Low

It’s not happiness, but something else; waiting
for the light to change; a bakery.

It’s a lake. It emerges from darkness into the next day surrounded by
pines.
There’s a couple.

It’s a living room. The upholstery is yellow and the furniture is
walnut.
They used to lie down on the carpet

between the sofa and the coffee table, after the guests had left.

The cups and saucers were still.

Their memories of everything that occurred took place
with the other’s face as a backdrop and sometimes

the air was grainy like a movie about evening, and sometimes there
was an ending
in the air that looked like a scene from a different beginning,

in which they are walking.

It took place alongside a scene in which one of them looks up at a
brown rooftop
early in March. The ground hadn’t softened.

One walked in front of the other breathing.
The other saw a small house as they passed and breathed. The
reflections in the windows

made them hear the sounds on the hill: a crow, a dog, and
branches—
and they bent into the hour that started just then, like bending to
walk under branches.

-Arda Collins (from The New Yorker, June 2, 2008)

Mad Doctors

Even as children they always went too far.
What will happen, they kept thinking,
if I pull that switch, strike this match?
Maybe no one told them not to,
or explained, logically, what could go wrong.
Then they were playing with lightning,

wondering what they would do if they didn't
have to die. Consider Doctor Cyclops,
stuck in the middle of the jungle
with his radium, making things small.

It's 1940, five years before Hiroshima.
Even the science wasn't on our side.
In the movie, Dick Decker's
shaved head makes him monstrous
and impressive, and a little like a child.
Yet he seems to have no past--

no wife to bring back from the dead,
no motive for evil, nothing but research.
His eyes are bad and he hardly sleeps.
We should remember Doctor Cyclops

from time to time, and Doctor Frankenstein,
Doctor Jekyll, and Doctor X.
They were all deceived by ambition,
although they believed themselves
betrayed by the world.

Maybe no one ever told them
we don't live forever.
Maybe no one explained, exactly,
the logic of it.

-Lawrence Raab (published in Gulf Coast, Summer/ Fall '08)

It's the same for a boy or a girl,
The meaning of the world lies outside the world

-David Berman (from the Silver Jews' "People")

****

"In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you--the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in every intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experiences is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth's expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing in itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things--the beauty, the memory of our own past--are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of the worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited. Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spells that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years. Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth. ...Do what they will, we remain conscious of a desire which no natural happiness will satisfy."

-C.S. Lewis (from "The Weight of Glory")

****

Love Calls Us to the Things of this World

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,

And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul

Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple

As false dawn.

Outside the open window

The morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,

Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.

Now they are rising together in calm swells

Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear

With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

Now they are flying in place, conveying

The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving

And staying like white water; and now of a sudden

They swoon down into so rapt a quiet

That nobody seems to be there.

The soul shrinks

From all that it is about to remember,

From the punctual rape of every blessèd day,

And cries,

“Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,

Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam

And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”

Yet, as the sun acknowledges

With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,

The soul descends once more in bitter love

To accept the waking body, saying now

In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,

“Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;

Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;

Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,

And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating

Of dark habits,

keeping their difficult balance.”

-Richard Wilbur

"Try, like some first human being, to say what you see and experience and love and lose....Save yourself from general themes and seek those which your own everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, passing thoughts and the belief in some sort of beauty--describe all these with loving, quiet, humble sincerity, and use, to express yourself, the things in your environment, the images from your dreams, and the objects of your memory. If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place."

-Rainer Maria Rilke (letter to a young poet, February 17, 1903)

"It is the Wisdom of this World which demonstrates to us that the Wisdom of this World isn't enough."

-Randall Jarrell (speaking of Robert Frost's poem "Provide Provide")


"I know nothing--I have read nothing--and I mean to follow Solomon's directions, 'get learning--get understanding.' I find earlier days are gone by--I find that I can have no enjoyment in the World but continual drinking of Knowledge. I find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good to the world. Some do it with their society--some with their wit--some with their benevolence--some with a sort of power of conferring pleasure and good humor on all they meet."

-John Keats (in a letter to John Taylor, April 24, 1818)

Reaching into the Future

It Still Moves

"In a small white house on a quiet country road in the foothills of northeastern Georgia--the end of the Appalachians or the beginning, depending on your point of view--there lived an old blues singer named Cora Mae (Sweet Petunia) Bryant. Rumor had it she could be difficult. Bryant had been known to slam her door on uninvited visitors, to demand a few "dead Presidents" for an interview, and to beat her manager with a purse for getting her onstage too late. Her nickname was borrowed rather than earned. It came from a song that her father, the blues guitarist Curley Weaver, wrote in 1928. Cora Mae was born two years earlier, but the lyrics were clearly about someone else: "I've got a gal, she's long and tall, every time she do the shimmie I holler, Hot Dog!"

This is the opening graph of a very fine piece by Burkhard Bilger published in the April 28th issue of The New Yorker. "The Last Verse: Is there any folk music still out there?" traces the history of field recording in the U.S. from the pre-War days of the Lomaxes to the folk-revivalist era of Harry Smith and right up to the north Georgia doorstep of Sweet Petunia Bryant, where "one morning in December" Lance Ledbetter and Art Rosenbaum showed up with microphones and a flash recorder.

Rosenbaum is a folklorist, painter, and professor of art at the University of Georgia who has "spent fifty of his sixty-nine years traveling around the South and the Midwest, recording folk musicians." Ledbetter is the man whose Atlanta label, Dust-to-Digital, released a four-CD retrospective of Rosenbaum's work last fall titled "Art of Field Recording: Volume 1."
In this edition of Out Loud, Bilger discusses his recent article and samples tracks from "Art of Field Recording: Volume 1," and Ledbetter's gospel collection "Goodbye, Babylon."