Here’s another little mystery, a riddle inside a riddle, which makes up a new song using the words of Emily Dickinson — but first a little of me sounding like a regular blog that talks about itself.

As assured time to work on this project has largely disappeared, I’ve been turning to simpler compositions and quicker realizations of them to cope with this, but over the past few months a number of pieces have sat in limbo, waiting to be rediscovered, waiting for decisions to be finished or abandoned. In going through some of these this month and I came upon a recording session for “A Route of Evanescence”  from last August.

I recall the session. It was just me and a couple of acoustic guitars, with access to my quiet studio space. I had some advance notice, maybe a day or so, that I’d have that time. On the hurry-up, I prepared a number of compositions to record, and when the day came, I set about laying down tracks singing and playing that pair of acoustic guitars. I’m not an exact or exacting guitar player by temperament, but when I haven’t played as much, my old hands produce more imperfections. None-the-less the limited time meant that I pressed on. I think I may have recorded basic tracks for at least two or three tunes that day. It’s likely that I’ve already presented at least one of the others here, but not this one. Why?

I might have blanched at releasing too many acoustic guitar tunes in a row. Despite my limitations I like what I can do with that instrument, but “like” means that I could fall into doing that over and over, and my temperament also doesn’t like doing that. I might frustrate you a little* by jumping around musical goals and genres, but a bored artist won’t interest an audience either. Or maybe I had some songs more distinctly about summer that I wanted to get out before the end of the season, and so this one was set aside?

Listening again to the raw tracks I thought it sounded pretty good. It’s harmonically different from some ruts I fall into, and the playing and singing is at a level that represents what the composition is. I may have thought I’d record some additional tracks, build out a more elaborate arrangement back then — but it stood by itself when I listened this month. Therefore, I mixed it and made it ready for distribution. **

Here the chord sheet for today’s Chimera. That 2nd inversion G is a neat sound.

.

And then, as I went to prepare this blog post, there was one additional surprise. I thought it was one Dickinson poem that I performed back in August, the one named in the recording files, but the song was made from two: “A Route of Evanescence”  (F. 1489) and “Ferocious as a Bee without a wing”  (F. 1492).

Why did I combine them? I don’t remember. They sound good as a combined piece, though doing so may confuse Dickinson’s intended mystery, because both appear to be riddle poems. As a poetic or sung genre, the riddle has a long tradition (folk music, going back to the Middle Ages, has a bunch of them). The lyric gives you hints that don’t exactly make sense until you figure out, or are told, what the subject or answer of the riddle is. “A Route of Evanescence’s”  answer/subject is the ruby-throated hummingbird. “Furious as a Bee without a wing’s”  may be a honeypot ant.***  The riddle poem, and Dickinson’s examples of that, are antecedents of the early-20^th century Imagist poem, where the moments details are exact, but inference or the title may be necessary to interpret the details meaning. Evanescence, as in the charged moment, is part of that Imagist creed.

Both of these are later Dickinson poems, written in the late 1870s more than a decade after the vast majority of her work written in the 1860s. Dickinson by then may have been like me, writing shorter and shorter — sometimes on scraps of envelopes or the back of food packaging in her case — trying to find autumn creation in the midst of life.

To hear this Chimera song combining a hummingbird and a honey ant, use the audio player gadget you may see below. No player to be found?  This highlighted link will open a new window with an audio player.

.

*Those I frustrate more than a little likely aren’t reading this. I keep thinking there are a goodly number of listeners who’ve heard one to a few of the Parlando Project audio pieces, but finding even a single ill-tasting example, leave off listening here for something elsewhere where they expect consistent rewards.

**I use an audio streaming service that is designed for podcasters, who are typically long-form talkers about their subjects. I could do a talking podcast, more or less replacing these written posts about the exploration that makes up this Project, but I don’t see the demand. So, the Parlando Project podcast is just these musical performances you see at the bottom of the blog posts. You can subscribe to or browse the last 100 or so Parlando audio pieces on most places you can get podcasts — except for Spotify, which for some reason they never shared with me, dropped the Parlando podcast distribution from their podcast section a few years back.

***A fascinating class of creatures that I knew nothing about. I’m not yet even sure if a species of it was found in Dickinson’s 19^th century Massachusetts, or if Dickinson knew of this insect. This poem seems to use many similar words to another very short Dickinson poem (F. 1788) that is the penultimate poem in the Franklin listing of the complete Dickinson poems. However mysterious, it’s an image Dickinson returned to.