Down in the Valley (Week One)

I walked about all week long with song stuck in my head, singing it under my breath in the daytime and high over it at night. Gosh this song is unreal — it sounds so eerie, unearthly. Like it may be eaten by mountains or the singer may be gobbled by mountains, full of despair in a valley.

For some strange reason, I really wanted to draw a specific image I had in my mind; a man, tall, gaunt, lone with a big pack hanging with pots and pans and handkerchiefs that would clack as he walked. He has no face, no eyes and no tears, but he does have big blue boots, worn, from which blue paint leaks. Every step he takes leaves a mark.

I just heard Mississippi John Hurt's "You got to walk that lonesome valley" for the first time and while the melody and mood don't quite fit, the idea that "there's nobody here can walk it for him"fits just right. Sidenote: he's always wearing the same plaid shirt. What a man.

I couldn't draw this — goodness knows I tried. I just haven't got hands that can draw what's so clear in my mind. It's almost nightmarishly frustrating, but there you go. It didn't help that I was terribly intimidated by all the stunning art the rest of the class has created — I just feel I couldn't encapsulate the feeling I felt if I couldn't capture the picture in my head.

So I wrote a poem. I'm not quite sure I do the song justice, but there it is. I'm still working on scanning everything I create, but I'll have a scanned copy of it posted soon and transcribe it below once it's up.

Leadbelly's version is absolutely great, particularly because he was in jail himself and so he really made the song his own. He emphasized the jailhouse aspects of the song over the romantic aspects. It's stellar, but I guess I should say that I really identify Down in the Valley (at least the "traditional" version) with a woman's voice. I looked through some renditions of it and somehow this, suburban as it is, seemed to fit best:



I also found a song by a modern folk band called "Down in the Valley" that has no direct similarities to the original folk song, but is rather nice. There are some themes of incarceration and love which still stand:

The OED, In a Hegelian Sense

I recently read this New York Times article discussing Supreme Court Justices' increased citations of dictionaries — over 120 different ones — in order to come to and strengthen their court decisions. 


As you may know I love the OED, and the piece reminded me of something I'd fancifully written months ago — a Hegelian analysis of the idea that dictionaries serve to limit as well as broaden our scopes of language ... and thought I'd post it here.


Thesis: Dictionaries are a repository of factual information, letting us know which words are words and giving us legitimacy when we use the tome ("hey, it is real — I looked it up in the dictionary!"). They also tell us what they mean, or are said to mean, opening up worlds to us and giving us a clear way of understanding the intentionality behind what others are saying. They also give us ways to say things ourselves — a sort of grab bag of words to choose from.


Antithesis: This is sort of limiting. For all the doors it opens to us, it also puts up walls. Words or interpretations of words not legitimized by the dictionary are labeled false or incorrect. The dictionary is neither personal nor vogue: the dictionary is right, and does not give us leave to conjure up new meaning for ourselves. For all that the dictionary broadens our lexical horizons, it sets strict borders as well.


Synthesis: The OED! Oh, the beauty of the OED, which gives us meanings with the promise of malleability and the guarantee of expansion. It's a dictionary created to account for the transcience of a living, breathing, growing language like English ... why don't judges stick to the OED alone?

Plus Rien Ne M'Etonne

Tiken Jah Fakoly

Ils ont partagé le monde, plus rien ne métonne
Plus rien ne métonne
Plus rien ne métonne

Si tu me laisses la Tchétchénie
Moi je te laisse l'Arménie
Si tu me laisse l'Afghanistan
Moi je te laisses le Pakistan
Si tu ne quittes pas Haïti
Moi je tembarque pour Bangui
Si tu maides à bombarder l'Irak
Moi je tarrange le Kurdistan

Ils ont partagé le monde, plus rien ne métonne
Plus rien ne métonne
Plus rien ne métonne

Si tu me laisses l'uranium
Moi je te laisse l'aluminium
Si tu me laisse tes gisements,
Moi je taides à chasser les Talibans
Si tu me donnes beaucoup de blé
Moi je fais la guerre à tes côtés
Si tu me laisses extraire ton or
Moi je taides à mettre le général dehors

Ils ont partagé le monde, plus rien ne métonne
Plus rien ne métonne
Plus rien ne métonne

Ils ont partagé Africa, sans nous consulter
Il sétonnent que nous soyons désunis
Une partie de l'empire Maldingue
Se trouva chez les Wollofs
Une partie de l'empire Mossi
Se trouva dans le Ghana.
Une partie de l'empire Soussou
Se trouva dans l'empire Maldingue
Une partie de l'empire Maldingue
Se trouva chez les Mossi
Ils ont partagé Africa, sans nous consulter
Sans nous demander
Sans nous aviser

Ils ont partagé le monde, plus rien ne métonne
Plus rien ne métonne
Plus rien ne métonne 

Great Words

 James Augustus Henry Murray was the ambitious  fourth editor of the Oxford English Dictionary — the most amazing feat of the English language.                                                                                                                                            
   
"I am a nobody.
 Treat me as a solar myth, 
 or an echo, 
 or an irrational quantity,    
 or ignore me altogether."

A Little Bit of Blue

Sometimes you need to feel a little sorry for yourself. Right now, I feel like the resulting blotch left by these women all painted in blue. A botched, blurred version of some absolute perfection — and not in Plato's-perfect-form-sense, but something much grander than that. More human.

Musings on Monet's Cathedral

The Portal, Morning Fog

I always want to spend what is, according to the judgment of most, "way too long" looking at art, but as it is I'm always rushed in museums.  My women walk quickly, boot heels clicking in a purposeful tempo across museums' mirrored floors, bodies determinedly sashaying from wall to wall, from one room to the next, taking all the walls in like a tornado indiscriminately sucking in all that flies across its path, taking it in with wide sweeps of Hercules's broom.


Most people don't realize that examining — no, experiencing — a single piece of art for hours can be far more fulfilling and enjoyable than examining many in a cursory manner.  Perhaps my favorite painting to dwell on (or, in) is Monet's Cathedral in the Fog, a pointillist rendition of the Rouen Cathedral, which Monet returned to again and again, during different times of the day and year, painting it over twenty times. Whether together or alone, his many dabs, his many cathedrals, become a single cathedral, an ur-cathedral, a Cathedral in its most unabashedly perfect form.


I can stare at the piece for hours, sinking further and further into it, seeing the cathedral emerge from the billows of fog in all its golden glory, and then fade back again, receding into nothing but a spectral imprint in my mind. I fall into the cathedral, becoming divine as I flatten myself against its crown, before diffusing myself far from it, becoming just another distant fleck watching the cathedral in all its gloppy glory.


This watching is a learning curve — like getting to know someone with whom you feel you will one day fall in love but haven't learned to be with yet, the painting does not surrender its entire essence to you at first glance; you get to know it over time. It whispers to you, intimating great grey thoughts through the fog and you're both arrested and unsteady. You're pulled forward and you wrench yourself away, testing the experience of being an intimate while remembering the importance of seeing as an outsider. You musn't forget you're not a part of the cathedral, but Monet makes it so easy to slip under its seemingly-translucent skin.


As with that of most people, the beauty of many paintings blurs upon closer inspection. But the world of Monet's Rouen . . . that only grows wider in scope the nearer to it I pan. I stare at pictures, at paintings — at Monet's cathedral — to see the world, to know every stroke and dab of it even with my eyes closed, to love it as it is; a memory truer than truth.

Like An Alarm Clock