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Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye - Leonard Cohen [Cover]
November, mist, departure, valediction, church spire, memory, loss, rediscovery. I busked this (badly) when I was sixteen.
Siciliano
Stranded, I decided to travel imaginatively. Segovia's transcription of the Siciliano from the BWV1001 (Sonata for Solo Violin) is impossible to come by, so I laboured for four days over some blank staves and the pause button. It is amazing the things you hear - phrases take on new meaning in isolation, meaning which doesn't disappear when they are returned to passages, seams vanished.
There are also things in pieces like this you only hear when you play them. The Siciliano sways; fishing boats on bobbing seas returning to white daub cottages; or hips languidly wander from sunny avenues to minor shadows. The way to the minor lies everywhere and is as inevitable as death follows life follows death. There is no easy way out from that latin doubt: the lovelorn and bereaved circle in a maze of trying, rush the doors, tilt at windmills, but return to the relative minor. Cycle through modes, be confident, be desperate, leave no stone unturned till a slipway is found, and through there you will stumble on sympathetic company; people gather as distant bells chime, and sadnesses and laughter are what binds them together. Rediscover that sweet major tonic, and let it linger while it will.
Download JS Bach, BWV1001: Siciliano
Re-awakenings
It is enough to say that spring thaws and awakens the frozen germs of life, and early summer melts all resistence.
Download Vals Navarra - Vincent Lindsey-Clark
Shee Beg, Shee Mor
Fionn mac Cumhaill, who ate the wisdom of the salmon, and built the Giant's Causeway to bridge the gap between the celtic nations, died in the battle fought between the fairy armies. Two queens, each from the smaller and the greater hills, Shee Beg and Shee Mor, fought, and continue to fight in the immortal night, and the battle will never be won. Fionn's first love was transformed into a deer, and his later love threw herself from his chariot on the Hill of Tara. A warrior is interned, upright in the cairn of Shee Beg, the lesser hill, alongside a woman, teeth perfectly preserved; they face the Hill of Tara. A common foe will one day unite the warring fairy armies, and the warrior Fionn will rise again, to defeat the invading hordes.
Here, in the tomb inside in the lesser hill,
I lie with my dead love.
Over on the greater hill,
the young warrior still raises armies.
No-one will win.
We will be found, fossils in the ground.
Men will look at our bones,
and see in us ancient truths.
But we will not be there.
Lovers of every generation
will come here, and gaze on these hills,
turn to each other and leave unspoken
the tales of fairy queens and warrior lords
that heave in their hearts.
We will watch them as we wander the fields,
I in the deer and you in the doe,
each in the soil,
communing in the air.
Warriors will hunt us for their prowess,
and our unending deaths will ennoble
their darkening hearts
with a measure of innocence.
Like vultures, rulers will scavenge us;
like snakes, they will corrupt our flesh
with the poison in their tongues.
And bards will come and sing of us
as an emblem of a nation,
a cypher for a world.
They will tell tales of wars
that cannot be won.
Their poems will call for me to rise again
with my conquering arm,
and they will call for you to rise
and be my heart.
They will sing,
until men and women are no more,
of restive vitality
and wise repose.
We will watch,
you and I,
as the cycle continues,
broken only by the look
in those lovers' eyes.
Download Shee Beg, Shee Mor - Turloch O'Carolan mp3
Allemande
Muse
I shall make you my muse -
since sly smiles and kinds words
that may mean no more than they appear,
now reveal me
no longer on a plain of certitude,
but on a precipice of potential.
The sideways glance of your laughing eye,
the hand resting on the table
are the seeming mirror of the flooded plain -
the unspoken invisible charge
is the white spray crest of the edge
and then nothing
- but muse -
that is the vertigo
of the waterfall.
(And the way you call me 'boy'
hints cascades of possibilities)
I have made you my muse
Download Bach - Allemande (BWV 996) mp3
Courante
Courtly ladies and gentlemen greet, bow and circle. Courtiers fawn. Attendants scuttle. The surface of things appears brilliant and refined. We accept the semblance because doing so makes the illusory into something real.
Pockmarked skin becomes truly smooth under white foundation, malicious hearts become saintly, snakes in the grass become lambs in the fold.
We have truly become cultured.
Download: Bach - BWV1009 Courante mp3
Metaphorically speaking
Many poets should be left as they were by the riverside. Your first encounter is likely to be the most fulfilling.
Some poets, however, demand a longer relationship, since their words evolve, even if the printed page does not.
John Donne's metaphysical poetry evolves with you as you go by. You can measure yourself by the extent to which you adapt to his conceits.
I used to think a metaphor required rigour: metaphors that broke quickly at points of logic and dissimilarity were inadequate.
Now I realise that the end of the aptness of any metaphor is the beginning of its use: where Donne reaches a broken path in the pursuit of his conceit, he digresses, follows the new road, and never looks back.
Those complex conceits which work on many levels do not remain faithful to their absolute limit, but push you to introspect, analyse and learn from the limitation. You emerge into a new kind of light at the end of the metaphor.
Download: Tarrega - Endecha
Prelude
For my father, Andrew Flintham: 6 May, 1951 - 25 December, 2001. Not a special lover of Bach, but I think he would have liked this.
I think of it like walking into the studio of someone who sculpts in wood. The latest work has been shipped out. All that remains are the shavings, the scraps from the block that were carved away to create the form.
If we lingered, forensically, over each piece, then maybe, we could remake the work of art, the piece that is missing. Each scrap of shaved wood bears the craft and skill of the maker, and the imprint of the lost form. They are too precious to discard.
Some might sweep them away, and pretend the work came into form without the mechanics of production. I prefer to cling to them as evidence of things forever gone.
Chips off the old block: me; my finger-squeak and frett-buzz; and memories of my father.
Download: Bach - Cello Prelude in G-major BWV 1007; transcribed for guitar in D-major
