Monthly Archives: July 2018

Aguas de Marco

30 Monday Jul 2018

Posted by in Aguas de Marco, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Brazil, Elis Regina, March, Seasons

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Yesterday I was driving home in the rain, and on the radio I heard Susannah McCorkle’s recording of ‘The Waters of March.’ For months I have been working on the chapter of my book that deals with seasonal art, including seasonal songs, and I can’t believe that I almost overlooked this shining gem.

The song was composed by Antonio Carlos Jobim, who wrote both the music and lyrics, including Brazilian and English versions. If there was ever a song with music more perfectly wedded to words, I can’t think of it. The song is about the rainiest month in southern Brazil, when floods carry things along in their stream, and the impressionistic lyrics flow just as the music flows. Almost every line of the song begins with the word ‘ė,’ which means ‘it is.’

It’s the stick, it’s the rock, it’s the end of the road . . .

All these things flow by, and life moves on towards its end. But there is a hint of hope, as the only repeated refrain is:

It’s the waters of March closing summer

It’s the promise of life in your heart

Jobim is likely Brazil’s greatest songwriter. Most Americans know his work from the song ‘Girl from Ipanema,’ maybe Sinatra’s recording of ‘Dindi.’ But ‘Aguas de Marco’—‘The Waters of March’—is his greatest composition. It was once voted the best Brazilian song of all time by a panel of critics and journalists.

It has been recorded many times, in many languages. Baby Boomers may be familiar with a recording by Art Garfunkel on his 1975 solo album Breakaway, a sadly lame version that fails to capture the essential rhythm of the song. (Sorry Art, it’s just not your best work.) Brazilian critics believe the definitive version is the duet between Jobim himself and Brazilian singer Elis Regina, which is lovely.

But for me, the best recording is by the beautiful, fated Elis herself, done with minimal accompaniment of gently chorded piano, bass, and brushed snare drum. The simple instrumentation keeps the vocals front and center, with all those tantalizing Brazilian sibilants flowing across the listener’s senses, whether or not one understands the language. There is a video of this recording here: check it out if you want a real treat.

But perhaps the most interesting aspect of ‘Aguas de Marco,’ from a seasonal point of view, is in the fact that Antonio Carlos Jobim wrote two sets of lyrics. In the Brazilian version, March is the rainiest month, the end of summer in southern Brazil, where Rio de Janeiro is located. This is the reversed seasonal pattern of the antipodes, as in Australia and New Zealand. Thus the lyrics about March closing summer and such.

In the English version, all this is changed. March is still rainy, but it is not ending summer, but bringing spring. Lines were added about ‘the promise of spring’ and more to indicate the opposite seasonal pattern. To my knowledge, this is one of the only instances in art—popular or otherwise—that takes this change into account. I mean, Irving Berlin didn’t write an alternate version of ‘White Christmas’ with the words ‘I’m dreaming of a sunny Christmas,’ nor did Sammy Cahn write ‘Let it Shine! Let it Shine! Let it Shine!’ so people in Australia could have songs appropriate to their summertime holiday. So let’s give credit to Jobim, who knew that his songs would be played in the U.S. and other parts of the Northern Hemisphere, for making sure that the lyrics would be about something meaningful.

Dental Surgery

26 Thursday Jul 2018

Posted by in Aging, Janus, Seasons, Youth

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I have a new dentist, a lovely twelve-year-old girl. Her dental assistant, Denise, is about the same age, give or take a year. When Denise was on vacation recently, she got her hair cut; she was tired of always putting it up because it’s so hot out so she just decided to whack it all off. My dentist thinks it’s super cute, really. This conversation took place between them while they were giving me a root canal and crown. It’s one thing that they get you in the chair, give you a shot to numb you, and then present you with a sheet full of disclaimers and cautions, asking you to sign it, approving the procedure you’re already in the middle of. But when they carry on this girlish chatter while the drill is digging ever deeper into your gums, it’s disconcerting to say the least.

Last night I was reading the novel Submission, by Michel Houellebecq. The story’s protagonist is a young man just finishing college who notes that ‘maturing is to some degree learning to lose our disdain for the generation we’ve been called upon to replace.’ I can see that. Reminds me of the old Mark Twain quote, ‘When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to 21 I was astonished at how much the the old man had learned in seven years.’ When I was young I was as bad a smart-aleck as has ever inhabited the planet. Later I saw how much my elders could have told me—tried to tell me—if I had only listened.

And now I am on the other side of the equation, the older person who sees everyone as too young for the roles they inhabit, too inexperienced to understand things fully. My young dentist, vendors who call on me at work looking like they just left the playground, insurance agents, financial advisors, everybody is so young! I am called upon to learn trust, to know that these people, while young, are educated, tested, ready to provide the services they advertise. I must lose my disdain for the generation that’s replacing me.

In art, the seasons are often used as a metaphor for human life, from the springtime of youth through the aging and death of autumn and winter. We move through them one stage at a time, always looking towards what comes next. But what you don’t realize until you get to an advanced age is how much you also look back. This is what separates the seasons from human life—looking back as much as looking forward. The Romans must have understood this when they created their god Janus, god of beginnings, whose name is inscribed in the month January. He was a two-faced deity, always looking forward and backward, because nothing ever happens—nothing meaningful, anyway—without both.

I purposely selected a woman dentist. I just don’t like a guy with his big hairy knuckles digging around in my mouth. I was, I am still surprised by how young she looks, how young everyone in her office looks. But my tooth feels fine now, she and her assistant did an excellent job, despite over-sharing about Denise’s hairstyle choices. Like most people, I dislike dental surgery, and it was a big step for me going in to get some things taken care of. It was also a big step, moving closer to trusting the younger generation.

Spaceship Orion

21 Saturday Jul 2018

Posted by in Climate Change, Seasons, Space Travel

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I was learning how to play a new song this week, ‘Spaceship Orion’ by the Ozark Mountain Daredevils. It’s an old tune I’ve always liked. To me it’s a companion piece to another song I have long known, Neil Young’s classic ‘After the Gold Rush.’ Both songs are about humanity flying to some distant planet, seeking a new home, once earth has been met with ecological disaster. Neil Young’s song is perhaps more optimistic about that future, ending with the lines ‘Flying Mother Nature’s silver seed to a new home in the Sun,’ while the Daredevils end their song with the repeated lines ‘It can’t be like home, it can’t feel like home to you there.’

Of course not. For one thing, it’s imaginary. How many books and stories and movies have there been about humanity setting up new colonies on distant planets? How often we’ve been run through the whole speculative drill about families in suspended animation, whole populations enduring multi-year flights to the ends of the galaxy, waking up to a planet with sufficient atmosphere, water, and acceptable gravity, waiting there for us? The fact that to this point no planet has been found that even remotely fills the bill does not deter the science fiction writers. It’s just not going to happen, I think anybody with their head on straight can see that.

This has always been my problem with the ‘space program,’ with ‘exploring space’—as if exploring something infinite has any practical meaning. What a huge waste of money. Sure, putting satellites into orbit has had some practical value; but manned space flight? It is as much science fiction as science, and always has been. Boys playing with rockets. And now, I fear that it feeds into some dangerous political fantasies. Our current White House regime holds to three interesting ideas, which considered together, make for a scary scenario.

First is protection of the wealthiest in America. The recently passed tax ‘reform’ bill does just that, while offering weak and temporary sops to working Americans. Wages remain stagnant despite what is touted as a red-hot economy, while inflation is ticking up, led by gas prices. To the top economic tier, a great economy means they are making more money, while to the rest of us, it means less value for our income. An extremely rich upper class trailed by a weakening middle class and increasingly desperate lower class is becoming institutionally cemented into our society. Anyone who would mention this or opine that it should be otherwise is, of course, a socialist.

Second is denial of climate change—or at least of man’s role in it. David Brooks wrote a piece years ago (when he still had some cred in conservative circles) about the things conservatives actually believe that they won’t admit. Climate science was one of those things. Most conservative politicians are educated people, they understand basic science and can see the signs all around them. But they can’t admit it, either out of deference to their energy company sponsors or to jolly along the average benighted southern voter. When the occupant of the White House takes America out of the Paris Climate Agreement and works to weaken any environmental laws we do have, the applause from his side of the aisle in congress is deafening.

Third is a fixation on space things. New policy directives call for a return to the moon and eventually flights to Mars, for renting space to rich guys who love rockets. In several of his recent disjointed ramblings, the Dissembler in Chief has mentioned how rich guys love rockets; this left many wondering where he was headed, what he meant—as if he ever really means anything. Where this comes from is anybody’s guess: so here’s mine.

A scenario of many of the science fiction stories about inhabiting the moon, Mars, and beyond posits a happy future on extra-terrestrial colonies—for a lucky few. Those lucky few are, of course, the wealthiest. This seems like outlandish speculation, except the idea of all our official resources being focused on the happiness of a tiny percentage of rich people is rapidly becoming reality. Further, we can officially deny the effects of climate change, but in private, keep a weather eye out for those changes. If our toadying to the energy companies and their campaign donations leads to increasing environmental straits, we ought to have a plan. And so that plan, being promulgated even as we speak, is to intensify our efforts in space, particularly manned exploration of other planets. We must prepare to set up those colonies for rich people if/when everything goes south. Yes, the whole idea is still as much science fiction as science, but I’d bet anything that our administration in Washington is more informed by movies like The Martian and Interstellar than actual science.

Let’s face it. Earth is the only planet where humans will ever live. Let’s work to save it, and stop with these science fiction scenarios in which only the blessed few may thrive on a distant orb. I like the song ‘Spaceship Orion,’ but I realize it’s only a song.

As for my theory about where the Occupant in Chief is headed with his space talk, you may think it’s a little far-fetched. Maybe I’m being paranoid and getting carried away. After all, setting up colonies for rich people, while denying the opportunity to the vast run of humanity, would require having some kind of enforcement in place, some kind of Space Force, and I haven’t heard anybody suggesting that we start a Space Force. Have you?

Edna Gets Around

08 Sunday Jul 2018

Posted by in Edna St. Vincent Millay, Poetry, Pulitzer Prizes, Seasons

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Sometimes I think we fall into using certain locutions, because they express our innate desire to be seen as sympathetic, or right-thinking. Sometimes, if we press further into the facts of the matter, those locutions turn out to be simply nonsensical. Here is my current example.

I have been reading American poetry that deals with the seasons: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Most poetry collections include an introduction that offers biographical and critical material, and puts the writer’s work into cultural or historical context. These same themes are also reworked when I visit Wikipedia or Britannica Online for further information. Of Edna St. Vincent Millay, one thing is said repeatedly—I believe I read it in three sources, if not four. ‘Millay won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923, only the third woman to win the prize.’ Impressive, no? It is sad, I think, that we continue to count women’s accomplishments by which number each woman who achieves something can claim. Good for Edna to haul in one of those coveted Pulitzers, and only the third woman to do so!

Then I got curious. She won her Pulitzer in 1923. The Pulitzer Prizes were established in 1917. The prize for poetry is not given every year. By the time Millay got hers, there had been five winners: Sara Teasdale, Carl Sandburg, Margaret Widdemer, Edward Arlington Robinson, and Millay. Yes, she was ‘only the third woman to win,’ but at that point, women had dominated the award. Women would go on to do very well, with Amy Lowell, Leonora Speyer, Audrey Wurdemann, Marya Zaturenska, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, and many others winning. Over the years, men have won more, but it would be a challenge to come up with a female poet who has deserved a Pulitzer and not won.

I think it would serve as better history, and indeed give credit to women poets, if the sources on Edna St. Vincent Millay said, ‘Millay won a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923, the third woman to do so in a field dominated up to that point by women.’

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) was notoriously promiscuous, taking many lovers, a practice that persisted unabated after her marriage. She wrote the famous verse:

My candle burns at both ends,

It will not last the night.

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—

It gives a lovely light.

The idea of a candle burning at both ends is often interpreted to mean that her lovers were both male and female. She had no children, and her biographers note that in her life she had two abortions—in a time when such procedures were terribly dangerous.

She wrote of all seasons, but in a life as unconventional as hers, she was never going to mimic the traditional themes of seasonal literature. In the poem ‘Spring’ she asks, ‘To what purpose, April, do you return again?’ She is unimpressed by the resurrection of life, and the thought that death is never final, because:

Life in itself

Is nothing,

An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs,

It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,

April

Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

More stirring to her is the death of beauty, as exemplified by autumn. In ‘The Death of Autumn’ she writes that when the reeds die and grasses are fetched off by the wind, she feels the weight of the year in her heart.

I know that beauty must ail and die,

And will be born again,–but ah, to see

Beauty stiffened, staring up at the sky!

Oh Autumn! Autumn!—What is the Spring to me?

As with most poets, Millay concentrates on spring and autumn, but summer also seems to hold special meaning for her. In her poignant ‘Sonnet XXVII’ she writes:

I know I am but summer to your heart,

And not the full four seasons of the year . . .

And in the poem ‘Song,’ she writes of summer:

Gone, gone again is Summer the lovely,

Gone again on every side,

Lost again like a shining fish from the hand

Into the shadowy tide.

Biographers have theorized that Millay’s sense of loss at the passing of another summer is a reference to her own childlessness, another fertile season spent without fecundity. But as far as I can see, there is nothing in her life to indicate she ever longed to have children, and the evidence indicates she was fully capable.

Millay is another example of the fact that the seasons will always be seen as similes for the progress of human life, both its cyclicity and its impermanence. And when that life is unconventional, so is the poetry it produces.

 

 

Uncut Pages in Burroughs

06 Friday Jul 2018

Posted by in John Burroughs, Nature Writing, Seasons, Uncut Pages

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Last night I was reading Winter Sunshine by John Burroughs. Recent editions of Burroughs’s original books are hard to come by: today we have mostly anthologies and collections of his hundreds of nature essays. This was a 1908 edition of Winter Sunshine, and in the midst of the essay ‘Autumn Tides’ I was much surprised to find two uncut pages.

Let me tell you, if you don’t know, about uncut pages. Books are printed and bound using large sheets called octavos, meaning that there are eight pages to a sheet. The sheet is printed and folded into a unit called a signature. The signatures are assembled into their proper order, then run through a finisher that cuts the edges so the pages are all separate. Sometimes, the cutter misses a few pages. Sometimes it misses many. In the old days, this was common, and one could encounter uncut pages with some regularity. A person who could read and write was likely to carry, or have handy a penknife, with which it was an easy operation to smoothly slice open the uncut pages. I have read entries in old journals about the pleasures of finding uncut pages, like unwrapping a gift, or opening a door into a new world.

I used my Swiss Army knife. I was being careful, since this was a library copy, borrowed through interlibrary loan from the Abbey Library in Conception, Missouri. As I continued through Burroughs’s wonderful musings about the changing seasons, I was struck by the fact that I was the first person reading this essay in this volume. Almost exactly one-hundred years, and never had anyone opened these pages. This is a loss: people should always be reading John Burroughs.

I have been reading and writing about the seasons on earth for more than fifteen years. In my ever-expanding book, I have written chapters about the science of the seasons, the measuring of the seasons with calendars, the mythology of the seasons, and the holidays based on the seasons. Now I am working on the chapter about music and literature of the seasons. This has led me to many of the great nature writers—Emerson, Thoreau, Dickinson, Millay, Muir, Teale, Borland, Beston, Dillard, and of course, Burroughs. Of these, I find Burroughs the very best.

His essay ‘A Sharp Lookout,’ from the book Signs and Seasons (which I am reading in an 1886 first edition, borrowed from Grinnell College Library) begins by noting that one need not travel the globe to see unique and interesting climatic features: if one will only be still and patient, and keep a sharp lookout, no matter where one lives, all the seasons will pass by in pageant, like new and strange countries. Burroughs’s writing is beautiful and deep, but the depth comes from close observation, not mystical thought. He is spiritual, but not superstitious. In ‘A Sharp Lookout’ he cautions against things like ascribing innate intelligence to trees, or the ability of animals to predict weather. He writes of finding a frog in hibernation in November, having made its hibernaculum beneath the thinnest layer of leaves, surely an indication of a mild winter ahead. But the sharp lookout must persist, and he found the ensuing winter to be long and unusually cold. He sought out his frog in spring and found it no worse for a bad choice of winter domicile.

In the essay ‘Phases of Farm Life,’ he relates the chores on a farm more closely to the seasons than any other writer, save perhaps Laura Ingalls Wilder. By midsummer hay-mowing time, ‘The men are in the meadows by half-past four, or five, and work an hour or two before breakfast.’ Sugar making comes during ‘. . . the equipoise of the season: the heat of the day fully balances the frost of the night.’ Interesting to note that when he writes of farm life, he uses the old, Biblical terms ‘seedtime and harvest’ instead of spring and autumn.

Reading Burroughs is like entering a wonderful world we are all too rapidly leaving behind. I am as moved by his paragraphs as I am by the sense that it is a lost world. The very thought that I can still cut pages and enter that world is as close to a spiritual experience as I am likely to have in this life.