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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
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
The Return of Don Chihuahua
I spoke to Don Chihuahua today.
He told me that he recently discovered something alarming. More than a decade ago, in his teens, he had stood on a prosaic street corner in a northern English town, and had busked Famous Blue Raincoat, but Avalanche and the Story of Isaac were beyond him.
There was something mature in them; something beyond him. He simply couldn't control his fingers - couldn't even imagine his fingers doing that. Looking back, this was unsurprising. Just as a journeyman could not understand what it meant for a soul to be swallowed, so it was not for a journeyman to master that arpeggio.
So it was with alarm that the Don discovered purely by chance that, nearly 20 years later, he was playing those arpeggios almost without thought, for the first time in his life. He was not playing them with technical excellence; he did not really know what he was playing; and notwithstanding the discovery of a new ability, it felt more appropriate to go to the major rather than the minor for now.
"My fingers may grow old, but I swear my soul does not, and I am still an apprentice."
I understood him, I think: in adolescence one's purpose is to murder one's forefathers - whether it is in one's power or not. In later years, though, it seems more important to defer to them. They have created the paths that we now walk on.
I'll try to tell his story here.
Download: Leonard (mp3)
