Nica Post #4: Music, Madness, Poetry, Incongruency

On the tarmac at Miami International, Canadian singer-songwriter Bruck Cockburn's (pronounced Coburn) Nicaragua, played in my mind:

In the flash of this moment,
You're the best of what we are.
Don't let them stop you now,
Nicaragua. 

And this selection from the song's opening lyrics:

The kid who guards Fonseca's tomb,
Cradles a beat up machine gun,
At age 15 he's a veteran of four years of war. 

Proud to pay his dues,
He knows who turns the screws.
Baby's face and an old man's eyes.

Carlos Fonseca founded the Sandinista National Liberation Front, which after a long struggle toppled the notoriously brutal and corrupt -- and U.S. backed -- Somoza regime. An excellent memoir on the Sandinista Revolution and subsequent Contra War is, The Country Under My Skin, by a woman named Gioconda Belli. That's me to the right standing next to Fonseca's tomb.  The inscription at the bottom says, "Carlos is with the dead, but he never died."  Fonseca was killed fighting U.S. backed Contra rebels in northern Nicaragua.

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Another song that made its way repeatedly into my mind in Nicaragua is one I have been quietly working on for months.  (I am an amateur musician/songwriter.)  The reason I've been working on it for months is because of songwriter's block. I have a melody -- a very beautiful melody IMHO --  but can't decide what I want the song to be about:  romantic love or an ode to the beauty of our planet.  Either way, the song -- like most of my originals -- will include reflection on the human condition, as follows:

This world is but a hazy veil of tears,
someone said.
But now and then are visions sometimes fed.
Can  you remember?

This song has the potential to be one of my best.  I pray that my stupid male brain can get over itself and break the logjam....soon.

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Sometimes a style of music turns up where you would never expect to hear it.  This happened on Big Corn Island while scuba diving.  Several times I came up from the Deep Blue and was greeted by a melody like Kitty Wells' Will Your Lawyer Talk to God?  Country music from the 50s and 60s was the music-of-choice for the two Caribbean black guys manning the boat, not Bob Marley and Whalers, not Harry Bellafonte, not calypso music.

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Another song that visited my conscious mind on a number of occasions in Nicaragua was James Taylor's Enough to be on Your Way. It is the kind of song that either comforts you or rubs the salt in deeper. Here is a sampling of the lyrics.

Well, the sun shines on our funeral,
the same as on our birth,
the way it shines on everything that happens on this earth.
It rolls across the western sky, and back into the sea.
And spends the day's last rays upon this fucked up family. 

Oh, it's enough to be on your way
It's enough just to cover ground.
It's enough to be moving on.
Oh, build it behind your eyes.
Hide it inside your heart. 
Safe among your own. 

I have probably listened to this song something like 1,000 times by now, and each and every time it stomps my heart. It is one of Taylor's all time best, a musical work of art. What does this have to do with Nicaragua?  Nothing really, though there is a personal tie in. Whenever I travel abroad I go through a period of pensive melancholy.

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Nicaragua has a rich poetic tradition going back to at least Ruben Dario, but the tradition that so far has struck me the most is the poetry of the campensinos, the rural peasantry. Nicaraguan Peasant Poetry of Solentiname offers an excellent introduction to that genre through poetry that expresses the day-to-day lives of the peasants of the Solentiname Archepelago, a cluster of islands found in Lake Nicaragua, a huge freshwater lake whose southern reaches almost touch the Costa Rican border. In this volume are poems about love, the changing of the seasons, egrets, old age, and other topics.  And since Solentiname apparently was a hotbed of opposition to the Somaza dictatorship, one will also find poems about battles, violent death, oppression, exile, and similar subjects. 

Here are a few examples translated from Spanish:

Remember

Remember that life is not even
a thousandth of a second in the great sweep of time:
but one kiss from you is enough to make it all stand still.

An Egret

An egret goes slowly by
Lazily moving her wings
seeing her image
on the calm surface of the lake.

They Carried the Wounded Campesino

They carried the wounded campesino
down to his farm
Guardsmen had really worked him over.
Down from the thick mountains.
Dying, dying.
The wind ceaselessly moving the bushes.
There on the far horizon
The sun dropped out of sight.

And since the title of this post contains the word "madness."

It was a Night of Torment

It was a night of torment.
I went out to the patio in search of peace.
I thought I would die.
I sought air but found none.
I retired to a madero tree,
there i doubted my sanity.
I sat on a stone
until the sun's rays
announced the dawn.