100 Works of Art: (Aural) Crow on the Cradle, Sydney Carter

The 100 Works of Art blog series is to do with personal interaction with beloved works of art rather than impartial reviews or focussing solely on the relatable and universal qualities of the work. Because this is a blog, not a book. The first 25 are to do with visual art, and begin with Matta’s Black Virtue; the next 25 will be about aural art and begin with The Cure’s Let’s Go To Bed.

29. Crow on the Cradle, Sydney Carter & Jackson Browne

I grew up on a mixture of folk music and a little of the blues. My mother had what my peers characterised as “terrible” taste in music, and I adopted it: as I’ve got older her taste in music has become genuinely terrible (there was a point where it was all whale noise and Gregorian chant and then as I got into plainchant she managed to undercut me again and asked if I’d get her a James Blunt CD) and I’ve decided to ignore the judgement of a collection of Celine Dion-reared rejects from my childhood and embrace the inner folkie. A lot of the songs I listened to as a child were standard-issue folk music about girls with this or that coloured hair or one particularly brilliant song about an enormous pie - the title of which I’ve never been able to remember, to my great loss. But a lot of the songs, too, were protest songs: other contenders for this slot included Country Joe & The Fish’s Fish Cheer/I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ To Die Rag, a selection of Donovan songs including Universal Soldier, and the Fureys & Davey Arthur’s version of The Green Fields of France. Not surprisingly for someone who was taken to an anti-nuclear weapons protest at six weeks old, I grew up listening to various earnest people – both with and without beards and dungarees – requesting with various metaphors and degrees of urgency that the world consider maybe not nuking itself into oblivion.

Regular readers of this blog will be more than a little aware by now that I am morbid as fuck despite all my best efforts, and this began early, with a love of the aforementioned Green Fields of France and a collection of songs which were, bluntly put, guitar-led dirges about dead people. Crow on the Cradle is no different in that respect, and along with Universal Soldier and an untitled song about dead soldiers in the Vietnam War which I listened to so often that I wore out the C90 cassette it was on, got considerable use as a lullaby for me.

It is a little like a lullaby. There is something late evening, inevitable, and gentle about the version I am most familiar with. It puts me in mind of the festivals I spent all my childhood summers at: the sun low in the sky, the flies rising, a hubbub of voices and the smell of wood fires, music everywhere in the background, and hot, dry earth under bare feet. In that respect it is comforting, although you do have to wonder about finding a song warning of nuclear holocaust “comforting”. 

As with many a folk song, the lyrics work as a poem, and the whole thing is designed to be memorable and easily-recited. It’s a kind of troubadour tradition: make the information simple to pass on and vivid enough to stick in people’s minds. In the case of Crow on the Cradle it’s achieved with snatches of nursery rhymes and nursery-rhyme-esque phrase: hush-a-bye little one, never you weep; with rings on her fingers, and bells on her toes; in each case subverted by a fairly chilling closing part to the pattern: for we’ve got a toy that can put you to sleep; or and a bomber above her wherever she goes. As the fact that I’ve had a French nursery rhyme about wearing clogs stuck in my head for a week can very much attest, nursery rhymes are tenacious once crammed into the brain and arise as soon as a similar phrase is heard. So it is that this is a thing that I leave up to you immediately recalls the rest of the song, and while “Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross” is not the most oft-recited of nursery rhymes, it has been supplanted in my mind all the same by and a bomber above her wherever she goes.

Each verse in itself becomes bleaker and more morbid as it progresses, from cow’s in the corn to carry a gun (and the ominous omen of death in the crow on the cradle of the title and refrain), but overall they also become more and more ominous and threatening, like the returning passes of a bomber. Well-paced in this regard, it is the centre verse which repeats on itself, speeding up the onset of the fearful and the morbid (somebody’s baby is born for a fight / somebody’s baby is not coming back), setting up the remaining two verses with their violence and oppression at the start: your mother and father will sweat and they’ll save, to build you a coffin and dig you a grave. In these remaining verses the blame is attributed: the beginnings speak of the baby in the cradle and the doom overhanging it, while these tell the listener whose fault it is. The generation of the songwriter, apparently, is to blame. 

The song closes with an insistent demand for action delivered by the threat that must be eliminated itself, the eponymous crow on the cradle, repeating: this is a thing that I leave up to you. Even now the assigning of responsibility is palpable and in the context of the rest of the song the refusal to act seems like it comes at a chilling cost. It is not hard to imagine the crow as a mushroom cloud.

In light of all this, even more so, it is strange to find the song comforting, but I’ve always also found a certain level of comfort in nihilism and the idea of accepting the degree of powerlessness an individual has in the face of a very powerful force (in this case, mankind’s apparent yen for self-destruction).

Filed under: content: real life, content: review, music/gigs, 100 blog posts, 100 blog things, 100 works of art, crow on the cradle, folk music, jackson browne, lyrics, music, no nukes, nuclear disarmament, personal, protest songs, review, reviews, sydney carter

100 Works of Art: (Aural) Best Sunday Dress, Hole

The 100 Works of Art blog series is to do with personal interaction with beloved works of art rather than impartial reviews or focussing solely on the relatable and universal qualities of the work. Because this is a blog, not a book. The first 25 are to do with visual art, and begin with Matta’s Black Virtue; the next 25 will be about aural art and begin with The Cure’s Let’s Go To Bed.

28. Best Sunday Dress, Hole

For most of the turbulent and eventful year that was the first in the Gregorian calendar to begin with a 2 and carry three digits after it, the oft-lyriced-about 2000, this was my favourite song. It’s a B-side, which I can promise you is unusual for me these days, but in the height of my pre-torrents, pre-YouTube music fever collecting B-sides of bands I liked was an art form in itself, and involved petitioning virtual strangers on message boards to send me bad cassette tapes, and trips to various market stalls to acquire bootleg CDs. I had a weekly income of £22 from my Saturday job, which I was technically trying to save, and couldn’t exactly spunk money left, right, and centre on hunting down rare releases – especially when even finding what they were was such a hassle.

Reader, you will be glad to hear that I have since realised that it is not necessary to be a completist to appreciate someone’s oeuvre, and as such Hole more or less mark the point at which I never again put so much effort into investing my interest in a single band. I don’t regret it in the slightest, however: even a few years later, when I’d moved on and was mostly listening to techno, and a copy of America’s Sweetheart came into the offices of the student rag I worked for, I still snapped it up. Nobody’s Daughter, even more recently, still met with a doggedly loyal reception. Connections forged in the emotional overreaction that is adolescence tend to hold more firmly than those found later.

So why this particular song, of all songs? I didn’t come to it first – that honour goes to the title track of third studio album Celebrity Skin – and it probably isn’t the most lyrically or musically accomplished of all the band’s work (most people agree that Live Through This contains almost all the strong contenders for that title); what resonated at the time was, perhaps rather shamefully, the tragedy inherent in both the simple chord structure and the lyrics.

At 17 and 18 I was a fairly stereotypical Sixth Form Goth, and as for much of my adult life, preoccupied with death – this time with all the fire and fervour of youth – and with the tragedy of suicide and all that jazz. My Nirvana phase was squarely behind me, and I’d moved on to scanning the lyrics of Hole songs for Courtney’s obvious and ongoing agony regarding the death of her husband. The song is pretty much rife with references which either are or can be pressed into service as references to the departed:

Pale blue eyes so young
Pale blue eyes so far away
Watch me with his sorrow
Forgive me all his pain

And at the time I was still in thrall to the key-change as an emotional intensifier, having ridden through the first burst of puberty on the back of the Top 40, so the line at which this occurs (roughly around shone like a diamond) also cemented itself into my head as one with great meaning, although now, looking back at the song with an additional 13 years of life in the way, it’s this which seems the most poignant:

and I’ve come here all undressed
all the posion and pain and I take what is mine

possibly because these two lines to me represent adequately what has happened to Courtney in the eye of the beholder. She’s been repeatedly stripped of any right to mourn via rumours and accusations about her involvement or her emotional response (what is the correct response to your tempestuous and troubled love of your life shooting himself in the head while AWOL? Is there one? How do you respond to something so huge and so painful?), and exposed before all the world in the press as someone to be scrutinised at her time of greatest sorrow (much, indeed, as Yoko Ono was). A woman of strong, divisive personality and very powerful emotions, she would never have contented herself with a regal tear and the mannerly withdrawal required of widows: she was a rock star before she met him and she was determined to continue being one after he left. In the second line the poison and pain are as much the vitriol heaped on a grieving woman as they are the heroin and loss; I take what is mine could equally apply to retrieving the image of her dead husband from the media who declared him their property (I suspect she minded the fans slightly less) as to the acceptance of abuse (I take what is mine, I take what is intended for me, ie, poison and pain) from various quarters.

For what is a very, very sad song the sound is defiant. It’s not the sadness that curls in on itself and weeps quietly, but a kind of explosive sadness, a supernova of mourning or a howl of ongoing misery that acknowledges everything that’s fed into it as it pushes all of it outwards. Messier, and less acceptable than the accepted mode of widowhood, but then when I was 17 and 18 I was messier and less acceptable than the accepted mode of adolescence, trying to rescue my entire sense of self from five years in a lock-up and doing very poorly at it. It spoke to me, the way Courtney Love’s music spoke to several generations of unhappy and angry teenage girls and in fact continues to do so. The fans of it are still subject to the same derision and spite as its maker is, but that comes with the territory of being someone with too many uncontained feelings who refuses to beautify them for the comfort of others.

Filed under: content: real life, content: review, music/gigs, 100 blog posts, 100 works of art, best sunday dress, death, grunge, hole, lyrics, mourning, music, personal, review, riot grrl, songs, widowhood

100 Works of Art: (Audio) Szamár Madár, Venetian Snares

The 100 Works of Art series of drivel is a blog challenge thing which mostly involves me talking at incoherent length about things I like and how I relate to them. So far I’ve done twenty-five on paintings, sculptures, and photography, and one other one on music.

27. Szamár Madár, Venetian Snares

It’s not often that I can pinpoint a song which not only got me into a specific artist but an entire genre, but Szamár Madár redirected a lot of my feelings about instrumental and electronic music – previously focussed on repetitive examples of techno, trance, and psy-trance – into breakbeat, and by way of breakbeat also into DnB (Pendulum, hacktastic though they are, helped with that, and I won’t claim that the video to Showdown didn’t have a hand in that) and jungle, in a kind of backtracking through spheres of influence, and
then later primed me for dubstep.

Szamár Madár sounds like someone has taken a hammer to a soundtrack of someone’s unhappiness. It is splintered, fractured music, and is definitely the best track on what I have taken to referring to as “The Hungarian Album”, mostly because I find Rossz Csillag Alatt Született a little hard to pronounce. The rest of the album too is full of jagged edges and bleak grey squares and the flight of pigeons, but Szamár Madár‘s frantic rushing in sudden bursts of sound is the most electrifying of listens. If pressed I would say my favourite of Venetian Snares’ albums is not Rossz Csillag Alatt Született but either Winnipeg Is A Frozen Shithole or Detrimentalist, two vastly different sounding works – Winnipeg is a frantic mess of broken, aggressive sounds and layered pieces that sounds like someone having an angry breakdown in the middle of a wasps nest and borders on being more sonic assault than music (which is why I LOVE it), while Detrimentalist might almost be played in a club.

But the track I’m talking about now is, as an example from Rossz Csillag Alatt Született, is superficially classical in vein. That was what drew me to Venetian Snares in the first place. Back in the early noughties I was enormously into club mixes of classical music – a subgenre of which there were never enough skilful examples, and which I am still very much attracted to – and I had hoped initially that VS would be able to provide.

What happened instead was this weird snarl of strings and minor chord screeches came on like a violent scene in a modernist ballet and seized my listening mind by the throat. It is a series of small explosions – a painterly piece not in the sense that Debussy or Liszt might try to evoke a painting that represents a great scene, but painterly in the sense that it evokes something more like one of Francis Bacon’s frantic brush stroke chaoses resolving into an anguished face. Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto 1st Mov contributes to the classical sound, as it is one of the samples used in the track, but the construction, the choppiness, and the bursts of scampering movement sound very unlike the stately, nostalgic sound of Elgar’s uninterrupted compositions.

Szamár Madár started me down the road to my own weird creations, and demonstrates more fully than any other track I can think of the ways in which genre boundaries can be effectively smashed by sampling and a creative approach to what constitutes a song. It draws on soundtrack, ballet, and sonic art to create an adventurous, discordant, threatening and unsettling approach to sound which eventually also led me to Iannis Xenakis and other experimental composers and creators, and broadened my enjoyment of music considerably from its early constricted folk music roots.

Filed under: content: review, music/gigs, 100 works of art, breakbeat, classical, elgar, music, personal, review, reviews, Rossz Csillag Alatt Született, sampling, Szamár Madár, the hungarian album, venetian snares

100 Works of Art: (Audio) Let’s Go To Bed, The Cure

Having dispensed with visual art, the 100 Works of Art rambling about stuff I like has moved on to music. This is simultaneously more and less intimidating: it’s harder to talk bollocks about music and sound impressive because more people know what you’re on about at entry level and you have to step it up and get technical, which I assuredly cannot do about music.

26. Let’s Go To Bed, The Cure (1987)

My relationship with The Cure was brief but intense, like most things during sixth form college. Due to an accident of good timing I went from being a dedicated little bedroom goth to being the sudden proud owner of several very large posters, two video compilations of their music videos, one live video, and a couple of mix tapes of rare recordings for twenty quid from someone in the pub my friend worked at. This was the first and last time I ever managed to strike lucky on the “dodgy people in pubs” front.

With a catalogue spanning about as many years as I’ve been alive, if not more, and a slew of extremely catchy pop-goth chart songs as well as the more gloriously dreary grey-hued extrusions of Pornography, it’s difficult to pick a Cure song. Aside from being Cure Songs, majestic in their ridiculous storytelling and Fat Bob’s whining voice, they have personal connections: Friday I’m In Love from long before I tried my hand at backcombing my hair, bleating from a shitty clock-radio while I read children’s fantasy novels in my bedroom, or the later terrible half-choreographed goth two-step at B-Movie to Love Cats every month. There was the ongoing relationship between the whole of the KissMeKissMeKissMe album and the lurid, lustrous, purple Poppy Z Brite novels and atrocious short stories about vampires I read while listening to it and scrawling notes in pink biro. I have been every teenage cliché and many of them while listening to Fat Bob’s fab band.

Let’s Go To Bed is at its heart a tug-o-war. It is an uptempo song with slightly sinister and melancholy lyrics – a combination you’re going to see a lot of in this section because it is possibly my favourite kind of song (“I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things”, quoth Tom Waits, and I could not agree more) – and the tug-o-war is as much between the imagist nonsense of the verses and the straightforwards, unpoetic stubbornness of the subtly changing choruses as between the “I” and the “you” of the song.

But I don’t care if you don’t
And I don’t feel if you don’t
And I don’t want it if you don’t
And I won’t say it
If you won’t say it first

The chorus is an ugly dare, and in a world of songs about how love would go so right, or where love has gone wrong and I’m sorry, baby (or how we’re going to hump it all night, because emotional fulfilment is no longer the euphemistic core of lyrics that it once was),  it’s almost off-puttingly realistic. Certainly I’ve been in more than one relationship where it seemed there was precisely this kind of brinkmanship going on: I’m going to bite my fucking tongue and not say it until you do. I’ve used it as the basis of characterisation in numerous stories, because that ugly dare is an excellent source of tension as one or more characters struggle to force the other/s to spill their guts while reining back their own compulsive need to confess BUT I DIGRESS.

The music reinforces the sense of push-and-pull, with a very quick movement (technical terms: I do not know them) up and down the scale in what sounds like two-steps: the bass has the same two-part step, which really does put me in mind of some sort of dance where one partner tries to yank the other in one direction, and is immediately yanked backwards themselves. It’s a neat trick, and one which for me holds the song together through the drawn out breaths of the verses with their more photographic and less emotional lyricism.

Filed under: content: review, music/gigs, 100 blog things, 100 works of art, 80s, bands, goth, let's go to bed, music, personal, pop music, review, reviews, the cure

February Links Post

Things strangers have done

• Created a polygonal sine wave generator, which allows you to play sine and cosine waves generated from regular polygons which aren’t circles. Entertaining to mess around with, and allows you to change the frequency of the waveform to suit your hearing as well. Discoveries with A (440Hz) include that while increasing the number of the source polygon’s sides until it most closely resembles a traditional sine wave produces a smoother-sounding note, reducing the number of sides until the waveform resembles a flamboyant triangle drawn with a calligraphy brush creates something which is both harsh and musical at the same time. Fantastically good fun. 
• The British Library remind everyone that their Medieval and earlier manuscripts are in the public domain and the digitised catalogue is available for use: good news for scholars, the interested, or people like me who are having a bit of a belated spike of appreciation for the times prior to the fall of Constantinople.
• The Kerala State Library too have a large digitised collection online in English and Malayalam. Some of the books are very rare, and there are over a thousand titles available.

People have done other things, but I haven’t been paying attention.

Filed under: content: links, british library, english books, generators, illuminated manuscripts, kerala, library, malayalam books, maths, medieval, music, public domain, rare books, scholarship, sine waves, sound theory

Stop Pretending Art Is Hard

I’ve had an eventful few days which have involved, as a friend poetically put it, “sailing on the tequila river” (I also apparently refused to kick Madonna in the teeth, which I have no memory of but which I stand by even if my sober rationale is a little less profoundly confusing). They also involved dumping myself and my friend on the carpet at my flat so that we could, in her words, “listen to all the sad music in the world, drink cider, and cry”. I am thirty.

In an attempt to reinstate the mood somewhere north of suicidal, my friend (a Finnish scientist/engineer/all round genius, and one of the nicest and most enthusiastically nerdy people you could hope to meet) introduced me to Amanda Palmer’s Ukulele Anthem which I’d never listened to all the way through before.

Aside from being very effective at making us both stop sobbing pathetically into an Ikea rug, because it is very upbeat and catchy and funny, this song did a good number in reminding me that I want to talk about Art. Not the way I’ve been talking about Art in that I Swear I’ll Finish It Eventually 100 Things blog post series, but from the perspective of making art happen.

I do a  lot of furtling around with various things because I am not blessed with an enormous attention span and the world is so full of interest things I want to try my hand at that I will die not having attempted most of them: some of them, like music, I am very bad at. I cannot play a single instrument despite valiant attempts at the bass guitar and piano; my singing is enthusiastic rather than melodious. I still occasionally launch myself at a number of music-creation programs in order to do something discordant and horrifying. I’m no good at it, but I enjoy the process of making it, and I enjoy the fact that at the end, though I haven’t got a perfect piece of work I can show someone, I have made a thing where there was no thing before. Even if everyone wishes I hadn’t made that thing.

Doing things because you enjoy doing them, if you do it for long enough, makes you better at them. This is especially true if you get bored of doing them to the same level and want to make them better or bigger or different, and start looking for how other people do those things, so that you can take away what you need of how they do them. Not everything other people do to make themselves better at the thing you do will help, sometimes the way they do it won’t be the way you do it.

Because there are a lot of tutorial posts on the internet to help people improve at their chosen craft it becomes hard to separate “I do this thing because I enjoy it” from “a lot of work goes into a discipline before someone can become really good at it”; there’s confusion, and people become angry being told “you must practice every day and try out every single way of learning how to be better at this in order to be perfect” when they really just want to make lopsided but satisfying clay models of their favourite My Little Pony characters.

Surprisingly for, well, anything, a lot of truisms about creation are actually uttered on the internet:

• You have to practice a lot at shit to be good at it. A lot. Like almost every single day. For a really long time.
• If you’re going to spend that much time working on something it should be something you enjoy. Do it because you love it and it makes you happy overall, not because you think you should become good at it.
• Sucking at something is the first step to getting good at it.
• You do not have to be perfect.
• The methods that work for some people may not work for you; it is up to you to try them out until you find the things that work and occasionally after that keep trying new things. Just in case.

The things that get lost in the struggle to get people to accept one important fact are often important themselves.

Art is not hard, and you can and should do things you are bad at because you enjoy them, not to become good at them.

Being good at art is fucking hard, and takes a really long time. But if you love it, the fact that it’s fucking hard won’t put you off.

For my own part, music falls under “I like making it but don’t care to become good at it”, visual arts come under “I know ways of getting the results I want but rarely enjoy it, so I never practice enough to become good”, jewellery comes under “I am better at it than I was and I enjoy making it so I keep getting better”, and writing is “I have been doing this for a very long time because I enjoy it, I want to get better at it, and the fact that I love it and want to get better at it means that I don’t find trying to get better such a hardship”.  There are people for whom everything is “I love it and want to be brilliant at it” and there are people for whom everything is “it’s fun but I don’t care if I’m never any good”.

And that’s the third point:

Both are okay.

Filed under: content: essay, content: tutorial or guide, amanda palmer, art, creative, creative writing, creativity, electronic music, music, stop pretending art is hard, writing

November Links Post

Things my friends have done

• I can now say with absolute sincerity that I have had a song composed about me (by my dear friend Hana), and I will just have to sit on the fact that she wrote it because I pouted at her after she wrote a song about our mutual friend Fiona (and that mostly because Fiona rhymes with boner. We are an intellectually robust cabal). This is worth listening to just to hear Hana break down in giggles mid-verse.
• Written a rather beautiful poem.

Things strangers have done

• Pertinent to the month which has just passed by us, the Guardian have published a guide on how to write a book in 30 days.
• Set Skillex’s most well-known track into a piano piece, in which it sounds as well-composed and wonderful as ever, but perhaps less grating for those who, like one of the commenters, have strong negative feelings about dubstep.
• The Foreign Institute Service has developed a series of language courses and put them online for free.
• This deviantartist has created a tutorial on how to draw backgrounds using Google Sketchup.
• More appropriate links to the month just passed, and for anyone who still wants to be a writer: your lack of confidence is neither interesting nor unique.
• Memrise, who appear to specialise in mnemonics, have some courses on learning Irish.
• On the subject of Gaelic, there is a handy pronunciation guide here.

Filed under: content: links, art, background, composition, courses, drawing, foreign language, friends, gaelic, guide, how to, irish, language, learning, love poems, mnemonics, music, nanowrimo, piano, poetry, pronunciation, reference, resources, sketchup, songs, songwriting, tutorial, ukulele, very silly indeed, writing

September Links Post

Things I’ve done

• Written a post for Bad Reputation about female desire and pop music.

Things my friends have done

• Talent fountain and illustrator Kassie has at long last made it possible for people to commission her. Examples of her work can be found at the link.

Things strangers have done

• Created a beautiful map of the London Underground out of printed circuit board, and made a functioning radio with it.
• Used the rings of a tree to map a piano sound, and produced beautiful, chaotic music.
• Called for submissions of short fiction to a rollerderby themed anthology.
• Compiled a list of poetry publications who – unfortunately still a rarity – accept digital submissions. It is a particular bugbear of mine that poetry magazines, behind every other type of publication, refuse to accept poems via email or web form, especially as unlike longer submissions it is entirely possible to to attach a poem to an email without capsizing even the most stingy of email inboxes.
• Compiled a handy ten-point list of ways not to write about comics.
• Created a gorgeous collection of ominous clothing eerily reminiscent of the costume designs for the baddies in Lord of the Rings.
• Written a not uncontroversial article about preventative therapy for paedophiles and hebephiles.
• Weighed in on the subject of taboos in comedy.

Filed under: content: links, anthologies, art, clothing, comedy, comics, commissions, composition, controversy, costume, couture, criticism, design, desire, electronics, experiments, fashion, feminism, graphic novels, lyrics, magazines, maps, meta, music, music technology, paedophilia, paraphilias, pedophilia, pj harvey, poetry, pop, pop culture, pop music, psychology, psychotherapy, publishing, radio, rape, rape jokes, reviews, roller derby, rollerderby, science, sequential art, submissions, taboo, trees, writing

Guest Posts On Other Blogs:

A little note to say my post about PJ Harvey, “This Is Love”: PJ Harvey, Pop Music, and Female Sexual Desire has gone up at Bad Reputation.

Filed under: content: links, bad reputation, female desire, feminism, links, lyrics, music, pj harvey, pop music, writing

A memory:

The sun has set. It is 1988. I know the year because of the scenery. It is the most vivid year I will ever live in, because the scenery is never revisited, but it is constant for six or seven months.

The air is thick because the air is always thick, as it is always alive with the song of mosquitoes. The walls are blank, and voices follow their speakers down corridors. Every memory is a photograph and a set of lyrics, brought to life by someone singing. The lyrics don’t matter: it just matters that I heard them here, over and over, my three cassette tapes and my pink, battery-operated, AM/FM radio and tape recorder.

I have a memory of the hour being later than I was supposed to be awake, but the nuns liked my curiosity. They liked to talk to me. I was listening to the sound of music that wasn’t mine, and watching the light that came up through thick glass set into the floor. I was watching through empty stone windows. The building was a maze for the wind, to keep out the heat outside. All of the wildlife wandered in and left my skin red and white in lumps. The rest crawled about all day on the floor, and for every pill I wouldn’t take my mother put me face-down on the cool tiles where the disinfectant came each morning, where the bugs crawled. I had to stay until I took the pills: the nuns bribed me to take them instead. This is why when all my friends are afraid of their convent-school captors I am not.

It is an undetermined month. The girls at the convent school are learning a traditional dance. I have no memory of the dance, only of the feeling of the music and the light from the floor and watching where I shouldn’t be standing, and my mother coming to take me back to bed. I remember bangles, when I am given them. They accompany me for years, until I outgrow them: the anklets I have still, wear still, twenty-year-old, twenty-five-year-old Indian silver with long-lost bells replaced over and over. My mother hates them: I only want to dance the dances I cannot remember.

Filed under: content: real life, 1988, childhood, convent, gujarat, india, memories, memory, music, nuns, personal, personal history, sabarkantha