dwell on what might have been, yet the human animal seems bound to suffer regret, because we are the only ones who realise the nature of Time, and the fact that it travels in only one direction: it travels away from us.
The essence of English melancholy. The first line goes:
Good times for a change
which is a quintessentially English line, because it assumes bad times are the norm. That's why when you ask an English person how they are they'll tell you "mustn't grumble" which is a way of saying they have a lot to grumble about.
Melancholy being the state of feeling sad about something you can't change, Morrissey is the embodiment of English melancholy. At some point I'll get around to explaining why this is a particularly English phenomenon, or at least why it was so able to thrive in England in about the 16th century that we still can't get the impressions of those days out of our minds.
This post is made slightly less shameful by the fact that the original was not sung by some weird egghead-shaped camp British homunculus, but by Sir Elton John.
No sooner had I promised a post on melancholy but shuffle-play threw up a song which on hearing seemed so similar to something Dowland might have written (had he lived 400 years later) that I couldn’t ignore it.
It comes from the album Painted From Memory, a collaboration between Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach. They won’t tell us who wrote words and who music, but in this case I’m in no doubt. Elvis, of course, has since had more experience with Elizabethan works in The Juliet Letters, in which he reworks the Romeo and Juliet story with the Brodsky Quartet.
The things I like about this are the metaphor of the Beloved as a thief, and the concept of “glorious distress” which is very poetic and very Dowland.
The thing I hate is the baby-voiced woman who comes in at the end. WTF is it with that?
When I go to sleep, you become my thief Why don't you steal what you can keep? But you won't let me be You break into my dreams And every day seems different Sometimes I pretend you'll come back again And you'll console the heart you stole Have pity on the man Who knows that you have gone And has begun to break down
I feel almost possessed So long as I don't lose this glorious distress then You can take all I have left I know it's over If you can't be my lover Be my thief
I'm so drowsy now, I'll unlock the door What fades in time will hurt much more So here's that happy scene Where you come back to me It's only found in fiction
I feel almost possessed So long as I don't lose this glorious distress then You can take all I have left I know it's over If you can't be my lover Be my thief
"I didn't lead you on, But there will always be A little larceny in everyone So hush and don't you cry I'm trying to be kind Because I have a perfect alibi"
Words and music by Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach.
This (taken on Monday) was just the prettiest, fluffiest cloud ever, over the dead industrial wasteland of Groot-Bijgaarden. And the best thing about it is, it looks as if it’s dropping out of the sky. Plop! Right on top of the Corelio Lubyanka.
Every time I hear one of the songs of John Dowland pop up on my MP3 player, I have the urge to post about him here, just to share the melancholy pleasure with you all. There’s not usually much pleasure in witnessing someone wallow in sorrow, but when it’s done with such poetry as Dowland deploys, it can be a pure joy.
Not that all texts associated with Dowland are definitively attributed to him. Dowland (whose name I insist rhymes with ‘lowland’ although I seem to be in the minority) lived from 1562 to 1626. He served the English ambassador to the French court, then at the Danish court, after which he came back to England in 1606 to become a lutenist at the court of James I (this is all from Wikipedia, but the facts are not in dispute).
He was very popular in his day, for solo songs with lute accompaniment as well as for part-songs, lute works and compositions for consort, or instrumental ensemble. His style was very much melancholic, after the fashion of the day. That fashion, and indeed the whole concept of melancholy, is the subject of a post of its own.
The lyric I’ve chosen encapsulates Dowland’s brand of melancholy well, allowing me to overlook the fact that it may not be his, or may only be partly his, being based on an unknown or anonymous lyricist. I’ve lifted the text from the excellent website maintained by Emily Erutz, where you can see it in its entirety. I’m going to be breaking it up with my own interruptions.
The song takes the form of three sections, each of two verses and a refrain:
Now, oh now I needs must part
Now, oh now I needs must part, Parting though I absent mourn. Absence can no joy impart: Joy once fled cannot return.
The language of melancholy is the language of death, or its metaphor exile. While it’s probable that Dowland’s service took him abroad and away from lady-loves, it’s not really necessary to an understanding of the words to find their biographical referent. To the Lover, as we all know, any separation from the Beloved is an exile, and exile is death.
Also worth noting: on the emotional spectrum of melancholy, there are only two positions: Despair and Joy. A person presenting the signs of melancholy these days would certainly be diagnosed as depressive, and if not, as bipolar. The difference being that for the depressive melancholic, joy exists only in theory.
While I live I needs must love, Love lives not when Hope is gone. Now at last Despair doth prove, Love divided loveth none.
The train of thought goes thus, though it is written in reverse: The Lover is in Despair, because Hope is gone, which has banished Love, and since he must love to live, he needs must part. The parting seems to be a real death, according to that calculus. But really, between a real and a melancholic death, there’s no effective difference.
The urge to capitalise all nouns when writing about this material is, as you can see, hard to resist.
Sad despair doth drive me hence; This despair unkindness sends. If that parting be offence, It is she which then offends.
Unkindness is another vital concept in the melancholy lexicon. It essentially means “failure to requite love”. He’s saying here: I’m going (dying) because she wouldn’t love me back, and if my death bothers you, blame her. That’s quite astonishing to our ears, being somewhere between adolescent and vindictive. I suppose it’s the equivalent of killing himself to teach her a lesson. It may seem strange to find such a raw sentiment referred to by a term as innocuous as “unkindness”. I’ll make a note about kindness later in this post, and point out some rather less innocuous alternatives used.
In the second section, he addresses the Beloved directly:
Dear when I from thee am gone, Gone are all my joys at once, I lov'd thee and thee alone, In whose love I joyed once.
And although your sight I leave, Sight wherein my joys do lie, Till that death doth sense bereave, Never shall affection die.
He’s now making a distinction between being ‘gone’ and death, since presumably she knows he’s not dying, but going back to Copenhagen or wherever his duties take him. This is a fairly straightforward Lover’s declaration: I won’t have any fun while I’m away from you; but I’ll keep on loving you all the same.
He does make it plain, here, that she loved him once, and she may well still do. Perhaps her ‘unkindness’ is in letting him leave.
Sad despair doth drive me hence; This despair unkindness sends. If that parting be offence, It is she which then offends.
In the last section he reminds us (and the Beloved) that parting and death could turn out to be the same thing, finally. This idea, though universal, must have been more weighty in Elizabethan times when a journey to a distant place involved more dangers than now, and in many cases was assumed to be for good. The lovers in Ae Fond Kiss are separated by a sea journey, but it’s taken as read that she is leaving forever. People didn’t just go off to the West Indies and then come back some time later in those days (and that was more than a century and a half after Dowland):
Dear, if I do not return, Love and I shall die together. For my absence never mourn Whom you might have joyed ever;
The last two lines are almost humorous: Don’t cry for me, though it’s all your fault and I might have been so happy. I understand that laughter might be an entirely modern response, however.
Part we must though now I die, Die I do to part with you. Him despair doth cause to lie Who both liv'd and dieth true.
So it’s plain that he’s dying because he’s parting. He was true in life and he’s being true in death, although he’s not actually dying. Despair has made him say so.
Sad despair doth drive me hence; This despair unkindness sends. If that parting be offence, It is she which then offends.
***
ETA: Here's one of the many videos of performances of this song available on YouTube. Most are pretty dismal either in sound or quality. This one has Julian Bream on the lute, although the singer sadly does nothing for me.
A word about unkindness:
The quotation that springs immediately to mind from around the period of Dowland's work comes from Shakespeare, in Hamlet, Act I scene 2.
King: But now, my cousin Hamlet, and my son— Hamlet: A little more than kin, and less than kind. King: How is it that the clouds still hang on you? Hamlet: Not so, my lord, I am too much in the sun.
Where Hamlet is not only punning on kin and kind but also using the word in a way that means rather more than it would today.
According to the Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearian and Stuart Literature (link: highly recommended), 'kindness' is often used a euphemism for sexual favours, with kind woman a euphemism for 'whore'. That seems to fit better with Dowland's repeated use of the word, since sexual favours are precisely what the Beloved is withholding.
The idea that unkindness means more to him than it does to us is reinforced when we see what else he accuses her of.
O ruthless rigour harder than the rocks, That both the shepherd kills and his poor flocks.
Burst forth, my tears
Laura, redeem the soul that dies By fury of thy murd'ring eyes,
Rest awhile, you cruel cares
If you seek to spill me, Come kiss me, sweet, and kill me. So shall your heart be eased
Lady, if you so spite me
And so on ...
In the next post I'll be talking about melancholy in general, and the sudden surge of the sentiment across Europe at around the time Dowland was working.
