Apologies to those who came to this post in expectations of a follow-up to my (however simplified) approach to Art Song last time. I’m looking forward to finding time to use my acoustic guitars and imperfect singing voice – really, I am –but sometimes you have to deal with the internal question “You’ve got a strategic stockpile of electric guitars, so why don’t you use them?”

A midcentury person, I grew up in a world with the fear of nations who for ideological supremacy or imperial colonialist designs, would bomb, invade, and make war on others. My country, the United States, was to be a bulwark against this – and so, might these other countries launch an attack, perhaps on a pretext that they were preempting our weapons and opposition to theirs? The scenarios were detailed in dream shadows: missiles across the arctic, a covert foreign army across our southern border, some manifesting murderous domestic fifth column.

And now I have those fears again – only it’s my own country that will be the attacker.  Manifest Destiny seems to have a new expansive definition: the whole world. The mad despot I fear now sits in my capitol. First, we got the flavor of what government round ups of our neighbors would feel like, and then our “warfighters” blitzkriegs across this-and-that border. The borders that are preeminent principles in the former are of no matter in the latter.

Perhaps I’m oversimplifying things – or you wish it was simplified in the way our leaders rule correct in their current mood Yet, perhaps, we haven’t simplified these things enough. I’m not writing this to be clever or to lord over you with some moral superiority, I’m just disgusted by warfare cast under shoddy precepts by callous and vainglorious men.

When Millay wrote “Man” in her title, did she mean a general, genderless, “mankind?”

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So let me get on with it – we should have some poetry and some purported music. I recently read this Edna St. Vincent Millay poem. You might think of Millay as the writer of wistful poems on inconstant love and desire. Yup, she wrote those poems, and some of them are quite good. Desire and how we keep or loose it is a deep subject, worthy of verse, and metaphysics and theology elsewhere in poetry have less to testify about the times we are naked before the shroud.* But there’s an angry Millay that I’ve also featured here too, and this one suits my household’s current mood. When this poem of hers, “Apostrophe to Man”  was published  it was not some sort of detailed position paper in verse either. Here’s a link to the text of that poem. I suppose one could try to make it sound pretty in spite its spite, but there’s a Stratocaster not Stratofortress that wishes to launch ordinance on you there today. You can hear my assertion of something much like music around Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem with the audio player below. No player to be seen? It’s not a stealth fighter or secret police thing, merely the inability of some ways you might read this blog to show a graphical audio player gadget. Use this highlighted link then, and a new tab with its own audio player will appear so that you may hear a screaming coming across the sky.

 

 

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*No real footnotes this time, but I still hope to have other musical presentations that attempt beauty this spring.