Bound By The Beauty/Not Fade Away(Reprise)

Close and faithful readers may remember this post, sort of.  It first appeared on Sept. 23, 2012 in slightly different form, but with a whole different list of songs.  It's one of my favorites, if I'm allowed to say that, and I'm right back in that same place now, so, rather than re-inventing the wheel, I'm riding it again.

I remember it like it was yesterday:  I was taking a test in Miss McDonald's (poor, tragic Libby) fifth-grade class when suddenly, for no apparent reason, I sat bolt upright, put down my pencil and looked around the room at my classmates, my teacher, the desks, chairs, blackboard, the clock,  and thought "Holy shit" (or something like it--I used bad words even then)-- "I'm in fifth grade already;  I'm ten years old!"  My near-constant awareness of and absorption in the passage of time, how fleeting is our--and all our loved ones' --time here,  an awareness which had likely always been there, but subliminal, was now right at the front of my brain, where it has remained to this moment.

I've had a love/hate relationship with Autumn all of my life, an ambivalence which is directly related to the above anecdote, I'm sure.  On the one hand, here in New England, at least, it's the most dazzlingly glorious time of year; on the other, it's a harbinger of the cold and death soon to follow.  The trees blaze with vivid reds, yellows, golds and that peculiar  hue which is green-going-to-yellow, itself a return, as Frost noted so brilliantly in "Nothing Gold Can Stay," which begins  with "Nature's first green is gold...."  And the sky: is it just my imagination, or is it actually a deeper blue than at any other time of the year?  Late-blooming flowers, fire-red sumacs, even the dun-colored grasses in meadows contribute to the almost overwhelming ecstatic riot of sensory stimulation all around us.  You can practically hear the color.

For about two weeks.  Then it all changes again.  The first colors to go are the birds. Those  we've been feeding all summer long, particularly the finches, my favorites because they're most colorful, are suddenly ravenous.  The feeders need re-filling constantly, it seems, as the gold, red, and olive green creatures fatten themselves for their arduous flight south.  One day, it dawns on us that they've vanished, just like that: "See ya next year, maybe." That happened this past Thursday.  The leaves, meanwhile, have continued their inexorable, biologically-driven march to brown and crispy.  One night there's a wind-driven rainstorm and the next day they, too, are suddenly gone.  We are left bereft of vibrancy, resigned to subdued hues of brown, black, gray and white, of tree and chickadee, stone and snow, broken occasionally by a splash of evergreen or flash of blue jay.

For me, ever since at least the age of 10, this annual demonstration of death, albeit temporary, puts me in mind of the inevitability of real and permanent death.  Every goddam year is a metaphor for every other goddam year, right up to the end. It's sorta like having a full-scale map of the world.

Poets, writers, thinkers of every stripe have dealt with this down through the ages, of course.  The whole dying-and-rising god thing which has been the basis of so many religions arises (yes, I saw that) from this cycle.  If the earth is reborn, why not we?  Keats, in To Autumn ("Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness..."), concentrates on the beauty and bounty of early autumn, while Shelley, his friend and contemporary focuses on the other end of the season in  "Autumn: A Dirge ("The warm sun is failing, the/bleak wind is wailing.");  Andrew Marvell in To His Coy Mistress ("But at my back I always hear/ Time's winged chariot hurrying near," and Billy Collins in, ironically, "On Turning Ten," ("This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself") have obviously felt it too.  We all must; I'm curious at what age it really strikes each of us, this awareness, this knowledge.  Why are we the only species, so far as we know, which is aware of our mortality?  Wouldn't it be better to have no knowledge it was gonna come?  Just live your life, find your acorns, eat your grass, your plankton, synthesize your photos, and then BAM, it's done.  No dread, no sadness or longing, just the fact, which was there all along, unbeknownst.

Here are some songs to celebrate the beauty and mourn the fading:


All This Useless Beauty                                            June Tabor
Beauty                                                                        Linda Thompson
The Beauty Of The Days Gone By                            Van Morrison
The Beauty Of The Rain                                            Dar Williams
Bird Of Beauty                                                           Stevie Wonder
Bound By The Beauty                                                Jane Siberry
Came So Far For Beauty                                            Jennifer Warnes
Chi-Wahwah Beauty                                                  Ottmar Liebert
For The Beauty Of The Earth                                     Paul Winter Consort
For The Beauty Of Wynona                                       Daniel Lanois
Hesitating Beauty                                                       Billy Bragg/Wilco
Temporary Beauty                                                      Graham Parker
Thing Of Beauty                                                         Hothouse Flowers
Ugly Beauty                                                                Friends Of Dean Martinez
Daylight Fading                                                          Counting Crows
Fading Away                                                               James Taylor
Fading Memory                                                          Eilen Jewell
Don't Fade Away                                                        Dead Can Dance
Don't fade Away                                                         Milla
Don't Fade Away                                                        Willie Nelson
Don't Fade On Me                                                      Tom Petty
Fade Away                                                                  Ernest Ranglin
Fade Into Light                                                           Boz Scaggs
Fade To Black                                                             Dire Straits
Fadeaway                                                                    The BoDeans
Not Fade Away                                                            James Taylor
Not Fade Away                                                            Stones


Noon till two on Tuesday, 91.5 FM, www.wool.fm on the webs.  See ya there?

Is it a coincidence that we refer to Adam and Eve's transgression as "the Fall?"  That's why we're mortal and know it.  Damn.