Why songs matter: Miners and Negroes

Do you remember old songs, the kind people supposedly actually sang a lot once? I do. They taught them to us in school as part of the curriculum.

Oh my darlin, oh my darlin, on my darlin Clementine, you are lost and gone forever, dreadful sorry Clementine..........In a canyon, in a cavern, excavating for a mine, dwelt a miner, forty-niner, and his daughter, Clementine.

Or, the mysterious and simple, but maybe most beautiful of all: "Shoo fly"

Shoo fly don't bother me, shoo fly don't bother, shoo fly don't bother me, for I belong to somebody
I feel, I feel, I feel like a morning star, I feel, I feel, I feel like a morning star
Shoo fly don't bother me, for I belong to somebody.

We were told at the same time we were taught them, what these songs were: Miner's songs and Negro Spirituals, and what those were. This was Venable School in Charlottesville Virginia, around 1950. None of us seven or eight year olds knew any miners or Negroes personally of course; our lives were lived separately from theirs (Negroes and miners)--one separated by neighborhood, the other by time, that is to say, in an eight year old's imagination, long, long ago. It was some time before I understood that the miners  in the songs from out West and my own great, great grandparents in Parsonsfield Maine were alive at exactly the same time, and that the essence of being a slave is eloquently expressed in "Shoo fly."

It occurs to me that whatever the people who ran Venable school planned to have happen because of their curriculum, they got it right. Children were exposed to actual relics of days gone by and it stuck in their heads (because songs do) to eventually inform the child when it is well into its forties or fifties what it must have been like back then being a slave. Knowledge like that is universal and invaluable.

Seven deadly sins and other close readings of the Gardens of Flora Baum

September 29, 2014

Flora Baum envies the ghost of Tasso his patience and graciousness:

"Tasso, you lasted. Is this mad? You worked. 

Is our right work our earthly paradise,

The work that is our play the paradise, 

The play that works our madness paradise?

Our madness may be rationality.

How patiently you listen. Do I rave?

Is there a rationality that anger

Advances like a warrior to guard,

A play protected by a pious pride,

A lust that burns for truth, a gluttony

Greedy for feasts of beauty, and a sloth

That is the otiosity of art

And the long laziness of contemplation?

How graciously you listen. 

                                                  Tasso laughed

Patience is easy in eternity,

But those who live in finite time must try

To finish something fine before they die." (Bk.3, 935.9-10)

                                                   

Flora has listed for Tasso the deadly sins inherent in the act of bringing about an earthly paradise in her life: "Is our right work our earthly paradise?"  Might not writing poetry for her be an angry rationality,  an expression of pious pride, a lusting (if only for truth),  a greediness (though for beauty), a sloth inseparable from art and its contemplation? Do these apply? 

His answer--a laugh--brings her about, encourages her, answers her fully. These things come with being finite and mortal: bear up. Try and finish something fine before you die.