The Green Wave

You do get a choice, you know – and not only about your ears, either, but since this is a space to think about music, we’ll stick to ears for the moment. Allow me to explain.

I spent the week with my family in Maine last week, which was a great treat. I had time and leisure to hang out with my grandmother, my mother, my aunties, my cousin Tom, my brother Dan, and the whole McGovern gang all gathered in for the Thanksgiving feast. It was a lovely time and quite poignant, but there was one aural irritant that ran through the days: television! I’m not used to this constant chatter, often shrill or over-excited. I’m not accustomed to its two modes, either: selling something or telling a terrible story. I haven’t watched television in years (since Buffy the Vampire Slayer, to be exact!) and so all of this – to my mind – ugly sound stimulation leaves me jittery, distracted, unmoored. And being “plugged in” all the time seems an especially bad idea for creative people, because it means listening to someone else’s cues and notions, rather than paying attention to your own. In an alternative universe, I love to think of people giving us the news from the worlds they choose to plug into:

• Woman Bakes Seven Gorgeous Pies at Midnight, says she was “Inspired”
• Man Returns to Clarinet and Feels Alive Again
• People and Cats: Happiness is Contagious
• The Pine Trees are Lovely at Dusk, says this Maine Musician

Which brings me to the ears. When you are just beginning to create something, or when you are just getting to know a new instrument, or when you have made tentative steps in your novel, poem, song, or blog, think carefully and consciously about whose ears you allow to encounter your fledgling art. If you have ever had that soul-crushing experience of sharing something with the wrong person, you know how destructive this can be. Here’s my chief value when it comes to making art:

Keeping Going.

Perfection is useless, beauty is secondary, popular appeal falls off the chart if this one cardinal virtue flags. As an artist, this is our North Star. We pledge to keep going. And that means that we must evaluate the very people who evaluate us. We can ask:

Does this person’s comments and tone make me want to keep going?

If yes, then you have possibly discovered a good set of ears. This doesn’t mean a set of ears that will be unanimously positive, but a person who basically supports your keeping going. You stand to learn something from this person.

But if the answer is no, then quickly remove yourself from this set of ears. No, this doesn’t mean you’ve encountered an evil person or even a person bent on destroying you (not necessarily, anyway). Ultimately, it isn’t about blame so much as it is about alchemy. If, in the wake of someone’s comments you feel anything like shame, self-loathing, or an urge to stop doing what you do, then you’ve discovered something important: this is the wrong set of ears.

What then? Run to your instrument, your laptop, your sketchbook. Give yourself hours to drain off the poison by playing, writing, drawing, painting, singing. Please yourself. Turn off that beastly TV of nasty stories and false promises. Remember that your own ears can listen to the double murder story or the seven-pies-at-midnight story. Choose the latter. Tune back into your own rhythms and preferences.

And be very careful next time to choose your ears wisely!

I wrote several weeks ago about improvising music with my friends Chris and Dawn at Chris’ lakeside home. (I also want to include Chris’ pleasure-dog, Chelsea, in the equation. I call her that because she recently stole half a pork roast out of the oven and gulped it down, wagging her tail the whole time, totally unrepentant). Well, the other night Chris gave me a wonderful gift and I want to tell the story of that gift because I think it is the most wonderful illustration of a creative circle I can imagine.

• Chris, who has a gift for making singable, memorable melodies, invents a bouncy, joy-making riff and a happy first verse. It’s called “Midsummer Night.”
• Then she gets stuck for words and asks me to help. I go home and think about Shakespeare’s play, about woods and fairies and shadows and taking chances. I scribble some verses.
• Chris reads them and threads them right into her melody and they really work!
• But we’re missing a bridge. Chris asks Dawn for help.
• Dawn goes to work with Chris and they invent a great bridge that links back to the final verse and chorus. The two of them also do some of their guitar-magic to the song to give it a lovely instrumental signature.
• Dawn also goes home and records the whole song in her basement, but it’s so beautiful and clear and professional it sounds like it was done with a staff of six in a fancy recording-house.
• We all listen and listen to the amazing recording and the amazing song – amazed, yes, to hear how things have come together.
• Chris and Dawn head north for a song-writing workshop in Ontario. They stay at the home/studio of Tracy, an artist who has committed her life and soul to art. They all love each other.
• Chris and Dawn play the new song at the workshop and people like it!
• Later, unbeknownst to Dawn and me, Chris commissions Tracy to make a painting from the song. She asks her to make a single painting but on three panels so that they work together and apart.
• A few nights ago, Chris shows me the three panels together. I gaze at Tracy’s whimsical, smile-inducing artwork and see the links between all of us, the words and music, and the song. Chris gives me my panel -a curlicue moon rising next to a dancy tree with a star in its branches – and will soon give Dawn her panel, so that all three of us can enjoy remembering the midsummer nights when we made a song together.

This is art, friends! In ideas, music, words, song, paint, trust, and friendship – and who knows where else this circle may roll, what unexpected places it may reach? Sending you all good wishes for that circle in your own lives, and all thanks for letting our circles overlap here and when we meet.

I have the most wonderful news to share: that harp I mentioned last week in passing – the amazing harp with 5 full octaves, a ringing bass and a sparkling treble, sharping levers on every note, beautifully made of African bubinga wood – that harp has come to live with me! I am in heaven!

It is enormous, and very like a boat with its four-and-a-half-foot pillar like a prow up front. The sonority and resonance of those strings lend expressive possibilities as wide as the sea. And playing it is a kind of sailing, changing direction with the wind and weather. It is hard to adequately convey the happiness this brings, but I can say without reservation that it is a dream come true. If any of you are harboring dreams right now, I hope that reading this will help you keep faith with them by reminding you that dreams really do come true.

Last April, I dreamed of playing and sailing a harp-boat, and here is the poem that came from that dream. When I think about that dream so many months ago, I am amazed at life’s tides and currents. There I was, dreaming of a harp that was also a boat – which to my mind combines my love of music with my father and brother’s life on the sea. Six months later, I win a chapbook contest with a collection of poems about my father and our life by the sea, and the prize money helps me buy my dream harp. Amazing how things fit together so beautifully!

So, love your dreams and let yourself enjoy them. And write me a note if you’re so inspired to let me know how they’re coming true.

PS: This poem comes from my upcoming chapbook Fisherman, Fatherman. Yippee!

The Harp-Boat

Anyone learning a new instrument
is bound to fall off sometime,
my lover consoled in the dream
of the harp-boat,

a deep-bellied skiff
strung gunwale to gunwale
with stout metal strings
you’d play with a hammer.

From the prow the mast
jutted up like a narwhale’s horn –
out of place
except in dream-boats –

with a foot’s width of plank
for the harper to start in
before dancing out along
the rails to make boat-music.

I clung to that spar
with no hope of hammering
some music from the strings
and the boat began to move –

swung and rocked and picked up
like a rogue porch-swing,
a harp-boat hung on the sun,
arcing up into the heights

so fast and high I lost myself
and tumbled over the stern,
failed musician,
failed sailor.

Anyone learning a new instrument
is bound to fall off
at least once –
so I climbed back on

and this time pulled my mind
from my stomach and put it
first in my feet and legs
where the boat’s pulse thrummed

and then in my hands and shoulders
where the making of music lives.
And finally into the song
I hoped to live in all my life

and I let go the mast
and sailed into harp-boat-music,
a sailor-harper in perfect time
with her dream.

Kate Chadbourne

I’m up to my elbows in student essays these days and learning quite a lot from this latest batch of students and their hard work. For weeks now, we have been walking in a world of talking horses, edible houses, falsely-hospitable witches, dark woods, hard choices. They’ve been reading “source” fairytales set down by the Brothers Grimm or Charles Perrault, and considering them alongside recent retellings by 21st century storytellers and authors. The process builds in quite a lot of time for thinking and re-thinking: first there is some free writing, then a draft, and finally, after lots of comments and discussion, a revised version of the essay.

What impresses me most is that every student has used the process (and my ceaseless and perhaps irksome questions!) to deepen his or her relationship with these tales. What at first seemed black and white, evil and good, villains and heroes, has become complicated and difficult – and way more fruitful. Some of them even believe me now that questions, ambiguities, and mysteries are the seeds of good writing.

What is most interesting, though, is that the very best of these essays are not only accomplished and rigorous, but they also embody a kind of intellectual compassion that elevates them beyond the ordinary. What I mean by that is that the writers of these essays have written with the head and the heart – and not in some drippy, sentimental way, let me assure you. The result of this kind of writing is, if anything, even more intellectually satisfying because it penetrates to a deeper level of story and reveals more than other kinds of readings. These essays allow us to feel and think, and sometimes they even teach us a way to feel and think. They show us the strength and beauty of the lines that attach this particular tale to our own world.

They don’t set out to do this. They couldn’t. And if they did, the result would be drippy and heavy and overblown. But they do set out to answer a question, solve a riddle, or illuminate some small puzzle in the story. Working closely on a tiny knot, they begin to see the threads stretching out to other parts of the story. They keep working and thinking, and as time passes, the story settles into a deeper level of their thinking. They tell it without realizing it. They begin to live parts of it without consciously realizing it. All the threads now appear connected and woven as a tapestry of beauty and meaning. That one small knot is integral to the integrity of the tapestry, they realize. Then they write an essay and we, the readers, understand and feel the alchemy in it.

I’m beginning to think that these ingredients – time, a willingness to internalize and incubate, mystery, alchemy, a belief in meaning and a commitment to sharing it with other people – are the same ingredients that go into any transformative art. Music, dance, poems, even extraordinary cooking – all of these call us to use every resource at our disposal: intellect and imagination, intuition, experience, time, trust. Getting to the marrow of something outside ourselves means getting to the marrow of what’s inside ourselves.

This is the most exciting work there is. It takes us into the heart of fairy tales, songs, epics, giants’ treasure-houses and witches’ ovens. It requires a whole self and a whole lifetime.

Fellow traveler, I’ll see you in the heart of the dark wood. You’ll know me by my talking horse!