Sounds arrive upon waking. A ceiling fan with a loose post squeaks overhead, so persistent it becomes an earth sound. The lake, which from this proximity looks flat, sends a low roll onto shore every two seconds. Crows stretch voice north and south while seagulls bleat quickly before landing on one of the boats moored out front. An endless wall of crickets projects. The refrigerator kicks on reminding the house that you are there, manufacturing isolation from the sources of the foods it contains, and thankfully it goes off. To the sound of crows. Lapping waves. A boy tossing in his bed in the next room. A seagull. The ceiling fan. Electrical dance of song inside. Inside of what?
Bernart de Ventadorn (ca 1150-1180). Translated by Paul Blackburn in Proensa, Mallorca: Divers Press, 1953 (the translation in the 1978 edition differs).
CANSO
It is worthless to write a line
if the song proceed not from the heart :
nor can the song come from the heart
if there is no love in it.
Maligning fools, failing all else, brag
but love does not spoil,
but countered by love, fills,
fulfilling grows firm.
A fool’s love is like verse poor in the making,
only appearance and the name having,
for it loves naught but itself, can
take nothing of good,
corrupts the rhyme.
And their singing is not worth a dime
whose song comes not from within the heart.
If love has not set his roots there
the song cannot bud from the heart : whence
my song is superior, for I turn to it
mouth eyes mind heart
and there is the joy of love in it.
And the binding glance is food for it
and the barter of sighs is food for it
and if desire is not equal between them
there is no good in it.
God grants me no strictness to counter my desire
yet I wonder if we afford its acceptance,
responsible for what we have of it. Though
each day goes badly for me
fine thought at least will I have from it
though no other thing :
for I have not a good heart and I work at it,
a man with nothing.
Yet she made me rich, a man with nothing.
Beautiful she is and comely, and the more
I see her openness and fresh body, the more
I need her and have smarting.
Yet so seldom her fine eyes look on me
one day must last me a hundred.
Yet her fine body—
when I gaze on it, I
grow like a canso, perfect.
And if desire is equal between us
the desire enters my throat.
The poet and translator Paul Blackburn. Apologies, Mr. Blackburn, that the inadequacies of HTML will not let me indent your lines properly. This was originally posted in October 2008, but fit the mood of today for me, so I humbly offer it again as a reminder of Blackburn’s, and de Ventadorn’s, gifts. Hear Blackburn read at Penn Sound.
[video]
A boat floats out into a mist. Fog rounds punctuated by open lanes parsed light and possibly drifting detritus. The pulsing water and dampening in the heavy air make placing sound difficult. But you hear dimensions across the water, some near, others far, some seeming placed and others scattered across space.
When they quiet, or rather when you leave them, you think in delayed quintuplicate. Only words. No phrases. The sound of the land gone but there, attempting. Are those church bells? Is it a child on the beach with a toy horn — distorted by space and the time it takes for you to hear it. It is easy to be distracted.
When you were young, you think, and the older children would go out to play, you’d stay in the house with your great aunt. She once had you help her clean smelt. Scraping their scales, splitting them from tail to neck, cutting off their heads.
Your hands smelled of them days later, even when your older brother had you out on the small sailboat.
If you close your eyes now you can still smell it. And hear Agnes next door playing the piano. Fragments of hymns. She’s humming within them. You cut yourself. You did cut yourself.
That summer your family moved and saws and drills and hammers kept the new house in vibration, fishing new wires in walls, taping plaster cracks, spreading mud and sanding.
That dust now today’s fog — slow to dissipate. Tired and suspended in space. Or was it one’s eyes that held it there. If you’d closed them would it all have disappeared. This is my life you think and how can this be happening to me.
In the moment you stop thinking there is an echo of her. Of them. Her open door. You think of the night you couldn’t sleep. It was the first like it. The night your grandfather died and you saw him in your doorway. His bright smile.
His wife, your grandmother, bought you your first guitar. When you lived in that house. The one with the glass-paned French doors between every room.
In the bright light of day when the fog burns off you will see an array of white shapes across the lake. Sails and hulls. This seems to be coming now. What might have been a church bell or a child playing could be that distant tone.
The sound of the rubber tires of your bicycle racing down the boat launch just before hitting the plywood jump. Your cousin braying as you launch into the air and splash into the water. Moments suspended in the air. A cantilever of emotions you cannot decide how to hold.
The guitar is long gone, disposed in haste during some move. You still try to achieve the truth of just one of the chords you played on it.
Whatever happened to every
Whatever happened to every
Whatever happened to every
Whatever happened to
Whatever happened to
Whatever happened to
Whatever happened
Whatever happened
Whatever happened
Happened
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On West Wind, Evan Caminiti plays electric and acoustic guitars, harmonium, gong, voice and piano; he also is responsible for the artwork (cover above). West Wind was superbly mastered by Patrick Klem. Three Lobed continues its superb tradition of delivering well-crafted, heady albums. Click here for a downloadable preview of the first track “night of the archon”(via Three Lobed).
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Evan Caminiti: The “land of fog and tube amps,” it claims. I swear, I wrote the above before I went to this site. Must be something in the air….