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Traveling Through the Dark
1988

tenor
piano

duration 24'

first performance:
Mark Evans and Michael Beattie
Emmanuel Library, Boston / September 27, 1990

RECORDING—first performance
(A Spirit Haunts the Year's Last Hours and Journey Through Hell omitted from this performance)
n.b. this is poor quality transfer from a cassette tape
 
SCORE
A Summer Twilight
The Ghost Ship
Camphor Laurel
A Kind of Goodbye
A Spirit Haunts the Year's Last Hours
Strange Tree
The Dreadful Has Already Happened
Journey Through Hell
The Bardo of The Experiencing of Reality
The Village Coddled in the Valley

PROGRAM NOTE
One way of listening to Traveling Through the Dark might be to see it as a journey through death. Life is ebbing away during the first three songs, the fourth, A Kind of Goodbye, is the moment of death—"he told me to enter my darkened house," the fifth is, perhaps, burial, or at least a kind of benediction. From here through Journey Through Hell the tension and horror increase as unattended issues and unfaced fears are given form by the frightened soul. The ninth song is a passage from 
The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a treatise to guide the soul through the events which will occur after the body's death. Escape from these terrors is possible; the realization that these apparitions, like all
the apparitions of the material world, are not actual but are the cloaking of thought and emotion in
form. The final song is about safety and tenderness. Another, less esoteric, interpretation is, of course, that this is a nightmare and the final song is about waking up to safety; and again that this may be about the process of working through any dark and troubled time. All of these seem to me to be the same creature in different guises; the work is about the travelling through more than about any
specific destination.

TEXTS
A Summer Twilight
It is a Summer twilight, balmy sweet,
A twilight brighten'd by an infant moon,
Fraught with the fairest light of middle June;
The lonely garden echoes to my feet,
And hark! O hear I not the gentle dews,
Fretting the silent forest in his sleep?
Or does the stir of housing insects creep
Thus faintly on mine ear? Day's many hues 
Waned with the paling light and are no more,
And none but reptile pinions beat the air:
The bat is hunting softly by my door,
And, noiseless as the snow-flake, leaves his lair;
O'er the still copses flitting here and there,
Wheeling the self-same circuit o'er and o'er. 
Charles Tennyson-Turner (1808–1879) 


The Ghost Ship
Through the crowded street
It floats 

Its vague
Tonnage like wind. 

It glides
Through the sadness 

Of slums
To the outlying fields. 

Slowly,
Now by an ox, 

Now by a windmill,
It moves. 

Passing
At night like a dream 

Of death,
it cannot be heard; 

under the stars
It steals. 

Its crew
And passengers stare; 

Whiter than bone,
Their eyes 

Do not
Turn or close. 
Mark Strand (b.1934) 


Camphor Laurel
Here in the slack of night
the tree breathes honey and moonlight.
Here in the blackened yard
smoke and time and use have marred,
leaning from that fantan gloom
the bent tree is heavy in bloom. 

The dark house creaks and sways;
“Not like the old days.”
Tim and Sam and ragbag Nell,
Wong who keeps the Chinese hell,
the half-caste lovers, the humpbacked boy,
sleep for sorrow or wake for joy. 

Under the house the roots go deep,
down, down, while the sleepers sleep;
cracking the paved and broken street.
Old Tim turns and old Sam groans,
“God be good to my breaking bones;”
and in the slack of tideless night
the tree breathes honey and moonlight. 
Judith Wright (b.1915) 


A Kind of Good-bye
I met an old man near a darkened house,
And he looked in my eyes and he spoke of that house,
Said the girl with the flame in her voice, in her hair,
“What did you he say to you standing there?
What did he say to you, darling, darling?” 

He said that the house was my own house;
Said the girl with the flame in her eyes, in her hair;
That's what he said to me standing there;
That's what he said to me, darling, darling. 

He said I'd live all day in that house,
He said I'd live all night in that house,
Said the girl with the flame in her hands, in her hair;
“And what did you answer him standing there?
What did you answer him, darling, darling?” 

I said I hated my darkened house,
Said the girl with the flame in her skin, in her hair.
That's what he said to me standing there;
That's what he said to me, darling, darling. 

But the old man told me to enter that house;
“You are here; we are ready; come into your house.”
He told me to enter my darkened house,
Said the girl with the flame in her heart, in her hair;
That's what he said to me standing there;
That's what he said to me, darling, darling. 
Theodore Spencer (1832–1900) 


A Spirit Haunts the Year's Last Hours
A spirit haunts the year's last hours
Dwelling amid these yellowing bowers:
To himself he talks;
For at eventide, listening earnestly,
At his work you may hear him sob and sigh
In the walks;
Earthward he boweth the heavy stalks
Of the mouldering flowers;
Heavily hangs the broad sunflower
Over its grave i' the earth so chilly;
Heavily hangs the hollyhock,
Heavily hangs the tiger-lily. 

The air is damp, and hush'd, and close,
As a sick man's room when he taketh repose
An hour before death;
My very heart faints and my whole soul grieves
At the moist rich smell of the rotting leaves,
And the breath
Of the fading edges of box beneath,
And the year's last rose.
Heavily hangs the broad sunflower
Over its grave i' the earth so chilly;
Heavily hangs the hollyhock,
Heavily hangs the tiger-lily. 
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) 


Strange Tree
Away beyond the Jarboe house
I saw a different kind of tree.
Its trunk was old and large and bent,
And I could feel it look at me. 

The road was going on and on
beyond, to reach some other place.
I saw a tree that looked at me,
And yet it did not have a face. 

It looked at me with all its limbs;
It looked at me with all its bark.
The yellow wrinkles on its sides
Were bent and dark. 

And then I ran to get away,
But when I stopped and turned to see,
The tree was bending to one side
And leaning out to look at me. 
Elizabeth Madox Roberts (1886–1941) 


“The Dreadful Has Already Happened”
The relatives are leaning over, staring expectantly.
They moisten their lips with their tongues. I can feel
them urging me on. I hold the baby in the air.
Heaps of broken bottles glitter in the sun. 

A small band is playing old fashioned marches.
My mother is keeping time by stamping her foot.
My father is kissing a woman who keeps waving
to somebody else. There are some palm trees. 

The hills are spotted with orange flamboyants and tall
billowy clouds move behind them. “Go on, Boy,”
I hear somebody say, “Go on.”
I keep wondering if it will rain. 

The sky darkens. There is thunder.
“Break his legs,” says one of my aunts,
“Now give him a kiss,” I do what I'm told.
The trees bend in the bleak tropical wind. 

The baby did not scream, but I remember that sigh
when I reached inside for his tiny lungs and shook them
out in the air for the flies. The relatives cheered.
It was about that time I gave up. 

Now, when I answer the phone, his lips
are in the receiver; when I sleep, his hair is gathered
around a familiar face on the pillow; wherever I search
I find his feet. He is what is left of my life. 
Mark Strand (b.1934) 


Journey Through Hell
On a saddle without a horse
I made a journey through hell. 

In the first circle I saw
A few figures reclining
On bags of wheat. 

In the second circle
Some men riding bicycles
Didn´t know when to stop
Because of the flames. 

In the third circle I saw
Only one human figure
it appeared to be a hermaphrodite.
A thin and twisted figure
Feeding crows. 

I went on trotting and galloping
Through a space of hours
Until in a forest I came upon a cabin
Where a witch lived. 
A dog tried to bite me. 

In circle four
An old man with a long beard
Bald as a watermelon
Building a little boat
In a bottle. 

He gave me a kind look. 

In circle five
I saw some students
Playing Indian hockey
With a ball of rags. 

It was savagely cold.
I had to pass the night
Keeping vigil in a graveyard
Sheltered behind a tomb
To keep from freezing. 

The next day I went on
Into some hills
I saw for the first time
The skeletons of trees
Burned by tourists. 

Two circles were left. 

In one I saw myself
Sitting at a black table
Eating the flesh of a bird:
My only companion
Was a kerosene stove.

In the seventh circle
I saw absolutely nothing
All I heard were strange sounds
I heard a horrible laughter
And deep breathing
That tore open my soul 
Nicanor Parra, (b.1914) trans. Miller Williams 


The Bardo of The Experiencing of Reality
O nobly-born, that which is called death hath now come;
Do not cling, in fondness and weakness, to this life. 

O nobly-born, when thy body and mind were separating, 
thou must have experienced a glimpse of the Pure Truth,
subtle, sparkling, bright dazzling, glorious.
Be not daunted thereby, nor terrified, nor awed.
That is the radiance of thine own true nature.
Recognize it. 

Since thou hast not a material body of flesh and blood,
whatever may come–sounds, lights, or rays,—are, all three, unable to harm thee:
thou art incapable of dying. 

These apparitions are thine own thought-forms. 

O nobly-born, if thou dost not recognize thine own thought-forms,
the lights will daunt thee,
the sounds will awe thee,
and the rays will terrify thee. 

Shouldst thou not know this
thou wilt have to wander in the world of birth and death. 
from The Tibetan Book of the Dead trans. Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup 


The Village Coddled in the Valley
The village coddled in the valley,
The bird cuddled in the cloud,
The small fish nested, the babe breasted,
Sleep with a deeper dream endowed:
For them this evening especially
Hangs its veil over all the world. 

Whickering child and weeping lamb
Interchange in the general care
That Nature, cradling in her arm,
Extends to all new things that are:
As, walking clouds, she keeps from harm
the whickering child and weeping lamb. 
George Barker (b.1913–1991)