Song

Have you ever listened to birdsong? Early morning in the twilight hour (I think that’s what we call it). It’s organic, erotic even. But perennially peaceful. I love it. It’s impossible to recreate it humanly; listen to the trilling in the second half of the first movement of Spring, Vivaldi (I don’t even like baroque music as such), it’s stunning (yeah, I’m listening to it now), but it’s not a patch on the real thing. It’s so...natural. Organic. Frank. Our ancestors listened to it; our great grandmothers, our great, great grandfathers, all of them. I guess that makes it atavistic; pertaining to our ancient relatives. They would have known it as well as we know it (the sound of birdsong, I mean). Isn’t that comforting? Everything’s changing; it’s the techno World, 2009 baby. Go listen to Benga and Coki and Dubstep and fuck up your ears at Ministry and go grind your teeth at Fabric. But despite it all, we still hear the birds. Somethings never change; the World changes, but, it also stays the same. Shakespeare referenced birdsong himself, and, for no real reason apart from that I love this play, I’m going to quote him:
Juliet:
“Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day:
It was the nightingale, and not the lark,
That pierced the faithful hollow of thine ear;
Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate-tree:
Believe me, love, it was the nightingale”

Romeo:
“It was the lark, the herald of the morn,
No nightingale: look, love, what envious streaks
Do lace the severing clouds in yonder East:
Night’s candles are burn out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.
I must be gone and live, or stay and die.”

Now, I’m a Londoner, I couldn’t tell you the difference between a lark and a nightingale, my point is, it always remains.
However, (I’m just making this up as I go along btw, there’s no structure to this post), look at the word... birdsong. I almost think it’s the wrong word to use; song. Song is beautiful, but it is superfluous. We like music, we like songs, we like chorales and orchestras and chamber groups and R’n’B, but it is entirely superfluous. We don’t communicate via. music (you know what I mean..!) it’s not our primary way to speak to one another. Admittedly Gregorian and Benedictine monks use song to communicate with God (think monastic chants, or, Carmina ecclesiastica or something thereabouts), but in general we don’t use it to communicate. We use words, the spoken, not sung, word. Birds are different; they use birdsong as their primary means of communication, it’s their speech, isn’t it? Calling it song almost seems to degrade what it is; it’s an essential part of their existence. Or maybe I’m just being ridiculously digressive? Who knows. Tbh, who really cares?

Sound... we rely on it (no shit), but I think, we rely on it more then we realise. It’s more important than sight, much more important. You can look at someone, you can have lust for them, think of concupiscence, whatever whatever... but how can you love someone you can’t communicate with? Surely sound is thereof much more important than sight; we need sound to communicate do we not? We need communication to love. We need love to live.
However, I suppose we could counter this. The ability to write is one of the uniquities of being human; animals do not write, humans do. It is with the writings of the past that we’ve learned so much; the Bible, the Tanakh, the quran, the Magna Carta, hieroglyphics, the dead sea scrolls, old papal bulls, everything really, tell us so much. How could we know about the ancient Egyptians, without the hieroglyphics? Obviously, things like the Sphinx and Pyramids are hard to miss, but that’s not what I mean. How would we know there was a Tutankhamen, and Osiris and Amon Ra and Cleopatra, if it was not written down. We wouldn’t and couldn’t. So, we can agree I presume, agree, that writing is one of the cornerstones of civilisation? Even now, our political beliefs are influenced by writers such as Marx – The Communist Manifesto, Locke – Two treatise of Government, Wollstonecraft – A valediction on the rights of men, Proudhon – Property is theft!, Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Hobbes, et al. The fact is, we are shaped by the writings of other people. Our laws are codified in a constitution; they’re written down (well, ok, Britain doesn’t have a constitution but shush), you get my long drawn out point .



Writing is the cornerstone of society, of civilisation even. However, a pre-requisite to writing is...sight. How can you write if you cannot see? There’s always dictation, but surely that would hinder even the greatest writer; how stifling! Without sight, you cannot see, if you cannot see, how can you write? Let’s look at John Milton; he wrote Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained back in the 17th c. His mission was, if I can paraphrase correctly, to “justify the ways of God to man”. He was also completely blind. And guess what – Paradise Lost is by all admission a horrible poem. It’s book after book after book of poor poetry. It’s written in Blank verse for one (compare to Shakespeare’s perfect iambic pentameter), it’s just not especially pleasant. It doesn’t roll of the tongue; Milton (imo obviously) overcompensates his inability to see by placing strange emphasis on the sounds of the poem. Obviously, alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia etc... are all good poetic devices, but in moderation surely. Milton just seems to have thrown it in everywhere, with the effect that it’s a long, unengaging, epic poem, with little to sell itself. It doesn’t even rhyme. You simply cannot compare it to the great poets of English history; John Donne (A valediction forbidding mourning, and my favourite poem; The flea), Shakespeare, even the romantic poets like Wordsworth (though I think he was off his face on opium half the time).
This is a stanza from ‘A valediction forbidding mourning’;
AS virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
"Now his breath goes," and some say, "No."

And this is a stanza from my favourite metaphysical poem, ‘The Flea’;
MARK but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is ;
It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.
Thou know'st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead ;
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pamper'd swells with one blood made of two ;
And this, alas ! is more than we would do.

The rhythm, the structure, it’s perfect. Take any Shakespeare quote you know, or any sonnet ‘shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’, and it’s guaranteed to be the same. Now, let’s take a few lines from Paradise Lost, book X:
Meanwhile the hainous and despightfull act
Of Satan done in Paradise, and how
Hee in the Serpent, had perverted Eve,
Her Husband shee, to taste the fatall fruit,
Was known in Heav'n; for what can scape the Eye
Of God All-seeing, or deceave his Heart
Omniscient.

Yawn. It’s stodgy, it’s fat, it’s boring, it doesn’t flow or rhyme. It’s practically a book.
It’s practically this blog,
It’s just prose,
Separated into poetic
lines.

It’s poor poetry, and the worst thing is how much of it there is. The key difference between Milton, Donne and Shakespeare? (Apart from the fact Milton pussied out of how bad his poetry was by blaming his ‘Christian muse Urania’, a “celestial patroness” who “dictates to me slumb’ring, or inspires/ Easy my unpremeditated verse”), is that Milton was blind, and the others weren’t. Clearly then, sight plays a massive role in how we write. Perhaps if Milton hadn’t been confined to dictation, he would have written a semi-decent poem instead of the soporific crap we got instead. Milton has a way with sound, but over all his poetry, to use internet parlance, was FAIL. The only good thing I can think of was that he coined the word pandaemonium, now, pandemonium, in reference to hell.
So what’s my point; sight is equally important? Sound is more important? I really have no idea, I’ve been writing this for ages, for absolutely no reason but my own self-gratification. Perhaps they’re both needed in conjugation? Sight is needed for writing, writing is required for our civilisation, however, I think sound is required for love.

I don’t know. I have no idea. This is all rather rambly. There’s no point to it whatsoever. I should shut up and go sleep now, shouldn’t I? What an utterly jejune ending; I’m sorry. I did warn you I wouldn’t be pedagogic.
xox