The interviewer asks the singer what Fado is. She says that it is hard to define. Like love. He asks if Fado is about love. That is too limited, she says. It is about a certain people, the poor people. It is a kind of complaint. They show that they suffer. They show that they love, too.

Birches
(Bill Morrissey)

They sat at each end of the couch, watched as the fire burned down,
So quiet on this winter's night, not a house light on for miles around.
Then he said, "I think I'll fill the stove. it's getting time for bed."
She looked up, "I think I'll have some wine. how 'bout you?" She asked and he de
clined.

"Warren," she said, "maybe just for tonight,
Let's fill the stove with birches and watch as the fire burns bright.
How long has it been? I know it's quite a while.
Pour yourself half a glass. Stay with me a little while."

And Warren, he shook his head, as if she'd made some kind of joke.
"Birches on a winter night? no, we'll fill the stove with oak.
Oak will burn as long and hot as a July afternoon,
And birch will burn itself out by the rising of the moon.

"And you hate a cold house, same as me. Am I right or not?"
"All right, all right, that's true," she said. "It was just a thought,
'Cause," she said, "Warren, you do look tired. Maybe you should go up to bed.
I'll look after the fire tonight." "Oak," he told her. "Oak," she said.

She listened to his footsteps as he climbed up the stairs,
And she pulled a sweater on her, set her wineglass on a chair.
She walked down cellar to the wood box -- it was as cold as an ice chest --
And climbed back up with four logs, each as white as a wedding dress.

And she filled the stove and poured the wine and then she sat down on the floor.
She curled her legs beneath her as the fire sprang to life once more.
And it filled the room with a hungry light and it cracked as it drew air,
And the shadows danced a jittery waltz like no one else was there.

And she stood up in the heat. She twirled around the room.
And the shadows they saw nothing but a young girl on her honeymoon.
And she knew the time it would be short; the fire would start to fade.
She thought of heat. She thought of time. She called it an even trade.

Sung by Bill Morrissey on "Night Train," Philo, PH 1154, 1993.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Comments on the Song "Birches"

Subject: Re: A 3-minute movie...
From: pbertsch@cup.hp.com (Peggy Bertsch)
Date: 18 Nov 1995
MessageID: 48jmff$b7o@hpax.cup.hp.com#1/1
references: <48asqd$7i7@hpax.cup.hp.com> <48gmj9$oo1@newsbf02.news.aol.com>
organization: Hewlett Packard Cupertino Site
newsgroups: rec.music.makers.songwriting

JEricL (jericl@aol.com) wrote:
: While story songs are great. Good ones are few and far between. It is a
: real challenge to write a great one. My point it, that you probably should
: write some of the other types of songs also. The ones that deal with
: things in a short time frame, without a loger story line.

Absolutely.  Variety is important.  Not all songs are meant to be chock full
of dialogue or metaphor or other elements that are so crucial to, say,
short story writing.  But by the same token, some songwriters *never* think
of their songs as short stories, and I was trying to show that sometimes
the two forms of writing can overlap very effectively.

Most story songs seem to hand-hold the listener through the passage of time,
telling the story from beginning to end, not leaving anything to the
imagination.  It's like each verse starts out with a line that tells you
exactly how much time has passed, or which particular significant milestone
this verse is going to cover (e.g., verse 1: meeting your true love, verse 2:
getting married, verse 3: having a child, etc.)  Some do this *much* more
effectively than others -- I personally think "Something In Red" did this
in a very unique and special way; I wasn't, on the other hand, impressed with
"Don't Take The Girl" and the way that *two* of the verses started with the
line "Same old boy, same sweet girl, (X) years down the road"...I felt like
I was being force-fed the scene, instead of being drawn into it. (That is,
of course, only my opinion -- obviously tons of people liked that song a *lot*
more than I did :-)

What I found unique to "Birches" is the way the writer (Bill Morrissey) just
drops us down in the middle of this couple's living room, no introduction,
no background on what has transpired before, and manages to paint the most
vivid picture of what their relationship has come to by letting us eavesdrop
on one simple scene.  It's a skill that writers of great short fiction have,
but which songwriters too often neglect, IMO.  But of course, I obsess over
lyrics to a point that sometimes goes beyond rational :-)

XXVII. Oral Literature.

§ 3. Early Popular Song.

An early mention of popular song in America occurs in an entry in the diary of Cotton Mather for 27 September, 1713:	3
“I am informed, that the Minds and Manners of many people about the Countrey are much corrupted by foolish Songs and Ballads, which the Hawkers and Peddlars carry into all parts of the Countrey. By way of antidote, I would procure poetical Composures full of Piety, and such as may have a Tendency to advance Truth and Goodness, to be published, and scattered into all Corners of the Land. There may be an extract of some, from the excellent Watt’s Hymns.”	4
Doubtless many legendary and romantic ballads were brought from England by the colonists, but probably Mather’s “foolish songs and ballads” did not refer to these but rather to convivial, sentimental, or humorous ditties, the street pieces or broadsides popular in the mother country. These he would like to see replaced by religious and moralizing songs. Most songs, of either type, in the period before the Revolution, were probably imported, either orally or in broadside versions; but there were also historical pieces that were indigenous. Professor Tyler, writing in 1878, mentions as ballads popular in New England The Gallant Church, Smith’s Affair at Sidelong Hill, and The Godless French Soldier. These pieces do not appear in printed collections, however, and, in general, little has been done in the way of an attempt to recover songs from the period before the Revolution. The oldest remaining historical ballad composed in America of which texts are available is Lovewell’s Fight, recording a struggle with the Indians in Maine, 8 May, 1725. It was composed not long after the event, and was long popular in New England. A text reduced to print almost a century later begins: What time the noble Lovewell came, With fifty men from Dunstable, The cruel Pequa’tt tribe to tame With arms and bloodshed terrible. Longfellow chose the same subject for his early poem The Battle of Lovell’s Pond.	5
Greater effort has been made toward collecting songs and ballads of the Revolution, though the work should be done again more exhaustively and more critically. Frank Moore printed in 1856 a collection of verse, brought together from newspapers, periodicals, broadsides, and from the memory of surviving soldiers. Most of these pieces are semi-literary in character, to be sung to familiar tunes imported from England. That oftenest quoted as having the best poetical quality is Nathan Hale. 1  Many express the discontent of the colonists, and many are burlesques. Sometimes they were based on older pieces, as Major André’s The Cow Chace, which is built on The Chevy Chase. Of better quality is A Song for the Red-coats, on the defeat of Burgoyne.         Give ear unto my story, And I the truth will tell Concerning many a soldier Who for his country fell. Some of the most popular pieces of the Revolutionary period, mostly satirical verses by known authors, have been treated in an earlier chapter. 2	6
From the War of 1812 remain James Bird, a ballad of a hero shot for desertion, texts of which have drifted as far inland as the Central states, and a camp song in ridicule of General Packingham. Some verses beginning         Then you sent out your Boxer to beat us all about; We had an enterprising Brig to beat the Boxer out, and some stanzas preserved as a marching song for children—         We’re marching down to old Quebec While the drums are loudly beating— may also date back this far. The Texas Rangers, widely current through the South and the West, and modelled on the British Nancy of Yarmouth, sounds like an echo of the fight with the Mexicans at the Alamo in 1835.	7
Songs surviving from the Civil War are frequently sentimental in character, like When this Cruel War is Over and The Blue and the Gray. 3  These are of traceable origin, yet they have passed widely into oral tradition. There were numerous camp songs on sieges or battles, but these have not shown vitality. Best remembered in popular literature from the time of the Civil War are many negro, or rather pseudonegro songs, given diffusion by the old-time itinerant negro minstrels. Many are the work of composers like Stephen C. Foster 4  or Henry C. Work. 5  These persist in popular memory side by side with songs like Juanita or Lorena, or the later After the Ball. Every collector of folk-song comes upon pieces of this type far oftener than upon songs commemorating battles or political events. In similar manner, the popular song given currency by the Cuban War, A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight, modelled on a Creole song, does not reflect directly the war that “floated” it. Nor do the songs universalized for England and America by the war of 1914—Tipperary, Keep the Home Fires Burning, Over There, The Long, Long Trail—commemorate its leading events.	8

---

Note 1. See Book I, Chap. IX. [ back ]

Note 2. See Book I, Chap. IX. [ back ]

Note 3. See Book III, Chaps. II. and III. [ back ]

Note 4. See Book III, Chap. V. [ back ]

Note 5. See Book III, Chap. II. [ back ]

CONTENTS · VOLUME CONTENTS · INDEX OF ALL CHAPTERS · BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

A branch of American Literature too often ignored.

Thought-provoking essay about the thinking of a thoughtful man.

Unnatural: the Heretical Idea of Making People

By Philip Ball

Reviewed by John Gray - 10 February 2011

We human beings persist in thinking of ourselves as a unique species, endowed with special insight into a universe that we can manipulate. In fact, this notion is based on unexamined myth.

 

Humanity doesn't exist

At one time ranked among Britain's most influential scientists, the crystallographer J D Bernal (1901-71) recognised no limits to the power of science. A lifelong Marxist and recipient of a Stalin Peace Prize, Bernal believed that a scientifically planned society was being created in Soviet Russia; but his ambitions for science went far beyond revolutionising human institutions. He was convinced that science could bring about a transformation in the human species - a planned mutation in which human beings would cease to be biological organisms.

Bernal's dream was that human society would be replaced by what Philip Ball describes as "a utopia of post-human cyborgs with machine bodies created by surgical techniques". Further ahead, Bernal envisioned "an erasure of individuality and mortality", in which humans would cease to be distinct physical entities. In a passage Ball cites from his book The World, the Flesh and the Devil: an Inquiry Into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul (1929), Bernal looked forward to this apotheosis:

Consciousness itself might end or vanish in a humanity that has become completely etherealised, losing the close-knit organism, becoming masses of atoms in space communicating by radiation, and ultimately perhaps resolving itself entirely into light.

Bernal's strange fantasy shows how science can be a channel for ideas that owe more to mysticism than to dispassionate study of the world. The idea that human beings might shed the mortal flesh to enter a realm of deathless light harks back to the ancient religion of Gnosticism, while the belief that science can animate dead matter and fashion artificial human beings renews the visions of the medieval alchemists. The fact is that science has often been used as a channel for myths in which human beings acquire magical powers. Predictably, this has generated counter-myths in which science is demonised as a semi-diabolical force.

Ball's aim in Unnatural is to bring clear thinking to bear on the question of what science can and should aim to be, and it would be hard to find a more lucid and reasonable guide to contemporary controversy about the use of science to create life. Hidden underneath the sometimes bitter controversies surrounding IVF, embryo research and human cloning are ideas inherited from thousands of years of myth-making. "Natural" and "unnatural" are not scientific categories. Heavily freighted with ideas about what is good and right, they embody judgements of value that express immemorial hopes and fears. Ball uncovers these mythic traces and shows how they continue to shape our understanding of the life sciences and the new reproductive technologies these sciences have made possible. In light and graceful prose that is a pleasure to read, he provides an absorbing cultural history of "anthropoeia" - the project of "making people".

A striking feature of Ball's account is the ease with which it moves between science and the arts. It is refreshing and instructive to have
detailed discussion of recent advances in stem-cell research alongside descriptions of the fictions of Balzac, Poe, Huxley and Wells. Even more impressive is Ball's range of reference, which moves from Greek prehistory through the golems and homunculi of medieval Europe, through the unhappy ogre pictured in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, up to the muddled obscurantism of the Bush administration's policies on stem-cell research.

If Ball provides an illuminating cultural history of the myths surrounding the attempt to use science to make people, his attempt to demystify the contemporary debate is less convincing. He argues that those who oppose the project of "making people" deploy beliefs about what it is to be human that can only be explicated in religious terms, writing: "The notion of a soul can no longer be considered intellec­tually respectable, and can certainly play no part in discussions about what constitutes life or personhood, or how we should think about the status of the human embryo." Maybe so, but opponents of people-making are not the only ones who invoke an idea of the soul. So do ardent supporters of the project when they propose using science to transcend the human condition. Bernal viewed religion with contempt, yet in thinking of "the rational soul" as a spark of consciousness imprisoned in the material world, he was reproducing a conception of human nature that is quintessentially religious. Among evangelists for "scientific humanism", the notion that rationality is the essence of humankind is an idée fixe. But it has no basis in science.

Aiming to demythologise our thinking about humankind's place in the scheme of things, Bernal reproduced an ancient myth of salvation. Ball is far more balanced, but his exercise in demystification seems to me to be similarly self-defeating. Seeking to purge us of myth, he proposes that we approach the world without assuming that what is "natural" is good. In effect, he is advocating that we embrace a rigorous form of scientific naturalism - a method of inquiry that makes no metaphysical assumptions about the goodness or otherwise of the environment in which the human animal finds itself. Science yields knowledge of how the world works, Ball maintains: it is up to humanity to use that knowledge to improve the world.

The trouble is that "humanity" is also an idea shaped by myth. In an interesting discussion of classical Greek ideas of nature, Ball notes that, from the late 5th century BC onwards, philosophers began to view tekhne - the art of making things - "as a means of coercing nature, by force or even by 'torture', so as to gain mastery of it and transgress its boundaries". Aristotle portrayed tekhne as "a kind of handmaid to nature, helping to bring it to a state of greater perfection". In this Greek conception, everything had a purpose. Even the universe was striving towards perfection, and the role of human beings was to assist in the realisation of that purpose. This view of the world ceased to be viable when Darwin removed the idea of purpose from biology, leaving only natural selection operating against a background of random events.

Despite Darwin, the classical Greek view of things has not been abandoned. The idea that humankind has a special place in the scheme of things persists among secular thinkers. They tell us that human beings emerged by chance and insist that "humanity" can inject purpose into the world. But, in a strictly naturalistic philosophy, the human species has no purpose. There are only human beings, with their conflicting impulses and goals. Using science, human beings are transforming the planet. But "humanity" cannot use its growing knowledge to improve the world, for humanity does not exist.

No doubt rightly, Ball cautions against basing our thinking on unexamined myths. He seems not to have noticed that the idea of humanity intervening to improve nature is just such a myth. Clearly, thinking about the human animal in rigorously naturalistic terms goes very much against the grain. Could it be that such a way of thinking might be - dare one say it - somehow unnatural?

Unnatural: the Heretical Idea of Making People
Philip Ball
The Bodley Head, 384pp, £20

John Gray is the NS's lead book reviewer.

His latest book is "The Immortalisation Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Defeat Death" (Allen Lane, £18.99)

 

Mythos and Logos--still at it after all of these years. This author calls an idea "invalid," which avoids the question of truth altogether. Darwin may have shown that humans came via a process of natural selection against a background of randomness, but that does not establish that the idea of an ordered, reational universe is therefore "invalid." It would be wrong to act as if the idea were proved. It seems wrong to act as if it is disproved.

the web of

American

Transcendentalism

For discussion of Transcendentalism, join the Transcendentalism Club Forum (est. 9/2010). Mariana Mussetta and Andrea Vartalitis, The Transcendentalist Experience of Beauty in "The Artist of the Beautiful." Excerpts from Diane Yoder's thesis on "Satisfying the Head as Well as the Heart: James Marsh, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the American Transcendentalist Movement", 2009 Transcendentalist Principles from Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman in the film, "The Dead Poets Society" by Allan Sugg Review of Excursions, edited by Jeffrey S. Cramer. "Man Thinking About Nature: The Evolution of the Poet's Form and Function in the Journal of Henry David Thoreau 1837-1852," by S. H. Bagley "Transcendence: the Yin and Yang of Emerson and Goethe" by Sheri Gietzen. The Transcendentalists by Barbara Packer. Review of A Journey into the Transcendentalists' New England by R. Todd Felton.

Authors & Texts Ralph Waldo Emerson Henry David Thoreau Margaret Fuller [Dr.] William Ellery Channing Theodore Parker Amos Bronson Alcott Jones Very [William] Ellery Channing Christopher Cranch Orestes Brownson Elizabeth Palmer Peabody Other Transcendentalists

Roots & Influences Transcendental Forerunners The Transcendental Legacy in Literature Walt Whitman Emily Dickinson Frederick Douglass The Transcendental Legacy in Philosophy and Religion The Transcendental Legacy in Political and Social Reform

Ideas & Thought Introduction to Transcendentalism Philosophy of Nature Aesthetics and Writing Social & Political Reform Religion Education

Criticism Literary Essays Historical Essays The Dial

Resources & Bibliographies Bibliographies Web Links

Communication Center Talking about Transcendentalism Submission of New Materials or Links

This interlinked hypertext was first created in Spring 1999 by Virginia Commonwealth University graduate students studying in Professor Ann Woodlief's class in Studies in American Transcendentalism. It is a work in progress, and submissions of papers, texts and notes on them, and links are welcomed; full credit will be given to papers selected for the site. Professor Woodlief [now emeritus] may also be contacted at awood@vcu.edu by people interested in doing serious independent study of these writers. [Article on the site in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov. 6, 2002]

Well worth exploring. You could write a whole term paper just using this site and its links.