Well, this is sort of embarrassing. The Parlando Project is about wandering about in the universe of other people’s words that I might combine with music. I wanted to cast for a wide choice of words because that was part of the core energy of one of the project’s ideas: “Other People’s Stories” and how could my music and the performances illuminate a range of experiences.

You see, I think that the performer—like you, the reader or the listener—should become the co-creator with the author’s text for the fullest experience. I find it rewarding when, in taking my part, I am collaborating with William Butler Yeats, Fenton Johnson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Du Fu, Emily Dickinson, or Tristan Tzara. Long-time readers here may have noticed that in the past year I’ve increasingly turned to translation from non-English authors, which enforces that need to become the respectful collaborator with the author’s text, but in effect even those authors who wrote in my native language require translation into a performance with music.

I had the damndest dream! I was this 4th century BCE Chinese guy eating breakfast in Minneapolis. And then I awoke, and I was just Walt Whitman, a cosmos.

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So despite those principles, the most popular piece in terms of likes and listens this past fall was “Two Butterflies,”  an exception where I wrote the words as well as the music. In my original post on “Two Butterflies”  I didn’t take much time to write about my intent with the poem. Let me do that today.

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The original experience that brought this poem to my mind was sitting at an outdoor city patio early one morning eating breakfast when I was startled by the pair of butterflies flying past me within inches without stopping on their way to the potted plant near the café’s door. For the next several minutes I was enraptured by them, compelled to watch them experience the same transient morning I was in. I noticed them intent on their connection to the flowers that co-existed with a watchfulness so that they would each take off in a spiral flight when someone else would enter the café for takeout.

Much of the poem then was pure observation, its ideas derived largely from what I selected to report. The effect I was seeking to bring out in the reader in that part of the poem was an intense investment and identification with these creatures and the poem’s speaker. At times the speaker is away and watching, at times he seems as close as one of the butterflies is to the other, or even seeing through their eyes the humans about them.

Then two stanzas from the end, the poem has its turn, its volta. I’m not sure if the way I went was the right way to go. I destroy the imagist mood of the opening three-quarters or so of the poem, but I often quite like it as a reader when a poem destroys its mood or continuity in service of another frame or facet of what it’s portraying.* My readers often note this as a fault, a mistake on my part, but if so, it’s a mistake following my intent here. The poem could  end before the last two stanzas, and it’d be more likeable. The casual reader would find that foreshortened poem largely understandable, a pleasant word picture.

The sin I risk in the last two stanzas is pretention—and that’s not a tantalizing sin to me. I fear committing it as much as I fear being caught committing it. To say what I sincerely thought in that morning’s moment is not an air-tight alibi. I pack a lot of metaphysics into those last two stanzas, and most readers don’t want to be waylaid by such. Most of us are too busy competing with or caring for each other to find that useful. For a few moments—and pretentiously, for only a few moments—one morning I was unoccupied enough to think on these things. You, dear reader, are not obligated to do the same. If you’d like to hear my performance of “Two Butterflies”  the player gadget will usually appear below. If you don’t see a player, this highlighted hyperlink will also play it.

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*The desire for this kind of sideways explosion in a poem’s intent or at least a slicing undercutting of its statement was something that I found in my attempt this month to come to terms with the Zhuangzi,  and its own Butterfly Dream. Casual readers and even philosophers seem so taken by the implied question in Zhuang Zhou’s Butterfly Dream of how can we be sure if something is dream or reality, and then entirely miss the extra explosion Zhuang Zhou put at the end of his parable: that we find these two states completely distinct, and yet we move between them. Therefore, can we not move between completely different states in our outlook in other matters?

I’ve got Burton Watson’s translation of The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu  containing all the inner books of the Zhuangzi,  and it’s somewhat slow going to fully grasp despite Watson’s helpful framing and notes, but as promised Zhuang Zhou hops around quickly, hoping perhaps to destroy conventional reading.