voting

Their Beauty Has More Meaning, or parachuting from a trainwreck

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

So, a momentous American Election Day, and the LYL Band reconvened during the noon-hour while voters were still casting their ballots. If you recall, I – acting as recording engineer, musician, and half-time vocalist – played the first few notes on electric guitar, went to sit on the stool beside my microphone position, and…

…I’d moved the stool that morning to check some audio wiring patch points. My blind ass couldn’t see that, and I plopped butt-first on the floor.

No matter how ominous great human events are, there’s room for a pratfall.

When the LYL Band plays – and we’ve done that for over 45 years – we’ve followed a practice of alternating between song leaders. Recovering my dignity (such as it is) I’d done my Stephen Vincent Benét selection. It was Dave’s turn, and in the Parlando Project spirit he had a poem by Robinson Jeffers. Just as Dave didn’t know what I would play or what I’d be singing or speaking, I didn’t know what Dave was starting to perform. I had a recording software screen in front of me, keying drum sequences and occasionally checking levels while trying to inventory and retrieve my limited stock of musical skills within myself – but no lyrics or music, not even a scribbled chord sheet. My posterior may have been sightless when we were thrown down from heaven, but in this musical situation, I have the decades that Dave and I have played together to guide me. I’m not sure what I’m thinking when I spontaneously play with him, and that’s a strange, yet somehow pleasant feeling. On one level my mind fears and braces for what bands call “a trainwreck,” where timing and pitches collide, and as I begin to play my ears will sometimes hear that collision emerging. I must try to repair the parts of the train as they are exploding! Other times, when it starts to work, I feel like a cartoon character rebuilding the train-track while sitting on the front of the moving locomotive: how fast can the rails and crossties be laid-down? When playing, I’m hastily searching for the “good notes,” the safe ones that won’t conflict with what Dave is playing while trying to allow the ones that rub and stretch with the other parts in urgent ways.*

I happen to like loosey-goosey music that finds itself in the playing, though not all musicians and listeners do. Without brag or pride I say: when mixing the recordings later, I’m often surprised at what makes enjoyable sense to my ex-post-facto composer’s judgement from what I remembered as a frantic grab for the emergency parachute rip chord.

In the midst of all that, I’m hearing and trying to react to the words Dave is spinning out. This time, they seem slightly familiar, but I can’t be bothered to wonder much about that. We finish the single take, the one you can hear below, and Dave says it was a poem by Robinson Jeffers. Here’s a link to the text of that poem.

Robinson Jeffers on the rocks

Robinson Jeffers, rock star, which is to say he built his own home out of rough-hewn stones.

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I’ve always found Jeffers an odd case, and he interests me even if I suspect the two of us wouldn’t agree much. He’s a pioneer in the 20th century intensification of the 19th century American Transcendentalist theological examination of nature as the revealed truth – something I see in some contemporary poetry – but even if that approach retains currency, Jeffers take on these matters remains unusually strong and strange. He called a core tenet of his animating thought “inhumanism.” Today’s poem, chosen by Dave for performance, “Their Beauty Has More Meaning,”  examines the experience when the poem’s speaker (presumably Jeffers himself) examines a morning in its one-in-an-ages-long sequence of dawning and knows that he is as brief or briefer than a single day in the face of astronomical and geologic time. Even the birds and their birdsong, (always a handy metaphor for the musician’s or poet’s art) issues from any creature’s short life, though generations will perhaps repeat this utterance.

When Jeffers expresses his beliefs, one could find this outlook too fatalistic, even despairing – but in this example that Dave selected, Jeffers is, I think, at his most comforting. We, the ordinary people of this world (or the artists in it) are making our morning songs as best we can or must – beautiful to some ears at some moments, though we still have so little power to move the universe. Our “I Voted” stickers of last Tuesday are – at least at the individual level – tiny, constrained circles. Where I live, we’ve been through a year where the birdsong of whistles and car horns were arrayed against masked and armed troops, and two who did such were shot and killed. Is it comforting to know that we are small, temporary, things, doing the small, temporary things that are what we can do? In contrast, the self-styled great men who rule us think (as the previous piece in this series put it) that because they have great power, they must have great wisdom.

Jeffers wanted his message of human inadequacy to judge, and find lacking, the deadly engines of warfare – a human imitation of the great destructive acts of natural disasters. So strongly did he feel the human vanity in war that he steadfastly opposed WWII, the mighty violence that we often judge as on-the-whole necessary to oppose great human evils.

We finished playing Dave’s presentation of Jeffers’ poem. It was my turn at the mic. I had a chord sheet page for Dave, and a surprise. The nature of that surprise is part of the next post, coming up soon.

To hear the LYL Band perform Robinson Jeffers’ “Their Beauty Has More Meaning”  live in the studio on Election Day, you can pull the lever** for the audio player below. No player visible? You can request a provisional ballot – well, another way to get an audio player: this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

 

 

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*We do use rough chord sheets for some pieces, we usually try to guess and announce the key center for a piece; but we don’t work out an arrangement between players, and the sheets are sketchy and undetailed. Is this the best way to do what we intend? I’m not sure, but it’s the way Dave and I have done this. With the rest of the Parlando Project pieces I’m increasingly working in the one-man-band scheme, playing and then rejecting or excepting the tracks I lay down or compose.

There are folks who intentionally skill themselves in free music improvisation, who come at the situation with more musical chops and theoretical knowledge. I admire, and praise that commitment, but I don’t believe art is essentially a hierarchy. I act instead on what I feel was the core belief of the 20th century folk revival and the later (but highly similar) punk-rock movement that saw music and art as the sharing of necessary expression.

**Old person reference. Voting machines used to be these 8-foot-high booth-sized contraptions where you flicked little levers like a pinball machine racking up points and then registered your choices with a bigger lever that felt like you were shifting a truck into gear when you yanked it over with a satisfying clunk. Filling little exam ovals with black ink lacks the tactile and auditory richness of the old ways. I could even say the modern silent ink seems like composition abstracted in musical notation while the old voting machines felt like grabbing a Bigsby whammy bar while slamming out a chord on a guitar.

The Angry Percy Bysshe Shelley: England 1819

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

My teenager asked me what I’m doing, overhearing me test-shouting the text of today’s piece Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “England 1819.”  Here’s a link to that text if you want to follow along.

“Shelley, the perfect English Romantic Poet, might have been the most radical poet of his time. In matters of sex, religion, politics, aesthetics and philosophy he was explicitly in opposition, and he was chased out of England for it. But still he was capable of being driven to a new level of outrage by events.”

“The ruined statue in the desert guy?”

“Yeah, that’s him. And some readers forget that as beautiful a poem as “Ozymandias”  is, that there’s real anger behind it—but you can’t miss the anger in this one.”

So, once more I’ll write today about the process of translation. Not from some other language to English, but from perfectly fine English and a past you may not know, to our time. “England 1819”  is 201 years old, and some superficial particularities could make it seem a little antique. It wasn’t so when it was written—and it just so happens that the rhymes of history may make some other specifics in the poem ring out to a reader or listener today.

What was it that set Shelley’s anger to a new heat point? In August 1819 a large meeting was planned by reformers in Manchester England. The organizers seemed to take care that it be a powerful but peaceful demonstration. Chief among the subjects of the event: the granting to ordinary people the ability to vote.* On the appointed day, tens of thousands turned out, including whole families. Many were dressed in their “Sunday best” to hear speakers in St. Peter’s field, an open space in Manchester.

I’ll summarize the brutal details of what happened. Given that it’s 1819 there are no photographs, no bystander cell-cam video: one has to read and use imagination to picture it. Mounted police were sent to arrest the speakers and organizers on a temporary stage in the midst of the large field while the event was happening. Their horses were slowed and tangled in the crowd (described as so dense, that the hat brims of the attendees touched one another). This led to additional mounted militia and eventually regular soldiers that had been held in reserve to be sent against the crowd. Sabers were used as the horsemen struck out at those surrounding them, and of course the horses themselves were trampling on those who fell or were in the way. In some ways it seems miraculous that “only” eleven were killed. Hundreds were injured: men, women, children. The organizers were arrested, convicted, and jailed.

Peterloo_Massacre

Wikipedia says the banner the woman on the left is holding that day would say “Let us die like men and not be sold as slaves.”

One of those who was injured, and who died a few days afterward from his wounds, was a veteran of the Battle of Waterloo, the famous British victory of four years earlier. With bitter irony this event was called “The Peterloo Massacre”

It took a few weeks for the news of this outrage to reach Shelley who was in Italy. That September he wrote today’s sonnet, along with a longer work “The Mask of Anarchy”  and a third poem in a song form. Despite that he was already a self-exile abroad, none of them were published during his lifetime. There was a reason for that: merely publishing an account of The Peterloo Massacre was considered sedition and libel. He asked his friends to not publish them, for there was a real risk of imprisonment for them to do so. The poems were circulated informally, and finally published over a decade later after Shelley had died.

“England 1819”  then has some specifics. The stabbed in line 7, the army in line 8, and the sword in line 9 aren’t only metaphors—they are, albeit second-hand, reportage. Adjusted for the speed of communication in Shelley’s time, they are roughly as immediate as a blog post, just in the form of a sonnet.

What about the possible correspondences of history/rhyme I mentioned? I could write how in some way that the charges laid out against the 1819 English government power structure and the insidious way they used their power could be compared to my country in 2020. I almost wrote just such a section—but anyone who remains in my audience can likely do that for themselves. I personally found some of them as bitterly ironic as the decision to call the 1819 event Peterloo. You may think otherwise. Feel free to do your own translation today. As to prophetic Shelley’s concluding “glorious Phantom,” the Phantom that may emerge from the graves created and filled by those that then recognize they are dying themselves: what tempest will that day bring? A cleansing, nourishing rain, applauded in the leaves of trees, or a hurricane?

The player gadget to hear my performance of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “England 1819”  is below.

*For over half-a-century in my life, voting is something that would seem uncontroversial—at least since the heroes of the Civil Rights movement, some of whom died to make that mundane. Indeed, how many radicals have I met who invoke the saying that if voting could really change anything, they’d make it illegal. Now I hear that statement backwards. If there are current efforts trying to impede voting, reduce it, and denigrate it—there must be powerful people afraid of some change it could bring.