My time today has been somewhat chiseled away by my writing of a brand new poem, I was given the 1st and last sentence and had to fill in the rest. I hope you’ll enjoy it (or rather not >.< since it is not quite happy…). It is called “A sailor’s fate”.
Well, yesterday I carried on my rant about life so much that unfortunately I didn’t managed to finish my thoughts. And since I said that I don’t have that much of a time, it is a good opportunity for me to just add this one small thing today.
I wanted to expand a bit the topic, including the opposite view. And this would have been the perspective of Death (as an imaginary entity) and his views about music. At least, as writers and composers depict him.
Maybe through this, by sensing what and why, those people think about death, would give us the opportunity to see another reason for the happy music.
Again I shall use a familiar tune of mine that I believe that it describes many of the views that poets have about Death. It’s again a Cretan song, named “Death of a lyre-player”, written and sung and played (lyre) by K. Mountakis.
This song’s choice of music illustrates my point perfectly. It is a sad tune in almost all of its length, but on ~4min when we enter the 4th period of the lyrics, where Death explains why the lyre is not allowed to the hades, the music turns up really joyous. I like to see this as this: Death is a grim subject that is due to sad music, but Death himself explains that merry tunes are unfit for it, and so our lyre player decides to ‘speed it up’ a bit 😀
————–
In one’s lyre-player’s the courtyard, Death came.
And the lyre-player stood up, old wine to bring,
like (Death) was a valued friend, to lay him the table.
And he (the lyre-player) unhooked his lyre, sweet tune to play.
As if he (Death) was a roisterer, to make him have fun.
———–
-Leave the tray lyre-player and hang your lyre.
Hide your fiddle stick because you’re not getting it anymore.
And go to prepare, your best clothes wear,
because I’m taking you right now to get you to the underworld.
————
-Death, if you wish let me take my lyre,
where the cords talk and the ‘rider’* cries,
where the eaglebells* of the fiddle stick tell me
of the joys of the above world and the (joyful) escapades of the youths,
(of) the beauty of the girls and the grace of the gallantry,
and of an old love’s the commandment,
who double-ordered me the lyre to not forget,
when I’ll go to the underworld.
————-
-I won’t leave it to you, crazy (old man), better for me (that you) break it.
Because with your fiddle stick, you raise the dead,
and you will start playing little tunes to upset the men,
to drive nuts the girls, to shake up the old men,
and you will bolster the babies to cry for affection.
And everyone will hate the cells, the Hades castles,
and everyone would want to come up again.
—————-
*rider refers to the cordy part of the fiddle stick
*eaglebells are little bells traditionally hung by the fiddle stick so as to produce little noise when the player plays fast tunes.
We see here, that Death is afraid of merry music. Music is a representation of life, the liver the tune, the more close to the above world. So, maybe the cheerful music is something like a spell, like the laughter of children that banish away all fears of the old people. Happy music is there to lighten their burden, but not by making them forget death, but through making them remember life. Through chasing the dreadful thought away…
First of all. Huge update. I managed to steal some time to post some of my earlier works. Those are the most recent ones, written in CAD forums by me. As they had little to edit, it was easier to do them first. On a sidenote, I have almost finished editing another ‘half-done’ (and by this i mean the first few chapters that are the intro, to what seems to be a huge novel… :P) story of mine, and will post it soon. For now, enjoy all those (that is if you haven’t read them yet). Poems/Stories, can be found here ——————>
Secondly… On topic:
Death and music:
Death, such a heavy word. A word that inspires fear, something that we all run to avoid. And it is natural to try to escape, if one tries to rush towards it, he can only be named insane.
I am lucky to be born in a country that the custom is to deal with heavy subjects with music (Greece). Through dance we drown our sorrows (or so they say). Or at least we used to be, but the downfall of my country’s custom is not the subject of my rant tonight. Undoubtedly, there are many other places like here, but alas, I can speak only for the places I have been to.
Usually, when a song speaks about death its music is surprising cheery. I can’t tell why is that… Maybe the composer tried to sweeten the bitterness. I believe though, that this can only be attributed to two things. Either it’s the fear of death that compels them to write such rhythms, so as to misguide himself and his listeners, to draw their mind away from the subject, or it is the acceptance of it, the will to look Death in the eye, and laugh. To smile at him knowing that the time’s is up, the fare is closed.
In the end, those two completely opposite views are also the views that one can have for death. There will always be people that try to outrun this last stop. But some few will have managed to acquire the strength to understand that this life is just a fleeting moment. No, I’m not talking about the afterlife. I’m talking about the here and now, the moments that one can hold to his heart and treasure them. Some will say that I’m still too young to have many such moments. But I will argue that every breath that one takes is worthy to be engraved forever in our minds.
Good or bad, it doesn’t matter. After all, our human strength allows us to rise again after each fall. If we will have learned anything from this, it is optional. So when the end comes, there will be two kinds of people, the one that wasted his life trying to find something to remember and the one that truly lived his life. It will be the latter one, he, that will look Death in the eye and say “My life’s done. Here are the moments I value” and he will not show Him abstract snapshots of his life, but a complete video of it.
N. Kazantzakis, a famous Cretan writer has written in one of his works a small passage. A passage that now adorns his grave. It reads “I fear nothing, I hope (believe) nothing, I’m free”. Some will try to argue that hope is what drives us through our hardships. Of course they are right. But this is not the hopes that the writer speaks about. He speaks about the mentality that disallows us to look in the present. For if we fear to live our lives, for if we only aspire to live in a future that we will create, we lose the ability to live in the present. As another Greek writer (K. Kavafis) has written: (freely translated) “When you start to find your Ithaki (the destination of Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey), wish for your journey to be long” Meaning, that its not the destination that counts, but what you learn while trying to get there, the present.
They say learn from your mistakes. But how can you learn from something if you don’t actually embrace and live it fully? When the time comes, what will you remember: the fall or the flower that lay in the ground that you fell upon?
I choose the flower.
But I feel that, as always, I have carried myself away from the initial subject. I was blabbering about music and death, about the merry themes of dreadful songs.
I like that. I like the marriage of the sorrowful lyrics with the cheerful music. It gives a completion. It shows us that the worst and the best go, and should go, hand by hand. The best example that springs instantly to my mind, is a traditional Cretan song named ‘As heavy as iron is’. It talks about death, but its music is so nice that, many times, the song is nicknamed ‘the hymn of the lute’. I suggest you hear it if you like traditional music. But to show to you the dichotomy, I’ll give you the (freely, it is a shame that English has so few words for some things…) translation of the lyrics:
As heavy as the iron is, aman aman*,
So heavy are the black clothes
Because I wore them too, my jasmine,
For a love that I had
Because I wore them too, aman aman,
For a love that I had
I had, and I lost it, lying world,
I remember, and I sigh.
Split open earth, so that inside I’ll enter, oh my baby,
The world to not have to look
Split open earth, so that inside I’ll enter, lying world,
The world (the people) to not have to look at
*it may sound gibberish, but the original word (aman) is an exclamation that describes great inner burden/pain, I couldn’t find an appropriate translation for this… if you heard the song, you can probably identify it as the word that continually resounds in it. It shows great agony as well as resignation.
Note: the uploaded version is a little variation of the translated one.
Rebirth In Darkness 