Letters from Quotidia, 2024- Episode 4. I live in Quotidia and have done so for a considerable time, and indeed, I have a degree of control over what happens here. But I do not allow this to go to my head, having, over time, learned the lessons hubris teaches. Therefore, you don’t need a visa to enter Quotidia because Quotidia remains that space, that place, where ordinary people lead ordinary lives. But where, from time to time, they encounter the extraordinary.
Frozen water and steel comprise the elements of my first song. And to introduce it I wish to quote, in its entirety, Thomas Hardy’s magnificent poem, The Convergence of the Twain. In a solitude of the sea/Deep from human vanity,/And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.// Steel chambers, late the pyres/Of her salamandrine fires,/Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.//Over the mirrors meant/To glass the opulent/The sea-worm crawls — grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.//Jewels in joy designed/To ravish the sensuous mind/Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.//Dim moon-eyed fishes near/Gaze at the gilded gear/And query: “What does this vaingloriousness down here?” …/Well: while was fashioning/This creature of cleaving wing,/The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything/Prepared a sinister mate/For her — so gaily great —/A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.//And as the smart ship grew/In stature, grace, and hue,/In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.//Alien they seemed to be;/No mortal eye could see/The intimate welding of their later history,//Or sign that they were bent/By paths coincident/On being anon twin halves of one august event,//Till the Spinner of the Years/Said “Now!” And each one hears,/And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.// Subtitled Lines on the loss of the Titanic, it is a masterclass in poetic technique resonating in 11 stanzas of rhyming triplets with Hardy’s idiosyncratic and unique voice.
The overweening pride of Empire, glorying in contemporary industrial confidence about the future bending to human will, is the ironic underlay of the poem. Every time I read the opening tercet, In a solitude of the sea/Deep from human vanity,/And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.//I see the ghostly outline of the sunken ship developing as if in a photographic darkroom, when in 1985, the Argo, a Remote Operated Vehicle, showed the world the first images of the iconic liner since that fatal convergence 73 year previously.
This is my first original song written this year. I had wondered in the weeks before whether my creativity had, like the Titanic, sunk without a trace- umm, hubris maybe not entirely expunged from my soul! The title is based on the wry Belfast retort to those who taunt them about the Titanic disaster, She was all right when she left here!
As a teenager I would visit my girlfriend (later wife) where she lived in the docks area of Belfast. Her father, a noted traditional fiddler in Northern Ireland, worked for many years at Harland and Wolff, the firm who built the Titanic. He made her a doll’s house from scrap material there, and, of course, I worked this and myself into the bridge of the song. As I say, hubris not entirely expunged. So here is She Was Alright When She Left Our Town. [insert song]
They thought she was the perfect ship. What, I wonder, would a perfect person be like? Michelangelo’s David? Perhaps one of The Stepford Wives? Or what about the perfect society? Calvin’s Geneva where, according to Steven Hicks, acts of God such as floods or earthquakes were acts of Satan, Copernicus labelled a fraud, attendance at church and sermons were compulsory where Calvin himself preached at great length three or four times a week. Or would you prefer Pol Pot’s Cambodia after Year Zero where all culture and traditions within a society must be completely destroyed.
In yearning for perfection, like so many other things in life, it is wise to remember the admonition to be careful what you wish for. In Australia, to call any achievement or attainment pretty ordinary is, in fact, a comprehensive put-down. But what about the situation so many find themselves in where to achieve the merely ordinary would be a blessing, if not a miracle? It was in the mid-70s, living in Wollongong, that I read Thomas Shapcott’s poem, Near the school for handicapped children. It struck a chord then and that dissonant stack of notes has sounded again and again over the decades since, striking closer to home. This compelling poem gets it right: I am hurt by my wholeness, the poet says when he spots the disabled child whose freckled face reminds him of nephews and how his limbs remind me of how straight/is my own spine and that I take my fingers/for granted. Love blazes out in the simple line; he has been dressed carefully. When the lights change to green, the child skips across the road like a skimming tambourine/brittle with music, the telling simile with which the poem ends. For that skipping child, though, and for so many, the light, signalling the ordinary, will be stuck on red forever. I wrote this three years ago for my post Letters for Quotidia , episode 30. With my 10-year-old younger daughter in mind, I wrote the final song of this post back in 2001. It is called Perfect (as you can be) [insert song] The next Letter is in 11 days’ time on April 25th-Anzac Day- which, in Australia and New Zealand, marks the disastrous Gallipoli campaign of 1915.
She Was Alright When She Left Our Town (Quentin Bega)
She was alright when she left our town the shipyard men reply
To those who mocked their labour and said they had missed the mark
When in April Nineteen Hundred and Twelve they bade their ship goodbye
Not knowing that their transatlantic gem would never reach New York
Thousands worked at Thompson’s dock to make this dream come real
Of architects and engineers for the famous White Star Line
They laboured six days a week to build the unsinkable keel
The future beckoned all aboard assured all it would be fine
An iceberg waited patiently across the rolling sea
As dancing drinking laughing men and women- oh so pretty-
The witching hour approached and declared it not at all to be
A journey that would reach its end in glittering New York City
Your father walked in through those gates many years of his working life
He made for you a doll’s house with the scrap found lying round
You laughed and cried, played children’s games in the shadow of the docks
Until with your daughter and this man in tow you left for Sydney bound
“She was alright when she left here” the Belfast men reply
To those who mocked their labour and said they had missed the mark
When in April Nineteen Hundred and Twelve they bade their ship goodbye
Not knowing that their transatlantic gem would never reach New York
That their transatlantic gem would never reach New York
Perfect (as you can be) (Quentin Bega)
Experts say you’re damaged goods, why, they cannot tell
Something happened somewhere else some time ago
And there’s nothing they can do, just accept the fact
And try to adapt to what is here
It’s all right you’re all right in my eyes
You’re just as perfect as you can be, as you can be
Some things are too hard for you, and I hate to see
Confusion in your eyes wet with tears
Some things you will never do others take for granted
And I cannot pretend, oh it hurts me too
It’s all right you’re all right in my eyes
You’re just as perfect as you can be, as you can be
I’m just thankful you are here just the way you are
I can’t imagine life without you near
Steps you make however small are greater in my mind
Than those steps up on the moon in sixty-nine
It’s all right you’re all right in my eyes
You’re just as perfect as you can be, as you can be
So why do experts say you’re damaged goods?
Credits: All written text, song lyrics and music (including background music) written and composed by Quentin Bega unless otherwise specified in the credits section after individual posts. Illustrative excerpts from other texts identified clearly within each podcast. I donate to and use Wikipedia frequently as one of the saner sources of information on the web.
Technical Stuff: Microphone-songs Shure SM58; (for the podcast spoken content) Audio Technica AT 2020 front-facing with pop filter); Apogee 76K also used for songs and spoken text. For recording and mixing down: 64-bit N-Track Studio 10 Extended used; Rubix 22 also used for mixing of microphone(s) and instruments. I use the Band in a Box/RealBand 2023 combo for music composition.
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