More Reflections on Faun and Revolutionary Music

(The following is a expansion of my recent comments about Faun,  the outspokenly Pagan German musical troupe that has become part of Europe's post-Christian avant-garde Left and one of its primary cultural magnets. Like today's commentary, this too was birthed by my correspondence with the writer Cate Montana, who has become one of my closest friends.)

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I WAS ZENNING OUT, recovering from the monthly madness of the senior-citizen newsletter I edit and produce, when I decided to play some more of Faun's work including “Blaue Stunde,” a piece to which I had not really listened before.

Then playing it while actually paying attention,  I discovered several of those poetically indicative chills in the musical accompaniment and instantly became enough curious about the song to run down a translation of its lyrics. 

What I discovered was rather mind-blowing. From the lyrics of “Blaue Stunde” I would say whomever wrote them actually encountered the Goddess, much as I did in the water meadow at Wickersham on 15 August 1970...

I had walked alone and lonely into the Innis Creek water meadow, a vast unkempt field beyond the buildings and gardens of the Wickersham, Washington commune where I was then staying, and now I stood amidst Nature's shadowy harbingers of Autumn: blown thistles, bright clumps of pearly everlasting, iridescent cobwebs bejeweled with dew. The communards were meeting in their main building but were ensnared in psychodrama intensified by ideological disputes, and I had left in bitterness and disgust. Now in search of inner peace I sprawled on the ground and gazed at the zenith-high improbably brilliant full moon as if it were some mandala of last resort. Then to my astonishment there was a kind of psychic jolt, intangible yet seismic in its intensity, as if some unseen door had burst open, and all in the same breathtaking instant the moon spiraled into a rainbow that expanded to fill the entire sky, contracted to a vortex of spinning colors, plunged tornado-like to earth and shaped a magnificently ageless woman pale and translucent as mist yet undeniably real. She was majestically naked but loosely wrapped in the lunar blonde infinity of her own hair; she smiled, reached out her hands, touched me, perhaps even kissed my brow, then like some impossibly magical dancer swirled her endless mane into rainbow hues that swept her aloft, dissolving herself back into revolving bands of color that expanded once more from horizon to horizon and shrank into the moon again – a millisecond's vision, a mere glimpse so brief and so ephemeral I could scarcely believe I had seen it and yet so vivid it could not be denied.  But now as if nothing at all had occurred there was only the commonplace moon again, the midnight sky and its diamond constellations, the fragrant crush of wild chamomile beneath my head, the vast nocturnal stillness of Pacific Northwest woods so unlike the firefly-bright insect-rowdiness of the fields and forests in which I'd spent the summers of my boyhood and adolescence.  When the night's chill finally urged me to my feet, I remember there were faint tendrils of fog rising from the creek, and for a moment, just once, it seemed I heard the clear cold water chuckle.

….much as Apuleius (124-170 CE) encountered her at sea (for which see the account beginning on page 70 of The White Goddess [Farrar, Straus and Giroux edition: 1982]), much as Graves himself obviously encountered her but – lest he be declared insane – never dared acknowledge it save in his poetry: “Her sea-blue eyes were wild/ But nothing promised that is not performed.”

Whether such encounters are objectively real or merely an especially intricate manifestation of some carefully unacknowledged insanity spawned by our species' overwhelming terror of mortality – and I must confess I myself alternate between precisely those antitheticals – one does not write such poetically accurate description from belief or theory alone: again my own statement that one cannot be truly Pagan unless one has spent enough time in the back country to have seen the shadows dance. Indeed  as I wrote the preceding sentence it came to me – and with that bright undeniable certainty of an old-time flash-bulb going off – here is the entire story of my life: seeing the shadows dance sufficient times to learn not to flinch, to embrace the experience as a demonstration of love, and now that I am too old and worn down by age and poverty to retreat again to the wilderness and once more hide there from the Lords of Chaos who have usurped that which rightfully belongs to Our Lady, to at last bear witness to what half the time I know to be unequivocally true. Quoth Graves: “none greater in the universe than the Triple Goddess.”

Which, by the way, is why I bristle at the Xtians even when, as now, they occasionally acknowledge the relevance of ritual dance and thereby (unwittingly) underscore the irremediable contradiction between the dialectically inertial momentum of matter that is the essence of life versus the infinite hatred of sensuality and indeed of the entire physical realm that is implicit in the definitively misogynistic, definitively ecocidal dogma at the core of Judaism, Christianity and Islam alike.

But perhaps I should not bristle quite so much. Ritual dance has been methodically denied the followers of the downpresser Abrahamic creeds since the Deuteronomic (patriarchal) "reforms" of approximately 600 BCE,  and the fact dance is now (begrudgingly) admitted to some Xtian ritual cannot be anything other than yet another example of how, when the Goddess is barred from the front door, she inevitably creeps in the back door – a truism that is of course dismissed as “an old wives' tale” – never mind that is precisely what she did via the folk-music renaissance of the 1950s – in which context note the noun "ballad" as a  derivative of the same root (Latin as I remember) that gave us "ballet." In other words, a ballad was once by definition  the musical and poetic accompaniment of a dance, a ritual dance, the  connection remaining so powerful that in some of the original folk-renaissance renderings of balladry (such as Martin Carthy's variant of “Willie's Lady”), the music is so vivid my mind's eye can see the turns of dance – the very sort of vision so emphatically underscored by Faun, obviously knowingly as I believe they are all classically trained musicians and being European are of course classically educated as well.

(How ironic one of our main hopes for a sustainable world comes from what was only recently the most warlike nation on this battered planet.)

Returning to “Blaue Stunde,” as an individual piece of music it stands in stunning contrast to the present-day music associated with U.S. expressions of the resurrection of the Goddess. What was performed nearly 50 years ago by the (probably murdered) Tim Buckley was wrenchingly powerful – “if you tell me of all the pain you've had/ I'll never smile again,” a line from “Phantasmagoria in Two” (a modern variant of the classic dialogue between poet and Muse), probably has no equal even in antiquity – but it has no  counterpart in today's U.S. Paganism, which has become like the USian people themselves, oppressively submissive. A good example is Loreena McKennitt's work, which was originally unapologetically Pagan, but which she has since – no doubt under severe external pressure – diligently repositioned as New-Age-ecumenical instead. Indeed – and despite the sometimes-bold content of its lyrics – in its new, self-consciously de-Paganized context, it often comes off more as lamentation than celebration or defiance. (And as I know all too well from my various odysseys into the organized versions of U.S. Goddess-centered Paganism, the decidedly serf-like passivity of its participants [and therefore of much of its present-day music] goes hand-in-hand with its definitively oppressed and obnoxiously oppressive we-are-all-victims pacifism. The result is a vehement but implicitly frightened [maybe-if-we-aren't-militant-they-won't-kill-us] rejection of politics in any form – which is of course the source of the real U.S. Left's unmitigated scorn of Paganism as “no different from many other religion in being just another opiate to facilitate the oppression of the masses” [the quote is from a Marxian comrade] – and which therefore provides us with a classic example, as valid as the induced racism and sexism that forever fragments the U.S. Working Class,  of “divide et impera” in action.)

It is an aside, albeit a pointedly relevant one, to note the curious anachronism within the Buckley video linked above. The song was recorded in 1967, while the video – obviously made by someone who recognized the poetic vision that was the wellspring of Buckley's best work – was made in 2011. Though he has been dead since 1975, and though the relatively free world of the '70s was almost indescribably different from the slave-world of today, in the parlance of hipster poets and musicians, “Tim Buckley Lives.” Indeed there may be no greater praise the human mind can formulate.

That said, “Blaue Stunde” is truly a horse of a different sort (if you will pardon the spontaneous emergence of a stream-of-subconscious reference to the Celtic/Scythian Goddess Epona), with what kind of horse she is revealed by the accompany drumming. “Blaue Stunde” is ritual dance, yes, but it has none of the implicit submissiveness that has come to define so much U.S. paganism, which given the omnipresence of the secret police (and precisely as suggested by the semiotic evidence I cited above), has probably been infiltrated and co-opted much as Women's Liberation was infiltrated and co-opted – so that the depth of one's commitment is now defined by only by one's material success. As the mainstream brand of U.S. feminism is surely Ayn Rand feminism, so it seems there is also a mainstream Ayn Rand Paganism. Such is the Pavlovian power of capitalism, specifically the mind-mangling might of Madison Avenue.

What first caught my attention about “Blaue Stunde” – what prompted me to seek out the lyrics (and what so surprised me about their content) – was obvious militance of the music. Focusing more closely, I realized it was the drumwork, which, when I began actually hearing it, stood my hair on end with that wondrous chill of recognition. Note the four-beat drum-flourish at the end of certain lines in the lyrics:

“And the pale light of dawn outlined
Her head adorned by the morning dew” (drum flourish).

“Her fairy-like limbs were white as the moon
Her hair was like made of gold” (drum flourish).

Note also the drum riffs elsewhere in the piece.

What I realized, listening so intently, is “Blaue Stunde,” despite its poignant beauty, is most assuredly not the music of submission. It is instead the music of active resistance. Indeed – though I do not know how I knew it – I suddenly recognized the drums as  war drums, the sort of tribal ritual that is a prelude to a battle and the sort of music that accompanies you as you advance across open ground against a vastly superior enemy, you assuming you will not live to see the next moonrise or maybe even the next minute but not really giving a damn because that is the desperation to which you have been driven by the foe's depredations and yet by some miracle not only you yourself survive but so do most of your comrades and in the end you have won the day and won the future – perhaps as if Boudicca and all she symbolized had triumphed on that fateful morning in the midlands of Albion somewhere north of the still smoldering ruins of Londinium or if Wounded Knee had become the beginning of a victorious rising rather than the end of First Nations resistance. Whatever, I glimpsed it clearly for a moment, by the time-reference provided by its weaponry sometime in the pre-atomic past or more likely in the post-apocalyptic future...

(“And the pale light of dawn outlined
Her head adorned by the morning dew”)

I am as you know given to reject such mind's-eye visions unless I am able to rationalize them at least to the extent of recognizing their real-time sources, and of course I have since tried to do that with “Blaue Stunde” and have succeeded to the extent of recognizing the longer riffs with the congas echoing as if through slumlord streets, the rhythm identical to what one so often heard on the Lower East Side during the weeks after the Tompkins Park (Police) Riot of 1967, as an organization called Jade Companions of the Flower Dance briefly united Hippies and Hispanics in common resistance to the invading cops and thrill-seeking suburban phonies. Verily, if I may be allowed to paraphrase Dylan, “red lights flashing in the hot Manhattan night,” complete with drums echoing ominously 24/7. 

Faun's eclectic combination of drums and pipes in “Blaue Stunde” also reminded me of an incident during one of the anti-Vietnam War protest marches when maybe 500 or 1000 Caucasian thugs had bottled up the entire 500,000-person demonstration in Central Park and kept us there until the members of the Columbia University Pipe Band edged their way to the front of the crowd, formed themselves into what a half-century earlier would have been a line of battle and, skirling their pipes and drumming a rhythm similar to (or maybe even identical to) that of "Blaue Stunde," led us out of the park and onto Fifth Avenue. The thugs, some of whom had baseball bats or chains and who were brazenly countenanced by the cops (as was commonplace in those days), fled in obvious fear as soon as the pipers began leading the advance.

But what it was about the punctuational drum flourishes in “Blaue Stunde” that first caught my attention remains undefined, never mind the undeniable recognition implicit in the initial chill. Though now as I think of it I believe I remember reading or hearing somewhere – most likely both as the reality of music remains beyond the descriptive ability of linear language – such drum-emphasis was, along with stringed instruments and pipes, characteristic of ancient epic poetry.

As to the use of genuine love poetry as inspiration to resistance, the only people I know of in the modern age to have done so are Celts...and of course Russians, in which context note “Beriozka” (Birch Tree), a favorite of the Red Army in World War II and – because birch is used in making musical instruments – an invocation of Yulya,  one of the many Slavonic names for the Goddess – hence the chorus: variations on the theme of “Yulee, Yulee lovely birch tree.” 
 
It was so beloved by the Red Army, it was recorded by the Red Army Chorus and Dance Troupe.  and just for retro-kicks, here it is, static and all, as I heard it via the 78-rpm music of my earliest childhood.  Then of course there is how it is formally danced, in this instance preceded  by some of the most stunningly hypnotic choreography I have yet seen:   With this sort of aesthetic quality commonplace elsewhere, no wonder the rest of the  world damns us as “nyekulturniy.”

Not really relevant to this essay (which began as the sort free-association, semi-stream-of-consciousness thing Cate so often inspires whenever she and I talk or exchange emails) – or maybe relevant in some way I don't yet see – is the Faun piece that, were I a videographer, I would use – as I stated in an OAN essay in 2012 – as the accompaniment to that incredible footage of the horse rescue in Holland c. 2005.

Quoth Buffy Sainte-Marie many years ago, when only allegedly nutso people like myself (and unfortunately a few spooks) had any idea what obtained: “Goddess is alive/Magic is afoot”

LB/24 November – 2 December 2015

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