On Music, On Tomorrow
Mícheál McCann | Tolka Issue Five, June 2024
Derek Jarman’s The Tempest (1979) has almost ended. Miranda and Ferdinand are in wedding garb. A band of white-suited sailors loiter gayly. The set is aristocratic and regal. The frame fills with confetti of such colour that the screen becomes momentarily blocked with a pastel pink. The confetti thins, carpeting the entire set, to reveal a figure in golds and yellow helmeted with a pearl-gold bonnet from which stem seven white-gold feathers; discs of translucent lemon fabric imitate the dawn rising behind her. This is the Goddess come to bless the wedding party, yet it is her rendition of the torch song ‘Stormy Weather’ that haunts my imagination most. The lyrics are smoky and sad; her face is lit by an eerie smile. I lie awake later that evening thinking of the lilting sailors, Welch dwarfed between them, beaming as she sings. Life is bad. Gloom and misery everywhere. Passing those gathered, touching shoulders as she passes, rolling her eyes and smiling to the ceiling. I’m weary all the time. The muted clarinet is like a mischievous child, and Welch seems pleased. I can’t go on. Everything I had is gone. Her hands akimbo as though half-greeting, half-worshipping a divine creature just out of shot. I try on the smile before falling away into sleep.
*
We are driving north out of the city to a friend of A’s for dinner. It is late summer according to the calendar, but the frigid air outside suggests early April. Inside the quiet pod of the car, we admire a clear and blue sky. For the thirty-minute drive we take turns choosing songs: Shania Twain, Dani Larkin, Xtina, Lucy Dacus, Aretha Franklin, Judy Garland, Chaka Khan, Joanna Newsom. Should we go outside? Should we break some bread? We are warmly welcomed. It is an angular house: one room holding a prospective avalanche of books; another pristine marble and polished glass, gleaming darkly. The Thai food that is served is made from scratch. It’s good and hot; beads of sweat protest from the plank of my forehead at how hot the king prawn curry is. A cavalcade of wines makes themselves known in an orderly fashion. The sun lights the sky over Cavehill in the distance, whitely yellow orange I describe to my father on the phone, cradling a now slow-warmed white wine glass in my hand. The light fades and the night proceeds into its final act, as they often do, with: what’s your favourite rendition of [X song]?
There’s something lethal and forgiving about the combination of alcohol and the sincerity that comes with explaining music you find important. How often I’ve found myself in the fresh night pits of 4 a.m. insisting to a poor group of people why this performance by Judy Garland really has that tragic feeling to it, or how resonant I find this pair of lines in a single version compared to the album version. Those gathered around the grey-wood outdoor table fade into a considered quiet. After a few long seconds the host perks up. We are promptly directed to a grainy recording of Jake Thackray, a comedic singer from Leeds, singing ‘Old Molly Metcalfe’. I’m reminded of how upbeat an ABBA or Bee Gees song feels to the ear, and how eerie it becomes when you comprehend the lyrics. A cognitive dissonance between what your ear musically enjoys, then lyrically is punctured by.
I feel a growing self-consciousness about my go-to example, but square my chin, it being my turn. Kate Bush’s ‘Moments of Pleasure’, specifically from her 2011 Director’s Cut album, I say. The eyes watching wait for an explanation. Well, the final pair of lines are slightly altered in the remaster. In 1993 she sings Hey there, Michael, do you really love me? Hey there, Bill, can you turn the lights up? I’m out of breath with anticipation; thrillingly, in 2011 Bush sings Hey there, Michael, do you really love me? She pauses, the piano ostinato slows like a pulse falling asleep. Did you really love me? Everyone is silent. Well, I hasten to add, in the intervening eighteen years, I wonder if Bush’s concept of this relationship with a Michael was altered; there’s a seismic quality to this, as though the foundation of one particular, very important memory has been shifted. I know that feeling, I say. I think I can feel that feeling, the way her voice wobbles and quickly dies away.
The host disappears into the beautiful, pointed house, then reappears with another cold bottle of white wine. We continue in this vein: a more emotional and, frankly, more fraught version of Spin the Bottle. My relative knowledge of classical music is referenced by my kind-eyed beloved, and the inevitable question follows: to my mind, the most stirring piece of classical music. Less fearful uncertainty now. I describe Henryk Górecki’s third symphony, the famously termed Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. A solo soprano and orchestra, the singer’s text lifted from various sources connected to the Holocaust; one, in particular, I stress, was a scratching on the wall of a Gestapo holding cell. Mother, do not cry, no. Most pure Queen of Heaven protect me always.
I’m glassy-eyed with the effort of recounting the music, and everyone is couched in respectful silence. Of course, I’ve quite genuinely assassinated the mood at this point. Both penitent and adamant about my choice, I recline, as I often do, into the safety of knowing rather than feeling things. This song roulette continues a while, but the hull has been breached. We’re taking on water. Perhaps it’s the alcohol. My partner’s friend opens a dessert wine the colour of urine when he says, you’re both very prone to the melancholic aren’t you? I pause – being in polite company – and then smile, say something affable and humorous, the conversation trundles onward, but the remark lingers for weeks.
The music we have been choosing in courteous sequence is being played through someone’s phone connected to a decent Bluetooth speaker. Our host’s partner reminds him that the volume is quite loud. It’s a Sunday, children are in bed, and yet my memory recalls the music growing louder. Snatches of birdsong mixing with Judy, then the soprano’s voice rising like a flighted animal into the darkening sky.
Earlier in my life, in a dark depressive period, I found the gloomy quality of melancholy attractive, romantic even. If you can’t banish your demons, accompany them to a candlelit dinner instead. The host meant nothing by it. It was undoubtedly a throwaway comment, but it pierced me nonetheless in the way surprisingly true things do.
A few months later, the American-Japanese singer Mitski – famous for keenly felt, achingly sad songs – passed through Belfast. A post-concert report I received indicated that the majority of attendees that night were fifteen, sixteen, and singing along to every aged, jaded word. Darling, play your violin. We will manage somehow. I had thought, patronisingly, there was a qualified, adult sadness to a musician like Mitski that a younger person wouldn’t entirely grasp. Mom, would you wash my back this once? I show my boyfriend a décor Pinterest board – matte green half-tiles, painted door frames, built-in bookshelves, cat architecture – in lieu of a mortgage. I begin to think about this emphasis on the melancholy as a generational atmosphere, rather than simply my own predilections. Phoebe sighs, I know the end. Joni, nothing lasts for long. Lana, and if this is the end, I want a boyfriend. Peggy, if that’s all there is then let’s keep dancing. Mitski, nobody, nobody, nobody, nobody, nobody.
I stand and watch the working ships not far from the Titanic slipway. The night has come on quickly; the shipping bells ring like distant church bells and the sea slams surprisingly hard against the boat’s sides for being this far inland. With this gloomy soundtrack I turn the thought around that with the very real prospect of environmental catastrophe in my eyeline, perhaps the melancholy, the mournful is a colour I experience more vividly than my kindly dinner host. Or rather, it’s the thread that has woven the veil I see things through.
Standing in the mouth of Belfast Lough I think how the river is my guide home. What is loud and arrogant by the docks is a steady and meditative flow near our apartment. On the drive home Karen Peris’ crystalline and eerily high voice snakes out of the busted speakers. Some clear joy is coming. Her voice stops vibrating on ‘clear’, elongating the syllable: it makes me think of cresting a hill and the wind suddenly dropping into austere and bright quiet. This song seems to detail a period of mourning, perhaps for a child. A’s hand tightens around the gear stick; his hands are lined in a way they weren’t when we met several years ago. His cheeks are childishly rosy from the cold. Birdless in the spring. My man and I are weeping. The night outside the car could be threatening, peaceful, or nothing at all. Perhaps contentment is when company can stopper a proclivity to foresee the end? Do you hear that it’s coming again? He asks me if we have peppers in the fridge. I don’t think so. My mind turns away from worry for a moment. To be able to anticipate grief in the company of someone else can be a kind of victory, I think, as we reach home, having followed the snaking river there. Anticipatory grief, regardless of what it’s for, indicates to me the worth of something before it’s gone. Would that we missed things more vocally on this side of their disappearance.
Michael Longley memorably suggested that every poem is, after a fashion, an elegy. In a parallel vein, perhaps every poem is a love poem. Every gloomy dirge I’m drawn to is a portent for something miraculous, the quality of being alive. Didn’t Wallace Stevens distinguish between ‘nothing that is not there and the nothing that is’’? To elegise the world, the climate, is to fiercely posit its beauty. It might be good enough to commit the elegance of birdsong, of a cat’s hair, of how the oaks of my hometown uproot the concrete, to paper. The given world was plentiful, alleluia.
My phone lights every other week or so with a bracing push notification giving more scientific clarity on how civilisation is on the brink of collapse. Precious flora and fauna being disappeared. The growing ambition of the sea. Imagine: how hapless must a generation be, to read said article closely, close the web page, then be capable to continue with laundry, the walk we halted, the windows we were cleaning. We have inherited some hereditary illness that is swiftly turning terminal. I speak broadly, of course. There are remarkable activists agitating for change, but the bookish among us (to you I address this also) are monastic, prone to quiet rooms. We have been limited in material means as well as imaginative ones.
All this, I believe, necessitates the soil seep of sadness and melancholia my kindly host felt charmed and knowing of, dare I say superior to? What else could be expected? What I trace here – emotive and hard to quantify as it is – is less an atmosphere and more a sentiment, a sentiment which I trace in many writers and musicians alike.
I write about music here, when I’m really, humiliatingly, writing about my own poems. So many skirt around the terminus of perception. I often thought this was a long-winded outworking of a suicidal period, but no. I’ve grown into adulthood with the awareness that the land around us is dying, my imagination has no doubt been compacted by this; perhaps the imaginations of my peers, too. The desk I write from sits parallel to a floor-to-ceiling square window where the street outside looms orangely. I’m cognisant of something incomprehensible looming and I’m fretful. My imagination can’t proceed beyond this ledge. Like a religious visitation, the rapture, a tide pulling miles out to prepare for a tsunami. I’m not sure when it will happen, what it will look like, how it will come, if it will hurt, who will be hurt the most, and my mind is bent out of shape anticipating it. We’re all contorted with worry, unwound like a wire hanger. And still the poems persist from all corners of the island, each landmass that commits its thoughts to writing. As our time shortens, be that mortal or otherwise, the poem presents (if we pay attention) a vessel to say something urgent. Marianne Moore’s disdain/adoration of the form sums this feeling well. Who has time for this fiddle when so much is wrong? More and more, in a world of ingenuine discourse, it conjures a place for the genuine.
*
I think about happiness on the way home from that remarkably delicious dinner, the off-fruit fragrance of dessert wine between the two of us. For someone so supposedly drawn to melancholy, the elegiac (where love finds its most authentic expression), I note that joy has a radical quality. Let no hint of irony or jaded bit-cheek infest joy from here on. With all that’s wrong, and all there is to be sorrowful about, happiness (naïve or not) is a ward against the night outside; and of course, following my logic, these melancholy songs conjure a mutual feeling of, yes, sadness, but sadness that reclines in a room with the smoke of happiness spinning above heads, so enthralled in chat they don’t realise. The melancholy is a gesture of yearning, a supine palm trembling to be touched.
To evoke something in writing essentially erects its negation. Health, sickness. Loved ones, their going. Joy, a deep pervasive sorrow. And the reverse applies too. With this in mind, I decide that a love poem written now is that not in spite of the darkening morning, but in light of it. I force myself to imagine thirty years from now: a small girl with musical black hair, a daughter, pointing questioningly to a book of poems with her surname. Some moments that I’ve had, I might describe to her, pulling wide the curtains (I hope there is still beauty there, green, the notes of birdsong) and lifting her into my arms. No more weariness. Some moments of pleasure.
Mícheál McCann is from Derry City. His poems have appeared in the Stinging Fly, Queering the Green, Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland Review and elsewhere. His first poetry collection, Devotion, was published by The Gallery Press in 2024.
‘On Music, On Tomorrow’ was first published in Issue Five of Tolka (November 2022). You can also subscribe to Tolka for a year for €22.
