Then we cried, the music breaks you open so.
I also love Gregorian chant, which I sang daily for two years in a convent community trained by a monk from Solesmes. But this music is the precise opposite. Plainsong is safer, though not safe. It stations itself on a wide plain at the edge of the abyss. Standing patiently in the comprehensible world, it weaves a daily net of attention. Wise music. Sacred Harp, by contrast, flings itself over the edge. Driven by the relentless rhythm, the singers spend themselves. “O Canaan, Sweet Canaan! We’re bound for the land of Canaan—” we shriek, giving it, giving everything. We are caught up in a fury of dispossession, for immolating ourselves. We reiterate at full volume the impossible: “I’ll fly—”
Well, we won’t. We waken on the Monday after a convention, thirty hours of singing, stunned to see that the sun has risen, that we have to teach school, sell cars.
I’m four pounds lighter on the scale.
IN BRITAIN, wailing and praying out loud are not on the daily menu, and we were not sure how our music would be received. Yet the British singers, too, give it all away. I say this with respect and diffidence, not affirming some vulgar public catharsis, but rather an elemental artistic event, close in spirit to what Federico Garcia Lorca called “Deep Song.” “These black sounds,” Lorca wrote, “are the mystery, the roots fastened in the mire that we all know and all ignore, the mire that gives us the very substance of art.” Mostly in music we husband our resources, color within the annotated lines; we have to live to sing another day. One of my teachers wrote me a note once, during a concert: “Don’t put all your musicality into every phrase—” That was one of my most important artistic lessons, and the one most quickly forgotten, especially in the hollow square. Lorca speaks of the singer who in extremity can but tear the voice, there is no other option; she must search out “the marrow of forms, pure music with a body so lean it could stay in the air.” This is what he famously calls the duende. It may not be a loud moment; perhaps it is encompassed within a pure chord, when the shell of a human seems to open and slide as if it were made for that.
Once, in a dream, my father came to visit me from the country of death. “What is God like?” I asked him. He said, “The condition of music.” In the waning hours after singing, you can see on the faces of the British singers the look of people coming slowly back from a struggle with the soul.
It’s now a couple of weeks into our trip to England, and Robin and I are trying out the interval of a fourth in an abandoned eleventh-century Romanesque church on the Welsh border. The night before we had tested the acoustics of a sea cave on the Cardigan coast: it’s an obsession singers have, I guess, or people who find God in harmonic progressions.
What puzzles us more than the resonances of the little church are the pagan carvings around its eave, or corbel. I use the word pagan as advisedly as I use the word God, for I’ve talked in my time to many people who kneel in odd spaces, like the lady in Deer Park, Wisconsin, who receives the Blessed Virgin on the off-channels of her TV. For my part, I used to feel quite comfortable among the Guatemalan Indians who went to Mass on Sunday, then burned offerings to the Mayan gods on the church steps. It made sense to me; my religious nature is omnivorous. I can worship just about anything that occupies a certain slant of light. Pray always—the old injunction goes—and, it must follow, to anything.
This little church was built by Celts with a similar—perhaps progenitive—religious imagination to mine. We discover a “green man” disappearing into stonework fretted like the illustrations in the Lindisfarne Gospels. Over the main door is carved a horse surmounted by a cross. A guidebook, written by the former vicar, identifies it as an “Agnus Dei,” but I know lambs too well to mistake them for horses; I’m pretty sure the horse is a symbol for the Celtic goddess Rhiannon. These were folk, who like the Guatemalan Indians, knew how to hedge their bets.
Given this sensibility, what are we to make of the corbel carvings? There are men falling from the sky, male figures embracing. Who can they be? Lovers? Choirboys? A number of carvings represent various occupations and trades, but no coherent thread links them, no story I know. Here’s a story I do know: a representation of a squatting woman with her legs spread, swollen genitals, a wild smile on her face, and a distinctly alto quality. Obviously she has just given birth—perhaps the icon is simply an advertisement for the local eleventh-century midwife. The guidebook says I’m wrong. She’s identified as “an erotic female figure,” the Shelagh-na-gig who so often turns up in ancient Irish architecture.
I suspect the scholars are wrong about Shelagh. Men, even genteel male clerics like the one who wrote our guidebook, tend to see a woman’s genital presentation only as it affects them. But I do not think this figure would puzzle a woman from traditional culture, used to giving birth in a reasonable squat, with hands clasped around her knees to help the womb open. I’m not an art historian, but I am a needleworker, and I know that stylized versions of this same figure occur in the weaving and embroidery of most indigenous cultures. Ukrainian girls, for example, used to work a version of it on the bed curtains they sewed for their dower chests.
Some feminists have tried to reclaim the Shelagh as a “goddess figure,” but I don’t think traditional women made such a separation between the sacred and the profane. How did such icons come to be? It seems natural that a pregnant woman, thinking about her swelling body and the ordeal to come, would fashion for herself an image of happy birth—or her mother would make it, or her husband, or the local midwife—and her fingers would return to it for reassurance and her eyes would want to seek it on the corbel of the church where the hopes of all the village gathered. I wonder if ancient worship was not all “natural” in this way. Things go well or badly without explanation, but our humble vision of a good outcome (call it prayer) turns the will of time.
This religious expression seems organic and logical to me. These people knew many faces of God and did not trouble their minds with theologizing and the agonies of “belief.”
British singers—confronted by the radical presence of Sacred Harp texts—will sometimes shyly ask if we’re “believers,” Robin and I. It’s a hard question. Often, as soon as someone says, “I believe in God” or “I don’t believe in God,” I fear that I will not be able to talk deeply to that person. The fierce, unyielding word believe suggests—though not inevitably—that such a person views the issue within an analytical frame that is relatively meaningless to me. It is “believers” who so often take an uncompromising and fundamentalist position as though to defend the wheels and cogs and flysprings of their mental processes. Yet in the last few days, people have opened their hearts to me with just this bashful phrase. Perhaps it is more an incantation than a theological query.
Certainly I believe whatever I am singing for exactly as long as I’m singing it.
Show my forgetful feet the way
That leads to joys on high,
Where knowledge grows without decay
And love shall never die.
Thus Robin and I were wailing away in the middle of a deserted Welsh forest. We like the last two lines so well that we bawl them out again: and love shall never die! Suddenly about fifteen Welsh people materialize out of their hidden fastnesses and begin to applaud. But what they are clapping for, I don’t know—perhaps, being Welsh, the interval of a fourth.
Knowing God is rather like experiencing a deer by her scent, when she has passed before you a moment earlier on the trail. I know a woman in Vancouver who can sense bears this way. The experience of God is that subtle and that destabilizing:
