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?