Poppies

Walled garden, Mirehouse

A song is personal. The choice of song indicates preference, the inclination of personality. A song is emotion, sometimes poetry, the expression of an inner self; it is the breath of your life. Singing requires a particular kind of breathing which is perhaps why it is so linked to wellbeing.

A dandelion will sing a song and not think twice about it nor care where its spores land. A tulip may have a few qualms but in the grand scheme of things probably isn’t too bothered. But orchids, as ever, need the right environment. Singing in harmony with dad, the feeling was always right. Singing at home feels right. 

Singing with others can feel fraught, or irrelevant even when I have been asked if or whether I will sing again.  Just as I only dance when the feeling is right I only want to sing when the feeling is right and in public it never has been quite right. But the same can be true of watching and not singing.

Perhaps we are afraid of looking or sounding stupid of rejection, of seeming weak. We are back to Cain. 

The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears. I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt—and there is the story of mankind. (John Steinbeck, 'East of Eden')

It is coming in to poppy season.  Poppies are curious. They will grow in poor soil, but they are not dandelions. Fragile, yet enduring.  Picked, a poppy dies within an hour. Is confidence like the poppy, stunning and miraculous in the right soil; but sensitive, easily killed off? 

It's puzzling that some people sing so easily with others but I have learned that we only tend to see who is present. And for everyone who is present there are also their shadows, those absent or who do not join in.  They all have their reasons. I have met many people who stopped going to the milongas because they were not invited to dance, or they hadn’t the self-belief or the experience or simply the assistance, the support to master the traditional non-verbal signals of invitation and acceptance. They wanted to, but they couldn’t. Or no-one talked to them and that is far too common.  Inexperienced, overwhelmed, bewildered perhaps afraid, the neophyte it seems, is still supposed to make the effort. 

Fear kills many impulses. Maybe it's fear, but also I don't sing there because I have no-one to sing with. No-one knows my songs because they are in Spanish and from far away countries.  No one has quite said "bring some music and I will play for you" though sometimes they have said so-and-so will probably play.  Why sing with someone else? Singing with gives security.  We all have the primal need to feel safe. Our sense of safety is affected by our personality, our environment and by what happens to us.  If you grow up in a culture that sees singing as about individual performance and associating certain attributes with that then of course if you are an ordinary person with an ordinary voice you are unlikely to feel safe singing in front of a group of strangers.  It would be profoundly unnatural. But if you grow up in a culture like that shown in the Argentinian documentaries about folk music, there, music fulfils a very different there, singing accompanies the mundane tasks of daily life - herding, planting, expressing the events and feelings of your own life, seeing your  neighbours, marking festivals, participating in  community life. 

(See: The Ultimate Companion, Strangeness and Awe, Musical Journeys)

There are unusual people like Laura who sing out, solo, their joy in life.  I remember her coming to the old Glasgow practica for the first time, introducing her to people, inviting her to the tiny cafe we used to squeeze into, to drink tiny cups of thick Italian hot chocolate while our breath fogged the windows.  She sang tangos for us there and we were delighted. Years later at the milonga in the garden of her home in Utrecht she sang again. Someone told me later that when she knew she was sick she sewed a shroud of flowers.  They might have been poppies. 

 Not everyone sings for joy.  Why would I sing alone, to a group?  Each singer is politely applauded, but what is the point, apart from to feed the ego?  For me it is about the pleasure of singing with, not singing to. I don't mean singing within the much more formal structure of a choir, just singing with someone or some few people.  My idea is more that of dad with the hymns or Bing and the washing up or my Argentinian friend with his campfire and friends, guitar and zambas and the backdrop of the Sierras de Córdoba .