NOTES AND OBSERVATIONS

 Deepening Shadows

In the democratic West we live in the age of shadows. The shadow of tyranny and the threat to democracy, the shadow of Putin and war, the shadow of poverty and economic destitution, the shadow of climate catastrophe. Two events recently have seen shadows take form out of the fog of deceit and misinformation, and become concrete reality, the overturning of Roe V Wade in the US and the scrapping of the Human Rights act here in the UK. For women, the world over, this assault on their bodily autonomy represents a return to an oppressive darker age, for make no mistake the decision of the Court has given hope and cover for reactionaries everywhere.

The cost in mental health and human flourishing by this atmosphere is immense and impossible to quantify. Never has human solidarity been more important.

A Wounded Johnson

Johnson emerges fatally wounded after a mauling, first in a vote of confidence and now by two disastrous by-election defeats. Surrounded by a cabinet of second-rate cronies, none being capable of challenging him, and with no obvious successor in sight these are dangerous times. Even talented governments that are on the ropes struggle to govern effectively, for a government like Johnson’s the scenarios are terrifying.

Waiting for Putin

I find myself increasingly like a Becket character on stage waiting for dangerous people to die. Putin, Trump continue, ogre’s incapable of human responses, to hold the fate of millions in their hands. Sat on a wooden crate I wait for news of their demise.

Bye Bye Blackbird

Listening the other day to a rendition of Bye, Bye, Blackbird. There are some songs that feel as if they had something hidden within them, something unspoken, something, regardless even of lyrics, suggestive of something melancholy, a sense of sadness, of loss, Bye, Bye, Blackbird is just such a song.

The song tells of return and restitution.

“Where somebody waits for me, sugar’s sweet, so is she. Bye, bye, blackbird”

But the tone is unconvincing. You do not really believe it. And here tone is everything here.

“No one here can love or understand me,

Oh, what hard luck stories they all hand me.”

The song was written around the year 1924, which, to my astonishment, makes it just under 100yrs old. Yet it feels so contemporary that it could have been written last week.  Some of this modernity comes directly from the layers of ambiguity. Who or what is the blackbird? Who waits for him and why the distance? Researching this I have seen some suggestions that this may not be his sweetheart but his mother. But such speculation is, of course, silly the ambiguity is central to the song, what holds it together.


The lyric speaks to feelings of being unloved and surrounded by low key desperation.  That is all the information we have. Of time and place there is nothing. This surely provides the opening in which we can insert ourselves. It is a lyric which speaks more one feels to how we wish things could be rather than as they are.

“Pack up all my cares and woe,

Here I go winging low,

Bye, bye blackbird.”

Who has not wanted to take off, leaving the office, hair salon, shop floor, behind them? It is the sadness inherent in being stuck in a situation, a life that no longer satisfies.

Peggy Lee, in one of finest renditions, adds a short coda.

“I don’t know why it makes me sad.

A happy song should leave me glad.”

I think I know why, and it is what makes the song so wonderful, so poignant, so timeless.

 


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