"Starlight"

There are a few songs that I can listen to again, again, and again.  I'm sure many people have these songs.  They are songs that are tied to particular events; they may help put people in certain moods.  What I have been most interested in recently is how certain songs or tunes give expression to certain emotions.    The music becomes a vehicle by which the unspeakable is expressed--unspeakable joy, exuberance, anger, melancholy, pain. 

When I listen to music for the work it does on me emotionally, the song I most readily turn to is "Starlight" by the Wailin' Jennys.  (Below is a youtube video with the song and lyrics, but I ask you not look at the video; the background picture will be distracting.)

(Lyrics)

When a song or tune rocks me to the core, I can't help but close my eyes and sink in to the experience of the music.  But a peculiar part of my experience of music is that songs rarely take me back to a particular place in my own memory, but to a place the song creates.  It is in this space that the song creates that I remember past emotions.  In hearing a new song that seems to promise to touch somewhere deep within me, I close my eyes to see where the music will take me.

This song brings me to the middle of a snowy field at night, a clearing miles wide surrounded by forest.  The only light is ambient.  Stars shine brightly against pitch black moonless night; the snow reflects the light back up to its source, as only snow can. The cold air is oppressive and makes breathing difficult. There are signs of civilization in the distance--power lines with no origin or destination in sight--but they seem so far off, and in the emotive space created by this song, civilization is not good enough.  Home--warmth-- is what I long for.  I imagine beginning to walk...in any direction... but never quite making it out of the field.  Yet the movement itself is important; the attempt to leave the frozen fields keeps some sense of hope alive.

The closest approximation to my mind's eye's view.

That sense of hope is a feeling muted in the song, but it is there.  This is not a song describing the hopeless, although I imagine that it is a song that would speak to one in pain and despair.  The song speaks of victimization, brokenness, pain, coldness, the dark night of existence...but...there is also resilience.  The lyrics and tune are plaintive, yet insistent.  A cry of defiance against the night after naming the pain.  "Take us home."

I was reminded of this song, and the images it conjures for me, a few months ago.  I've always experienced this song in my mind.  In my mind I've stood in the field.  I've laid in the snow staring at the stars. I've felt the heat of my body desert me for the surrounding air and the ground in that field, leaving me chilled.  I've walked with only the sound of boots crunching the snow in my ears. But I have never seen this field in what is commonly called reality. That changed in January.  

I was riding in the back of a friend's car on a trip to a retreat.  We were driving at night, due north from New Haven into Massachusetts.  Near the state line the urban landscape became rural and we crossed into snowy ground.  It was a welcome sight for me.  I am not often in the back seat on road trips anymore, but I took it as something of a treat that night.  We passed fields I have only imagined in listening to this particular song.  Sure, I have seen plenty of snow in my time in New Haven, but this was different.  In New Haven, snow becomes brown in a day, and nowhere qualifies as deserted. But here...along this road... moments would sometimes pass where, aside from the headlights and instrument panel of the care I was in, stars and moon were the only lights falling on fields of undisturbed snow.  I pressed my hand against the window, and felt the heat leave my body.  The song jumped into the realm of the intellectual, then reactivated the realm of the emotional, and finally entered the realm of the physical.  The song was finally in the flesh...in my flesh...a living expression of melancholies in which I have found myself.  

That night, I didn't find myself experiencing the melancholies and pain that I have taken with me to the snowy field.  I remembered them, like running my hand over healed scars, but they were not opened by the experience. Now I listen to the song to remind me of the reality of pain (and I know there will be a time that  I will return to the song for its expression of a truth within me); but the need for resilience is what is at the forefront in the song for me.  

And, now, I'm not in the middle of the field.  I've walked quite a distance...towards a light long ago seen, and it beckons still.