Songs of La Cigarra

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BERJAYAAnahuac, Texas ~ named for the Nahuatl term meaning ‘place beside the waters’

With the rising of summer heat and humidity, a relative silence descends upon the land. Spring birdsong gives way to chips and calls of fledglings eager for food; the very embodiment of lassitude, squirrels take to shady limbs while humans murmur complaints. Only the cicadas carry on. The sound of their trilling — interminable, shrill, occasionally annoying — is impossible to ignore. 

Out on the docks, waves of sound wash up from surrounding oak trees: the buzzing loud enough to attract attention. On a neighboring boat, a worker looks up, looks to the trees, then catches my eye. “Es la cigarra,” he says, grinning. “The cicada.”

Hearing the Spanish term piqued my interest and served to remind that the noisy insects have played a role in cultures other than our own since antiquity. Aesop, the well-known fabulist believed to have lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 564 BCE, wrote of the careless cicada (sometimes personified as a grasshopper) who spent the summer singing while the ant stored away food. With the coming of winter, the hapless cicada found herself without provisions; in George Fyler Townsend’s version of the fable, the ant tells the hungry cicada, “If you were foolish enough to sing all the summer, you must dance supperless to bed in winter.”

In 1668, French poet Jean de la Fontaine interpreted Aesop’s fable as “La Cigale et la Fourmi” (“The Cicada and the Ant”). In areas of France, the creature took on nearly mythical proportions, and often was interpreted in ways not intended by Aesop.

According to Provençal folklore, the cicada was sent by God to rouse peasants from their afternoon siestas on hot summer days and prevent them from becoming too lazy. The plan backfired. Instead of being disturbed by the cicada, the peasants found the sound of their buzzing relaxing, which in turn lulled them to sleep.
Today, there is a Provençal expression: “Il ne fait pas bon de travailler quand la cigale chante,” or, “It’s not good to work when the cicada is singing.”

BERJAYA

Nearly 300 years after La Fontaine, Raymundo Pérez y Soto (1908-1991), a Mexican musician, composer, and singer with more than a hundred songs to his credit – including some some written in Nahuatl — romanticized the cicada as a creature that sings until it dies in a mariachi-style huapango titled “La Cigarra,” written and published in the mid-1950s.

The word huapango, derived from the Nahuatl word Huapantli or wooden board, dates back to the 17th century in the Huasteca region of northeastern Mexico. Huapango dance forms traditionally feature intricate footwork akin to tap dance; known as zapateado, their name is taken from zapato, a Spanish word for shoe; their performance on hollow platforms or stages emphasizes the dancers’ rhythmic stomping.

The typical huapango, known as Son huasteco, originated in northeastern Mexico and is accompanied by a trio of stringed instruments. The huapango norteño incorporates influences from northern Mexico, and typically is performed by larger groups featuring a mix of instruments that includes accordion, double bass, drums, and saxophone. 

In the 20th century, huapango was incorporated into the mariachi repertoire, with musicians accompanying singers or dancers with a number of vihuelas, trumpets, guitarróns, and violins. Mariachi versions also added elaborate violin entrances and interludes, elongated falsetto passages in vocals, and eliminated traditional huapango footwork.

Soto’s composition “La Cigarra,” one of the  most well-known mariachi huapangos, has been wonderfully performed by Natalia Jiménez and Lila Downs. Born in Madrid in 1981 to a Spanish father and Portuguese mother, Jiménez began her career as a fifteen-year-old playing on the streets of Madrid. In time, she became the winner of both Grammy and Latin Billboard awards. Ana Lila Downs Sánchez, born in Oaxaca, México in 1968, is a popular Mexican singer-songwriter and activist whose achievements include one Grammy and three Latin Grammy Awards.

When las cigarras begin to sing, whether you accept the sound as a reminder to provision for winter, take the Provençal approach and choose the French version of a siesta, or simply are annoyed, the Jiménez and Downs version of Soto’s song might be just what’s needed to put you back in a happy summertime frame of mind.

La Cigarra ~ Spanish and English lyrics below
Ya no me cantes cigarra
Que acabe tu sonsonete
Que tu canto aqui en el alma
Como un punal se me mete
Sabiendo que cuando cantas
Pregonado vas tu muerte
Marinero marinero
Dime si es verdad que sabas
Porque distinguir no puedo
Si en el fondo de los mares
Hay otro color mas negro
Que el color de mis pesares
Un palomito al volar
Que llevaba el pecho herido
Ya casi para llorar
Me dijo muy afligido
Ya me canso de buscar
Un amor correspondido
Bajo la sombra de un arbol
Y al compas de mi guitarra
Canto alegre este huapango
Porque la vida se acaba
Y quiero morir cantando
Como muere la cigarra
Don’t sing to me anymore, cicada
Let your singsong end
For your song, here in the soul
Stabs me like a dagger
Knowing that when you sing
You are proclaiming that you are going to your death
Sailor, sailor
Tell me if it is true that you know
Because I cannot distinguish
If in the depth of the seas
There is another color blacker
Than the color of my sorrows.
A little dove upon flying
Bearing a wounded breast
Was about to cry
And told me very afflicted
I’m tired of searching for
A mutual love.
Under the shade of a tree
And to the beat of my guitar
I sing this “huapango” happily
Because my life is ending
And I want to die singing
Like the cicada dies.

 

BERJAYA

Comments always are welcome.

Tripping the Light? Fantastic!

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BERJAYACome, and trip it as ye go
On the light fantastick toe…
–John Milton, L’Allegro, (1645)

Friend and artist Gary Myers’s annual solo exhibit at the Principle Gallery in Alexandria, Virginia opens this coming Friday, June 13. Titled Entanglement, the exhibit is his twenty-sixth at the gallery; I’ve found this year’s paintings as enticing as any I’ve viewed in the past.

According to Gary, this year’s show highlights the bands and tangles of energy that connect humans with each other and with the natural world. Often, he represents that energy by swirls and flows in the sky: “as twisting, knot-like ribbons without beginning or end…cacophonous bands that interweave over and under one another.”

In the painting above, colorful rhythmic spirals are employed as representations of energy. For Gary, the spiraling sky and undulating sea evoked a feeling of dance: hence the title, “Trip the Light Fantastic.”

After reading his post about this painting, I mentioned my own association with the title he’d chosen. During my childhood and youth, my favorite aunt lived in Lower Manhattan. During one of her trips back to Iowa, she taught me a song about New York City; she called it “East Side, West Side,” although it’s probably better known as “The Sidewalks of New York.”

Composed in 1894 by vaudeville actor and singer Charles B. Lawlor (1852-1925) with lyrics by James W. Blake (1862-1935), the words recall the men’s childhood neighborhoods and the friends they shared: Johnny Casey, Jimmy Crowe, Nellie Shannon who danced the waltz, and Mamie O’Rourke, who taught Blake how to “trip the light fantastic” — a somewhat old-fashioned phrase for dancing rooted in Milton’s poem. I still remember the words, and the tune.

East Side, West Side, all around the town
The tots sang “ring-around-rosie,” “London Bridge is falling down”
Boys and girls together, me and Mamie O’Rourke
Tripped the light fantastic on the sidewalks of New York.

Decades later, a shortened version of the phrase “tripping the light fantastic” appeared in a quite different dance video. “Trip the Light,” composed by Garry Schyman and sung by Alicia Lemke, serves as accompaniment to Matt Harding’s somewhat odd but utterly charming commitment to dance his way around the world — with thousands of partners.

I became aware of his video when firemen from my own town danced on the stairs of their training building. I found it quirky, smile-producing, and inexplicably hopeful. Like Gary’s painting, it spills over with “bands and tangles of energy that connect humans with each other,” not to mention gentle reminders of truths too often forgotten in the chaos of our time.

Remember we’re lost together;
Remember we’re the same.
We hold the burning rhythm in our hearts
We hold the flame…
We’re gonna trip the light,
We’re gonna break the night,
And we’ll see with new eyes
When we trip the light.
In the morning light I’ll remember
As the sun will rise
We are all the glowing embers
Of a distant fire…
We’re gonna trip the light,
We’re gonna break the night,
And we’ll see with new eyes
When we trip the light.

 

BERJAYA

Comments always are welcome.

Blooming on Broadway

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BERJAYA New blooms surround old stones

If you say “Broadway” to residents of southeast Texas, most will think of Galveston, where the street named Broadway serves as the city’s main thoroughfare.  Traversing the island from its northern edge to the Gulf of Mexico and lined with palms, oleanders, and historic homes, the impressive boulevard has managed to survive a multitude of insults, from the devastating Storm of 1900 to Hurricane Ike in 2008.

Between 1839 and 1939, a six-block collection of seven burial plots were established along Broadway to meet the needs of the city. The original cemetery, set aside for family burials as part of the 1839 town charter, eventually expanded to include three cemeteries associated with faith communities: Catholic, Episcopal, and Jewish. Oleander Cemetery, previously known as Potters’ Field, also was established in 1839 to provide a resting place for the indigent.

In 1867, New City Cemetery, originally known as the Yellow Fever Yard, was established in response to a disease outbreak that nearly destroyed Galveston: an episode of yellow fever. From 1839 to 1867, at least nine such epidemics swept through Galveston; in 1853, sixty percent of the city’s approximately 45,000 residents contracted the disease and 523 died. In 1867, as the island attempted to recover from its Civil War losses, yellow fever once again made an appearance. First recorded in late July, by August it was causing an average of thirty deaths each day.

Dr. J.M. Haden, buried with his family in Broadway’s Episcopal cemetery, was instrumental in containing the disease in Galveston. After receiving his M.D. from the University of New Orleans in 1847, he served both the United States and the Confederacy during the Civil War, then returned to Galveston to begin the practice of medicine. During his tenure as president of the Galveston County Medical Society and head of the island’s Board of Health, it became apparent that yellow fever had been brought to Texas from outside the state. His obituary, published inThe Galveston Daily News  on October 31, 1892, noted his role in containing the disease:

It is probably due to Dr Hayden’s measures adopted in the [yellow fever] epidemic of 1878 that such a strict state quarantine has been established, and the testimony of leading citizens is preserved which credits his vigilance with the preservation of this city from horrors of the epidemic which swept over some of our neighboring communities during his administration of our health affairs.
BERJAYAThe Haden family crypt

Both the New Cahill (later renamed Evergreen) and Old City cemeteries are filled with victims of a different sort; many who lie there perished in the Great Storm of 1900. Initially, many victims were buried in the island’s sand dunes, but as the city rebuilt, some were reinterred in Broadway’s more dignified locations.

Of course, not everyone buried in the various cemeteries were victims of natural disaster or disease. Each provided final resting places for some of the earliest immigrants to Texas; soldiers from both sides of the Civil War; businessmen; legislators; and entirely ordinary families. Wandering among the stones and reading inscriptions, the German, Italian, Dutch, English, Irish, and Spanish heritage of the city becomes obvious.

On the other hand, more than history entices visitors to Broadway when spring arrives. The profusion of wildflowers allowed to bloom in some of the cemeteries can be spectacular if conditions have been favorable, although it can be hard to predict which flowers will appear, or when. During a visit on April 12th of this year, I found relatively few Gaillardia scattered among the profusion of golden-wave tickseed (Coreopsis basalis) surrounding the stones.

BERJAYAAn 1890s stone surrounded by 2025 Coreopsis

In some years, Indian blanket (Gaillardia pulchella) does indeed blanket the graves; occasionally, Gaillardia and Coreopsis mingle together in a lovely patchwork.

BERJAYAA different year, a different flower ~ Gaillardia in 2016

This year’s Coreopsis crop offered a multitude of interesting images. Here, a single bud accents a grave stone with its color.

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Elsewhere, fully developed flowers hosted a variety of pollinators: particularly honey bees, native bees, and a variety of flies.

BERJAYAPacking in the pollen

Given the dramatic sweep of red and yellow, it can be easy to miss other native species hidden among the coreopsis. Some appear every year; this almost-white pink evening primrose (Oenothera speciosa) surrounded by tiny scarlet pimpernel is a good example.

BERJAYA

Small but abundant, the common catchfly (Silene gallica) is covered with fine, sticky hairs: perhaps the reason for the ‘catchfly’ name. Introduced from Europe and now naturalized on all three American coasts, its specific epithet means ‘from France.’

BERJAYASmall catchfly

No matter where it appears, the cutleaf evening primrose (Oenothera laciniata) is best seen early. Scattered through the individual cemeteries, a multitude of pretty yellow blooms hadn’t yet developed the color change I found among fading primroses at Brazos Bend State Park.

BERJAYA

One of my favorite blue-eyed grasses peeked out from among the graves.  Neither blue nor a grass, annual blue-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium rosulatum) may be lavender, white, yellow, or pink. The yellow ‘eye,’ with its burgundy accents, helps to make this tiny, half-inch wide flower more visible.

BERJAYA

Vibrant purple spiderworts (Tradescantia ohiensis) certainly stood out among the coreopsis-covered plots, thanks to their color, their height, and the density of their bloom clusters. Each flower opens for only one day, but each plant can produce multiple blooms. Often found along roadsides or on abandoned properties, they seemed to be doing equally well in the sandy soil of the Galveston cemeteries.

BERJAYA

The surprise of the day was the softer lavender of Texas toadflax (Nuttallanthus Texanus). Despite being one of our most widespread wildflowers and quite common on Galveston’s west end, this is the first time I’ve come across it in the cemeteries. A host plant for Buckeye butterfly larva, its flowers provide nectar for bumblebees, other long-tongue bees, butterflies, and skippers.

BERJAYA

An impressive spring flowering depends on a variety of factors: particularly, rain. After periods of early spring drought, rain clearly had come to the island; a number of fading rain lilies (Zephyranthes chloroslen) attested to its arrival. Despite having been moved from the lily family to the amaryllis family, the common name endures because of the plant’s behavior. Not precisely a spring flower, rain lilies burst into bloom sporadically from late spring into autumn, several days after significant rainfall.

BERJAYA

Even in mid-April, grasses had begun to lend an air of untidiness to the land. Despite occasional pressure to ‘neaten things up,’ several of the cemeteries allow the grasses to grow and flowers to naturally fade until their seed has been produced. With mowing so wisely delayed, next year’s show is almost guaranteed.

BERJAYA Non-native, cool season rescuegrass (Bromus catharticus) combines well with colorful flowers

 

BERJAYA

Comments always are welcome.

A Day for Singing

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BERJAYA

 

Faith
is the instructor.
We need no other.
Guess what I am, he says in his
incomparably lovely
young-man voice.
Because I love the world,
I think of grass,
I think of leaves
and the bold sun,
I think of the rushes
in the black marshes
just coming back
from under the pure white
and now finally melting
stubs of snow.
Whatever we know or don’t know
leads us to say;
Teacher, what do you mean?
But faith is still there, and silent.
Then he who owns
the incomparable voice
suddenly flows upward
and out of the room
and I follow,
obedient and happy.
Of course I am thinking
the Lord was once young
and will never in fact be old.
And who else could this be, who goes off
down the green path
carrying his sandals, and singing?
                                          “Spring” ~ by Mary Oliver

 

BERJAYA

Comments always are welcome.

Celtic Wisdom for the Ages

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BERJAYAWomen of  the Highlands

From Oban to Skye, from the Outer Hebrides to St. Kilda they traveled, two Aberdeen photographers intent on capturing and preserving the life of a remarkable people.  The colored lantern slides of  George Washington Wilson and Norman Macleod,  an iconic collection now in the hands of Mark Butterworth, were produced in the late 1880s, fifty years before color photography came to Scotland,

While Macleod and Wilson pursued their art, Alexander Carmichael also traveled the highlands and islands — Arran, Cithness, Perth, St. Kilda — gathering traditional prayers, invocations and blessings from the region. Between 1855 and 1899, he compiled a collection he titled Carmina Gadelica (Gaelic Songs), fascinating examples of Celtic tradition combined with Christian faith.

After St. Patrick’s arrival in Ireland and St. Columba’s missionary journey to Scotland, a unique spirituality began to evolve: quite different from our modern eagerness to separate sacred and secular. That separation would have seemed laughable to early Celt converts. In the words of Avery Brooke, “Celtic Christians seldom left the spiritual behind in the living of their lives, nor the world behind in their prayers.”  

Tolerant of  Celtic beliefs and practices, Christian missionaries often adapted the prayers, blessings, and invocations of daily Celtic life into expressions of Christian faith. According to Brooke, “Christ was the Chieftain of Chiefs, but the old tales, songs, customs and runes – not to mention the crops, the fish, the daily work, and the nightly sleep – were sained, or marked with the sign of the cross: as were fæiries, banshees, and ordinary people.”

At heart, saining was a matter of consecration. Today, consecration generally implies removal from the routines of daily life — a setting aside or setting apart –but for the people of the Isles, consecration meant an elevation and hallowing of  every ordinary circumstance.

Traditional morning and evening prayers certainly played a role in Celtic devotion, as did invocations of the saints and hymns to Jesus.  But woven into the fabric of Celtic spirituality were rituals to mark the passing of the days and the cycles of the year; blessings for households; rituals for the ‘smooring’ of fire at night and blessings of the kindling that ‘lifted up’ fires in the morning.

There were songs for the heifers and milk cows, prayers for protection of cattle and songs of praise for the ocean and moon.  There were blessings for fishing, hunting and reaping,  prayers for travel and prayers for sleep. Celtic prayer was less something one ‘did’ than an attitude one nourished: an attitude at once grateful and receptive.  Like the hearth ember nurtured each morning and protected each night with ritual and prayer, the spark of divine presence, the mysterious ember glowing at the heart of the world, was to be tended by a grateful humanity.

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Among the blessings and invocations collected by Carmichael are The Clipping Blessing, The Loom Blessing, and The Consecration of the Seed. The words shimmer with  reflected light from a nearly forgotten time, charmingly bereft of hesitation or embarassment. In The Clipping Blessing, the petitions hardly could be more specific.

Go shorn and come woolly,
Bear the Beltane female lamb,
Be the lovely bride thee endowing,
And the fair Mary thee sustaining,
The fair Mary sustaining thee.
Michael the chief be shielding thee
From the evil dog and from the fox,
From the wolf and from the sly bear,
And from the taloned birds of destructive bills,
From the taloned birds of hooked bills.

In the Outer Isles, on the Island of Uist, Carmichael observes that “when the woman stops weaving on Saturday night, she carefully ties up her loom and suspends the cross or crucifix above the sleay. This is meant to keep away the brownie, the banshee, the ‘peallan’ and all evil spirits and malign influences that might disarrange the thread and the loom. All this is done with loving care and in good faith, and in prayer and purity of heart.” Once again, the concreteness of the petition and the obvious conviction that the smallest detail of life is of interest to the divine is made clear:

In the name of Mary, mild of deeds,
In the name of Columba, just and potent,
Consecrate the four posts of my loom,
Till I begin on Monday.
Her pedals, her sleay and her shuttle,
Her reeds, her warp, and her cogs,
Her cloth-beam and her thread-beam,
Thrums and the thread of the plies.
Every web, black, white and fair,
Roan, dun, checked and red,
Give Thy blessing everywhere,
On every shuttle passing under the thread.
Thus will my loom be unharmed
Till I shall arise on Monday.
Beauteous Mary will give me of her love,
And there shall be no obstruction I shall not overcome.

BERJAYA

Finally, in The Consecration of the Seed, the intimate relationship between early Christian and Celtic belief is laid bare. Carmichael notes that “three days before being sown the seed is sprinkled with clear, cold water, in the name of the Father, Son, and Spirit, the person sprinkling the seed walking sunwise the while.”  The baptismal and trinitarian influences are clear, but the ‘sunwise walking’  refers to pre-Christian rituals.

I will go out to sow the seed
In name of Him who gave it growth;
I will place my front in the wind,
And throw a gracious handful on high.
Should a grain fall on a bare rock
It shall have no soil in which to grow;
As much as falls into the earth,
The dew will make it to be full…
I will come round with my step,
I will go rightways with the sun,
In the name of Ariel and the angels nine,
In the name of Gabriel and the Apostles kind.
Father, Son and Spirit Holy
Be giving growth and kindly substance
To every thing that is in my ground
Till the day of gladness shall come.

To hear Celtic invocations, blessings, runes, and dedications is to experience their love and deep respect not only for life but also for language. Filled with power, intimately lodged in the hearts of the people, spoken out of silence to hallow and elevate every aspect of life, words themselves were understood as gifts to be cherished and preserved.  In a morning prayer collected by Carmichael, this phrase stands out:

Praise be to Thee, O God, for ever, for the blessings thou didst bestow on me – my food, my speech, my work, my health.

BERJAYA

If praising God for food, work, and health is understandable, including speech as a blessing worthy of praise is remarkable. Perhaps praise for the gift of words came more naturally to those steeped in oral tradition, or it may be that isolation increased the communities’ gratitude for speech. Whatever the motivation, it can’t be denied that Celts always have nurtured and cared for the language they recognize as gift: necessary as fire, and powerful as the sea.

In a world where language is being reduced by technologies and desecrated in advertising, politics, and human relations, our contempt for language — our willingness to reduce the heart of our humanity by exchanging the power of words for scattered emojis, meaningless slogans, and fleeting text messages seems astonishing.  And yet, it happens.

In the midst of our remembrance of St. Patrick and our celebration of all things Irish, we might do well to remember the people of the lamb, the loom, and the seed. Celtic traditions offer a legacy far greater than green beer and shamrocks They offer a vision of life lived whole: a life both attuned to the universe and content with ordinary days.  Above all,  they offer us the possibility of sained speech: words spoken and received with a dignity appropriate to the celebration and consecration of human life.

Be the cross of Mary and Michael over me in peace,
Be my soul dwelling in truth, be my heart free of guile.
Be my soul in peace with thee, brightness of the mountains.
Morn and eve, day and night, May it be so.
BERJAYA

 

BERJAYA

Comments always are welcome.