This year I’ve had the real pleasure of uniting some of my deepest interests – music, poetry and my humanist outlook on life – to write some songs for the British Humanist Association.
Here’s a song we’ve recorded recently – it’s now released on itunes and all proceeds go to the British Humanist Association, with some of the money going to support the BHA choir to record more music for humanist celebrations.
I wrote a few months ago about slowly starting to challenge the self-perception that I’m not a good dancer. And about working through the frustration of learning new skills, particularly in areas that don’t come to me as naturally as others.
At an early stage of learning tango I was getting frustrated at the way my body was slow to respond to the music, when I knew so clearly how I wanted to respond musically. I also was very conscious of how slowly I was learning the new skills, compared to others who seemed to pick them up much more quickly. It added up to a deep need to show my teacher and dancing partners that I wasn’t slow at learning everything or insensitive to the music.
Although most of my life I’ve seen myself as a weak dancer, being a good singer is definitely part of my self-image. Over time I’ve acquired a real confidence in my ability to sing and to communicate to an audience. So I set myself to learn to sing some tangos. Partly because I knew I’d enjoy it, but also because I felt the need to make up for my lack of competence as a dancer.
And so, at a milonga last Friday, as well as dancing almost all evening, I sang three tangos that I’d learnt…
What really surprised me was that I received as many compliments for my dancing as for my singing!
I’d danced several tangos with a new partner – he was a good dancer, and we really seemed to understand each other, so I found it really easy and fun to dance with him. Not just with him, but with other dancers that evening, I really felt how much progress I’d made in the last few months. But what stunned me was that, as he led me back to my table, he commented that he didn’t know which had been better, my singing or my dancing.
Once I got over the surprise, I realised that there’s something very special about receiving a compliment that so strongly supported the hard work that I’ve done in challenging my own perceived boundaries.
These precious wooden eggshells
Out of their tough cases they are vulnerable
But locked away they cannot sing –
when singing is their reason for being.
There is always a tender tension
in a good musician whose instrument
is resting on a chair
even as he chats with colleagues
in an orchestral teabreak.
part of the mind is always attentive
to the fragility he has drawn
out of its case. An attention
not guilty, but born of gratitude
for the open trust
that allows them to sing together.
The defenceless fragility of the walls
is what allows them to vibrate.
The strength of a tree planed down
to this delicate membrane of music.
And something is betrayed when these
fragile cocoons of sound
are ruptured by carelessness or spite.
My body is a dusty guitar
strung by the hair that falls
past the curve of my waist.
Wounds patched, barely visible now,
wholeness restored by patient hours of healing
until the intact walls are ready
to sing again. Yet still the dust lies thick,
undisturbed by the waves of emotion
that once shrugged away both dust and time
The waves of emotion that used to make me tremble
flowing up the shell of me and coming out in sound. The waves that were stranded in the doldrums
when the songs of my heart and my body
were silenced by the pain of love’s abandonment.
Unplayed, an instrument
grows stiff, loses its sweetness
must be coaxed back by the gentleness
of patient fingers. As if the wood
knows how fragile its defences are
and fears to once again
be twisted to play uncongenial tunes
by hands that force its fragile walls
not to resonate
but distort.
Yet a body that has once known the joy of song
will always yearn to sing again.
And the music that is in me
cannot be silenced
for long.
In a world muddied by fake vibrato the real thing
becomes mythical. So rare for the ears
to glimpse the vibrant voice that springs
from the stretch of a diaphragm sinking low
to touch the gutrock of emotion. And yet
when you hear that voice coming up from
the depths of the soul, trembling with the
force of its intimate journey, you know
why there are so many imitations of this
pulsing heart-sound. The endless shabby
imitation doesn’t flatter – it clutters,
makes it harder to find the real gold –
yet cannot debase the real coinage
for those whose teeth know how to bite it.
Still sad to see the thousand wild goose chases
of shaky singers, who, like celebrity chefs,
pretentious poets or arrogant artists
seek to show that they are great cooks
by pouring salt and spices over
tasteless battery meat when flavour
comes from the deep bone marrow of a life
lived as free-range as a skein
of geese winging their heart songs
across the face of the coming dawn.
I’ve just butted into a poetry conversation between Dana and Dave, who have been exchanging poems, each one responding to the previous poem. They’ve kindly extended the invitation for other poet-bloggers to join them. If you’d like to reply to my poem, or any of theirs, all you have to do is link back to the poem you’re responding to, and leave a comment with the original poem so that people can follow the conversation in both directions. Have fun…
To celebrate six months of blogging (over 200 posts and nearly 100 poems!), I thought I would share thirteen things I have learnt in that time, many of them directly from blogging:
Hearts can heal, and a thoroughly healed heart is stronger than one that has never been broken.
Creativity, particularly new creative projects, is a great way not just to recover from a broken heart, but to grow immeasurably from the experience.
Writing doesn’t have to be a solitary activity – and sharing drafts with an understanding audience is a great way to keep motivated.
Writing things in a public forum, even to a small audience of people whose faces I have never seen, is different from just writing them for yourself – and it can be much more healing.
Sometimes the things I don’t want to say are the ones I most need to say. Sometimes the things I don’t want to say are also what others are most interested in hearing
Free writing practices often produce some of my best writing… and paradoxically often my most structured writing too. And I’m increasingly realising that the ideas and experiences that go into my poems are strong enough to stand as free verse. I enjoy playing with different structures, but I can have more confidence in the interest of my own voice.
It’s better to say too much than to be too vague to be understood – even if you have to clarify what you meant, or soothe someone’s agitation, you’re communicating. And being so tolerant of other people’s views and beliefs that we don’t express our own is almost always counterproductive – and leads to much less interesting discussions.
It’s far too easy to accept arguments and evidence that supports your conclusion, and not notice the obvious flaws. Reading and participating in the debates in the blogosphere has made me very aware of this, and hopefully made me a more honest debater!
There are some wonderful people out there in the blogosphere…. as well as a lot of people who can’t string a coherent sentence together. Many people out there have had lives incredibly more difficult and complicated than mine has been. I’ve been touched and moved and shocked by some of the things I’ve read. I don’t know whether bloggers are more likely to have trauma in their past, or whether it’s just that in the blogosphere, people tell stories that you would normally hear only from your closest friends. Either way, thank you all for increasing my awareness and understanding of what it is to be human.
Finding my own words to express myself is, right now, more important to me than singing the music and words written by others, however beautiful and powerful.
Always follow your dreams can be a good principle, but it can also be a trap that leaves us struggling and miserable, feeling like failures or forcing ourselves to do things that just aren’t right any more. So it’s important to leave room for both you and your dreams to change and grow.
This last year has been an intense time – difficult in many ways, but I don’t regret a moment of it. I have learnt so much and grown so much, that it’s a hundred times worth all the tears and the pain of heartbreak.
Writing means far less without readers – so thank you all!
A garden of sweet strings softly lit by
The warmth of flute and clarinet
Rises into the air, inviting my entry,
Into flowing landscapes of sound
And now I hear those notes that are
For me a cue to prepare my body
To take in air – every inch of my torso,
A balloon whose walls are poised muscle.
Smooth inevitability of the passing bars
Leave me no choice but to join the dance
And suddenly the internal space of my head
Is throbbing with sound – my voice lives.
Who am I? A mournful abandoned lover
Every emotion raised to operatic intensity
By the magnificence of the pouring harmonies
That awaken powerful echoes in my heart.
The endless lines must flow unimpeded
By self-doubt or adjustment. I try to float
And trust that the sound will ride secure
On the smooth strength of the tensing muscles.
Suddenly a change of key brings out the sun
Rushes optimism through every bar
The heart beats faster as if obeying
The quickened pulse of the conductor’s arm.
A new challenge now – cascades of notes
Too fast to think, or fear mistakes
Just following, setting the voice free to fly
And soar above the racing orchestra.
Now tension builds towards the climax
My breathing deep, my throat relaxing
To soar above the frozen orchestra
And plummet down to the final note.
Responding to a prompt at one single impression to write about melody, I thought I would try my hand at a poem that trys to capture a singer’s perspective of singing one of my favourite arias – Bellini’s Qui la voce sua soave from I Puritani.
To make this a multimedia experience, I’ve added a recording of me singing the aria I had in mind. It was recorded at home on my computer so it’s neither great quality sound nor my best quality singing – but I thought it would give you an idea of what the experience I’m describing sounds like from the outside.
Pisen Rusalky O Mesiku (Song of the Moon), Rusalka’s aria from Rusalka
Mesiku na nebi hlubokem…………O moon, high in the heavens
Svetlo tvé daleko vidi,………………Your light sees far,
Po svete bloudis sirokém………….You travel around the wide world
Divas se v pribytky lidi…………….Gazing into human dwellings
Mesicku, postuj chvili ……………. O, moon, stand still a while
reckni mi, kde je muj mily………..Tell me, where is my love?
Rekni mu, stribmy mesicku,……..Tell him, silvery moon
me ze jej objima rame,……………..That I embrace him tightly,
aby si alespon chvilicku……………That he should for at least a while
vzpomenul ve sneni na mne………Remember his dreams!
Zasvet mu do daleka,……………….Shine on him, wherever he is
rekni mu, kdo tu nan ceka!………Tell him I am here waiting!
O mneli duse lidska sni,……………If he is dreaming of me,
at’se tou vzpominkou vzbudi!…..Awaken his memories
Mesicku, nezhasni, nezhasni!……O, moon, don’t disappear!
There’s a school of thought that says we should never let go of any of our dreams, but always continue to give them everything. That our failure or success in different fields is entirely determined by our commitment to that dream, by our belief that it will happen. That if we for some reasons stop dedicating ourselves to a dream, we will end up living a half-life that we will always regret.
I’m starting to think it’s more complex than that. A life lived without dreams would be sad, indeed, but as we grow and change, our dreams sometimes change. As our dreams contact reality, we learn more about them… and perhaps we discover we’re not so well suited to them as we thought. We may also find new things to dream about. So there come times when we have to reshape our dreams, or indeed let go of old dreams and find new ones…
(As I write this, I wonder – is this all really true, or am I just trying to reconcile myself to letting go of something that has been a cherished hope for so many years? I think it’s more than that, but it’s an important question.)
I’m at that stage with my dreams of singing professionally. There is no doubt in my mind that singing will always be part of my life. I had often thought of doing it professionally, in order to be able to dedicate my time to improving my skills and to have the opportunity to perform at a high level, but things never quite seemed to work out. Just over a year ago, inspired by the attitude I’ve described above, I decided that if I didn’t really give it a try, I would always regret it. And in trying to raise my game, I learnt a lot about myself.
Importantly, I think I’ve learnt that my joy in singing is very vulnerable to the fierce competition inherent in singing professionally… I love singing in concerts, where all I am asked to do is to give pleasure to my audience, and I delight in the post-concert comments which tell me that they have indeed enjoyed my singing. But doing auditions are so different, not least because success is rare and feedback is even rarer. And I can imagine that the pressure of having to make money would just exacerbate that.
Singing is very personal to me – when I sing there’s a sense in which I open the voice of my soul to my audience. And, as I found after the break-up, my personal emotions are closely entwined with my singing. I suppose if I went for it professionally, I would toughen myself up, learn a greater emotional distance.. but I’m not sure I want to.
I must also recognise that, at 31, it is in many ways too late for me to take the standard routes into professional singing. So much of that journey seems to depend on having the luck to be in the right place at the right time. And for various reasons, I just wasn’t.
Deep down, I also feel, rightly or wrongly, that I don’t have the steely discipline needed to really get to the bottom of my technique. To really hammer into my vocal and mental musculature the consistency that I would need to get to the top. There are a lot of reasons for that – I’m very much a person who lives in her head rather than her body, and that kind of athletic repetition doesn’t come naturally. I like to try different things each time… Also my expectations get in the way of my achievement, as I’ve discussed before.
Maybe there are people who only have one dream throughout their lives… for them to let go of that dream would be a real loss. But I have always been someone who has had a lot of different dreams.
One question people are asked, when trying to find the dream they should pursue, is “what did you dream of being when you were really young.” I know the answer very well – it was writing, not singing, that I dreamed of as a child. Not that I didn’t sing, too, but the stories and poems I wrote were an even deeper part of my identity. I don’t remember when I started really writing… but I know I tried (independently of my parents!) to send a story to a publisher at the tender age of 9, and that certainly wasn’t the first thing I’d written.
At sixteen, having written 3 fantasy novels of over 50,000 words each, I stopped writing. I realised that the stories we tell express what we know and believe about the world, and that I didn’t know enough. At the time I thought that I needed to move from writing fantasy to writing about reality, and that the big blockage was my lack of experience. Actually I’m still drawn to writing fantasy – the freedom it gives you to create a world in which you can give expression to so many thoughts that would be harder to communicate otherwise. And I think the effort of creating a completely new world often says much more about your views of how things work, or should work, than a story set in the “real” world.
In the months when I was too choked up to sing, I rediscovered writing again. And found in it a source of healing and expression that has been very precious to me. So much so, that I haven’t missed not being able to sing anything like as much as I would have expected. An important difference, for me, was that writing gave me the opportunity to do things my way.
Now I am working on rediscovering my singing, because it gives pleasure to me and others. And I am also exploring songwriting, too. Singing will, as I say, always be part of my life.
But I have a feeling that the new dream that I want to start to dream will involve writing. So perhaps the title of this post should have read “dreaming old dreams again”!
(The youtube clip (with a great slideshow!) is of an Argentinan folksong called Sapo Cancionero, a song about a toad that is in love with the moon, with the eternal madness of all poets. The refrain means: Singing toad, sing your song – how sad life is if we live it without a dream to aspire to!)
To the place she left so happily to respond to your call of love
Mimi returns alone to her solitary nest.
She goes back to embroidering pretend flowers
Goodbye without resentment.
Listen, listen
Gather together all the little things I left lying around
In my drawer is the gold band and the prayerbook.
Wrap it all in a cloth and I’ll send the porter.
But look now! Under that pair of gloves
Is the pink bonnet you bought me on the day we fell in love
If you want…. if you want…
If you want then keep it as a reminder of our love
Goodbye. Goodbye… without resentment.
Strangely this was a song that I never found too emotionally powerful to sing, even though it has a very personal resonance for me. I too tried to let my ex go free by suggesting that we should exchange keys and the other possessions we had left at each other’s flat – he reacted with a very bizarre self-protective anger! I don’t think he understood at all what I was trying to say…. as in the last line of the aria: addio, senza rancor! I was too hurt and sad to say it as clearly as I would have liked to, but that only partly accounts for his misinterpretation.
Perhaps the message of letting someone go in peace is such a strong idea that, unlike other songs I was trying to sing at the time, it strengthened rather than upset me. It’s a lovely aria, anyway – I’ve only just started really working on it so I don’t quite do it justice yet, but it’s so satisfying to sing.
Singing is one of those things that seems to work best if you don’t try to control it too hard.
I’ve been using recording quite a lot as a tool lately – it’s really helpful to be able to make instant recordings of a particular phrase, then keep trying different takes until I get a sound that I’m happier with. Sometimes I get demoralised by the sounds I’m producing… but it’s great to be able just to rerecord and find that OK, maybe I didn’t get my best sound first time, but I can try to fix the problem, and make a real difference.
Often getting the sound I want, counterintuitively, seems to involve forgetting what I want it to sound like! Some things – like for example trying to enunciate clearly, do require concentration and focus. (I’m often shocked to realise I just can’t hear some consonants at all on the recording… when I was sure I was pronouncing them first time round!)
The trick is to know the few things that I need to do to set up the right conditions – and trust my voice to do the rest without my interference. A challenge, but an enjoyable one.
Words that sing 