I was driving to the supermarket in the rain. The CD player had come on, and was at no. 14 of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, by the pianist Glenn Gould. It was the 1981 re-recording as opposed to his debut album in 1955 playing the same 31 pieces. This later version stands out for the dramatic variety of its tempi and its ultra-high fidelity: sufficient to capture his soft sing-along accompaniment (“groaning and crooning”), if you listen carefully.
There was a longish queue at the traffic light. It’s a point when you often receive the gift of someone else’s music, as the neighbourhood air vibrates in a mini-quake with its epicentre at a subwoofer fitted in the back of an otherwise undistinguished automobile. But the melody I heard behind Bach wasn’t Glenn Gould, nor was it someone else’s stereo. The rain was pelting down so I lowered my side window a mere inch, and then I caught it full blast: a liquid torrent of improvised notes. Above the newsagent’s shop I saw the singer: over the roof, above the chimneypot, atop a bent TV aerial, stood a blackbird. It’s been well attested, after measuring the decibels, that town birds sing louder than country birds, precisely so as to be heard through traffic noise.
For all that I love Bach, I found myself turning him off to listen to the live performance. The lights went green and we moved on but I left the CD off, realizing that if I had to choose between the banning of Bach and the extinction of our beloved native bird, I could not say “Bye, bye, Blackbird”. It would have to be “Hit the road, Jack, and don’t you come Bach no more”. Drastic; but just as your mind can hardly tell the truth, so can your body never lie.
“Bye, bye, Blackbird” was written by an American in 1926. I’ve heard on the Wiki-vine that it wasn’t really about a blackbird, but a prostitute planning to pack up the game, go back home to Mother:
Pack up all my care and woe,
Here I go,
Singing low,
Bye bye blackbird,
Where somebody waits for me,
Sugar’s sweet, so is she,
Bye bye Blackbird!
In any case the blackbird I’m talking about is not to be found in America. I’m sorry for those who haven’t had the opportunity to hear his voice. You can keep your “Nightingale sang in Berkeley Square” and even your “Ode to a nightingale”. Why not click here to discover this black bird with the yellow beak? Hit the black button on that page to play his song, before you come back here to continue reading. I like to keep the bedroom window open so to catch his street song from a chimneypot or telegraph pole in the hour before dawn. Except Friday nights, when my own species may stagger home at any ungodly hour, and never mind who knows it. The blackbird’s improvisations never repeat themselves, and he pauses at the end of each phrase, to listen for the reply of any other within earshot, and it’s like two musicians jamming.
Do we in literature or lyric find worthy homage to the musical inventions of this fabulous (yet not endangered) bird? We do. He has inspired the best description of an infatuation in 20th-century literature, in the novel Wolf Solent, by John Cowper Powys (1929). The eponymous hero, a highly-educated young gentleman, is smitten with Gerda Torp, beauty of the village, daughter of the local stone-cutter, who woos him with birdsong. I’ll try and pull together the relevant threads that span a hundred close-packed pages.
Solent first goes to the house of Mr Torp on his employer’s business, to order a headstone for a grave. He’s struck by Gerda’s looks and for her part
she gave him a glance that resembled the sudden trembling of a white-lilac branch, heavy with rain and sweetness.
He makes a return visit: the parents leave them alone together, shy and silent, till he breaks the ice with a pick-up line she would not have heard from other boys in the village:
I suppose you’ve often been told that you’re as lovely as the girl who was the cause of the Trojan War?
The girl’s passivity reminds him of
a great unpicked white phlox in a sun-warmed garden
He suggests a stroll and they escape unnoticed from the house, off to the meadows and copses surrounding the village. She gives him the slip in the gathering dusk, fails to answer his echoing cries. All he hears is a blackbird,
in the dark twilight of hazel stems. . . . It seemed to hold, in the sphere of sound, what amber-paved pools surrounded by hart’s tongue ferns contain in the sphere of substance. It seemed to embrace in it all the sadness that it is possible to experience without crossing the subtle line into the region where sadness becomes misery.
But then he realizes
instantaneously by a kind of sudden absolute knowledge, like a slap in the face . . . that Gerda was the blackbird!
For she knew a wonderful way to whistle, in imitation of its song.
They meet again, another twilight. Wolf wants to lead Gerda to a hut deep in the woods, whose floor is softly furnished with dry bracken. She lightly resists:
“Not now,” she said. “Let’s talk.”
For she is the offered bait, and marriage is the trap. All it will take is a little manoeuvring. Now she says:
“Did you like me directly you saw me, that day in my house?”
He doesn’t want to talk about Helen of Troy again to this simple girl so he replies,
“I liked you best when you were whistling to me.”
I should say that Wolf has already become entangled with another. She’s Christie Malakite. Her face has not launched a thousand ships. She’s the daughter of a widowed bookseller, living with him in a seemingly unnatural relationship. But she’s an intellectual equal to Wolf, and fascinates him profoundly. Despite this, despite Gerda’s existing boyfriend—grocer’s boy Bob Weevil—the mismatched pair Wolf and Gerda tie the knot and live in wedded bliss for at least six weeks.
Which proves what mischief may come from mixing up the rain-drenched white lilac, the white phlox in a sun-warmed garden, and the blackbird’s song.
a wayfarer’s notes 
There are some birds I do like listening to. I often open the window in my office, especially on these spring mornings when it's temperate.
I have no idea what kind of birds they are. But I enjoy the varied songs I get to hear. Some of them are raucous and rude and some sweet and trilling and kind of funny.
Makes me wish I had the time to go out and figure out which bird is which and listen to more of their funny tunes.
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“Queue” for what we call a “line” here in America is something I don't think I'll ever get used to. There's always a moment where I have to stop and do a quick conversion in my head, like someone who isn't used to the metric system yet. I've always liked the word, and the sound of the word, and even the letter that word sounds like. It just never quickly connects in my mind with the thing it describes.
I suppose the opposite might be the case for you.
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I've tried using queue here at work.
“All right, you lot! Queue up for tea!”
They just look at me like I'm completely crazy.
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Excellent, dear Yankees, form an orderly queue.
Within these shores we understand all too well most of the American terms and some of us spend an inordinate amount of time trying to eradicate them like some infectious disease, so I'm delighted to see any attempts to reverse the invasion.
One of the most hideous imports to my ear is misuse of the adverb “like”. Instead of this phrase,
“if like I was hanging out the window of my apartment having a smoke” I would find it imperative to say “as though I were leaning out of the window having a fag”. We tend to say “out of” though I sometimes might say “out the window” or “out the door”. In our language a fag is a cigarette and a rubber is an eraser: important points for the tourist, I guess. (Strictly speaking, that “guess” is an Americanism too. Speaking properly we'd substitute “suppose”.
The one American word I find useful is “sidewalk”. We say pavement, but I understand that in US that refers to the road surface and therefore has an opposite meaning.
But national pride has its limits and I'll grant you that America too may have its sweet-singing birds.
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I don't have a problem with “like” as long as it's doing some kind of actual work as a word in the sentence, even if it's just filling in for another word that's out sick for the day. What kills me is when people use it as a random interjection, like a pause between words. “Then I was…like…going to the store, and she was all like…” some people don't even bother to do that. They just keep saying “uhhhh…” every 5 seconds until you…like…wanna smack them in the face 😀
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I wouldn’t wanna smack ’em inna face, especially if they were young and charming like yourself, and especially female which you are not.
And if they are American, it could happen to anyone, well anyone who is American anyhow, and it cannot be helped. It can happen to the nicest people.
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Well sure, it can happen to anyone, but some people do it wayyyyy too much. It's like this one kid I worked with, he came out on break one day, specifically to bother me, I guess, and he just kept saying the f-word over and over. Now, I know I say it plenty myself, I admit, but this was ridiculous. It was every third or fourth word. It started giving me a headache. It all started to run together until he sounded like an angry little duck “fukfukfukfukfukfuk” Learn a new word already.
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I like the word, used sparingly, both in its original Lady-Chatterley's-Lover sense (which DH Lawrence in his idealistic way was trying to rehabilitate) and as a handy expletive when I've just done something stupid and hurt myself. In the latter case I combine it with other expletives, and it's highly remedial, especially when it comes out wrong, as in “Damn-shit-fast-bluck”.
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I love using Britishisms just to mess with peoples heads. One of my favorites is “'Ere now! What's all this, then?” Done, of course, in my best English Bobby imitation. That always makes people stop and say “What?”
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Talking with Glenn, sitting permanently on his bench in front of the CBC, (and always dressed with warm coat, gloves and Canadian beret, even in the warm spring sunshine), he said he totally understood that you would prefer a blackbird song to Bach mixed with his crooning.
But, in a concert hall, as I heard him in his and my youth, the bird would not have stood a chance.
Very seldom do I meet someone who truly knows and loves Gould as he is. It warms my heart. Merci!
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I hope you don't object to the “eh!” us, Canadians, add at the end of our sentences, when we speak.
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Ah, Claude! You have inspired me to add a pic of Glenn on that bench. We are piecing our memories together, you in that concert hall when Glenn Gould was live, me in a particular moment in the car, when the blackbird was live.
So to balance things, I've added a pic of the wrecked TV aerials atop which the blackbird sang. Not being bronze, it had flown away by this time.
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Eh? I don't object to the “eh!” but I'm not hearing it, or seeing it.
“'Ere now! what's all this 'ere, then? Move along now please. Nothing to see.”
One of the delights in London, fifty years ago or less, was the bus-conductor, bright as a Cockney sparrow, ('sparrer' to be correct) cheerily rattling his leather bag of coins:
“ANY more fares please? Move right along dahn the bus now. Hold very-tight-please.!” Then he would signal to the driver “Ding-ding!” and we'd be off to the next stop. Or because the back was open, people would hop on or off as they pleased.
“Next stop Angel Islington. Come on all you angels. Time to fly,” etc etc.
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I think of that Canadian “eh” as “ay?” and typically with that question mark, as though seeking confirmation. “It's a nice night for some ice fishing, ay?” It's kind of like the American habit of saying, “huh?” or “right?” at the end of sentences, but a tad bit more frequent, right? It's kind of like this, huh? Just a little more Canadian, ay?
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Queue up for tea!
Queue seems perfectly natural to me, possibly because I am a programmer and I have allowed the programming vernacular to seep into my common speech.
Things, being queued up meaning, waiting in a first in first out pattern, seems normal.
If I got out in the real American world more, it not seem so natural.
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How kind of you to have elevated Glenn to the blackbird level. He would be honoured. He was a nature's lover, having lived many summers at a cottage, at Lake Simcoe, Ontario.
RE: The Canadian “eh!” I might have told you already that I grew up as a French Canuck. I learned English by immersion when I moved from Quebec to Ontario, at the age of 24. I caught the “eh!” by parroting the language I was hearing. I never noticed it until I lived in Texas in the 60s, and American friends gently teased me about it. I like Mr.White's interpretation of it.
Of course “queue” is very French, and is perfectly natural to me.
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I think the only Americans aside from Bryan and I who would even know what queue means would be programmers like Mr Myste.
I just got this funny flash thought of a Canadian telling a woman named Emma to get in line. “Queue Em, eh?”
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I've noticed that things like Netflix and iTunes use the word “queue” there it sounds natural to me. I suppose because it blends together in my mind with the idea of something being available “on cue”, which is probably completely unrelated.
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Right, Q! Cue the queue!
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Another lovely post! I love the song of birds every morning but I do not know their names.
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Wonderful writing, as always!
Have a fine time in Amsterdam! What a lovely city!
(Oh, dear…I see that chain of endless links, lurking below this comment box…)
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Gina thank you. The city is indeed lovely and so was the nearby countryside, around our hotel. As for the chain of links, anyone clicking them won't be wasting their time. And I shall remind them that the links aren't a result of your shameless self-promotion. At least, I believe you when you tell me that!
Right, Ashok, it isn't necessary to know their names, but it is nice to distinguish one from the other, and perhaps try to understand something of their language!
And Claude, by elevating Gould to the blackbird level you are right that I do him honour there, because there are several composers who've been influenced by birdsong, for example Beethoven (Pastoral Symphony), and Vaughan Williams (The Lark Ascending).
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