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raven_cromwellAmal El Mohtar loves poetry and folk music as much as I do, which isn't extraordinary in and of itself--there're many people who love both genres with my ferocity. What is however extraordinary is her willingness to glory, with baroque linguistic exuberance in her loves and to slowly unveil why those loves exist. This essay starts as love-letter to Anais Mitchell and slowly circles back to that as concluding theme, but it feels deeply symphonic to me because while that's the hook to lure you in, it interweaves with other themes. Of folk as endlessly tread ground deeply comforting because it's so endlessly tread because there's no right entry point into folk, no artists one simply must! know to pass the gatekeeping tests of so many fans of other musical movements. And how that willingness to admit all people onto familiar ground and let them make of it what they will gives us this glorious stone soup of a musical movement, everyone contributing some little bit to the harmonious whole.
That's summation, but doesn't do the breadth and incisiveness of the writing in this justice; it brought me to tears, recontextualized why I like so many of the things I love, was so thoughtful and generous and brimful of wonder. All I can do is give you a taste, and hope you'll let yourself be drawn in entire:
That's summation, but doesn't do the breadth and incisiveness of the writing in this justice; it brought me to tears, recontextualized why I like so many of the things I love, was so thoughtful and generous and brimful of wonder. All I can do is give you a taste, and hope you'll let yourself be drawn in entire:
I remember, writing this now, a Charles de Lint story called “Held Close in Moonlight and Vines,” in which a boy dreams himself a hideaway “with old castle rock for walls”—not a castle, crucially, but a ruined space, one that makes room for him, that he transforms with his presence. The rocks are more precious, somehow, for having been broken from castles, from having suggested the shape of a castle that once was—more precious by far than they would have been in a whole castle, where they could be nothing but synonymous with it, just the castle and not its composition. Paradoxically, castles keep people out; ruins invite people in.
Mitchell’s songs have old castle rock for walls. She writes so powerfully and poignantly about the intimacy of her life, her history, her desires, but when she sings I hear an immensity that I feel from gazing at the sea from broken ancient places, from windy cliffs. And these things are inseparable: her presence, her now-ness, with its sly, slippery play, and the solemnity of ages that comes from a folk phrase like you will not come to harm.
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Date: 2019-11-05 09:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-11-06 04:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-11-05 11:17 pm (UTC)Oh fuck, what a gorgeous perfect metaphor for that confluence of historicity and endless densely layered reimagining that is so much of what I love about folk music - and also ancient poetry (Beowulf, The Odyssey, etc) read in translation, or stuff like Tolkien that's consciously evocative of it, or even ruins themselves. There's a passage from H Is For Hawk that I always think of when I'm trying to describe that shivery sense of immensity, and that I'll leave you in thanks for linking to this wonderful essay:
“I once asked my friends if they’d ever held things that gave them a spooky sense of history. Ancient pots with three-thousand-year-old thumbprints in the clay, said one. Antique keys, another. Clay pipes. Dancing shoes from WWII. Roman coins I found in a field. Old bus tickets in second-hand books. Everyone agreed that what these small things did was strangely intimate; they gave them the sense, as they picked them up and turned them in their fingers, of another person, an unknown person a long time ago, who had held that object in their hands. You don’t know anything about them, but you feel the other person’s there, one friend told me. It’s like all the years between you and them disappear. Like you become them, somehow.”
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Date: 2019-11-06 04:30 am (UTC)And of course, you're so intensely, profoundly right about the ancient poetry and the qualities it shares with music, qualities so tightly threaded together that much of the best shorter poetry has been set to music in one fashion or another. (I'm thinking especially here of something like Lady of Shalott as done by someone like Loreena McKennitt
But, the passage in particular made me think of Amal El Mohtar's brief, glorious tale Pockets I can't give away the tale, save to say that it's about people being connected by tales across impossible geographies by magical means and is, honestly, one of the most profound short pieces I've read over the last two years since I started keeping sustained track of its reading.
To give you a taste without spoiling its wonders, here's a brief bit:
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Date: 2019-11-06 01:53 pm (UTC)And I will definitely check out that Amal El-Mohtar story at some point this week - hopefully tonight, if I have the time.