The Music, the Poem, the Short Story That Started Everything - Issue #32

Over the years, I listened to many interpretations of this piece by many different performers, but the one that became my penultimate was a recording by Nigel Kennedy and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. No other recording or performance I've heard so far, measures up. I will share it with you here on condition that you promise to listen to it in the following fashion: Go to a quiet room, sit down, turn on the music, and listen with your eyes closed, preferably. This is not something that is suitable for background music. You must give it your full and undivided attention for the first listen, at least.

When I listened to this as a young teenager and then a twenty something, I could easily become so lost in the music, I could nearly feel myself suddenly transported to a green hillside--cool, misty air all around, watching a lark climbing the skies. I frequently played this on my MP3 player as I walked to work through busy traffic. I did not much like the city, and I was only too glad to have its noise fade away and live in this green quiet place for the next 17 minutes. And then I discovered that Vaughan Williams had written this music in response to a poem of the same name by George Meredith--The Lark Ascending. I won't quote the entire poem, because it is too long, but here's a small portion:

For singing till his heaven fills, 

’Tis love of earth that he instils, 

And ever winging up and up, 

Our valley is his golden cup, 

And he the wine which overflows 

To lift us with him as he goes: 

The woods and brooks, the sheep and kine 

He is, the hills, the human line, 

The meadows green, the fallows brown, 

The dreams of labor in the town; 

He sings the sap, the quicken’d veins; 

The wedding song of sun and rains 

He is, the dance of children, thanks 

Of sowers, shout of primrose-banks, 

And eye of violets while they breathe; 

All these the circling song will wreathe, 

And you shall hear the herb and tree, 

The better heart of men shall see, 

Shall feel celestially, as long 

As you crave nothing save the song. 

Was never voice of ours could say 

Our inmost in the sweetest way, 

Like yonder voice aloft, and link 

All hearers in the song they drink: 

Our wisdom speaks from failing blood, 

Our passion is too full in flood, 

We want the key of his wild note 

Of truthful in a tuneful throat, 

The song seraphically free 

Of taint of personality, 

So pure that it salutes the suns 

The voice of one for millions, 

In whom the millions rejoice 

For giving their one spirit voice.

What does it mean? So much. But the poem seemed to give voice to a queer feeling I have gotten when looking at animals. That they are doing exactly what God wants them to do by being so perfectly what they are. A lark is being precisely a lark, just as God created it to be and is giving glory to God by doing so. And would that all humans be exactly what He intends us to be! In simply flying, a thing birds do without much thought, they are a glorious and beautiful sight. And by being exactly what they are, the inhabitants of the animal world awaken in us, if we're not too dull to notice, the desire to be like them in their simple beauty--in their ability to just be and not rebel against what God designed for them. I read this paragraph and am unsatisfied that I have communicated what I'm trying to communicate satisfactorily. And thus, my fascination with the music and the poem--it leads to so many thoughts.

And as I walked to work each day, listening to this music and thinking about this poem, my brain worked overtime in the most satisfying ways.

So much so, that when I was tasked with writing a story for one of my college English classes, such a strange, startling story sprang to my mind, and while I wrote it, this music played in my mind. It was a story about some scientists who wanted to end all human sickness and suffering. Their solution was to make clones of people, raise them in a stimulus-free environment so that they would not have emotions, desires, distress, etc... They would be health insurance for real people in the real world. If a person needed a blood transfusion--no problem. If they needed a kidney transplant--no waiting list. If they need bone marrow--no anxious search for a donor. For fifteen years, these clones developed in silence into something not quite human. They did not speak, never heard speaking and did not miss something they did not know. They did not touch, nor were touched, nor missed human warmth and affection--a thing they did not know. They were automatons. And things seemed to go well. Until.

Someone left a door open that should have been shut, and Clone 27 wandered out. Out into warm sunshine, grass, away from the womb his handlers had built for him and out into a world full of sound, beautiful sights, thousands of creatures great and small, tall trees swaying in the breeze. Then a bird landed near him, pecked into the ground, and then flew into the sky and disappeared. 27 was never the same again, and the whole project came to a crashing halt. The sun and wind and a bird undid in ten minutes what humans accomplished in fifteen years. The end. That was my story. I got an A.

And that might have been the end of it, except that pesky story just kept at me. Finally, after publishing The Pursuit of Elizabeth Millhouse, I started expanding it into a novel in which I envisioned where the philosophical trends of the day might lead us in the western world. No place good, I knew that. But somewhere along the line, I thought to myself, "This society I am imagining in my head is so extreme and so farfetched, that nobody will buy in to the premise." And I stopped writing.

Then 2020 hit. The virus, the extreme lockdowns and restrictions, the propaganda, the rhetoric. The iron fist of censorship when people put two and two together and quite reasonably asked if the virus could have escaped from that lab in Wuhan and then the quiet admission that such viruses were, indeed, being developed at said lab... Add all that to the background of extreme woke gender and sex ideology that's been gaining steam for the last decade, and I thought to myself, "They'll buy in, now."

I hope to have the novel done very soon, so you can all read it. But in the meanwhile, listen to the music and read the poem, and let its beauty fill your minds, souls, and bodies as it did the subject of an experiment and gave him a will to live--truly live.

Until next time, folks...