Why sing?

March 17, 2007

There is one line you cannot trace with your finger, and which you cannot follow with your eye. A melody, with words, describes the heart. And as the thread of notes is drawn out from the lips, drawn out like the finest line of silk, it is taken by the wind, it coils around a finger, it settles into residence in other lives, it is colored by sunlight and hidden by nightfall, it is raised up with a baby’s cry and deflated by lament for the departed…

Everything is in everything else, and when the sound is pure, it reflects part of the world as a lake reflects the sky at daybreak.

We have many avenues for meeting ourselves, though with some there is a tendency toward hardening, becoming strict or structured; with music, the tendency is to open the throat, and opening the throat to open the channel of living which runs from one’s base up the spine through the lips to the world outside. The tendency with music is to fall into the river, and falling, to become water. When we dissolve enough, whatever words we choose to speak will carry truth.

Onde está o homem com quem eu me casei?
Tenha talvez viajado pró lado de lá do maré
Esteja talvez rodeado num quarto do coração…
um quarto de porta fechada
um quarto de luz apagada
um quarto de música muda
de amor, que existe quem sabe
mas não prá mim

A woman sings to her husband, a love song lost, because sometimes love’s misplaced, without knowing how, nor where it had been left.

You arrived with a cry and a question in your eyes
as though awakened from sleep
having taken flight through unlit skies:
Where am I? Where am I?
So you ask me I will tell you
so you ask me I will tell you
no lies
Here the land and the sea will write the songs for you
here the line of the tide is all divides
what you dream from what you do
simple as it’s true: one step and you choose
Now you ask me I can tell you
now you ask me I can tell you
no lies…

The dialog between child and father, where the answer is sweet with days well-worn in tenderness, gifts, losses.

We shoulder our loads and take to our roads
let the journey be our friend
the horizon it seems will collect all our dreams
but a circle begins where it ends
Behind every eye that you have held
is a seed you have watered well:
garden of days in this friendship we made
so strong

Every song wishes to speak if you let it. I wish you to hear these songs’ melodies, those that came before the words, the melodies that taught the words to speak. A thread of music comes from the heart like a line of silk, it is drawn from the lips, a line of silk that runs from the small hum of one spirit to re-sound in the small hum of another. One of the finer ways to spend time, spend time as though it were coin, precious as gold we cannot keep and cannot save, only spend as best we may.