Rhapsody
29:01 Share

A reading life, a writing life, with writer and teacher Sally Bailey. Now you find me thinking about the word rhapsody. Rhapsody, which means a stitched together song. All things bright and beautiful. A stitched together song from the Greek word raptane, meaning to stitch, and then from the word ode.

meaning "song" from Rhapsodia, an epic book of songs. And you know this word has special meaning for me because it is a mantra of sorts. All things, a philosophy, a form, a way of living, a life force. All things bright and beautiful. Because I want to tell you, and I want to tell the people listening in Wadham College Chapel on Sunday,

that I try to live my life as though I were stitching together a book of songs. Poetry and song, taking heart in poetry and song, that is the theme. And you find me beginning to consider the word Rhapsody. All things bright and beautiful

I have been fearing recently that I have been losing my voice, but apparently not. And I want to tell you that I try to live my life as though I were stitching together a book of songs. This is also how I write. It is my form. I write by rhythm. All things bright and beautiful. All creatures great and small. All things wise and wise.

The lyrical impulse, the urgent forward movement of words as they gather momentum and motive and life force and intention. What the French call "Ela Vitale" A spiritual life of its own. Rhapsody. A stitched together song.

Poetry came first, poetry came first in my household and I want to tell you how it is I have managed to survive through poetry and song. The force that through the green fuse drives the flower drives my green

Says the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, whose poetry I recall whenever I'm beginning to feel squashed. Squashed. The force that through the green fuse drives the flower. The force that through the green fuse drives the flower. The force that through the green fuse drives the flower. The force that through the green fuse drives the flower. The flower, says Dylan Thomas. St. David's Day.

St. David's Day has just gone by and it is the poetry of Dylan Thomas I recall whenever I am beginning to feel squash. Dylan Thomas, the force, Dylan Thomas, the force that through the green fuse drives the flower, blasts the roots of trees, is my destroyer and I am dumb to tell the crooked rose that my youth is bent by the same wintry.

I heard that line when I was young and I took to it. I took to those rhythms. They make me feel. They make me feel. They fill me. They make me feel. Full and throaty in fine fettle they push me on. The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.

His rhythms, Dylan Thomas's rhythms are essential and urgent and relentless and they run on and on as does his rising and falling, rolling, roiling voice picking up everything along. And that life force, that life force, the green fuse is everywhere. Once you start looking, once you start listening,

You can build a song, an ode from the rises and falls, the shifts in cadence and register. All things bright and beautiful. The forward and backward movement of everyday life as you pitch forward then take two steps back through the vicissitudes of daily life. Now comes the downpour of anecdotes. Anecdote.

A short, secret, private story, usually unpublished with a point. A secret tale never yet heard. The sudden downpour of rain, the vicissitudes of everyday life, the broken handle on your shopping bag, plop!

Plop! Down she goes. Yes, all of it your shopping along the Abingdon Road. All those luscious kiwis and bananas you bought feeling so glad, so very glad to have some colour in your life now all squashed because you ran them over thanks to the unforeseen puncture on your scooter. Plop!

Bang, crash, you skid, and all those people you know along the Abingdon Road in Oxford, they wave. They wave and say, hello Sally, hello Sally, are you alright? Are you alright Sally? And you start to giggle. You start to giggle because life you know is mostly absurd. And your heart lifts at the thought of how absurd you've become and how amused you are at yourself again.

You have run over your own fruit, wonderfully absurd. Ab-surd. From the Latin, absurdus, out of tune. And for a moment you are, for a moment in your daily life, you are out of tune. But then...

But then, on the Abingdon Road, surrounded by your squashed fruit bowl of kiwis and bananas which you have run over because your shopping bag broke, plop! Down she goes. You remember that song? That song you sang as a child. It comes to mind, it comes to your tongue. There she is, ten green bottles hanging on the wall.

green bottles hanging on the wall and if one green bottle should accidentally fall. There'll be nine green bottles hanging on the wall, nine green bottles hanging on the wall, nine green bottles hanging on the wall and if one bottle should accidentally fall.

And then another song comes and then another and then another. Soon after there is the taxi man who heroically chose to pull in as close to your boat mooring as possible to pick up the disabled lady. Where is she? That's me. That's me. Yes it is. That's me. Me in the red hat. Yes that's me.

And the man in the car, the taxi man, gets stuck picking up the disabled lady. He gets stuck on the other side of the concrete bollards where no man has ever dared to go by car before because it is verboten. The pass is too narrow. And so we are stuck for several moments trying to extricate ourselves and suddenly the world has turned absurd again. And we, yes we, are out of tune. The pass is too narrow. We are stuck.

on this borderland of grey concrete. And so I sing. I sing to the taxi man and he smiles and he begins to tell me about the rare plants and minerals from the Himalayas. And he smiles. From the Himalayas, he says, those rare plants and minerals I have never heard of, he shares with me and he tells me they may restore

my sight. Ten green bottles hanging on the wall. Because I am going blind and I am losing control of my nervous system, my hands and feet, my arms and legs. They do not work as they used to. My vocal cords are turning frail. They are splitting and fragmenting and falling away. Nine green bottles hanging on the wall.

Nonetheless, nonetheless, I tell him I'm on the way to the hospital to have my nerves seen to and so I must practice my singing because I am afraid, I am afraid of losing my four eight green bottles hanging on the wall. But I continue to stitch and I continue to sew along the line between one song and another. I keep my ode flowing.

I am a writer after all, and poetry and song were the first forms I heard in my first house. The force that through the green fuse drives the flower. And so I tell the taxi man, he's that sort of man, that I find myself singing urgently, urgently singing to push out the song and the lyrics and the rhythm and the life force and the memories.

the memories of my rhythmic sing-songing sounding singing ancestors and so I continue to sew together my songs. Rhapsody from the Greek rap tale. A stitched together song. Firstly my mother

My mother whose life force was carried out on her beloved sewing machine, aptly called, very aptly called by its brand name, the singer. Singer! Sing! Singer, singer, sing! And now, because my mother has arrived into this song, because I am stitching her into this rhapsodic set of small songs,

I go to fetch my ribbons in honour of my mother, a trained seamstress whose hands never stopped moving as she raced back and forth, up and down the firmly flattened piece of fabric she lay out beneath that jogging needle. And here in my left hand, I have a smooth satin blue ribbon.

rolling out from a coil across the floor, blue satin, a ribbon to represent my mother, whose hands I now attach to in my mind's eye, borrowing her rhythms. As my hands falter and stop and lose their nerve, I reach for my mother's hands and I attach to them.

My mother, whose manual moves I now imitate and sew myself into. Her moves, my mother, sitting in our icy cold blue and white checkered floor turning grey. Sing her!

My mother sewing together fragments of time and space. A rapid run along the blue coast, the satin ribbon as I saw it then. Along the edge of the satin blue fabric she was stitching together. Sing! Up and down and back down again and up and down and back down again. Everything was an elegant race against time and money and I wonder

If this was because my mother was losing her nerves. And as she sewed, she sang, my mother's beautiful lilting voice lifting the roof of our filthy, damp, slummy terraced house by the sea.

All things bright and beautiful. My mother, sewing. And I flew away with her to green pastures, a kind of Arcadia I'd made in my own mine, where beautiful nymphs, nymphs, like the ones I'd seen on antique vases my mother loved to linger over in the antique shop on the edge of town, sang. Beautiful nymphs.

sang when my mother sewed. My mother lived in an ugly house but she was beautiful and she sang beautifully to singer, singer. My mother was a singer. My mother was a seamstress who sang beautifully. And then I recall, and then I recall as the

singer goes up and down, up and down, fetching more and more material and fabric. I recall another song, because songs mostly come from the past.

And they are well rehearsed and they are beloved and well sung. Singer! Singer! And so I recall years later during my American period, the period when I had a twanging sound in my voice because you have to fit in after all. Those years spent in the Midwest of America where I taught aesthetic education. Singer! Singer! Singer!

with the unforgettable Barbie. Yes, that was her name. Barbara. Barbie for short. Flaming red-haired Barbie dressed in purple trouser suits. And now I pick up my vivid purple electric blue ribbon purple.

For Barbie, who wouldn't mind my little explosive plosive at this point in my song. All things bright and... Barbie, very much a jazz nightclub singer in my imagination, aged, oh, around 23 or so, looking 12. Honey, we're going nowhere in that car.

She used to say to me, "Barbie," who was 80 when we travelled together around the provincial Midwest in her car, because she took one look at my $250 costing car and said, "We're going nowhere in that, honey." Barbie. Barbie who had style and who jazzed her way through life and whose dancing style I will remember to the day I die. Barbie, sing-a!

whose moves I frequently imitate whenever I find myself now stuck somewhere on the grey uneven uneven they wobble those words wobble still they wobble around my mouth sometimes these days because I am beginning to lose my nerve

And so I must recall, Barbie, those moments on the grey uneven pavements, uneven pavements, uneven pavements wobbling around Oxford, unable to lift my leg.

And it is then that I begin to imagine moving like Barbie across that auditorium all those years ago. That stage where we took teachers and children and young people to encounter the arts. Barbie. Always cool. Who drove through life with s- Barbie.

Barbie, who said this when I told her I was listening to the beat poets and Allen Ginsberg. Honey, you've just got to give Ginsberg a lot of room, a lot of room. Barbie, as she swung out stylishly from her rectangular wide driveway in deep snow without blinking one of her bright orange eyelids.

Before we took to the snowy road to encourage teachers to take their children to theatre and jazz and classical concerts and art museums and dance performances. That is, to teach their children and their parents to sing a singer.

and sometimes we drove for miles whole days and Barbie recounted the details of her syllabus and her musical knowledge. Sing her! And her song. Sing her! And we sang together and we learned poems and we told stories and Barbie always drove us. Because I'm never letting you behind the wheel honey you look 12 and every policeman in town will be asking us for ID.

My American accent is slipping these days, but I can still hear the we used to say. Honey, those years when I drove around looking 12, I admit, and taught the workers from the car factory in Detroit, Michigan, and elsewhere, how to appreciate, to feel the arts. Singer, singer.

Only on an hourly rate, never paid expenses, always working evenings and weekends until I'd learned everything off by heart. Singer! Singer! The whole of Western Civilization.

and learned to drive a huge, dangerously new, shiny white minibus. Singer! Looking 12. Yes, looking 12. We're going nowhere with you, honey. Looking 12, I can tell you. Through the back streets of Detroit, I went ruff, ruff, ruff, ruff over the suspension-killing potholes. Ruff, ruff, ruff. Let that sound stand in for the potholes of Detroit. To the Detroit Art Museum on Saturday afternoons.

Me and a bus full of married men and women, all older, all older, who all showed up. Every one of them, honey. And whose husbands and wives I had to face at social engagements when they told me that I had stolen their husband and wife from them. Because all they want to do now, honey, is go to the art museum. Sing on!

And so you see, I am stitching together the fabric of my life and the lives of those I meet and those I have met. And I am attaching them to myself, to my hands, to my eyes, to my voice. I am placing one ode, one song next to another like those pieces of material my mother placed delicately one on top of the other.

overlapping so as to catch at the seam, at the hem, when she came back down the other way with her jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog

Singer! Those pieces of material she can now join together to make something more. The beginning of an arm, a sleeve, the beginning of a dress, for my mother made all our clothes. And I learned how to write by watching her patiently and elegantly and with grace stitch together those pieces of fabric as she sang her songs.

Often hymns, sometimes folk songs. But the one I remember is this. You've heard it before. It comes around again, like an old tune. Spooling and unspooling those pieces of fabric. These ribbons in my hands that I clutch at now like strands of time. Time slipping through my fingers. All things brighter.

Beautiful all creatures great and small all things wise and wonderful the Lord God made them all. My mother's song prayer for those making the makers the makers and so you see as I clutch at my pieces of fabric my pieces of paper my scribbled notes my sounds

Those images in my head which run up and down rapidly and away like my mother's hands pushing and kneading and pulling gently at the blue satin fabric to allow it to ease its way under the needle of her singer. I am grateful. I am grateful.

For those early patterns of making and creating, those stitch designs in my visual and oral memory of how to hold myself together when I would otherwise falter or sit over those uneven pavements and fall. Ten green bottles hanging on the wall.

And I am grateful for those early rhapsodies Rhapsody meaning a stitched together song For the colours and shapes and designs My mother has bequeathed to me and others too My fellow teacher in the arts Purple clad, red haired, flaming Barbie And her inimitable genre of jazz in the everyday A way of living that dares to improvise

Because it believes something will always come your way. And it does. It always does. The next beat in the... The next move. Singer! The next song. All things to fall. All creatures great and small. All things wise and wonderful. Lord God made.

Thank you for listening to A Reading Life, A Writing Life. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please like it, give us a review, or mention us to friends or on social media. Thank you.