music, chants, cadence

Sun 12.22.19

      I have noticed this week that my site is being visited by the good French folk of Canada, Québec primarily, Montréal and Beauharnois.  Bienvenue à mon site, frères is soeurs!  No, I don’t know who you are, the only information I get from my website host are the locations, city, state, country who visit, and the amount of clicks.  I like having French Canadians dropping by.  My father was born in Saint-Honoré de Shenley and my mother’s people were from Montréal.

         Last week’s topic was on how in humanity’s past, during the Paleolithic era of hunters and gatherers, humans were not split like we are; the world was not perceived as binary, black and white, good or bad.  All of it was one.  These people did not have a written language, stone tablets to put it all down.  As can be seen from their cave paintings they did want to communicate with us and their art was a venue.  But among each other how was important information transmitted and archived?  It was transmitted through song and poetry, which is metered and more easily remembered.  Poetry today is seen as an effete pastime indulged in by the overeducated.  But at one time poets filled theatres and were the rock stars of their era.  Where is our Chaucer, Spencer, Donne, or Marvell?

         We no longer communicate in such a manner.  We are moving too fast and there is so much to communicate that libraries cannot hold it all.  Music, chants, cadence are seen as the purview of artists in our age.  Indigenous people, sorcerers and witches have held on to these ancient forms.  Their spells, rituals are metered, double double, toil and trouble; and this piece by Starhawk, We have sown, we have tended/”We have grown, we have gathered,/ We have reaped a good harvest. And another  from a Papago Indian, The Death Song: In the great night my heart will go out/Toward me the darkness comes rattling/ In the great night my heart will go out.  These incantatory songs and poems have the power to create enchantment to influence events, to release one from the binary world of what we call “reality.”

         How did the split occur?  How did it come about that mirror self became dominant?  It was in the Neolithic age when humans developed agriculture, settled in one location and domesticated animals. The world was split between the tame and the wild, good and bad, easy and difficult.  One no longer communicated directly with one’s environment, was no longer fed, nurtured and mesmerized by it.  There was now a dependable source of food and shelter created by oneself or should I say one’s selves.

The favorite essay this month has been, Oy, Oy, Oy