Dark tales, bright fires

I suspect that some of you brilliant people could write a scholarly essay on murder ballads and how they fit into the folk music tradition.

All I know is that this is an art form that's been around a long, long time. And still today murder ballads are being written and performed.

I love them for the stories they tell, their drama and intensity, and how exquisite music, voice and lyrics combine to heighten the tale-telling, make it breathe.

I love the art form's lack of irony, ennui or elliptical meanings—it's life and death in these songs. They feel like core stories about the good and ill in humans; stories that folk have been telling for millennia. Cautionary tales about the most powerful and destabilizing of emotions: jealousy, fear, love, passion, rage and grief. Inspiring stories of struggle and courage.

I love them thrice because they emanate a sense of timelessness and the mythic...these stories, and these characters, have taken many shapes and iterations. You can glimpse in them fairy tales, legends, folklore, myths, stories from the Bible, maybe even the cave paintings of Lascaux.

As we listen to the tales unfold, it's as if we sit around the village fire, together fearing for the characters in danger, uplifted by flashes of heroism. We empathize with their hardship, their life and death struggle.

They are like people we've known. They are like us.

It is winter here in the northern hemisphere, the long dark; it is time for tales by the fire. Listen....

Folk tale for a cold night

On a dark and blustery day--when the turning leaves have frozen on the vine and passersby hunch their shoulders against the wind as they scurry to warmth and home fires--it is time to sit down with a strange tale of enchantment and wonder....

I have just the tale; one that captures the mystery of the forest and the power of old crones. A twisty story set in a land that echoes medieval Russia...a place where the snow is deep and the fearsome figure of Baba Yaga and her chicken-legged house may still roam.

The tale is called The Witch of Duva: A Ravkan Folk Tale, by Leigh Bardugo, and it begins this way:

"There was a time when the woods near Duva ate girls.

It’s been many years since any child was taken. But still, on nights like these, when the wind comes cold from Tsibeya, mothers hold their daughters tight and warn them not to stray too far from home.

“Be back before dark,” they whisper. “The trees are hungry tonight.”

Grab a steaming cup of cocoa, wrap up in a cozy blanket and enjoy the full tale here.

Fairy gold

In the stories, a traveler returning to mortal earth with a pocketful of fairy gold stolen from the Otherworld is always dismayed to find that his treasure, in tricksterish fashion, has undergone a transformation into yellow gorse flowers, or golden leaves.

I wonder if this story-germ was born out of human encounters with the transient beauty of the natural world and its creatures? People must always have tried to steal away a bit of its beauty for themselves, secreting away some glowing wild-rose or bright pebble plucked from a stream—only to find next morning that the beauty they’d sought to possess and preserve had faded to dullness, its magic lost. Fairy gold.

Maybe humans yearned for beauty that would stay, so they began to create beauty of their own; fashioning ornaments of gold, weaving cloth rich with woad-blue and rose madder. Unchanging, relatively permanent objects that could perhaps echo nature’s glory yet maintain their shining life, even when locked away in a treasure house or buried in a tomb for long centuries.

  

Anyway. What I’m getting at is how intrinsic this shapeshifting impermanence is to beauty’s sheer poignance, the way it can seem to pierce the heart and crack it open. Is it because the flip-side of our yearning for beauty seems to be our grief for its inevitable loss? ”So dawn goes down to day./Nothing gold can stay,” wrote Robert Frost (and as everyone who's ever read The Outsiders will remember). 

In another beautifully melancholy poem, Gerard Manley Hopkins calls loss "the blight man was born for," and tells a young child (and the rest of us) that our own mortality is reflected in the wild life of the leaves, and it is really for ourselves and our loved ones we mourn when we experience grief at the dying of a season. 

This idea isn't unique to the West, either...the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi finds true beauty in the impermanent and imperfect, which can fill us with spiritual longing or a sense of melancholy.  But it also may fill us with peace, because of its authenticity and essential truth about our mortal existence....

These are the thoughts I was thinking, as I saw that the rich, shining brown oak leaves I’d gathered from the ground one day had lost their luster the next; now bewilderingly flat and lifeless as grocery bags. Almost as if I’d caged a bird for its song, only to render it mute; a pale reflection of its wild and joyful self. Holding onto what cannot be captured, only felt.