Better Days 200
What We Do With Feeling
Thursday, January 12th
10:00 pm - 12:00 am Pacific
Webcast www.coopradio.org
Great need was my only strength
And so we were separated
As if we had become slaves
Out on the boats
Lost in the fog
To know one another no more
Because time moves forever forward
And carries with it
This endless sense of
Being alone*
I was having a chat with Texas Granny the other night on
MSN and we were talking about feelings.
I said I would take mine sometimes, put them in a bottle and
drop them off a bridge into the currents of the river below.
Motion. The mercy of possibilities.
If I remember properly, she wasn't so sure it was a good idea
to be letting go of feelings.
I joked for a minute, saying that it might explain what Billy Joe
McAllister dropped off the Tallahachie bridge.
Despair, my old psychologist once told me, is bearable,
because to despair, one's feelings must be in motion.
Depression is static, no fun at all.
I got to telling Texas Granny how some of the time I keep
feelings submerged at the bottom of a pond. Then, I told
her the old story of a person who was in the woods with a
dog one day and, when they came alongside a pond, a hairy
mud-caked arm reached up from the stagnant water and,
like that, the dog disappeared. The dog went down.
Word reached the king and he dispatched an army of men
to bucket out that pond. At the bottom they found a giant
named Iron John. He was led by 20 guy-ropes to the castle,
where he was locked in a cage in the courtyard.
Our buried feelings, freed briefly from the bottom of the
murky pond, soon imprisoned again. Not much progress there.
One day, the legend goes, the king's son was playing with his
golden ball and it rolled into the cage. The giant kept it and
spoke with the boy, cutting a deal. If the boy would bring him
the key to the cage, he promised he would give back the boy's
golden ball. The boy said he didn't know where the key was.
Iron John told him. "It's hidden under your mother's pillow."
Most men smile a little at this point.
So one day when his mother wasn't around, the boy looked,
and found the key. He freed Iron John from the cage and,
true to his word, the giant returned the boy's golden ball.
As I was telling this story to Texas Granny, I forgot its ending,
so I made one up. Something about the king's son rebelling a
few year's later and, when confronted by his father's absence
and his mother's judgments, he ran away. And, of course, he
ran toward something, too. I asked TG where he might go, this
boy, what he might run toward. To the pond, she said. I had a
feeling that she was right.
If I look at my own escape toward adulthood, I would say yes,
that's where I would go. I would go to the pond and then, from
there, to the river.
And from the river to the sea.
Iarla O Lionaird is from Ireland. One of the songs I'll air on
Thursday night, Seacht (Seven), is from a 1997 record called
Seacht gCoisceim na Trocaire, or The Seven Steps To Mercy.
It is a rare record, in Gaeilge, language of antiquity, a solitary
voice singing in the sean nos tradition, calling to the ancestral
spirits. Such songs bear textures of feeling, many feelings, ones
which come from before our births. With these sorts of songs,
you must give yourself to them before they give themselves to
you. Best to imagine that you are a bottle floating down river
toward the sea, toward the unknown, toward the memory.
There may be despair in the music, but it moves you. It's
one of the uses of music, part of what we do with feeling.
In the Irish tradition, the singer takes the hand of the person
nearest to him, whether friend or stranger, holds that hand,
lifting it and turning it as the song rises and falls over time,
to its last note. A kind of dance, across generations.
I can easily muse on that image as being a little like what I
mean to do each Thursday night when I take to the air.
This Thursday's show, the 200th Better Days episode, is
going to explore the textures of our feeling, how we find
our feelings moved along in music. The show is going to
begin at the bottom of the pond. I don't expect to reach
the sea, but, by midnight, at least we ought to be moving
in the direction of the river.
I hope you'll join me. Bring a bucket, or a bottle.
DL
*a translation of the lyrics to Seacht (Seven)
What We Do With Feeling
Thursday, January 12th
10:00 pm - 12:00 am Pacific
Webcast www.coopradio.org
Great need was my only strength
And so we were separated
As if we had become slaves
Out on the boats
Lost in the fog
To know one another no more
Because time moves forever forward
And carries with it
This endless sense of
Being alone*
I was having a chat with Texas Granny the other night on
MSN and we were talking about feelings.
I said I would take mine sometimes, put them in a bottle and
drop them off a bridge into the currents of the river below.
Motion. The mercy of possibilities.
If I remember properly, she wasn't so sure it was a good idea
to be letting go of feelings.
I joked for a minute, saying that it might explain what Billy Joe
McAllister dropped off the Tallahachie bridge.
Despair, my old psychologist once told me, is bearable,
because to despair, one's feelings must be in motion.
Depression is static, no fun at all.
I got to telling Texas Granny how some of the time I keep
feelings submerged at the bottom of a pond. Then, I told
her the old story of a person who was in the woods with a
dog one day and, when they came alongside a pond, a hairy
mud-caked arm reached up from the stagnant water and,
like that, the dog disappeared. The dog went down.
Word reached the king and he dispatched an army of men
to bucket out that pond. At the bottom they found a giant
named Iron John. He was led by 20 guy-ropes to the castle,
where he was locked in a cage in the courtyard.
Our buried feelings, freed briefly from the bottom of the
murky pond, soon imprisoned again. Not much progress there.
One day, the legend goes, the king's son was playing with his
golden ball and it rolled into the cage. The giant kept it and
spoke with the boy, cutting a deal. If the boy would bring him
the key to the cage, he promised he would give back the boy's
golden ball. The boy said he didn't know where the key was.
Iron John told him. "It's hidden under your mother's pillow."
Most men smile a little at this point.
So one day when his mother wasn't around, the boy looked,
and found the key. He freed Iron John from the cage and,
true to his word, the giant returned the boy's golden ball.
As I was telling this story to Texas Granny, I forgot its ending,
so I made one up. Something about the king's son rebelling a
few year's later and, when confronted by his father's absence
and his mother's judgments, he ran away. And, of course, he
ran toward something, too. I asked TG where he might go, this
boy, what he might run toward. To the pond, she said. I had a
feeling that she was right.
If I look at my own escape toward adulthood, I would say yes,
that's where I would go. I would go to the pond and then, from
there, to the river.
And from the river to the sea.
Iarla O Lionaird is from Ireland. One of the songs I'll air on
Thursday night, Seacht (Seven), is from a 1997 record called
Seacht gCoisceim na Trocaire, or The Seven Steps To Mercy.
It is a rare record, in Gaeilge, language of antiquity, a solitary
voice singing in the sean nos tradition, calling to the ancestral
spirits. Such songs bear textures of feeling, many feelings, ones
which come from before our births. With these sorts of songs,
you must give yourself to them before they give themselves to
you. Best to imagine that you are a bottle floating down river
toward the sea, toward the unknown, toward the memory.
There may be despair in the music, but it moves you. It's
one of the uses of music, part of what we do with feeling.
In the Irish tradition, the singer takes the hand of the person
nearest to him, whether friend or stranger, holds that hand,
lifting it and turning it as the song rises and falls over time,
to its last note. A kind of dance, across generations.
I can easily muse on that image as being a little like what I
mean to do each Thursday night when I take to the air.
This Thursday's show, the 200th Better Days episode, is
going to explore the textures of our feeling, how we find
our feelings moved along in music. The show is going to
begin at the bottom of the pond. I don't expect to reach
the sea, but, by midnight, at least we ought to be moving
in the direction of the river.
I hope you'll join me. Bring a bucket, or a bottle.
DL
*a translation of the lyrics to Seacht (Seven)
posted by doug lang | 23:05
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