Letters from Quotidia 2023 Podcast 19

It’s the 17^th of September as I publish the penultimate podcast in the Letters from Quotidia series: podcast 19 of 2023. On this date in 1849, three people fled from a Maryland plantation and made their way north towards emancipation. Harriet Tubman and her two brothers, Ben and Henry. The brothers got cold feet and turned back but Harriet persevered and continued her journey into history where she is revered as an icon- an abolitionist, a social activist and supporter of women’s suffrage. What Ben and Henry did is a story as old as the Bible and as up to date as the latest Tik Tok dancing sensation: people escaping their chains only to regret leaving the devil you know for the unknown perils and pitfalls that striving for freedom delivers.

The Danes have a word: Hygge, which the Oxford Dictionary defines asa quality of cosiness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being. Is this the same as our pejorative term comfort zone or is it something else? Oh, I hope it’s something else because I would be more than a tad disappointed to find that the comfortable conviviality that I so very often embrace is, in fact, a trap, a sticky, honeyed prison from which there is no escape because the entrapped have no desire for anything at all but the sweetness of their servitude. Gemütlichkeit, the German word that describes the cozy domesticity of Schubert’s  Biedermeier Vienna, is yet another term that comes to mind.

As I ponder the dilemma between choosing a cozy existence or seeking a more challenging milieu, I remember a recording my father made of The Green Glens of Antrim, a song about the place of my birth.He took his treasured AKAI reel-to-reel tape recorder down to a hotel where there would be a recital featuring the song. This would have been in the mid-1960s. He was proud as punch to be able to memorialise the event, as no one else in the village of Cushendall has such equipment back then. Fast forward to the mid-1980s when I directed a play for the amateur dramatic society in Cushendall after I had returned from Australia, and we were placed in the All- Ireland Finals (confined section).

In the hotel bar afterwards, a singsong commenced. Someone started to sing, Far across yonder blue… the opening line of the song. I have never heard a better rendition for we glens folk raised the roof with the best a capella version of the song I can recall. Of course, my eyes may be framed with rose-tinted glasses and misted with the fumes of the copious spirits we consumed that night, but I did get round to recording my take on this nostalgic song of place during lockdown in 2020 back in Australia. It doesn’t bear comparison to the epic rendition in that hotel bar in the west of Ireland, but it delivers hygge to me and you can find more detail about this in my post A Bit of Banter, Episode 90 [insert song]

Our world is acting out- like a toddler or, for that matter, a teenager throwing a tantrum. One may wonder if the Gaia hypothesis is real, and the earth is reacting to the multitudinous insults she has suffered at our hands in the past few centuries. However, in spite of the wildfires, the floods, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, mudslides, and pandemics presently afflicting us, who among us is not awestruck at the many wonders our world reveals to us when she is in a beneficent mood: the sunsets, coral reefs, floral profusion, caressing, cooling breezes, and the magnificent varieties of animal and bird life?

Switching gear now to poetry, and who better to evince the beauties of the world than John Keats in his majestic Ode to Autumn, Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,/Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;/Conspiring with him how to load and bless/With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;/To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,/And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;/To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells/ With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,/And still more, later flowers for the bees,/Until they think warm days will never cease,/For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.//Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?/Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find/Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,/Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;/Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,/Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook/Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:/And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep/Steady thy laden head across a brook;/Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,/Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.//Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?/Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—/While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,/And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;/Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn/Among the river sallows, borne aloft/Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;/And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;/Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft/The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;/And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.//

Who would choose to leave such a place behind? Too many do, alas. It takes a lot to bring me to tears but a song that does that is the elegiac, This Sweet Old World by Lucinda Williams first released on an album in 1992 and when Emmy Lou Harris, who covered the song on her 1995 album Wrecking Ball joins her in a duet, well… Williams wrote this song after someone she loved took his own life. When I sing it, I think also of all those who left the world before their time through carelessness or recklessness, or who were taken through mayhem, murder, or misadventure. Even the elderly believer in a paradise awaiting is in no hurry to get there, generally speaking. [insert song]

I’m going to use a somewhat loaded term, now- patrimony. Seven years ago, in August 2016 I published a post and song with this name as part of a series I called The Summa Quotidia– the seed corn, in fact, of the present Letters from Quotidia.  I wrote then, Patrimony is defined by Merriam-Webster as anything derived from one’s father or ancestors. It may be material and exogenous, such as a mansion or something less tangible but nevertheless real- such as an inheritable characteristic such as a predisposition to…what? Let us conduct a mind experiment where the progeny of St Francis of Assisi and Snow White are set against the issue of, say, Adolph Hitler and Cruella De Ville. The children: a boy and a girl from each union, are stranded on a sinking ship. There are only two places left on the last lifeboat. You must choose who is to be saved. Do you save the girls? The boys? The pair from the forces of Good or those of the forces of Evil? Or one from each family? Choose. Perhaps you want to leave that to the Twittersphere…

Quaint, isn’t it? We can no longer refer to the Twittersphere. But what, then? The X-sphere? Back then, I quoted the poem, Heredity by Thomas Hardy, I am the family face;/ Flesh perishes, I live on,/ Projecting trait and trace/ Through time to times anon,/  And leaping from place to place/Over oblivion.//The years-heired feature that can/ In curve and voice and eye/ Despise the human span/ Of durance- that is I;/ The eternal thing in man,/ That heeds no call to die. He was referring unknowingly to DNA, even though it would be decades before Crick and Watson won a Nobel Prize for it in 1962.

I wrote the song Patrimony in 1996 when I was at a low ebb financially and in questionable health. I recorded the song at a small home studio in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney during long service leave I took in 2000. There are no backing tracks, it’s just me playing an acoustic guitar and singing. As I said in introduction to the song in 2016, Patrimony is really just the good stuff we tell each other. [insert song]

For a while now, I’ve tried to tell you good stuff in prose, poetry, and song but as the cliché will have it, all good things come to an end and the end is nigh, as any street preacher will tell you. I won’t be quite so histrionic but will simply inform you all that the next post will be the last of the Letters from Quotidia as they have run their course as a pandemic project. Until then keep well, keep true.

The Green Glens of Antrim

Far across yonder blue lies a true fairyland
With the sea rippling over the shingle and sand
Where the gay honeysuckle is luring the bee
And the green glens of Antrim are calling to me

Sure if only you knew how the lamp of the moon
Turns a blue Irish bay to a silver lagoon
You’d imagine a picture of heaven it would be
Where the green glens of Antrim are calling to me.
 
Soon I hope to return to my own Cushendall
T’is the one place for me that can outshine them all.
Sure I know every stone I recall every tree
Where the green glens of Antrim are calling to me
 
Now I’d be where the people are simple and kind
And among them the one who has been on my mind
Sure I pray that the world would in peace let me be
Where the green glens of[Antrim are heaven to me

Where the green glens of Antrim are heaven to me

This Sweet Old World (music and lyrics by Lucinda Williams)

See what you lost when you left this world, this sweet old world

See what you lost when you left this world, this sweet old world

The breath from your own lips, the touch of fingertips

A sweet and tender kiss

The sound of a midnight train, wearing someone’s ring

Someone calling your name

Somebody so warm cradled in your arm

Didn’t you think you were worth anything

See what you lost when you left this world, this sweet old world

See what you lost when you left this world, this sweet old world

 Millions of us in love, promises made good

 Your own flesh and blood

Looking for some truth, dancing with no shoes

The beat, the rhythm, the blues

The pounding of your heart’s drum together with another one

Didn’t you think anyone loved you

See what you lost when you left this world, this sweet old world

See what you lost when you left this world, this sweet old world

See what you lost when you left this world, this sweet old world

See what you lost when you left this world, this sweet old world

Patrimony (words and music by Quentin Bega)

I ain’t left a will there’s nothing much here that can’t be divided easy

Some things I’ve been some things I am are not very likely to please ya

What I have left are tokens at best a battered guitar and a sack full of rhymes

I hope you can make more of them now than I was able before ya

And if you can prevail escape the swinging flail that knocks ya down to the ground

Then you might rise above the cruel tides that endlessly seek to surround ya

Wear this cloth cap it represents what our forbears had to put up with

Put on these boots yeah walk in the shoes your father tried to get by with

Take this gold ring place on the finger of someone who loves you and can bring

Into your life the gifts of the time that will never leave ya

And if you can prevail escape the swinging flail that knocks ya down to the ground

Then you might rise above the cruel tides that endlessly seek to surround ya

Now go outside gaze at the moon whistle a tune that comes easy

Walk through the trees yeah take your ease by a stream that is running beside ya

Splash in the waves laugh at the clouds smell the wild flowers and kick up the sand

And if you can watch the sunrise painting the sky up above ya

And if you can prevail escape the swinging flail that knocks ya down to the ground

Then you might rise above the cruel tides that endlessly seek to surround ya

Then you might rise above the cruel tides that endlessly seek to surround ya

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- 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 9 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.