My Quaker friend Peter Rutter died at a great age on January 15th 2019. By coincidence it was also on this day that Mary Oliver died. I had never heard of her but received this pœm from an admirer, which perfectly summarised Peter’s life and death. I read it at his memorial Meeting.
When Death Comes
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it’s over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
Subsequently I bought Mary Oliver’s Collected Works and have been reading a pœm a day; but not until I encountered the pœm Praying in mid September did I see one that produced an immediate musical response, to the degree that I had sketched out almost all the melodic narrative spontaneously. Then I tackled Thirst with the same visceral response. A couple of days came the lament Lead – so relevant to the eco-cide which the human species is visiting on our planet. The fourth pœm I set last as I knew it would be the most challenging to achieve the right idiom for a quasi-operatic scena the words demanded. The final Pœm (the spirit) Clancy found in a book about Hildegarde of Bingen by Matthew Fox, who regards both pœts as speaking with one orphic voice. This set made me wondering about creating a light-hearted vocal acappella scherzo à la Manhattan Transfer or King’s Singers, but with words of profound spiritual content.
Stylistically, the closer the performance comes to a barbershop acappella sound the happier I shall be. The words need to be articulated as clearly as possible. However there are some passages, especially in the latter two songs where particular care will be needed to communicate the narrative.
The process of computerising the score is a long slow business, and I often use one of my screen to keep half an eye/ear on other things. Two personal memories stand out. I was working on the tragic poem Lead while watching the parliamentary debate following the Prorogation judgment, and if anything summed up humanity’s blindness to the needs of the environment, natural justice or the bigger picture it was the aggressive factionalism of Johnson’s Conservative Party. The other is that while I was finalising The Fires I watched a beautiful documentary about Leonard Cohen’s muse Marianna and their life (not/) together, the pre-lapsarian existence on the Greek Island of Hydra in the ’60s, and the tragic consequences for its cast of characters as their dreams evaporated and one by one they were overtaken by the destiny they had been escaping.
To me, Mary Oliver’s poems are not merely about such hope, they are about a more profound perennial wisdom and forgiveness found in nature, with which we can align ourselves if we set aside the limitations of the human intellect and embrace the non-dual (without drugs). It must seem a paradox, when the music I have written depends supremely for its realisation on a high level of intellectualised skill – and yet the composition is distilled from the subconscious, the inchoate, and can only be effective if performed in that spirit … the consciousness that returns us to the unconscious – that cycle of perpetual motion where the unknowing gives us the knowing that gives us the unknowing.
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When Death Comes
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it’s over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
Subsequently I bought Mary Oliver’s Collected Works and have been reading a pœm a day; but not until I encountered the pœm Praying in mid September did I see one that produced an immediate musical response, to the degree that I had sketched out almost all the melodic narrative spontaneously. Then I tackled Thirst with the same visceral response. A couple of days came the lament Lead – so relevant to the eco-cide which the human species is visiting on our planet. The fourth pœm I set last as I knew it would be the most challenging to achieve the right idiom for a quasi-operatic scena the words demanded. The final Pœm (the spirit) Clancy found in a book about Hildegarde of Bingen by Matthew Fox, who regards both pœts as speaking with one orphic voice. This set made me wondering about creating a light-hearted vocal acappella scherzo à la Manhattan Transfer or King’s Singers, but with words of profound spiritual content.
Stylistically, the closer the performance comes to a barbershop acappella sound the happier I shall be. The words need to be articulated as clearly as possible. However there are some passages, especially in the latter two songs where particular care will be needed to communicate the narrative.
The process of computerising the score is a long slow business, and I often use one of my screen to keep half an eye/ear on other things. Two personal memories stand out. I was working on the tragic poem Lead while watching the parliamentary debate following the Prorogation judgment, and if anything summed up humanity’s blindness to the needs of the environment, natural justice or the bigger picture it was the aggressive factionalism of Johnson’s Conservative Party. The other is that while I was finalising The Fires I watched a beautiful documentary about Leonard Cohen’s muse Marianna and their life (not/) together, the pre-lapsarian existence on the Greek Island of Hydra in the ’60s, and the tragic consequences for its cast of characters as their dreams evaporated and one by one they were overtaken by the destiny they had been escaping.
To me, Mary Oliver’s poems are not merely about such hope, they are about a more profound perennial wisdom and forgiveness found in nature, with which we can align ourselves if we set aside the limitations of the human intellect and embrace the non-dual (without drugs). It must seem a paradox, when the music I have written depends supremely for its realisation on a high level of intellectualised skill – and yet the composition is distilled from the subconscious, the inchoate, and can only be effective if performed in that spirit … the consciousness that returns us to the unconscious – that cycle of perpetual motion where the unknowing gives us the knowing that gives us the unknowing.
---
When I compose is when I feel the greatest intensity of relationship with my Inner Otherness, therefore I have to trust that what I’m doing has some ultimate meaning - even when in the ‘real world’ it has neither meaning nor value. I have to believe that the latency of the beauty I am creating has the power to bring into existence a world in which it would make sense. This may of course be a complete delusion but it makes a better basis for living my life than thinking I’m a Nowhere Man making songs for nobody.
When I look at my life trajectory and see how everything I blindly struggled for has manifested beyond my wildest dreams, I don’t see why that principle would not also apply to my composition. Therefore if I were to take the view that if noone will pay me I won’t do it, as I used to, I deprive myself of my greatest private bliss and make a mockery of the trust mechanism that has generated everything of value that now surrounds me.
In all of this the one profound grief I have is that I have not been able to learn heuristically by actually hearing what I have composed in the divine sunlight of acoustic sound, for then I think I would’ve been able to escape my own mind. But I cannot change what I cannot change.
I keep thinking that if I have resolved pretty much all my other issues why can’t I call on the Powers That Be to resolve this one too? But that seems to be the big fat God button I can’t find. I know it’s there somewhere, and I figure that if I keep pressing the buttons in sequence and combo then statistically I’m likely to hit it sooner or later. Or sit on it by accident!
And meanwhile walking in the dark is its own ‘proof of concept’ - ie, faith - and nothing is more agreeable than to have a hypothesis proved correct after a difficult process. And if isn’t? Well then it’s still a pleasanter way to wind toward death than the conviction you’ve wasted your time. I regard myself as a Merlin in his Esplumoir fashioning the Excalibur/s some future Arthur will draw from the rock. My job is only to make the thought-form as perfect as I can (& that’s why concessions to amateurs won’t help). It’s the big one or it’s nothing.
For me this is a win-win. If I’m busy I’m not spending money (albeit not making it, but I have precious little control over that either! And it seems to work out) :: it doesn’t cost anything, harm anyone or put me within reach of the law. There is only the heartache of each new piece coming off the production line to a deafening silence. But after a lifetime of people not seeing the point of me I’ve come to understand that being understood is not the raison d’être — it’s more pleasant to be sure, but the big game sub specie æternitatis is to listen to the voice and be accurate transcribing it. Did I ever tell you that for my choir school auditions the piece I was given to learn was “I know that my redeemer (/justifer) liveth” ... and at the latter end he shall stand upon the earth? Is more prophetic resonance than this ever offered on the bumpy road to love?
So, madness or faith? Shall we ever know?
