Beethoven on acid: the roots of music

It surprises me how often things are joined together, even chained, or branch ever outwards yet back into each other. Or is it like one of those plants that puts down new roots along its runners, like a spider plant or a banyan, thus recreating a baby plant complete in all its parts?

Whatever. It's Sunday, I made a few discoveries that I found intriguing, and I want to capture them before they melt away like a Creamsicle on a hot sidewalk in August.  As I wrote in my last post, my little lovebird Jasper got sick and nearly died, until he suddenly popped back into vibrant health. This brought to mind the old Elizabethan round, Ah Poor Bird, which I had not thought about in. . . oops, half a century. Jesus, I'm getting old.

Then I remembered something my brother Walt said about Mahler: that a melody in one of his symphonies was actually Frere Jacques in a minor key. Bing-bing-bing: I realized that Ah Poor Bird (or something like it) may have been the original source.

Try it. Hum or sing Frere Jacques (and I don't know for sure if Americans even know it, but to Canadian children it's more familiar than O Canada). Then try Ah Poor Bird, as in the last post with the three singers. Compare and contrast.

Then we have the Mahler, conducted by Leonard Bernstein who is worthy of a post on his own. But he makes me sad, and he makes me sad because he had everything a person could ever want, including worldwide fame, and yet he was. . . sad.

He died of cancer at 70, I think, but it's a miracle he lived that long, smoking obsessively, drinking with ever-escalating ruthlessness and popping pills like candy. In his later years he seemed like a blurred version of himself. It affected his conducting. I heard a very late version of Beethoven's 9th that he conducted when the Berlin Wall fell: it lumbered, it galumphed, it didn't move along swiftly the way Beethoven desperately needs to to prevent it from sounding like Brahms on a bad day.

Beethoven has a heavy and profound and even dense and solid aspect, to be sure, but (being a paradoxical genius) there was also a mercurial quality,  quicksilver and fire, and he was unpredictable. He did things that shouldn't have worked, and wouldn't have worked for anyone else. He was definitely the father of Mahler, as twisty and bizarre as Mahler can be. Mahler is the bad son, like Beethoven on acid.

Speaking of dying too young, Mahler keeled over dead from heart disease at 50. A sad loss for the music world, though much of his stuff was too impenetrable for me to enjoy. Simply unlistenable. I don't expect Readers Digest compilations of Strauss waltzes, but I must be able to find a point of entry somewhere. When music repeatedly pushes me away, I can no longer stay in its presence.

OK then! Bernstein, Mahler, and oh, who was that other guy.  . . I mentioned Alban Berg, and he's a good example of being pushed away. His opera Lulu, which has nothing to do with To Sir with Love, is a lulu all right. It's a mess, a theoretical exercise that does not work in actuality. Not for me, anyway.

But it's interesting how much he resembled Stephen Fry. Almost no one resembles Stephen Fry. His face is like something you'd find on Easter Island, craggy and monumental. Kind of like. . . Beethoven?


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Sick birds and Mahler symphonies

I vaguely remembered this song from my childhood: though we weren't exactly the Von Trapps, we were given to singing in harmony, even in round, and I may  have taken the soprano part (though I doubt it). Then the whole thing was tossed to the back of my brain, to the point that I began to think I had imagined it. For decades, it just didn't come up.

What shook it loose? Uhhhh. . . my bird got sick. That's right. I was ridiculed on someone else's blog  just for having a bird, and a large picture of me was posted with Jasper on my shoulder: anyone who has birds must be nuts, some crackpot old lady half out of her mind.

I'm not. But to get back to the original point, we did some painting upstairs (in my office, in fact: it's now a lovely soft blue with a touch of dove-grey) and my bird got sick. We tried everything to keep him away from possible fumes. It may not have been the paint at all. He has something wrong with the toe on his left foot, and has partially lost his grip. Did he take a fall? For whatever reason, he was puffed up, ruffly and almost unresponsive, and we feared the worst.

When I picked him up (for he no longer had the energy to just hop into my hand as usual), he snuggled down in my palm as if in a nest and buried his head in my hand. Not normal behaviour, at all. It was then that the song began to play in my head. After more than 50 years, my sick birdie pushed "play".

Ah, poor bird. Take thy flight. For some reason I remembered my brother Arthur singing it. It was one of those songs that came from who-knows-where: nobody wrote it, apparently. It just "was". On doing a bit of digging, however, I discover that the roots of it may well be Elizabethan. No doubt it sounded different hundreds of years ago and there were/are many versions, but this is the one I kept finding on YouTube.

This was the only decent version I uncovered.  It's an amateur group, but they're definitely singers. It's touching, if not perfect: meaning, it's music. I like the way they sing it more than once, the way they work on it and discuss it and let it evolve. The process is everything (and I particularly like their obvious joy in singing).

Most of the videos I found were of Godawful children's choruses singing wildly off-key. It's a children's song, apparently, like Frere Jacques. . . but hey, do you hear a sort of similarity? Flip Frere Jacques into a minor key, and there you have it. With only a few changes, we have the original Ah Poor Bird, stolen by who-knows-who.

Way leads on to way. The next association was with Gustav Mahler and his - what, second symphony? We played Mahler recordings endlessly when I was a child (along with every other classical composer, up to and including Kurt Weill and Alban Berg). One day the slow movement of this symphony was playing, and my older brother Walt said, "Listen to this. It's Frere Jacques." "No it isn't." "Yes it is.  It's just in a minor key." "What's that?" "You know. The sad key." I was probably eight years old, but it somehow stuck.

I found a recording of the Mahler piece and will post it next, along with some revelations about the composer and Leonard Bernstein, then deemed the go-to guy for interpreting Mahler symphonies.  It's funny how finding one video, or remembering one bit of tune due to a sick bird, can open out memory telescopically, or rather, kaleidoscopically.

By the way, my bird suddenly recovered and is now hopping into my hand, devouring millet and humping his plastic toys with his usual elan.

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I can see the funny weeping willow (can't you?)

Evening is the time of day
I find nothing much to say

Don't know what to

do

but I come to

When it's early in the morning
Over by the window day is dawning
When I feel the air
I feel that life is very good to me, you know

In the sun, there’s so much yellow
Something in the early morning meadow

Tells me that today, you're on your way
And you'll be coming home, home to me

Night time isn't clear to me
I find nothing near to me

Don't know what to do but I come to

When it's early in the morning
Very, very early, without warning

I can feel a newly born vibration
Sneaking up on me again

There's a song bird on my pillow
I can see the funny weeping willow

I can see the sun, you're on your way
And you'll be coming home, home to me

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Crying for the sadness

This was a case of one of dem-dar songs that gets into your head, and won't quit playing.  I knew it was from the '60s, one of those moody, philosophical things we all loved to dissect ("what do the lyrics mean??"), sometimes over a joint or a forbidden glass of wine.  I mainly remembered the lines, "From a distance, from a distance/ You can hear a crying angel sing,/She's crying for the sadness tomorrow's sins may bring."

I haven't had time to research this song, to figure out who wrote it. There is at least one other song called From a Distance, more recent and more famous than this one, which is why it took me awhile to find the original recording. I don't really know who P. F. Sloan was either, though he may have been one of dem-dar one-hit wonders.

The song is still quite pretty to my ear today, though a bit sappy, as I feared it would be. It attempts to sing of faith, which was pretty rare in those days, more rare today.  I remember another moody, opaque song called Everyone's Gone to the Moon, much more dysphoric and even nihilistic. We discussed that one to death. This one is merely melancholy, and earnest.

Looking back, everything ended almost before it began, though we thought the ethos of the '60s would go on forever and change the world. It didn't. In fact it eventually became a laughingstock. Everything reverted to crassness. The bellbottoms were put away, to be replaced by the Mint Green Polyester Leisure Suit of our worst nightmares.

Kids wear '60s tshirts now: peace, love, and all that stuff that got left behind. Now it's just sort of an affectionate (maybe) sendup, or a way to recycle old logos. I see it all from a distance. I know, that's cringe-inducing, but it's really how it is. This song got recorded in my brain so long ago and was buried so deep I didn't even know it was there. Then, some random set of circumstances, or something someone said, or even just a turn of the sky, pushed "play".


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The hate crime no one talks about

Oh yes. Oh, yes, Captain Kirk, and his noble soliloquy in perhaps my fave original Star Trek episode, Miri. The one with all the kids on that planet, you know, all by themselves coz the adults all died, and they get all gross when they hit puberty and Yeoman Rand's leg looks like a major cigarette burn. I watched it at 13, tape recording it as I usually did on our old reel-to-reel Webcor with the fan-shaped microphone. Kirk wasn't ridiculous then, he wasn't a joke, he wasn't a buffoon and to date, he had done no Loblaws commercials. Kirk was just Kirk.

But his immortal line, "no blah blah blah!" has taken on a special significance in my mind over many decades of observation.

Do you know what I'm talking about? Happens so often I want to yip with irritation. In fact it happened yesterday:  we're in Denny's eating our veggie omelettes with hash browns, when I hear a familiar drone coming from behind Bill's seat.

Umbumummm-bumbumbummm-bumdabumdabumdabuuuuuuuum.

I -

UMMM da bummada bummda. Mm-mmoom-dah! Da bomada bomada damda bom.

A -

Bum BUM DA dum dum, demda dum! Dem -

So you get the idea by now. It was one of those totally one-sided conversations you constantly overhear (without meaning to: this is hardly eavesdropping, as I would have loved to shut out all this blathering) in restaurants or theatres or other public places.

One person is blathering on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and - sorry, my hand just fell off - but as this blathablathablathablathablathablatha goes on, all of it self-referential, all of it self-serving, all of it self-entitled, all of it related to the blatherer's intense suffering at not being treated like a crown prince/ss, I can sense the listener/receiver's blood volume being slowly, slowly, and surely sucked down and siphoned out.

When they leave the restaurant, the blatherer will be hugely inflated with self-righteous helium for the next deadly gas attack, and the victim (for that is what it is) will be but a pale shadow of his/her former self. She will be so anemic, you'll be able to see through her. She'll have to go home and lie down for a month or two, maybe get a transfusion.

But the thing is, they'll still go out again next week for lunch. The same thing will happen all over again. He or she will tell the same pompous, pointless stories, the same tales of persecution. No one even notices how soul-destroying the experience is. The entitled one will be bursting with hemoglobin by now, ready to explode like some honey-forced queen bee or ruptured giant termite. The victim will now weigh 37 pounds. Doesn't matter how many pancakes she puts away.

I heard it yesterday and I heard it at the mall food fair the day before with a similar booming, thrumming, droning male voice, this time with some sort of European accent. Bom-bomda-BOMmmdaa-bommmm-daBOMmada-bonga, etc. etc.


This is not a conversation. This is a monologue. The monologuist has no idea that it isn't a conversation and in fact thinks he's a very good conversationalist, very smart and sharp. His blathering about camping equipment or the plumbing in his house or his car troubles or the asshole at work who got the promotion he should've got (or his bitch of a wife, always a favorite) strikes him as scintillating discourse sparking a lively debate, an exchange of witticisms rivalling the Algonquin Round Table in sheer witti-blah-tudinous-ness.

He doesn't know, because his brain is made out of shoe leather and his psyche is about as penetrable as a block of obsidian. I would like to start carrying a baseball bat around with me to play whack-a-mole with these characters, but there are just too many of them, and besides, then *I* would be considered obnoxious and antisocial, hitting these poor innocent guys who weren't doing nothin'.

This is abuse. The endless, boring, repetitive blathering with only the occasional squeak out of the audience/receiver/victim/codependent masochist.  This person NEEDS this sort of ego-stroking, this constant reinforcement of his (or her: one of the worst I've encountered is a her, droning on for 45 minutes about her Grade 11 science teacher and what he wore to class) innate sense that his every word is interesting and useful and even enlightening, when in reality it's a torrent of horseshit more horrific than the result of opening Mr. Ed's stable door.

There is nothing to be done. Stay away, that's all I can say to you, try to stay away and not call them friends. A friend does not stick a drinking straw in your jugular vein and begin to vigorously suck. Blatha-blatha-blathata-blah.

I don't know if this codicil belongs here, but I might as well tack it on. It's the self-proclaimed expert who charges into a room full of chemo patients and bellows, "TAKE MILK THISTLE AND YOU WILL BE CURED!" The person so sure of (his or her) convictions that they force them on others as absolute, unassailable gospel truth.

One doctor I know is a doozie. Educated, an "expert" on many things, in fact famous.

"Illness means you've repressed your emotions."

"No, you mean: I believe illness means you've repressed your emotions."

"There's no debate about this, it's simply true."

"So everybody else, everyone who believes something different from you, is completely erroneous and full of shit?"

"I didn't say that! Don't be so defensive. It's just an opinion."

"Then why didn't you say so?"

"Because it's an opinion that happens to be true."

"Jesus, don't you hear yourself? That's total arrogance!"

"Obviously you have issues with authority figures."

"No, just with YOU, asshole!"

(That last line was fantasized, but isn't it great?)

I once attended some sort of workshop (it had something to do with my sick and dying church trying to manage a last-minute, futile resurrection) where the facilitator said, "Tell me the difference between these two statements: Divorce is terrible."

(Slight tremor in the room, caused by minute vibrations from the divorced people trying not to spit at her.)

"MY divorce was terrible. Which statement is easier to accept?"

Wa-a-a-a-al.

But people don't do it that way! They stride in and say, "Everything happens for a reason/God never gives us more than we can handle/It's all in God's plan." This person has never suffered a major hardship, and in fact has led a charmed existence.  God's will has been, at least up to now, a piece of cake. (Secretly she/he thinks it's because she prays a lot and "surrenders", so God favors her.) But never do they say, "I've come to believe that - " or even, "It's my conviction that - ". No, they just take one of those thingamabobs they used to tamp down powder in a cannon, and casually shove it down your throat.

"I was about to die in a car crash, but my angel saved me."

"God must have intervened."

"It was meant to be" (but NEVER with reference to anything negative. Only positive things are "meant to be". No sense of entitlement here.)

"It was God's plan that little Timmy survive being run over by an express train 47 times."

Oh yes? What about this couple over here, dying of grief because God DIDN'T save their son? What about the man whose wife actually did die in a crash? Didn't she believe enough, didn't God love her enough, didn't she have the right mojo or put enough on the collection plate?

It's really just more BLAHBLAHBLAH, of a particularly toxic variety. It's toxic because it is so un-thought-out, so carelessly said. So smug. So entitled ("see, God loves me enough to pull me out of flaming wreckage. What's wrong with you?")

I wonder sometimes if even half of what people say is really considered, or if it just pours out of them like so much raw sewage. They snag on to jingles, axioms, homilies, catch-phrases, churn them around unexamined, and spit them in your face. They never preface these statements, just jam them up your nose as "fact".  It's easier than thinking, easier than feeling empathy or compassion or any of those dangerous things that require a little stretching of the soul.

The blatherers of the world are verbal thugs. When you see one, whether it's in Denny's or the hardware store or your local church or synogogue, whacking the palm of his hand with a lead pipe and wearing a smug self-involved smile, there's only one thing you can do.

Ru-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-n!

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Something indecent

In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent: a thing is brought forth which we didn’t know we had in us, so we blink our eyes as if a tiger had sprung out and stood in the light, lashing his tail.

Ars Poetica Czeslaw Milosz

Something indecent. The writer (particularly the poet) sneaks over the border into territory unknown, territory best left undisturbed. The writer (particularly the poet) has a way of seeing through the veils. Veils which are there for a reason, to protect us from reality, from the monstrous reality which lurks inside all of us. Watch your daily news. Be honest about your purest rage. No, don't, because even though we feed off it in other people, it's not socially acceptable and we can't stand to look.

Art is theft, art is armed robbery, art is not pleasing your mother…the true self is aggressive, rude, dirty, disorderly, sexual; the false self which mothers and society instruct us to assume, is neat, clean, tidy, polite, content to cut a chaste rosebud with a pair of silver-plated scissors.

Jeanette Winterson

Is this true? Have you looked in the mirror lately? No, I don't mean Facebook. I mean a real mirror, in someone else's eyes, someone who doesn't mind paring you down to the seedy core of your soul.

Art has quite a pair of hips and is barely contained by that dress. Art slinks. Art bites rather than kisses, draws blood. Why?

Theft, armed robbery, not pleasing your mother! Which is worse? Which is more heinous? Are we aggressive, rude, dirty, disorder. . . wait. No, that only applies to "them", the ones who have all the "nervous breakdowns", the ones who don't even earn a decent living wage but spend all their time screwing around with words.

Then why do so many people aspire to something so useless? Everyone's a novelist, and everyone can sing. Anyone can "epublish" and call themselves an author. But why?

Most of what they turn out is dishwater and requires no risk. They want the revelation without the "nervous breakdown", which is just a polite term for why doesn't she just pull herself together dammit.

Nobody wants human vulnerability shoved in their faces. Nobody wants these predatory females who not only want, but insist on sex. They're dangerous because they want want want want want so much.

There are hardly any exceptions to the rule that a person must pay dearly for the divine gift of creative fire.

C. G. Jung

It's rude and not decent to climb into these caves, to curl up inside yourself, to listen. It's narcissistic to pour your lifesblood out onto the page in the full knowledge that because you will never make a living at it, it's a complete waste of time, not to mention mad.


Why's it so good, then, to have that "creative fire"? Why does everyone want to be Hemingway when Hemingway blew his brains out? Even Hemingway wasn't Hemingway, which was perhaps why he blew his brains out.

Art wears a triple-D cup and smokes too much and demands happiness and demands orgasm and demands Truth. It's much too much too much too much, much too much of everything and more, and more, and more.

"You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier 'til this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that — everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been."

And thus Virginia Woolf loaded stones in her pockets and waded in, convinced everyone would be better off without her. Was she right? Why does every source continually mention her multiple "nervous breakdowns"? What is a "nervous breakdown"? It's nothing, it does not exist! It's a delicate lace-doily term for somebody who just can't cut it. Who is so pale and weak that they can't poke their head outside the door, who lives on tea and those brown digestive cookies. A nervous breakdown is an indulgence, a choice, something weak people embrace when they just want a little time off. Nothing to do with raging, wrenching, gut-hollowing, soul-haemorrhaging manic depressive illness which is infinitely worse than all the cancers of the human body put together.

It was not her choice to enter the cauldron, it just happened, she had that awful stamp of greatness on her which in her case meant unbearable pain and death. She knew how indecent and disorderly her soul was. No doubt this "drove" her mad. Would it have "driven" her to heart disease or cancer? Of course not. Madness is somewhere between self-indulgence and demonic possession. This is why we tiptoe around it so delicately.

Aggressive, rude, dirty, disorderly, sexual.

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