Thursday, February 4, 2021
Drawn and recorded: Blind Willie in space (An Aeon video)
Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground, and brilliant is that song
drifting through space
‘Johnson’s song
concerns a situation he faced many times: nightfall with no place to sleep.
Since humans appeared on Earth, the shroud of night has yet to fall without
touching a man or woman in the same plight.’
Carl Sagan, on including Blind Willie Johnson’s Dark Was the Night,
Cold Was the Ground (1927) on the Voyager Golden Records
The US gospel blues
musician and evangelist ‘Blind’ Willie Johnson was born to a sharecropping
family in the small town of Pendleton, Texas in 1897. After learning to play a cigar-box
guitar, he performed as a popular street musician throughout Texas, eventually
recording 30 songs for Columbia Records between 1927 and 1930. Little notice
was taken of his death in 1945, and much of his biography remains a mystery.
What is certain, however, is that today his legendary low-register howl and
slide guitar persists, both on our planet and in interstellar space. Here on
Earth, his music influenced the likes of Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin and Howlin’
Wolf. And just beyond the reaches of our solar system, his recording of his
song Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground (1927) is one of
27 pieces of music selected for the Voyager spacecraft’s famed ‘Golden
Records’, intended to capture the range of musical expression. This instalment
from the US animator Drew Christie’s series Drawn & Recorded combines
biography and mythology to recount how Johnson’s music made the unlikely
journey from the streets of rural Texas to the stars.
Director: Drew Christie
Writers: Drew Christie, Bill Flanagan
Narrator: T Bone Burnett
Producers: T Bone Burnett, Bill Flanagan, Van Toffler
Website: Gunpowder & Sky
Wednesday, February 3, 2021
Poem: "Beannacht" (written and recited by John O'Donohue)
For Josie, my mother
On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.
And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets into you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green
and azure blue,
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.
When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.
May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.
💖
Irish hills, folk music and David Whyte’s poetry form a fleeting, meditative moment (A Psyche Film)
‘I thank you … for the way my ears open even before my eyes,
as if to remember the way everything began with an original, vibrant note.’
You could easily mistake David Whyte’s ‘Blessing’ poems for
prayers. His words marvel at everyday sublimity and express gratitude to some
unseen ‘you’. But scrutinise his words and you’ll find language that, while
steeped in his Irish-Catholic upbringing, doesn’t express a creed. Rather, it
conveys what he refers to as ‘the conversational nature of reality’ – a sense
that there’s a distinct intimacy and presence beyond oneself in each fleeting
moment, if you’re willing to contemplate it. His ‘you’ is ubiquitous – no leap
of faith required.
If these ‘conversations’ are often drowned out by daily
distractions and planning, the US-based filmmaker Andrew Hinton builds a scene
where they cry out for attention in this short film, which adapts two of
Whyte’s ‘Blessing’ poems – ‘Blessing for Sound’ and ‘Blessing for the Light’.
Whyte, born in England to an Irish mother, possesses what he calls a ‘movable
frontier’ of an accent, which here errs towards his setting – an Irish
landscape of rolling green hills, barren trees and unswimmable oceans tugged by
fierce winds. The only human presence is Whyte and the stone walls carving up
the countryside.
‘The art of blessing, the art of calling in the invisible
help of the divine, is ever present to the Celtic mind,’ writes the musician
and composer Owen Ó Súilleabháin in Emergence Magazine, reflecting on his score
for the short film. It incorporates one of the oldest recordings of traditional
Irish music in existence – a 1905 wax cylinder recording of a song called ‘Cé
Phort Láirge’ (Waterford Quay). You needn’t understand the words to know that
it’s a mournful cry, captured on a fragile medium.
These three elements – words, music and landscape – bring
Whyte’s philosophy into vivid form, collapsing past and present, and interior
and exterior worlds, into a moment. The result is a work that offers a fleeting
invitation to, in Whyte’s words, ‘[stand] in the ground of your life fully’.
Director: Andrew Hinton
Producer: Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee
Poet: David Whyte