This page is dedicated to the Gypsy Scholar's favorite folk-rock singer-songwriter
Eliza Gilkyson
who holds a special place among the troubadours/bards of the Tower of Song.
This special nocturnal radio program is the Gypsy Scholar's tribute to the folk-rock singer-songwriter who will be performing in the Monterey Bay Area on Tuesday, September 16:
Eliza Gilkyson
And since the GS doesn't accept the distinction between "high art" and "pop art," he calls Eliza's unique style of poetic folk-rock storyrtelling (often accompanied with slide guitar) "mythopoetics with a twang"!
Image:
Eliza's new album
"Poetic, compassionate, songs of conscience from 'one of the most influential artists on the American folk music scene'." (Maverick)
( A "nocturne" (from the French which meant nocturnal, from Latin nocturnus) is usually a musical composition that is inspired by, or evocative of, the Night. Historically, nocturne is a very old term applied to night Offices and, since the Middle Ages, to divisions in the canonical hour of Matins. )
The Nocturne Diaries of "the dark night of the soul"
Eliza Gilkyson's music highlights the Essay-with-Soundtrack series entitled:
The Dark Night of the Outsider Soul: On the Road with Today's Traveling Troubadours; Mythopoetic Songbirds, Archetypal Lovers, & the Hotel at the End of the Road
It is dedicated, with profound gratitude, to Eliza Gilkyson, who the GS believes is inspired by the archetypal "mythopoetic songbird" (flying from Andalusia to Austin).
Excerpt from the Essay-with-Soundtrack concerning "The Dark Night of the Soul."
The Dark Night of the Outsider Soul: On the Road with Today's Traveling Troubadours; Mythopoetic Songbirds, Archetypal Lovers, & the Hotel at the End of the Road
In discussing the first secular singers of "love" in ancient Andalusia, one medieval romance scholar identifies this heretical tradition—at once sacred and profane—as that of the archetypal songbird:
"In the beginning, the bird is all things: Zen object of contemplation, singer like the poet himself, solitary like the soul—or is it God?—mourning witness to the lover’s blight, innocent, joyful beauty itself—or is that the Lover? They are clan brothers (some say it is a cabal) these poets and birds, survivors from forever, from the age of dinosaurs, but they are still, stark on the horizon. They keep us guessing; is he our soul? is she my lover? is she the singer? Does he clarify? Does he mystify? Will he fly away, just as I thought I finally had him in sight? . . . . Two hundred years after the invention of what the philologists would irremediably name “courtly love—and well after Llull himself, the poet of courtly love . . . we are struck by the immutability and the endurance for both tradition and poet of the mannerisms with their irrational and ultimately rationally unresolvable paradoxes and contradictions: the pain that brings delight, the marriage of trials and joys; the interchangeability of kisses and tears, joy and weeping . . . [and etcetera]. And there he is, perched in the tree—or sometimes flying away or flying back—the wonderful bird that sooner or later is each of the facets of the calliope of Love: poet and lover, God and beloved, witness and soul, poem and singer."
Thus, as far back as the Middle Ages (circa 11th c.) in Andalusia, poets have always used the metaphor of the ("hermetic") songbird as a symbol of both the ultimate poetic object, the Beloved, and the creative poetic process itself. Thus, speaking of the “lyricism of rock” (which evolved from the medieval, troubadour "love lyric"), I’ve recently heard that this archetypal Mythopoetic Songbird (a 'Solitary Singer' or 'Rare Bird') “sings her note from a secret place.”
Gypsy Scholar 09/15/14
Excerpt from the Essay-with-Soundtrack concerning "The Dark Night of the Soul."
The Dark Night of the Outsider Soul: On the Road with Today's Traveling Troubadours; Mythopoetic Songbirds, Archetypal Lovers, & the Hotel at the End of the Road
This crazy paradox of the Romantic Outsider’s “way down and out” is patterned on San Juan de la Cruz’s “dark night of the soul,” whereby the dreaded “darkness” is reclaimed and re-visioned as a necessary descent, a first step toward the light, and heaven and hell, acting together (as in William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell), are finally seen as a secret synergy of spiritual transformation....
In other words, it could be said that the contemporary Romantic Outsider, instead of running away (“people hide from truth, but I can’t live like that / . . . But you just run away from things that you don’t understand”) from “depression” (the proverbial “dark night of the soul”), must voluntarily undertake (like some "midnight rider," "Gonna celebrate the mystery / Of the hole I’ve fallen in") a descent-journey to the symbolic “dark side of town” in order to paradoxically experience creative illumination....
{Song here}
The Romantic Outsider knows the mad truth—i.e., real order must be proceeded by “a descent into chaos.” I associate this descent stage in the spiritual life of the Romantic Outsider with the classic “dark night of the soul” experience. However—to say what I've come to understand about it an another way—this descent into the dark night-world, as bequeathed to us by St. John of the Cross, is not necessarily evil; it is rather the necessary expression of a metanoia (a fundamental change consciousness) that heralds a new stage of higher being or consciousness—as was, in fact, exactly what Fray Juan himself experienced on that proverbial "Dark night"! ....
Some centuries later, after the Christian reconquest (“Reconquista”) of pluralistic and heterodox Arab al-Andalus, or Andalusia, the holy jailbird, St. John of the Cross, who spent most of his adult life in Andalusia, picked up on the unique motifs of the mystical Arab/Sufi tradition (with its “hermetic lyric”) and imagined the soul as a “solitary bird” (“Treatise on the Properties of the Solitary Bird”). St. John of the Cross, known at that time as Fray Juan, was in 1577 imprisoned at Toledo by Church authorities. He became despondent and despaired of his faith. One particularly dark night he heard a song that transformed his existential despair into ecstasy. However—to the consternation of the Church ever since—, it wasn’t liturgical music from the nearby chapel (as some have official biographers have wrongly assumed); it was a popular song about love and death from the Andalusian street below. (The theme of “love and death” was, of course, the leitmotif of the 12th-century Troubadours.) It was this profane song that inspired Fray Juan to compose his opus of mystical poetry, beginning with “Dark Night” and “Spiritual Canticle,” which are widely considered to be among the best poems ever written in Spanish, both for their stylistic point of view and their rich symbolism and imagery. And because of this rich symbolism of the (later entitled) “Dark Night of the Soul,” a poem about a woman stealing out of her house at night to met her lover, the same church authorities have ever since tried to defend against its blatantly erotic theme. (As I will argue later, both the church’s and modern exegetical methods are uncomfortable with dialectical ambiguity in this realm. Is it of sacred or profane love that poet sings? Is the “Beloved” muse or mistress?) …..
About the poets of courtly love (whether those erato-mystical ones from Andalusia or the Provence), who sang about the "Beloved," one romance philologist makes this noteworthy observation: "... we are struck by the immutability and the endurance for both tradition and poet of the mannerisms with their irrational and ultimately rationally unresolvable paradoxes and contradictions: the pain that brings delight, the marriage of trials and joys; the interchangeability of kisses and tears, joy and weeping . . . [to which should be added the interchangeability of rose and thorn]. And there he is, perched in the tree—or sometimes flying away or flying back—the wonderful bird that sooner or later is each of the facets of the calliope of Love: poet and lover, God and beloved, witness and soul, poem and singer."
{Song here}
Gypsy Scholar 09/15/14
Psychological Meme key concerning "The Dark Night of the Soul"
The soul sees by means of affliction. Those who are the most dependent upon imagination for their work--poets, painters, fantasts [singer-songwriters]--have not wanted their pathologizing degraded into the "unconscious" and subjected to clinical literalism. . . . The crazy artist, the daft poet and mad professor are neither romantic cliches nor antibourgeois postures. They are metaphors for the intimate relation between pathologizing and imagination. Pathologizing processes [e.g. "depression"] are a source of imaginative work, and the work provides a container for the pathologizing processes. . . . Pathologizing itself is a way of seeing . . . . Andre Gide said that illness opens doors to a reality which remains closed to the healthy point of view.
"Consciousness" means psychic reflection of the psychic world about us and is part of adaptation to that reality. As that reality darkens and divides, consciousness can no longer be described with heroic metaphors of light, decision, intention, and central control. Ego consciousness as we used to know it no longer reflects reality. Ego has become a delusional system. "Heightened" consciousness today no longer tells it from the mountain of Nietzsche's superman, an overview. Now it is the underview, for we are down in the [depressions of] multitudinous entanglements of the marshland, in anima country, the "vale of Soul-making."
Divinity is up at the peaks, not in the swamps of our funk, not in the sludge of depression and anxiety, the depths to which our life regularly returns. This is the alchemical soul-makers knew, as do painters and writers and anyone dependent upon the movements of imagination. . . . Oriental [new-age] transcendence will hardly look to pathology for what might be entering us through it, asking what door is opened into soul through our wounds. Instead it urges: rise above psychological hassles and tangles, be wise--not snared, court bliss--not affliction. . . . By turning away from its [the soul's] pathologizings they turn away from its full richness. By going upward towards spiritual betterment they leave its afflictions, giving them less validity and less reality than spiritual goals. In the name of the higher spirit, the soul is betrayed. . . . The psyche does not exist without pathologizing. . . . We try to follow the soul wherever it leads, trying to learn what the imagination is doing in its madness. . . . Pathologizing is a way of mythologizing--of "Soul-making."
. . . the soul's very being, a source of whose native insight is its native pathology. . . . Our falling apart is an imaginal process, like the collapse of cities [and hotels] and the fall of heroes in mythical tales--like the dismemberment of Dionysian loosening which releases from overtight constraint, like the dissolution and decay in alchemy. The soul moves, via the pathologized fantasy of disintegration, of too-centralized and muscle-bound structures which have become ordinary and normal, and so normative that they no longer correspond to the psyche's needs for nonego imaginal realities which 'perturb to excess.' . . . Falling apart makes possible a new style of reflection within the psyche . . . . Only when things fall apart do they open up into new meanings . . . .
--Dr. James Hillman
Really, is it like today?
"The fierce dance between the lyric, always modern and birdlike, sitting alone at the top of the tree, and the narratives of histories, which need to hold the lyric tightly and closely and surely, takes place not just in the larger arena which is the wrestling place of pride in the longest narration. It is perhaps always true that the lyric is constantly engaged in the onerous but exhilarating struggle with the myriad institutions that surround it, and the grand narrative, written hundreds of years later, is but one of them, the one that is the future and thus perhaps most powerful. But within the immediate historical contingency, the modernism of the lyric is wrested from its struggle with both the past, from which it must invent a new present, and the present itself, whose many powerful and orthodox languages crowd around, trying to interpret, explain, control. . . . At different times and places we can see these stark modernisms of the lyric fully articulated. In the Middle Ages in Andalusia, we can find lyric poetry that literally, utterly, refuses the paternal tongue, that literally invents and creates the new languages of literature. [The Romance languages] . . . . Heady times these, on those rocky shores of the Mediterranean."
Images of the Mythopoetic Songbird from its origins (that of the popular love song) in medieval Andalusia (before its decline), "a universe of song" (which could be like today).
This image is dedicated toEliza Gilkyson--inspired by the ancient Mythopoetic Songbird ("the bird in my hand promises paradise")--, who has touched the very soul of the Gypsy Scholar.
The image and the song, 'Paradise Hotel,' were the grand finale to my past Essay-with-Soundtrack series "The Dark Night of the Outsider Soul: On the Road with Today's Traveling Troubadours: Mythopoetic Songbirds, The Archetypal Lovers, & the Hotel at the End of the Road."
"Love's Messenger"-"But the bird in my hand promises paradise"
