Artist
April 21st, 2010
I’m not terribly
daunted by the Tao te Ching
or The Art of War or a screenplay-in-chrysalis,
but approaching my favorite artists and human beings with
words is another matter. Rilke said that “Works of art are
of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be
reached as with critical words. Criticism always
comes down to a more or less happy
misunderstanding.”
So on Bob Marley’s
birthday I give you Bob in his own words,
not mine. Likewise for Dr. King. My mother, my father,
my beloved friend Edward Abbey, who utterly changed my life,
about them I’m nearly as quiet as quiet can be. Now I long
to be quiet about Natalie Merchant, a hero of mine
for decades, but I can’t.
Or musn’t.
Natalie Merchant’s
work has, for so long now, been
saturated with musical mastery, lyrical beauty
and profundity, deep soul. With her new double album “Leave Your Sleep”,
she’s raised the bar yet again. Briefly, it’s a collection of musical renderings of other
people’s poetry. Something like 130 musicians worked on the songs,
which range from reggae to Chinese music ensemble to Cajun
stomp to shanties of the sea. She financed it herself, the
times being what they are in the music business. It’s
accompanied by an eighty page book which offers up
the poems in their original forms and her
exquisite writing about their authors.
It begins like this:
This collection of songs
represents parts of a long conversation
I’ve had with my daughter during the first six
years of her life. It documents our word-of-mouth
tradition in the poems, stories, and songs that I found to
delight and teach her. I pulled these obscure and eccentric poems
off their flat, yellowed pages and brought them to life for her. I willed into
being this parade of witches and fearless girls, blind men and elephants, giants
and sailors and gypsies, floating churches, dancing bears, circus ponies, a Chinese
princess and a janitor’s boy, and so many others. I tried to show her that speech
could be the most delightful toy in her possession and that her mother tongue
is rich with musical rhythms and rhymes. I gave her parables with lessons
in human nature and bits of nonsense to challenge the natural order of
things and sharpen her wit. These poems speak of so many things:
longing and sadness, joy and beauty, hope and disillusionment.
Grave or absurd, these are the things that make a
childhood, that time when we wake up to the
great wonders and small terrors of this
beautiful-horrible world
of ours.
In spite of the fact
that I have written song lyrics for
thirty years, I’d never considered myself a poet
or gave much of my time to reading poetry. I’m a late convert
to the art form but now I understand that poets are our soft-spoken clairvoyants.
They tell us about the things that have made us and keep us human. Poets are keepers
of the sacred language that describes our holy places — unknown and unknowable.
The poet holds the mirror that reflects the true shape and touch and taste
and sound of all the things that bind us together and keep us apart.
The poet’s work is putting silence around everything
worth remembering…
Lordy.
“Leave Your Sleep” is —
and I risk damning it with mature
praise here — the work of a mature artist.
Think “mature” like Mike Nichols or Paul Simon or Coleman
Barks, and you’re looking in the right direction. This music is so exquisite
that every song deserves to be taken alone, with a bit of quiet before and a spell of rest
and contemplation after. I am a lover of albums, but I don’t play this as an album.
I listen to a song like “Nursery Rhyme of Innocence and Experience”, recorded
in the video below, and I have to sit in silence for a while. It’s poetry,
after all, not just the lyrics but the music, and the breath that
comes out of this woman — all that is poetry,
and deserves some silence on
either side of it.
The scholarship in
the book that accompanies “Leave Your Sleep”
is substantial. All of the people whose poems have been turned
into songs are gone, and some are now obscure enough
that finding things out about them
can’t have been easy.
Wildly imaginative,
the prolific Eleanor Farjeon published
over eighty books, including poetry, plays, novels, musicals,
short stories, and translations, in a career that extended over nearly
half a century. She wrote her first storybook at age six
and was actively writing well into
her seventies…
But the scholarship,
thorough-going as it is, is not the most
extraordinary thing about Natalie Merchant’s writing about
these poets. Nor is the writing itself the most beautiful
thing, though it is exquisite. What is loveliest
is her quiet but steady generosity toward
the artists who came before her
and enabled her:
Awarded both the
Hans Christian Andersen and Carnegie
Medals, Eleanor could have also been honored with
the title Dame of the British Empire but declined with one of
the most humble and endearing statements ever uttered,
“I do not wish to become different
from the milkman.”
What a fine thing to trouble
to relate about someone. What an accomplished
lot of work, for such a worthy purpose. What
a marvel-us collection of music.
Triple gassho.
