"Epilogue" by Keaton Henson

Since it is National Poetry Month, I have dedicated this month, April 2017, exclusively to postings of poetry. But I can't resist interrupting the poetry for some musical and visual poetry. On Thursday, English folk rock musician, visual artist, and poet Keaton Henson released a surprise single song, "Epilogue." And it is kind of devastating.

Henson's style is usually highly emotional and melancholy, but this song veers into profound territory around the 2:10 mark with his repeated line, "trying to breathe" and the accompanying subtle electronic distortion.

This is followed by a dream-like string section that is effectively slightly off kilter but achingly lovely and heart-rending, full of a cosmic tenderness and longing...then a section of a murmured voice, possibly played backward.

And of course the gradual dissolution of the entire image is the perfect way to close such a deeply expressive and wrenching statement.

The letters at the end of the film are encoded words using a simple 3-letter shift, or Caesar Cipher: when translated, it reads, simply, "Be kind."

Here's to me
I'm on the edge of my seat
Bound to fall
But I'm hoping you fall into me

Here's to us
Here's to the ties that I've cut
Along the way
Here's to the eyes that I've shut

Here's to my soul
Here's to the weight of my gold
Here's to the words that I've sold
Here's to the cold deep in my bones

Here's to my door
Here's to records that no one would pay for
Songs that I wrote and got laid for

Here's to the floor
Here's to the floor

Here's to my rent
Here's to the money I spent on
Trying to do what I'm bent on,
Trying to breathe
Trying to breathe
Trying to breathe
Trying to breathe

http://keatonhenson.com/

"Fratres" by Arvo Pärt

Last night, I attended a concert at the Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco and heard a piece of music that is new to me. The Estonian composer Arvo Pärt wrote "Fratres" in 1977. Many different arrangements of the piece exist; I heard a version for strings and percussion. And was completely overwhelmed.

"Fratres" is simple, starts softly, builds in intensity (the strings get louder and louder, the percussion gets louder) and then fades away again. But the repetition of the little phrase the strings play is so heartbreaking; there is something about the piece that speaks to me of a certain kind of tension between melancholy and hopefulness. It is bittersweet but that is not quite the right word. I want a word that means feeling sadness but being content in the sadness, as though contemplating life itself, contemplating the suffering, brings a profound realization of the preciousness of life, of its fleetingness, its beauty. I don't think there is a word in English that captures that. I wonder if there is a language that can say all that in one word. (UPDATE: I think I may have found the language and word. In Japanese, the word yugen subtly means “a profound, mysterious sense of the beauty of the universe… and the sad beauty of human suffering”... I think that could be it!)

There is a holiness to the piece, and I certainly do not mean that in a religious way. I mean holy in the sense of "a cosmic, everlasting, transcendent truth." It speaks to an enigma...but "speak" is not the right word either. "Fratres" is all about the unspoken... things that cannot be uttered. Things that simply are, with no mind to formulate a word, with no mouth make a sentence... it is beyond corporeal.

At about 3/4 of the way through, I started to cry. And after the piece, I sat stunned and teary through the set up for the next piece, a Bartok piano concerto... I could not stop crying.

"I could compare my music to white light which contains all colours. Only a prism can divide the colours and make them appear; this prism could be the spirit of the listener."
--Arvo Pärt

http://www.arvopart.info/