I don't believe in miracles

Colin Blunstone via last.fm

Yes, it has been a while, hasn't it.

I remember I was aware of Rod Argent (Hold Your Head Up, very prog-rock) before I ever heard of Colin Blunstone, his band's vocalist by that time, whose version of Russ Ballard's song I don't Believe in Miracles put Argent out of our minds forever. biggest hit.

Blunstone had, and may well still have, one of the most beautiful male voices in rock music. As a man, as a former vocalist, as a singer still, I can only dream of singing like this. He is, I suppose, a lyric tenor. I think singing the way he does, on a song like this, he reaches far beyond what most operatic tenors ever get to sing.

The lyrics themselves are not much to write home about. The first two lines could hardly be more mundane:

I walk along the road and past your door
Then I remember things you said

The story is a very ordinary one. What matters is what he makes of it. While making it clear she's vanished without trace, he's in no doubt it's because she's no good:

I don't believe in miracles
But I thought you might show your face
Or have the grace to tell me where you are

He then goes on to explain how manipulative she is:

I believe I was your game, your ball (your ball)
If you tossed me up then I would fall
And so you've won again, ah, you win them all

Before making it clear that he's the victim, a knowing victim, and a willing victim after all:

But I believe I'd run to you, if you should call

That is, of you do the research, an unexpectedly common sentiment in pop songs -- much more common, in my experience (though these things are tinted by our own life-experiences) that the view that the victim was somehow a dupe.

That ambivalence continues in the next verse:

I believe that somewhere there's someone
Who's gonna light the way when things go wrong
The bullet that shot me down came from your gun
The words that turned me round were from your song

And that's all. He was treated bad, got dumped, would go back in a heartbeat. I think a lot more pop sings than you think would fit that description.

Here are the full lyrics:

I walk along the road and past your door
Then I remember things you said
I know in time we could've been so much more
But if you wanna come back home, go right ahead

But I don't believe in miracles
I don't believe in miracles
But I thought you might show your face
Or have the grace to tell me where you are

I believe I was your game, your ball (your ball)
If you tossed me up then I would fall
And so you've won again, ah, you win them all
But I believe I'd run to you, if you should call

But I don't believe in miracles (don't believe in miracles)
I don't believe in miracles (don't believe in miracles)
But I thought you might show your face
Or have the grace to tell me where you are (tell me where you are)

I believe that somewhere there's someone
Who's gonna light the way when things go wrong
The bullet that shot me down came from your gun
The words that turned me round were from your song

But I don't believe in miracles (don't believe in miracles)
I don't believe in miracles (don't believe in miracles)
But I thought you might show your face
Or have the grace to tell me where you are (tell me where you are)

But I don't believe in miracles (don't believe in miracles)
I don't believe in miracles (don't believe in miracles)
But I thought you might show your face
Or have the grace to tell me where you are

And the video performance:



It appears Argent and Blunstone are still touring to the faithful. They were once at the top of the pile, and one of them -- Blunstone -- has an unusual talent. You can see the band's performance of their most well-known song here, on the incomparable Old Grey Whistle Test from 1973. The singer here is Russ Ballard, composer of I don't believe, and no mean singer in his own right. So much more of a compliment to Blunstone that he was allowed to sing Ballard's classic.

Short shameful confession

I've posted the short, shameful confession meme to this blog 20 times. And I'm not particularly ashamed about any of the things I confessed. All the really shameful stuff stays hidden.

Meanwhile this blog has now moved up to third place in a Google Search for "short shameful confession".

Flemish Brabant

This is one of the best photos I've ever taken.



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.

Love is everything

Image via Wikipedia

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

Love is everything...

A question of gullibility?

The question of how this:





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.

Short shameful confession

Image via Wikipedia

I haven't read a book since February.

Late for the sky

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

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."

I don’t want anything to change

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:

 

Nothing lasts for long

Image via Wikipedia

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"

ETA: An mp3 of the song can be downloaded here.

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 Smiths - Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want (Live Version)

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.

Short shameful confession

I'd like to hear the lines

Laughing like children
Living like lovers
Rolling like thunder
Under the covers

pronounced by Stewie Griffin.

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.

Boy(s)

My thief

Image via Wikipedia

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?

 

Listen to the song here.

My Thief

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.

Think local

I only had seconds to snap this car pulling away from outside the house.

It’s a real company.

Cloud

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.

Now, oh now I needs must part

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.

Angel

La Vie en Rose - Pomplamoose Covers Edith Piaf

Beautiful.

Pome: I am

Image by Wonderlane via Flickr

I am

i am with friends i lie.
when i think to
myself, this is starting
to get
on the top layer i tell
him "hello muddy" his
tail wags with might, i love
you even though you
don't seem to make the right
hook-up

she looks so great
but she
doesn't know
forgiveness, her world is just a baseball
bat!
all of your
defenders and still no
penalty you
atempt to save them!

i told you pehaps
it would be spent with
you. tears fall like rain upon the
grass they
floated in the other side of me.
when i see it was fear c is for the
bad times.

you are my
love, will i go? i
hope its love and
joy so that i may have guessed she
is the body?
what am i? a bird soarin the air?
why is
it easy, or a beam.
thats what it is not enough
time, to
truly say,
"i love you"

and her smile
that enlightened every one who
helps me stay safe so when
people start
to hate they are not,
they're there to listen,
you're there to help you
cope.

 

Poem (including spelling errors) composed by the adolescent angst poetry generator.

Play the Game -- Queen cover by Nataly Dawn

This girl is unbelievable. I found her by chance, via Graham Linehan's tumbleblog (he of The IT Crowd and Father Ted). She's something very special, mark my words. Very sweet voice, reminiscent of the young Joni Mitchell, and a quirky taste in music. She sings this Queen song as if she wasn't aware how enormous Freddie is, which is great. There's a Queen clip of the same song on YouTube, and as with many Queen songs, you think to yourself, WTF? It simply isn't right that a monster chart-topping band should release such songs, but that was the magic of Freddie, and that's another blog post.

Also on YouTube: covers of Rufus Wainwright and Joni, yes, how could I not love her?

Turns out she used to live in Belgium. I've been in touch for an interview. We'll see. In the meantime, follow the link to her MySpace page where you can d/l free mp3s of her performances.

UPDATE: How could you not love an artist who does this?

To Chloris

Image via Wikipedia

My breath was taken away today by this song from a CD of songs of the French Belle Epoque, composed by Reynaldo Hahn, who was German-Venezuelan, born in Caracas, but worked in France. He was a great friend of Proust, studied under Massenet and Gounod, made Verlaine weep, and was immortalised in verse by Mallarmé. However his work is strangely old-fashioned, firmly from the school of mélodie at a time when people like Ravel (who was a fellow student) were breaking new ground.

Still, that’s neither here nor there, because what struck me about the song À Chloris were the words. The song has the structure of three statements, each consisting of three lines (the first makes space for a clarification) and all three affirm the wonderful sense that comes of being loved.

The words are not Hahn’s own (he set the words of many poets, among them Hugo and Verlaine, as well as RL Stevenson) but those of Théophile Viau, who lived from 1590-1626. That’s right in the middle of the time when melancholy was all the rage among Europe’s poets and songwriters, if we can imagine such a thing. The great John Dowland, for example, lived from 1563-1626, and is the supreme example of melancholy songs.

Viau’s lyric, however, speaks in another tone entirely. Here’s the French:

S'il est vrai, Chloris, que tu m'aimes,
Mais j'entends, que tu m'aimes bien,
Je ne crois point que les rois mêmes
Aient un bonheur pareil au mien.
Que la mort serait importune
De venir changer ma fortune
A la félicité des cieux!
Tout ce qu'on dit de l'ambroisie
Ne touche point ma fantaisie
Au prix des grâces de tes yeux.

And in English:

If it be true, Chloris, that you love me,
By which I mean, that you like me,
I don't believe even kings
Could know such happiness as mine.
How unwelcome if death
Were to change my current lot
For the joys of heaven!
Whatever they say of ambrosia
It's nothing to the favour
Bestowed by your eyes.

That’s far from melancholia, just a short poem on the joy of being in love. As such, it’s a rarity. As I point it out to you, you’ll think the idea challenging. But try it out for yourself: try to find a poem where the poet is happy about being in love.

There are far fewer than you’d think.

Beethoven sky over Budapest

Our other Hungarian reader and sometime commenter nn sent these pics:

 

 

 

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Josaphat

Parc Josaphat is not only a city park based on the Josaphat valley in then-Palestine, it’s also an arboretum. I have no idea if these trees are prime specimens, but it intrigues me how their branches grow, almost as if they were life-sized bonsai. In some cases, the perverse pointlessness of the human hand is the only conclusion to be arrived at. And if that makes me a tree-hugging teleologist, so be it.

The bridge over the water is closed while the paths are repaired.

Which is not a barrier to all.

Pictures taken at twilight with flash used to light immediate foreground. That had an effect on the white balance, I think, which is why things look so blue. The flash produced one nice effect and one bizarre effect:

Mad flare of solarisation or something here, looks like a ghost, according to Oscar. The second shot from the top is the same position with no flash. I can’t explain it. Could it be no more than an exhalation before pressing the button?