REAL LIFE REPORTAGE

NC WOMAN ABUSED BY INANIMATE OBJECTS         

July 24, 2012

At 10:30 this morning, while destroying a spider/moth graveyard with the hose of a vacuum cleaner, a female Spruce Pine resident was assaulted, on the temple, by a decorative corner of a bookcase. The incident was noted almost immediately by the victim’s husband, when he was roused from his computer chair by the sharp-tongued insistence of his spouse that he complete the vacuuming of the bedroom carpet, as she was indisposed, with an ice pack on her head.  (See photo below for scene of attack.)      

After satisfying the curiosity of dog and cat with presentation, for olfactory examination, of the frozen plastic ice pack, the victim retreated to the lavatory where, having seated herself and taken up a book of poetry kept in a wicker basket along with other bathroom reading material, she was assaulted by the contents of a bathroom waste receptacle, normally kept precariously balanced on the edge of the commode tank, leaning against the wall on one side to keep it secure. (The location of the plastic container is an arrangement incurred by the propensity of Sookie, then-puppy, two summers ago, for taking tissues from the receptacle, which she would then shred with her teeth and scatter throughout the house.)

The container full of crumpled bathroom tissues and other odd items tumbled over the lap of the victim this morning, and onto the floor, in a wanton display of the fecklessness of inanimate objects. Other debris fell on the tiled floor. The assault was an obvious bid for housekeeping attentions of the type shown to the carpets earlier in the day.

The victim reported no further assaults, but she was, however, threatened in the kitchen, by a large cooking pot filled with water, which was resting in the sink, the remains of the previous weekend’s chili, floating, with sordid provocation, on the surface of the water. Again, this obvious posturing was a demand for domestic attention.

The temperature in the kitchen being 83 degrees Fahrenheit, the victim ignored this harassment and removed to the living room sofa, where she seated herself before a large rectangular fan and re-applied the ice pack to her head wound.

(Photographs of the bathroom and kitchen perpetrators below.)  

                                                                     

Missing Niamh

Things have been jumping in Spruce Pine, and indeed the whole state of North Carolina, with the impending vote over Amendment One. Opinions are running high. Town is tense. But I keep turning my thoughts away from this because somehow my humanity is better served by meditating on the beauty of my late pet, Niamh. She passed away on January 31st of this year. She was a whole world of attitude, wildness, and sweetness. Just looking at her picture makes me dissolve. Here is a poem I wrote for her in 2000:


FOR NIAMH

What shall we do, my tiger girl
When we set off for Spain
You on your tasseled cushion
And me, in my velvet train?

By torchlight on the river bank
A masquerade of mice
Playing psaltery and fiddle
Will scent the air with spice.





                

We'll call for a silver goblet of

Men's lips in jellied wine

And the skulls of little songbirds

For your cruel teeth so fine.

Your paws perfumed with sweet decay

And your jaws that reek of death

You'll recline upon my shoulder

And we'll mingle, breath to breath.

(copyright cathy larson sky) 

When the masters say it best

My winter was dark. Death of two family cats. Fought like hell to stop feldspar/quartz mine from putting a tailings landfill within town city limits. Went up against a town council. One council member flipped through a magazine during the public hearing. Lost the fight. White dust from quartz mining is dangerous as coal dust. It is not pretty angel dust; it causes silicosis. But deals have been struck, the wagons pulled close. Voices silenced by the status quo.
Sometimes the voices of dead poets hit the exact nerve:

Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Robert Frost

My Fiddle, My Friend, My Voice

Part 2: Speaking

My husband and I once watched a documentary about a young man living on a small farm in China with his mother. The two lived in exile from the village, as the people disapproved that he was not killed at birth, since he was malformed. On the son’s shoulder, close to his neck, lived a vestigial twin. It consisted only of a nose and mouth connected to the young man’s nervous system. When he laughed, the eerie twin’s mouth widened and its tongue rose and fell, just like its host’s. When the young man cried, his twin’s mouth crumpled in silent mimicry of sobs. Somehow this never-to-be-forgotten image explains to me the function I expected of my fiddle – except that it was going to express my emotions in sound, not physical mimicry. The vision now seems like an immature expectation full of beginner’s hubris, but not without truth.

Working with fourth and fifth graders last spring, I would ask, “If you were a space man, how would you guess that a human could talk?” Well, humans have mouths – openings in their bodies. They also have lungs that inflate and deflate, so air passes through the throat, changing tones as the muscles in the vocal chords expand and contract. The tongue shapes words, cooperating with teeth, lips.

The fiddle can also talk, or sing, in that it has two openings, the sound holes. (To call them F holes made the kids snicker, but let’s forget about that.) The wind, or vibrating force, is created by drawing across the fiddle strings with the bow. That the bow is made of a wand and a horse’s tail made eyes wide. The sound of the note you want to make, I told them, comes from shortening the fiddle string by stopping the sound in different places with the fingers of your left hand, analogous to the work of the vocal chords. (Of course I didn’t use the word “analogous,” but struggled to show with my fingers how the vocal chords work.) The function of articulation is not by tooth and tongue and lips then, but by the strokes of the bow, controlled precariously by the fingers of the right hand. Are the motions of the bow choppy and short? Are they long and resonating? Hard, soft, medium pressure applied?

Because I believe in the energy centers of the body known as chakras, I appreciate the space that the fiddle occupies when played. The fiddle sits under the chin, protrudes from the body, and becomes an extension of the neck, throat and upper chest. In energetic terms, it lies close to the fifth chakra – that of vocalizing the soul’s work of receiving, interpreting, and then giving back information based on one’s unique experience, worship, perception. The position also hovers about the fourth or heart chakra, the warm energy field that transforms experience into nourishment and also allows us to love and be loved by others. The fiddle, then, is the little twin who is capable of broadcasting intense expression.

When I was new to Irish fiddling, and would tell people I thought I had a lot to communicate on the fiddle, they responded cynically. My husband suggested I tape record myself playing a jig with great emotion, then play it a second time shifting my attention to control of my motor skills, then listen to the difference. What he predicted was true: the controlled piece sounded much “better” because the force of emotion made my playing sloppy. Taking what is inside and projecting it is one thing, but preparing the message to be received and understood by others is another time consuming process. Like learning language, it is a long journey from using beginner’s words and phrases in order to voice basic needs to communicating ideas in complex word groups, conveying specific and detailed information. An even deeper layer of language is culture-specific, using colloquial terms readily understood by members of a community that shares physical, social, and historical references.

It is between two poles – the technical and the emotional -- I’ve had to bounce back and forth, over and over the years, while a river of information from listening to other players runs through my body/mind memory: tempo, phrasing and variation, tone, articulation. Emotion. But I’m always working toward creating a fiddle voice that represents my feeling- world, couched in my relationship to Irish traditional music.

My Fiddle, My Friend, My Voice

Thoughts are bulging out of my head and they seem to be emerging in essay form. So: Caveat: only for those with a long attention span.

Part I Initiation and Immersion

What is fiddling? People say he or she is “just fiddling around,” meaning that someone is wasting time doing inconsequential stuff. Not busy at serious, goal-oriented pastimes. In this season of falling leaves, of trees standing naked, I feel close to the wood of my fiddle. Its grain is a kind of hieroglyph of wind and water; its glow the memory of sunshine pouring down through openings in the forest roof. I know that the work I have done in learning tradition fiddling is the result of following a strong spiritual urge to find a source. For a long time I thought that source was outside of me, but now I see it is also within me. It is a force that motivates others possessed of the similar madness.

Fiddling and traditional music in general comprise an invisible world that can only be known by devotion and perpetual practice. It is not like playing from written music, with its succinct instructions, nor is it much like performing in the symphony, led by a conductor who interprets the musical piece. In an orchestral setting, the musician is a worker under the instruction of different bosses. Ironically, this is the kind of musician most widely regarded as productive and exemplary. Many of them cannot learn strictly by ear, as traditional musicians do. Their music does not become completely internalized and must be summoned by external prompts. Not all, but many classically trained musicians rely on written music. How then, does the process of learning traditional music, of fiddling begin?

You go through a gate. As far as Irish traditional music, if you are not born in Ireland, or in an Irish community in America, where you may have been born into a family already steeped in music, the process begins randomly. It may be a traditional concert down by a lake, or a recording you hear at a party that rocks your world. For me, it was an LP played for me when I was deep in grief. The music – it was the Chieftains -- soaked into the broken place inside me, telling me that it knew me. It seemed to be speaking about what I was feeling. How did it do this? Irish traditional music is for me, and always will be, a language of the deeper life of the soul, spirit, heart: whatever words you want to use to name the currents that run through us all. There is a kind of instant attunement, not unlike falling in love.

After you enter through the gate, that initiation, there follows a long period of listening and learning. As well as yearning. Nothing will satisfy that longing except being where the music is played. Hopefully, you are able to find traditional music communities or individuals who have a repertory of tunes. It only takes two to transmit and receive the music. This period may last for decades, or a lifetime, as it has been with me. To be open, to listen, and learn – these are traits which bind us to the world in a thoughtful way in general, not just in music. During the immersion period, waves of sound wash over the consciousness, each wave focusing, illuminating, until finally a clearer picture of the tune forms and curves begins to emerge. There is something pure about this period, as one listens holistically, allowing the colors and feelings of the tunes to come in, without judging or parsing out according to one’s acquired likes and dislikes. This sensory data will continue to cling to the tunes, including time, place, people, odors, emotions, in the same process that Proust’s madeleines sent him time-tripping, and indeed to question the nature of time itself. In time, the tunes provide an inner landscape rich in imagery: a kind of bank, or inner wealth of tunes that will demand to be played.

THE DRUMS AGAIN

I wrote these lyrics in 1977, when I was involved with the (successful!) movement against a proposed coastal nuclear power plant in Charlestown, RI. The song came back to me this morning, thinking of the brave ones now speaking out for balance, sanity, and the renewal of faith between earth and mankind.

CHARLESTOWN DRUMS

I will stand from my chair

Slowly I will shame the frozen air,

Set my words flying;

Speak the truth and hope it will appear

Before my dying.

The tires and the tractors shock the silence of the stone

Businessmen recite the words their fathers never owned

Every soul, believing it is ruthlessly alone,

Forgets the future.

I walk beside my children

Toward the light I took for granted as a child

The light of morning

My feet retrace the pathways

With the quickness of a rabbit’s beating heart

Beneath the meadow.

Inside smoky offices the Big Ones make their plans

Replace thoughts of balance with the deity of Man

Leaving to the poets all the reverence for land –

They’re dead, not dreaming.

The silence of the forest is the music

Of the senses breathing slow

You’re bound to listen

The sunrise on the ocean is the promise

Of the wedding of all hearts

Choir of color.

As the constellations weave the magic of the stars,

Brilliant white of Venus and the burning red of Mars,

All the earth is shining with the vision that is ours

If we just listen.

copyright cathy larson sky 2011

HIGH SUMMER BLUES

No blog entries lately because it has been all I could do to survive the storms and heat of summer. Finally I was able to give voice to my feelings with this poem. Sometimes I find myself channeling the rhythms and language of the Romantic poets, because I love them, especially Blake, Keats, Wordsworth, and Shelley.

SUMMER’S GAZE (The Mole's Lament)

The naked gaze

Of August days

Strips away the subtle shades:

The timid Spring,

The elphin glades.

The brutal sun

The Shining One

Robs every private breath

The lungs possess

Till leaves succumb,

And meet their death.

I flee this heat

On tiny feet

On naked pink and scurrying toes

I dig, I borrow in the loam

Seeking cool and fragrant home.

While in the sky

Great hawks do fly

Regarding, with most bitter eye

The prey below

And limbs that blow

The clouds of pollen to and fro.

These yellow clouds

That blur the sight

This yellow sun that drives the night

From resting place on hill and dale

And strips the fields of summer yields

And burns the skin once fresh and pale.

Summer, with your staggering heat

Crueler more than Winter’s cold

Merciless, your summer storms

Your rattling, shattering skies unfold

Burst and boom through every room

And keep the gentle child afraid

There is no silence in the trees

But drums of wings the insects made.

Sick of light, I long for dark

Lapis, cobalt, purple, ink

Poems writ of indigo

The dome'd void, the stars that wink.