Tendency No. 8
“Moon Has Set”
the tendency towards contentment
Moon has set
and Pleiades: middle
night, the hour goes by,
alone I lie.
-Sappho, fragment, c. 600 BC
It’s a hard, lonely job sometimes, tending to the Alligators up here on the Farm at the Darkest Northern Tip of Dupont Street. They can get pretty snippy when they’ve been cooped up long. I always tell them, if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all, but you know how Alligators can get. Their standards are very high, and their self-esteem is very low, and they’re like a pack of mean school girls when they’re hungry. And times have been lean lately, and musical nourishment scarce.
But sometimes there’s a moment, by the end of the week, when they’ve had all of the whole-tone scales they can gobble, and their bellies are full of triad-coupling exercises, and I turn on the radio, and Jonathan Goldstein tells us a story, and then we all doze off in the sunshine, and our noses whistle in perfectly-harmonized major-seven chords as we snore.
And it’s at times like these that we remember: the reason we put in 18-hour days and live on no money and suffer through hours of searing self-criticism is because we want to add to the world those soothing things which can put our animal brains to rest. The Farm may seem crazy sometimes, but we’re always just one gentle story or one lovely song away from contentment.
Through all of the procrastination, the yearning for comfort, the rush to nest and the restlessness, through our crazy daydreams, our self-doubt and our silly, impulsive infatuations, being a Farmer of Songs is perhaps the best way to calm All of Your Animal Tendencies.
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Footnote:
Dear Classics Nerds:
Yes, I set a poem by Sappho for big band, two jazz vocalists and an operatic soprano. Yes, it is a rock song.
Please come to my show.
