I love Irish music, and have for over a decade. I became aware of how much I loved it during the winter of 1997-98, when I was living in Philadelphia. I was attending U. Penn that year, studying Greek and Latin and making the decision whether to go into ancient literature as a teaching career (obviously no). I did spend lots of time in bars. I was emerging from an extended phase of drinking heavily, which had begun during my sophomore year in college, and continued on-and-off until just about then.
The death of my father in 1996 from brain cancer shook me into the awareness that my prolonged adolescence was over and it was time to start living a life I respected, and actually accomplishing a series of things I could call a career. In other words, it was time to grow up. I still drank quite a bit that year in Philadelphia, but I was putting an end to the problem. I realized that it's not enough to discover, as I did after sophomore year in college, that alcohol does damage to a person's life, brain and body. When the addiction has become physical, merely wanting to end the addiction is too weak a motive.
Alcohol damages and ends friendships, family relationships and careers. It precluded any scholarship I might have done in college. It deadens the conscious part of the personality, freeing the more primitive urges to express themselves.
This is why drunks tend to act crudely and boorishly, and be undesirable company in general. But if you cultivate the habit of not acting on those crude desires, but only let them loose in your mind, then being drunk can actually become a means to discover what is happening further down in your brain than the consciousness is willing to travel. That's important for thinkers and artists.
There's also the fact that drinking helps destroy relationships and career prospects. It engenders a general sense of shame in a person. And that shame itself can be useful--it is particularly strong acid on many of the assumptions in life, on social and religious conventions, and on identities based on race, nationality and class. In short, drinking heavily can train a person's mind to disregard as unimportant many of the things held sacred by reputable folks. Only your immediate emotional needs survive. If you're a writer or an artist, that is invaluable. It's a prerequisite for the vocation.
The society we've built up, including religion and government, certainly has its basis in our own psychology and in the world around us, but not all of it. Any system includes its own arbitrary limits, declarations peculiar to that system, and not necessarily to any other. Christians make Jesus Christ, only-begotten son of God, the focus of their religion. No other religious system does. Capitalism enshrines the idea that each person has the right to buy and own as much as he or she can afford. Not all economic systems are so. To step beyond those conventions takes hard work, both intellectually and emotionally.
So drinking has its benefits. But I decided against creative writing as a career, so I knew I had to sober up. It took a while, especially since I didn't want to go dry, and preclude the possibility of ever having a social drink again. I knew weaning myself of habitual drinking, without giving it up altogether, would be more difficult than going cold turkey.
But even so, it wasn't enough to simply want to give up drinking. I needed something else I could turn to, something I'd rather be doing instead of drinking. Otherwise, in my bored, solitary moments, I'd be too likely to find myself at a bar again, drunk or well on my way. I needed something similar to what Alcoholics Anonymous calls the "higher power". During that winter in Philadelphia, I found it: ballroom dancing. Ballroom dance was my avenue back toward being social again, making friends, meeting women, and doing something which was fun just by itself. A dance with a decent partner whom I might never see again after that dance is still a fine thing.
My six months of dancing in Philadelphia would be a long story in themselves, so I won't tell it here. But the lessons I took at that studio with my teacher Shana were, altogether, perhaps the biggest single step I took toward forgetting the drinking problem. Still, that didn't mean I wasn't drinking that year. I was, and I got to know plenty of bars around Philly. Philly is just Irish enough--not like Boston, but more than, say, Dallas--that many of the best bars have Irish themes. My favorite--and I have no idea if it's still there--was The Bards, in Central City. It was a modest pub, featuring its own in-house brew (Yard Ale--amber, as smooth as Guinness, but not as heavy), and no TVs. Conversation reigned at The Bards. A person might sit down at the bar, order a pint, pull out a book and start reading. It was a great place, an alcoholic coffee shop (and I was already in love with coffee shops). More than that, it featured musical Sundays.
A widespread custom in Irish bars all over the nation is that Sunday evenings feature a session of musicians who come in with their instruments and play. They tend to know each other, of course, but there's nothing formal about it. It's more of an open mic, though there's rarely any singing, and no mic. Traditional Irish music is something like jazz or blues, with some standard sets and chords and the potential for a band to simply improvise variations endlessly. I fell in love with pipes, fiddles, flutes, guitars, and Bodhran drums. I actually took some violin lessons that spring but decided I didn't have the time to invest.
Aside from becoming a Sunday evening chronic at the sessions, I snatched up a bunch of CDs of Irish music (ITunes didn't exist then, remember). I listened to those discs dozens and dozens of times. My Sunday morning breakfast-and-laundry ritual had an Irish soundtrack, to the point that I'd start making breakfast--either French toast or pancakes with coffee--and be sitting down to eat at pretty much the same point of the same song each week. It was almost choreographed.
Beyond the simple sound of the instruments and the varying rhythms, I loved the emotions the music was so full of. There is the endless, inconsolable lament, which I was sensitive to through the shipwreck of my late teens and 20's. There is also the inexpressible and orgasmic joy, a feeling of celebration which overwhelms everything else. Irish music by itself is nearly the perfect musical expression of the tao principle of yin and yang, two utter opposites forming one whole. I found in it my own psychology.
Two songs were my favorites, one joyful and the other melancholy. First, the happy one. It comes from one of the first discs I bought, actually a 2-disc set of various Irish artists playing tunes both traditional and original. It was composed by the piper Davy Spillane, and it's called "Sliverish". Because of that tune I feel that a banjo makes a fundamentally happy sound.
(And please forgive the crappy audio. It's the best I could do without a sound studio.)
My melancholy favorite is called "The Wishing Tree", composed by Seamus McGuire. It's not so
much purely mournful--those tunes can be pretty horrid--but is more an even mixture of joy and sorrow, the combination of both which resounds through the ages of human existence. I think of a tree, somewhat like the tortoise of Asian and Indian mythology, which spans many human ages and comprehends all possibilities of existence, almost beyond life and death themselves.
The illustrations I've posted to this blog entry--one treelike, the other more of of a stylized celtic pattern--are actually concepts of the Norse mythical tree of creation, Yggdrasil. But Yggdrasil has much in common with my concept of the Wishing Tree. It participates in all things foul and fair, beautiful and ugly, good and evil, deadly and life-giving. Everything that can be wished for is already part of our concept of creation. And any wish soever must always have the contrary and unexpected consequences we fondly know as life.
The Wishing Tree implies to me a person's engagement in life, in setting hopes and aspirations,
and whether attaining or not, engaging in the struggle which has defined our species throughout its existence. Victory is always attended with sorrow--whether through the austerity and discipline of the preparations, or through the consequences of winning, or by other means. Nothing in this life comes without cost. The stronger and deeper and more sincere a person's expression of life, the stronger the elements of triumph and tragedy exist within that person. Ultimately a person wishes for life or wishes for nothing. To the extent he or she wishes for life, that person learns the wisdom of the Wishing Tree. You cannot wish for part of it: you can only wish for all.
The piece itself is a melody which repeats three times, each time with additional instruments. The first run is a cello with very little accompaniment. A violin takes over the melody in the second repetition, with more strings in the background. The violin continues in the third, but with a swelling background which eventually takes over for the melody and then fades away.
In that tune I hear three generations: grandfather, father and son. By the time I first listened to the Wishing Tree, my father was dead and I had no immediate prospects for a family of my own. I thought of my grandfather, dad's father, and then my father, and me. Dad barely knew his own father, and I of course never met him. There was a mythical character to this distant man, seen
in a few black-and-white photos and some fragments of handwriting, even taller apparently than my own father, a skilled musician who brought his accordion to his hospital ship during the war and played for the convalescent soldiers. He was also the man--a gynecologist who wooed and eventually married the younger sister of one of his patients--who wrote home that he was burying the boys he'd delivered earlier in his life. I'm told he returned from the war a broken, desolate man who committed suicide a few months later. I envisioned the deep-toned cello as his voice, sounding its wisdom alone through the echo chambers of time. He is followed by my own father, singing the same melody but higher, more plaintively, closer to the present. I saw myself as the third verse, surrounded by the cacaphony of life today, but producing a melody that hasn't changed.
It's easy to transfer this concept down one generation, with my father becoming the cello, me the second verse, and little Eliot due to become the third. He'll know my father as I knew my granddad, as a quasi-mythical presence who becomes larger due to his absence. When I hear the tune I start to think of this continuity, and then think metaphorically about the quality and the nature of my own wishes on the Wishing Tree. I'm at a crossroads of my career, and life, perhaps lacking the resources to continue on the professional path I've selected. Heroes choose their way, and I've frequently been overly meek and not had enough faith in my own ability. My failures at Dartmouth and later are painful enough evidence of this. I frequently return to the thought that my wishes on the tree have been too small, and that I've asked too little of myself. A crossroads like this in life is another chance for me to define who I am for the rest of my life. Which way will I go? I don't yet know.
* * *
To focus simply on the music for now. I'll list my favorite pieces of non-pop music, holding to my categories of those which have a mournful or somber character, and those which are ecstatic. In no particular order, because I couldn't rank these:
Sorrowful:
-Beethoven's 7th Symphony, 2nd movement (Allegretto);
-Mozart's Requiem,
Lacrimosa;
-Samuel Barber,
Adagio for Strings;
-Brahms' Requiem,
Alles Fleisch ist Wie dem Grass;
-Seamus McGuire,
The Wishing Tree;
-Dougie MacLean,
These Broken Wings;
-Randall Thompson,
Alleluia.Happy:
-Leo Kottke,
Stolen;
-Leo Kottke,
Morning is the Longest Way Home;
-Altan,
Dulaman;
-Hapa,
Olinda Road;
-Davy Spillane,
Sliverish.
(You might note more entries in the melancholy category. So be it. I'll add, however, that quite a few of the happy--or happy in their way, at least--songs which I love are of the pop/rock variety, like the Beatles'
Savoy Truffle, Zep's
That's the Way and
Boogie with Stu, and Pearl Jam's
Bugs. So there.)
A note also about the Beethoven Allegretto movement (and I think Brahms based his
Alles Fleisch movement at least partly on it). Last night Kate and I watched The King's Speech, about how British King George VI overcame his stammering problem and was able to speak effectively to his empire during World War II via radio. King George and Winston Churchill combined through the radio to provide the leadership which British citizens needed during the Nazi siege on England, and during the worldwide onslaught of the Axis. The movie concludes with King George delivering his first major address of the war, as hostilities with Germany are about to begin. Churchill has just been elected, all attempts at peace have failed, and Germany has taken Poland by blitzkrieg in a matter of weeks. The Nazi military machine is faster and more fearsome than anything in history, and it is soon to turn toward England.
With this backdrop, the King--Berty as he is known in the film--steps into the broadcast room and prepares to speak. His speech therapist Lionel Logue is with him, and coaches him through the most strenuous effort of his adult life. The development of the film to this point has made it quite clear that the main role of the king is to communicate with his subjects via radio. Berty, with his stammering problem, has no greater weakness than speech. He knew as well as anybody the desperation of England's position in the coming war, and the importance of his own role. And he knew better than anybody that his weakest quality was at the same time his country's greatest need.
As the King prepared to speak, the first chord of Beethoven's 7th, 2nd movement, played. I thought, How strange--that sounds like Beethoven. The scene continued, and the movement carried on, and I felt that the choice of music was wrong, too heavy a setting for what should have been more combative or triumphal. But as the scene progressed--shots of Berty laboring to speak, hesitating and stopping, with Lionel standing in front of him desperately coaching him on in silence, alternating with shots of people around the country focused utterly on their radios--the import of his words became obvious. And I realized more and more that the choice of music came to fit the scene perfectly. The stark somberness matched the head-throbbing effort the King made to speak clearly. The darkness and urgency suited the eve of war.
It was a good film--not one of my favorites, but a good film--but that scene by itself is unforgettable, not least for the choice of music.
