6) What is the Best Nest?

A Best Nest Manifesto:

The best nest is always moving.
The best nest is never completely still.
The best nest is safe but charged.
The best nest is built from love.
The best nest houses firm generosity.
The best nest does a brief, elegant job.
The best nest celebrates the role of learning.
The best nest is where it is all allowed.
This nest is beauty.

Beauty invites tragedy, welcoming its energy as part of the necessary whole. This defiant act, to bring in the potential of an over-charged foreign entity into a safe site, which gives way to the Celtic notion of hospitality which has been a main stay of mine since I was wee. Welcome the stranger, make a friend. My conclusions towards my enquiry “What is Nesting” land at this reflective point where I connect some reflections towards my enquiry to the manifesto above. I am immediately drawn to my autobiography and when thinking of a musical connections towards beauty, I think of The Sailors Bonnet by The Gloaming:

I have always loved this song and have never really been able to articulate it until over the last few months. We are welcomed into a very timorous, generous space with achingly beautiful playing - playful, youthful and torturously painful in equal measure. My Aunt Gwen’s death in 2002 was the first time I learned about Martin Hayes generosity and gentle presence and every time I listen I am back on Tyron Doon watching a transformation from visible form into invisible presence - Gwen’s ashes becoming something new. This context of course provided me with an entry point to the reflective, deep power of this music and how it can illuminate what it means to be alive. Nesting is alertness and aliveness. It is an attempt to make a meeting place for safety and danger - potential grounds for beauty to behold.

In the Gloaming 2 documentary, fiddler Coaime passionately and romantically offers up this very result of this music on the listener, suggesting “it is the way it makes you feel, it opens up your heart when you listen to it. It’s like someone reaching in and twisting a tap open.” Musically, there are lots moments where The Gloaming twist open the emotional tap, relying on suspended chords on the piano in many songs and sensitive dynamics. There’s a clear care towards each songs journey, with each instrumental layer seeping on top of the other gently, which evokes a nostalgia and vulnerability. The use of space and minimalism naturally summons the romance and passion recognised within this diaspora. Song 44, a poem set to music which is the very first track on their debut album, sets the scene with an exposed vocal sung in medieval Gaelic. Eventually as Hickling puts it in his Guardian article, it becomes swathed in unearthly, droning fiddles, harp-like guitar and abstract washes of jazz piano. It sounds closer to a piece of contemporary chamber music than a traditional tune, though the players improvise freely. I think the gentle meandering nature of these arrangements also contribute to The Gloaming’s romantic sensibility. Melodically this is greatly exemplified in Hayes’ violin playing, which includes careful and deliberate slides up to notes, and sometimes the flattening of a note to give an almost blues effect.

The offer I make to myself to continue my journey with this enquiry is to encapsulate that into an arrangement. I gift my future self this first fragment which was composed in two sittings at the piano in the living room and recorded on the third in one take first thing in the morning. I decided to strip back the recording process here and capture this piano piece on my phone, fully embracing the timbral, percussive qualities that the dishes from the sink that my partner Gudrun is busy washing in the next room offer. They are sonic splashes, found sounds which do sometimes feel like they interrupt the flow of the piece but they give it life and colour majestically. It roots my place, as a music maker in a busy urban environment, focusing in on the introspective which we can only really do so much of - we are always brought back into the moment through the vibrations of the now and the other dances that are happening in the same space.

Components of this song to watch out for when dissecting:

Gudrun saying “bye” right at the start
Chromatic melodic passages
Double decker buses droning by outside if you listen closely
Dangerous dynamics
Fast arpeggiated broken chords
Octaves
Smash
Water Splash
Plates clattering
Creaking of the sustain pedal
A really obvious mistake just before the piano fades out

I will continue to look for the dance in this song. For now, here is the first warm up experiment with Jack, Jess, Fiona and I as part of a Paragon dance workshop called M3 (Make Music Move):

I love the idea of Blaise Pascal that, in difficult times, you should always keep something beautiful in your heart. Perhaps, as a poet said, it is beauty that will save us in the end. John O’Donohoe carries this perspective forward in a lot of his poems and text. He had a lifelong fascination with the inner landscape of our lives and with what he called “the invisible world” that is constantly intertwining what we can know and see. In a podcast with The On Being Podcast in 2005, O’Donohue explains:

One of the huge confusions of our times is to mistake glamour for beauty…
there is an uncanny symmetry between the way you are inward with yourself
and the way you are outward… there is an evacuation of interiority going on
in our times and we need to draw back inside ourselves and we will find
immense resources in there.
(O’Donohue, 2005).

We live in a culture which is image obsessed. Nesting, to me, is about learning the art of inwardness and making a safe but charged space for this to manifest. O’Donohue calls this “the pedagogy of interiority.” What can I learn from my former, youthful desire to nest in the basket as I move forward now? What site can I claim as my new nest to go about engaging with O’Donohue’s pedagogical offering? Nesting is about awakening the inner conversations and making an acceptance. Nesting is to give way to beauty. We all surrender to this at birth, squirming with desire and hunger for survival. My explorations of nests is becoming a meditation on the components that are common to us all, through the lens of beauty. Maybe my next steps are towards a project about beauty, using the nest as an apt aesthetic ground to build my own safe but charged creative response. It is not the beauty of the product but the process of making that beholds beauty in a nest.

As a final offer, I muse on Mary Oliver’s reflective poem “To be human is to sing your own song.” To me, this work offers so much wisdom and tenderness, so much resistance and surrender simultaneously, so much awareness that in the second half of our lives there is more room for grace within ourselves and those we love than we ever imagined. I anticipate this journey as I carry on into the new.

TO BE HUMAN IS TO SING YOUR OWN SONG

24 Years Later…

24 Years Later…

Everything I can think of that my parents
thought or did I don’t think and I don’t do.
I opened windows, they shut them. I pulled
open the curtains, they shut them. If you
get my drift. Of course there were some
similarities – they wanted to be happy
and the weren’t. I wanted to be Shelley and I
wasn’t. I don’t mean I didn’t have to avoid
imitation, the gloom was pretty heavy. But
then, for me, there was the forest, where
they didn’t exist. And the fields. Where I
learned about birds and other sweet tidbits
of existence. The song sparrow, for example.

In the song sparrow’s nest the nestlings,
those who would sing eventually, must listen
careful to the father bird as he sings
and make their own song in imitation of his.
I don’t know if any other bird does this (in
nature’s way has to do this). But I know a
child doesn’t have to. Doesn’t have to.
Doesn’t have to. And I didn’t.

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