So here I am wrecking my head over what I could possible offer this week to cheer us all up and distract us from all things virus-related for a measly five days. Not going to mention Corona once, at least not directly. Wish me luck.
(And if the options below have you rolling your eyes, at least admit that the photographs are pretty nifty given that they were taken while I was writing, through the window onto my balcony – the doves make regular appearances these days, drinking from the dish in the middle of rain…)
So, what shall we discuss? The Guardian offers antidotes, as a daily regimen, but honestly, do they excite you?
Looks like I am reduced to posting an animal video, good grief.
However, it perfectly captures my current vocalizing….
Maybe I’ll find something slightly more sensible, as always, with music.
And here it is: Schubert’s Die Taubenpost (Carrier Pigeon). It was the last song he wrote in his life, part of Schwanengesang D 957, a collection of songs published posthumously. Hah, got the education in, anyhow! Here is the text, check out the very last stanza: Longing…. the messenger of constancy. THAT is the concept to think about today!
“Dancing is generally believed to be a normal part of motor development …. and thwarts aggression, relieves tension, and strengthens the pair bond.”
Yup. Oh, to dance again. Turns out, that sentence included two words I replaced with dots, namely the words: for cranes.
I learned about the use of cranes’ dancing at the website of the International Crane Foundation, the only place in the world where all 15 species of cranes can be observed. In Baraboo, southern Wisconsin, no less. Hard for me to imagine to see these birds in exhibits in a refuge, though, rather than in the wild, where they represent such freedom.
I have written about them before, with a few scientific details. Today I want you to see them through the lens of a poet. Linda Hogan is currently the Chickasaw Nation’s Writer in Residence and lives in Tishomingo, Oklahoma.
I have introduced her work here before, a poem about herons, I believe, since her concern for ecological matters, cultural heritage and dispossession of Native Americans is, as my regular readers know, something I share (as part of my documentary film focus for Necessity – Oil, Water and Climate Resistance – there will be an on-line screening for Earth Day – check the link.)
BY LINDA HOGAN The language of cranes we once were told is the wind. The wind is their method, their current, the translated story of life they write across the sky. Millions of years they have blown here on ancestral longing, their wings of wide arrival, necks long, legs stretched out above strands of earth where they arrive with the shine of water, stories, interminable language of exchanges descended from the sky and then they stand, earth made only of crane from bank to bank of the river as far as you can see the ancient story made new.
*
This concludes a week where meadows, fields, flowers, birds and sky were all still to be seen on walks, and brought to you as tokens of nature that exist independent of our human worries. Reminders, too, that there are still many pleasures to be had.
First they were confined to slavery in Egypt, then to wandering in the desert.
Now Jews around the world celebrate Passover Seders on Zoom or Skype, confined to their dwellings. I have not decided whether it is helpful to draw the parallels to prior suffering – and the fact that it was overcome – as is custom during the service around the Seder table. Or if it is just reminding us that history repeats itself, and the sense of prevailing danger and unstoppable evil never ends.
Luckily we can distract ourselves with poetry.
Bracha Meschaninov, a South African Jew who moved with her family to New York state, published a poetry collection, Tender Skin,over 20 years ago that focusses on daily Jewish life. The simplicity of her poems hides the depth of the ideas, almost cunningly, as if she is not allowed to reveal her true intellectual strength.
This in turn, brought to mind two films I can recommend, (diametrically opposed to the life that today’s poet embraces.) Unorthodoxis a Netflix production loosely based on an autobiography by Deborah Feldman, describing a young Hasidic woman’s escape from her marriage and the confines of the communal system she lived in. One of Us , also on Netflix, is a documentary following several young people who made the same decision and paid extreme prices for trying to find their own way. It is a remarkable film, without the glitz that the Netflix series managed to add – although the main actress’s performance is stellar and worth alone to watch Unorthodox. If you have bandwidth only for one for this topic, choose One of Us.
Back to Pesach – here is something that feels probably quite familiar to several of us:
Pesach
House cleaned more or less kitchen surfaces covered more or less food ready more or less an experience of redemption more or less
The Seder
We chewed the hand-made bread of redemption and wine specially made children primed for performance… performed and wonderful guests came and prayed yet his eyes were sad and her skin showed strain
We left Mitzraim but in pain we stayed.
And here is the fitting musical accompaniment sent by a friend.
Chag Sameach!
And here are the traditional songs with explanation.
A timely poem to end the week. The poet is Franny Choi, author of the poetry collections Soft Science (Alice James, 2019) and Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014). She is a Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow at Williams College, a member of the multidisciplinary artists of color collective Dark Noise, and a cohost of the Poetry Foundation’s podcast, VS. Links to more of her writing can be found here.
Friderike Heuer Connection (2017)
The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On
By Franny Choi
Before the apocalypse, there was the apocalypse of boats: boats of prisoners, boats cracking under sky-iron, boats making corpses bloom like algae on the shore. Before the apocalypse, there was the apocalypse of the bombed mosque. There was the apocalypse of the taxi driver warped by flame. There was the apocalypse of the leaving, and the having left— of my mother unsticking herself from her mother’s grave as the plane barreled down the runway. Before the apocalypse, there was the apocalypse of planes. There was the apocalypse of pipelines legislating their way through sacred water, and the apocalypse of the dogs. Before which was the apocalypse of the dogs and the hoses. Before which, the apocalypse of dogs and slave catchers whose faces glowed by lantern-light. Before the apocalypse, the apocalypse of bees. The apocalypse of buses. Border fence apocalypse. Coat hanger apocalypse. Apocalypse in the textbooks’ selective silences. There was the apocalypse of the settlement and the soda machine; the apocalypse of the settlement and the jars of scalps; there was the bedlam of the cannery; the radioactive rain; the chairless martyr demanding a name. I was born from an apocalypse and have come to tell you what I know—which is that the apocalypse began when Columbus praised God and lowered his anchor. It began when a continent was drawn into cutlets. It began when Kublai Khan told Marco, Begin at the beginning. By the time the apocalypse began, the world had already ended. It ended every day for a century or two. It ended, and another ending world spun in its place. It ended, and we woke up and ordered Greek coffees, drew the hot liquid through our teeth, as everywhere, the apocalypse rumbled, the apocalypse remembered, our dear, beloved apocalypse—it drifted slowly from the trees all around us, so loud we stopped hearing it.
Notes:“Bedlam of the cannery” is borrowed from Martín Espada.
Friderike Heuer Isolation (2017)
Here she is on a PBS NewsHour reciting and discussing another one of her poems filled with courage not drowned out by anger.
Friderike Heuer Looking for Jobs (2017)
Photographs are from my 2017 photomontage series The Refugees’ Dreams.
Dickinson, she leaves me confounded. Always. And now this poem, that I have been mulling over for some weeks. What to make of the words below, what do they intend to represent? (You can tell I am still thinking about yesterday’s musings about artists and representation….)
By the Sea
Published 1896 (posthumously)
I started Early – Took my Dog – And visited the Sea – The Mermaids in the Basement Came out to look at me –
And Frigates – in the Upper Floor Extended Hempen Hands – Presuming Me to be a Mouse – Aground – opon the Sands –
But no Man moved Me – till the Tide Went past my simple Shoe – And past my Apron – and my Belt And past my Boddice – too –
And made as He would eat me up – As wholly as a Dew Opon a Dandelion’s Sleeve – And then – I started – too –
And He – He followed – close behind – I felt His Silver Heel Opon my Ancle – Then My Shoes Would overflow with Pearl –
Until We met the Solid Town – No One He seemed to know – And bowing – with a Mighty look – At me – The Sea withdrew –
So here is a woman poet, a recluse, who never saw the sea, I am told, writing about her visit. Planning a visit, note, not a walk on the beach, or a look at the water, but an encounter. She left early, thus avoiding being caught by the dark, took the protective dog, sensible precaution if you think this is about a woman out there on her own. She encounters a world just like the one she knows from home, the women at the bottom, the men on top. The mermaids doing what women do so well, looking their sisters over, judging.
The sailors trying to get their hands on you and rope you in – all menacing enough to induce that familiar feeling, being just a little mouse easy to be stepped on in the sand.
A slightly hypnotizing ballad rhythm, interspersed with these long dashes, making you stop and take in what she says.
And then she’s in the water – no man moved her; did she move herself into the waves, slowly going in like so many before her, ready to give up? Or is the ocean approaching, about to drown her, or representing a sexual danger – or enticement – an interpretation frequently offered because of the various items of clothing described in the inevitable rising, items that hint at fetishistic objects? Is the dew drop on a dandelion leaf describing her sense of diminutiveness, fragility, to be devoured by the floods, water returning to water, like dust to dust? Or is it a watery pearl, a metaphor for an altogether different aspect of the female anatomy?
But then she starts to move herself – just like she set out for the visit (remember started in the first line?) she now sets to leave, willing it, with him (the sea took on a personal pronoun) following. Her shoes filled with foam, a precious, pearly gift, or something to weigh her down or a tantalizing allusion to other bodily fluids, she turns her back on the pursuer. He decides to bow out – this time – once she reaches solid ground, anchored in community unfamiliar to his solitary existence.
Death? Desired or inflicted? Sex? Desired or inflicted? A feminist clarion call? I couldn’t care less. The poem whispered something altogether different in my ear in our current situation of unfamiliar danger.
We have a choice.
We can succumb to varying forms and degrees of despair, feeling helpless like little creatures easily crushed. We can give up and step into the devouring vastness of fear, letting it drown us. We can permit the lead of fomenting depression weigh down our shoes. We can allow panic to rise practically to our throats and choke us.
Or we can turn our backs to all that, willing it. There is no guarantee of safety – the sea – be it our fears, sadness or the pathogen itself – might not be willing to bow out the next time. But here and now, we can start to step back from it, both literally and metaphorically, and turn our eyes to the solid town, the community of friends, neighbors and strangers, who can act in solidarity (albeit in physical distance) to get us all through this, if not make us safer. We can focus on increasing support for those in need instead of catastrophizing. We can organize or be part of a movement that will carry the lessons we learn during crisis into a reshaping of our society for the better in the long run.
I know those words are more easily written than enacted. I have days where I barely make it out of bed. But we can alternate – on days where I am low, you can lift me up, and I’ll do the same on other days for you.
We can refuse to be a mouse!
So what happened to the dog – so prominently mentioned in the very first line and disappeared ever since as if protection was but an illusion?
Why, modeling social distancing, of course!
Where’s Milo???
Here is Copland’s music for some of Emily Dickinson’s poems. Hang in there, folks!
This week’s juxtapositions will end with a contrast of time frames. The photographs were taken within a window of 2 hours and mostly through the window of the car, across a space of some 25 miles, driving up the Pacific Coast from Newport, OR to Lincoln City, OR. The weather changed from sun to rain to hail and back multiple times. The color of the water alternated accordingly, sometimes three bands of different color simultaneously, unusually vivid in the cold air.
Today’s poem, on the other hand, spans seemingly all of historical time and the geographical space between Africa and the Caribbean. It looks into the pit of despair and emerges with renewed determination to look forward and resume a rightful place in history, or start history altogether – which is my own goal after yet another week of this interminable flu.
Walcott, who won the Nobel prize in literature in 1992 as well as a MacArthur Foundation genius award, died this month two years ago. He taught at various ivy league institutions, dividing his time between Boston, NYC and St. Lucia, the caribbean island where he was born. A lot of his poetry deals with the consequences of colonialism, slavery, and displacement. The work asks questions about memory in the absence of the typical memorial markers found in nation states, and the broken links of tribal narratives that come with forced exodus.
His poem The Sea is History weaves biblical and historical events together in wonderful ways, showing the parallels in lack of established “factual evidence” and yet richness in assumed underlying truths. You can just hear how the colonial interrogators are defied by the persistence of memory, however drowned in the sea, its return to power and will towards a new history, a right to place by the person who answers, representing all those who were subjugated far too long.
Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs? Where is your tribal memory? Sirs, in that gray vault. The sea. The sea has locked them up. The sea is History.
First, there was the heaving oil, heavy as chaos; then, likea light at the end of a tunnel,
the lantern of a caravel, and that was Genesis. Then there were the packed cries, the shit, the moaning:
Exodus. Bone soldered by coral to bone, mosaics mantled by the benediction of the shark’s shadow,
that was the Ark of the Covenant. Then came from the plucked wires of sunlight on the sea floor
the plangent harp of the Babylonian bondage, as the white cowries clustered like manacles on the drowned women,
and those were the ivory bracelets of the Song of Solomon, but the ocean kept turning blank pages
looking for History. Then came the men with eyes heavy as anchors who sank without tombs,
brigands who barbecued cattle, leaving their charred ribs like palm leaves on the shore, then the foaming, rabid maw
of the tidal wave swallowing Port Royal, and that was Jonah, but where is your Renaissance?
Sir, it is locked in them sea sands out there past the reef’s moiling shelf, where the men-o’-war floated down;
strop on these goggles, I’ll guide you there myself. It’s all subtle and submarine, through colonnades of coral,
past the gothic windows of sea fans to where the crusty grouper, onyx-eyed, blinks, weighted by its jewels, like a bald queen;
and these groined caves with barnacles pitted like stone are our cathedrals,
and the furnace before the hurricanes: Gomorrah. Bones ground by windmills into marl and cornmeal,
and that was Lamentations – that was just Lamentations, it was not History;
then came, like scum on the river’s drying lip, the brown reeds of villages mantling and congealing into towns,
and at evening, the midges’ choirs, and above them, the spires lancing the side of God
as His son set, and that was the New Testament.
Then came the white sisters clapping to the waves’ progress, and that was Emancipation –
jubilation, O jubilation – vanishing swiftly as the sea’s lace dries in the sun,
but that was not History, that was only faith, and then each rock broke into its own nation;
then came the synod of flies, then came the secretarial heron, then came the bullfrog bellowing for a vote,
fireflies with bright ideas and bats like jetting ambassadors and the mantis, like khaki police,
and the furred caterpillars of judges examining each case closely, and then in the dark ears of ferns
and in the salt chuckle of rocks with their sea pools, there was the sound like a rumour without any echo
of History, really beginning.
*
And as the most effective anti-depressant ever, let’s hear it for caribbean music, dreaming ourselves into the lesser Antilles.
After passing unanimously in the Senate last year, yesterday the house passed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act , with 4 House members voting No – Amash (I-MI) Gohmert (R-TX) Massie (R-KY) Yoho (R-FL) – which makes lynching a hate crime. It only took 120 years!
Let us celebrate with a poem that transcends time.
Unfinished, the road turns off the fill from the gulf coast, tracing the bay, to follow the inland waterway. I lose it in the gritty limbo of scrub pine, the once wealth —infantile again, and lean—of lumber barons, now vested in the state, now sanctuary for renegades and shamans, for pot growers and moonshiners, the upriver and clandestine industries that keep mostly to themselves.
Misting over a lake-front terraced lawn, evening’s pink tablet, japanning lawn and lake, magnolia leaf, ember easing, dips and gives gilt to the veiled nocturne vanishing in the view: the hint of maison through the woods faint as features pressed on an ancient coin. Swart arms of live oaks that hag their bad backs surreptitiously, drip Spanish moss like swamp things out of where a pelican taxis limp- legged across the lake, pratfalls awkward as a drunk on a bike. The bat above me, like a flung wristwatch
Gregory Pardlo is the author of Totem, which received the APR/ Honickman Prize in 2007, and Digest, (Four Way Books, 2014). His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, The Nation, Ploughshares, Tin House, as well as anthologies including Angles of Ascent, the Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, and two editions of Best American Poetry. He is the winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The Pulitzer judges cited Pardlo’s “clear-voiced poems that bring readers the news from 21st Century America, rich with thought, ideas and histories public and private.” In 2017, Pardlo was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is poetry editor for the Virginia Quarterly Review and teaches in the MFA program at Rutgers University, Camden.
Hand on my heart, this poem followed me into my dreams. Beneath the I-5 underpass near our house lives a homeless person, who does not even own a tent. He sits in piles of garbage, for weeks, months now and we all drive by.
Meditations in an Emergency
by Cameron Awkward-Rich
I wake up & it breaks my heart. I draw the blinds & the thrill of rain breaks my heart. I go outside. I ride the train, walk among the buildings, men in Monday suits. The flight of doves, the city of tents beneath the underpass, the huddled mass, old women hawking roses, & children all of them, break my heart. There’s a dream I have in which I love the world. I run from end to end like fingers through her hair. There are no borders, only wind. Like you, I was born. Like you, I was raised in the institution of dreaming. Hand on my heart. Hand on my stupid heart.
Cameron Awkward-Rich, both a poet and a critic, is the author of Sympathetic Little Monster (Ricochet Editions, 2016) and Dispatch (Persea Books, 2019), winner of the 2018 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award. His poetry has appeared in Narrative, The Baffler, Indiana Review, Verse Daily, The Offing, and elsewhere, and he has received fellowships from Cave Canem and The Watering Hole. Cam holds a PhD in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University and is Assistant Professor in Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
It is Tuesday morning after the debacle in IOWA. We don’t know the caucus results yet, but the delay and the mistrust after the screw up with the data transmission hurts the potential frontrunners and helps the laggers. Make of that what you will. More frighteningly, it has given rise to tons of conspiracy theories, and adds worry to scenarios where technology is all we have in the election – not the paper trail that is still there to count in IA. Most frighteningly, the voter turnout, by the information we have at this time, was not as high as expected. If that translates into the general election, we have reason to be fearful. Clouds hanging over us.
Sunday morning’s walk at the riverfront took place with the clouds coming in. Or going out, who knows in this crazy weather world anymore.
The mood expressed by the graffiti was dark as well.
Some fearful:
Some angry.
Knowing how I could go home to a dry house, a filled pantry, a privileged life, made me feel ashamed while thinking about the youth or whoever it is who express their rage and fear for us to see, mostly unheard. Watching the homeless shuffle along the Esplanade, trying to keep warm, caused a sense of continued helplessness.
Thinking about how many people I know who feel for those who suffer, but also increasingly express compassion fatigue, when they deal with the detritus or the shootings at night or the dangers of garbage fires. There was a moment there, on that walk, where I just longed for peace. For all. Which is, of course, unobtainable without justice. So we must be allies in the struggle. Thoughts just in time for the beginning of Black History Month as well.
Here is a text poem by Jamaican born Claudia Rankine, echoing the sentiment,
Mahalia Jackson is a genius. Or Mahalia Jackson has genius. The man I am with is trying to make a distinction. I am uncomfortable with his need to make this distinction because his inquiry begins to approach subtle shades of racism, classism, or sexism. It is hard to know which. Mahalia Jackson never finished the eighth grade, or Mahalia’s genius is based on the collision of her voice with her spirituality. True spirituality is its own force. I am not sure how to respond to all this. I change the subject instead.
We have just seen George Wein’s documentary, Louis Armstrong at Newport, 1971. In the auditorium a room full of strangers listened to Mahalia Jackson sing “Let There Be Peace on Earth” and stood up and gave a standing ovation to a movie screen. Her clarity of vision crosses thirty years to address intimately each of us. It is as if her voice has always been dormant within us, waiting to be awakened, even though “it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, (and) through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech.”
Perhaps Mahalia, like Paul Celan, has already lived all our lives for us. Perhaps that is the definition of genius. Hegel says, “Each man hopes and believes he is better than the world which is his, but the man who is better merely expresses this same world better than the others.” Mahalia Jackson sings as if it is the last thing she intends to do. And even though the lyrics of the song are, “Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me,” I am hearing, Let it begin in me.
Let’s start this week on a quiet note. Like really quiet, preparing for silence in space – quiet. Not a random choice of metaphor, either, since I learned that astronauts are sent by NASA to an anechoic chamber at the Orfield Laboratories in Minnesota where they practice being in environments where sound does not reverberate.
“An anechoic chamber is a room designed to completely absorb reflections of either sound or electromagnetic waves. They are also often isolated from waves entering from their surroundings.” It turns out that you cannot stand being in one of those chambers for very long – 45 minute has been the longest someone endured before fearing they would go insane. When you hear nothing else, you start hearing the noises that your own body makes, “you become the sound.”
All this came up when, as so often, I randomly ran across a poem that caught my attention.
Anechoic
George Foy stayed in the anechoic chamber for 45 minutes and nearly went mad. He could hear the blood rushing in his veins and began to wonder if he was hallucinating. He had been to a monastery, an American Indian sweat lodge, and a nickel mine two kilometers underground. In the anechoic chamber, the floor’s design eliminates the sound of footsteps. NASA trains astronauts in anechoic chambers to cope with the silence of space. Without echo, in the quietest place on earth, what else can we hold onto? What replaces sound in concert with what you see? The human voice, the timber when a person says kamsahamnida or yes, please, or fuerte, is 25 to 35 decibels. Hearing damage can start around 115 decibels. Metallica, front row, possible damage albeit possible love. The Who, 126 decibels. A Boeing jet, 165 decibels. The whale, low rumble frequency and all, 188 decibels, can be heard for hundreds of miles underwater. I once walked around inside a whale heart, which is the size of a small car. The sound was like Brian Doyle’s heart that gave out at 60 after he wrote my favorite essay about the joyas voladoras and the humming bird heart, the whale heart, and the human heart. Glass can break at 163 decibels. Hearing is the last sense to leave us. Some say that upon death, our vision, our taste, our touch, and our smell might leave us, but some have been pronounced dead and by all indication are, but they can hear. In this moment, when the doctor pronounces the time or when the handgun pumps once more, what light arrives? What sounds, the angels? The Ultrasonic Weapon is used for crowd control or to combat riots—as too many humans gathered in one place for a unified purpose can threaten the state. The state permits gatherings if the flag waves. Sound can be weaponized or made into art. It can kill. It can heal a wound. It is a navigation device and can help determine if the woman has a second heart inside of her now, the beating heart of a baby on the ultrasound, a boy or a girl, making a new music in the body of another body, a chorus, a concert, a hush.
by Lee Herrick from Scar and Flower, Word Poetry, 2019.
To tell the truth, I was not particularly taken by this poem as a whole. Little things, the list -like quality of researched facts (I mean who knows all those decibel numbers….) or the discussion of hearing being the last sense to go (after he cued in on hearing all along,) and then wondering “which light will arrive,” they irritate me. Or the tale of walking inside a whale’s heart and affixing the sound to the memory of a favorite author’s writing – I was in one of those last summer (they have them as plastic reproductions in all kinds of science museums, and all you hear is the delightful screaming of young visitors around you. Nitpicky, I know. Not granting generous artistic license. Guilty as charged. Perhaps it would help to know more of his work, apparently often preoccupied with hearing, but also quite political. Herrick, of Korean descent, was the poet laureate of Fresno, 4 years ago, teaches at college there. Here is a review.
But one line stuck, and made it worth slogging through all those facts he lines up: Sound can be weaponized or made into art. It can kill. It can heal a wound.
Think of how sound was used to manipulate you when you were a child. Ok, when I was a child, sent off, sickly still, to boarding school. Being yelled at loudly was pretty upsetting. Worse, though, was when punitive words came out really quietly, almost whispered, ominous as can be.
Sounds could be frightening, the pillow-muffled homesick sobs, my own included, of the new arrivals. Sounds could be disturbing, the penetrating school bell that cut time into slices. Sounds could be shaming – the snickering of the girls behind your back. The tsk tsk of a revered teacher, handing back insufficient work, not even worth a verbal assessment, just those devaluing sounds. The screeching of the coach on the sports field, egging you on to run even faster, until your lungs hurt so badly that you were ready to collapse. Sounds that were missing hurt as well: my childhood background chorus of lowing cows and songbirds, the farmer’s peacock.
Sounds could be healing. A hummed melody of a (forbidden) pop song as a reminder that there was still a world out there beyond the dormitory walls. The clinking of the silverware when 120 places were laid for breakfast, the only edible meal, really, of the day. The sounds of the gentle river waves of the Neckar, when you were allowed twice weekly to leave the walled estate, for an hour’s walk. Or being assigned an empty quiet classroom to practice your cello or piano, day after day escaping the noises of overcrowded, restless adolescent girls. Add the music, however incompetently, scratchily executed, with a blueprint in mind of the beauty of the real thing, and you were ready to tackle the next day. Healing, indeed. (My most played piece during those horrid years was this, (Khatchaturian’s Toccata ) allowing rage to flow into the fingers as well. It’s not as hard as it sounds, particularly if you play it slower like the older Russian recordings.)
What counts as healing, though, is in the ear of the beholder. Just a few centuries back the Church accepted only a limited number of intervals assume to please G-d, and that is why Gregorian chants are as they are. And the Church expressly forbade some intervals, including the tri-tone, composed of three adjacent whole tones, because they were thought to be the devil’s interval. Don’t ask me why. Times have, of course, changed.
Wagner used the tri-tone in Tristan and Isolde, to convey forbidden love and longing.
So did Leonard Bernstein’s Westside Story.
Beautiful. Unsettling. I guess it won’t be a quiet Monday morning after all. But one where I made you forget about sham trials and deadly viruses for at least 10 minutes!
