The omnipercipient Trevor Joyce sent me a screenshot of what appears to be a Facebook post by the poet Ben Friedlander, which reads as follows:
Best footnote I’ve seen in a while.
34 worms sing (kyūin mei 蚯蚓鳴): Or “worms murmur”? Readers may supply for the verb mei 鳴 whatever type of sound they would like the worms to make.
A little sleuthing suggests that this is from “61. Song of the Dragon Ryūgin 龍吟,” 59 “Everyday Matters” (“Kajo”) [see Correction below], a chapter in Treasury of the True Dharma Eye: Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō. And further sleuthing turned up this passage in Liza Dalby’s East Wind Melts the Ice: A Memoir Through the Seasons (p. 85):
Shamisen wo hiku mo sabishi ya mimizu naku
Plucking the shamisen
desolately
as the worms sing–Takahama Kyoshi (1918)
Do worms really sing? Even the most desultory research on the subject in Japanese leads you to confident statements that what was once considered to be the keening of lonely worms is in fact the voice of the mole cricket, a rather ugly burrowing insect that emerges on autumn evenings to chirp weakly for a mate. Yet the image of the singing worm is considered charming, and so it remains, a poetic conceit of peculiar appeal in the world of haiku. Many images like this can be found to have classical Chinese antecedents, but wormsong seems purely Japanese. The only faintly similar occurrence that I have been able to ascertain in Chinese is a reference in an ancient apothecary to the phrase “singsong girl” as a local term for “worm” in the area south of the Yangtze River delta — and that could imply any number of lubricious comparisons, not necessarily that worms were chanteuses.
Although worms do not have lungs, they do have mouths, covered with a sensitive flap called a prostomium. Just as I was ready to accept that earthworm singing was merely a Japanese poetic conceit, I stumbled across a reference to a German naturalist, C. Merker, who claimed that he was able to hear the faint voices of earthworms in chorus as they deliberately flapped their prostomia open and closed over their mouths, in a series of sounds marked by a definite and changing rhythm.
She goes on to discuss the Japanese metaphor “worms climb trees.” And for lagniappe, Trevor included a link to Tony Burrello’s “There’s a New Sound” (1953); the sound (spoiler!) is the sound of worms.
Correction. Trevor sent me this from Ben:
Good sleuthing, with one minor correction: it’s from essay 59, “Everyday Matters” (“Kajo”) (and if it makes a difference, the worm line comes from a poem by Dogen’s teacher, Rujing, that’s quoted in the essay).
My apologies to Dogen’s teacher!
There’s a Muppets version of the song, too.
‘There’s a New Sound’ really lives up to its label name of ‘Horrible’. I would only buy it for my Pet Rock. (Of course, I have never actually had a Pet Rock, but the song and the Pet Rock are similar enough to deserve each other.)
The song purports to give the sound of a worm, but some real worms are known to make sounds easily audible to humans. You can hear a recording of a gurgling sound from the underground movement of a giant earthworm at https://www.giantearthworm.org.au/
There’s also a Biblical verse that includes ‘the voice of the turtle’ (or similar), and various people have said that it refers to real sounds from real turtles, while others claim that ‘turtledove’ is meant.
At my uncle’s wedding ceremony (the most informal I have ever been to, taking place in my grandparents’ backyard), the liturgy mentioned the voice of the turtle several times. The Justice of the Peace stated several times that it was a specifically civil ceremony, and he seemingly didn’t want us to engage in anything even culturally Jewish until he had left.
When I married my beloved late first wife almost 30 years the voice of the turtle was explicitly heard because the ad hoc choir assembled for the service sang this 17th-century polyphonic setting of (a 17th-century English translation of) the relevant Hebrew text. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RL5LNO0EoUg
By chance a month or two ago I was drinking at a bar and figured out that one of the fellows I was talking to was the long-time NYC-area professional church musician who had way back then assembled/rehearsed the singers for that wedding. Which he didn’t specifically recall, because of course the professional will have done hundreds of such gigs which are thus less individually memorable than they were to the client who had commissioned them.
The Mock Turtle’s Song
Undoubtedly a bird in Shakespeare’s beautiful and very strange poem
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45085/the-phoenix-and-the-turtle-56d2246f86c06
Truth may seem but cannot be;
Beauty brag but ’tis not she;
Truth and beauty buried be.
It is beautiful and it is very strange.
An Eclogue for Christmas
Louis MacNeice
A. I meet you in an evil time.
B. The evil bells
Put out of our heads, I think, the thought of everything else.
A. The jaded calendar revolves,
Its nuts need oil, carbon chokes the valves,
The excess sugar of a diabetic culture
Rotting the nerve of life and literature;
Therefore when we bring out the old tinsel and frills
To announce that Christ is born among the barbarous hills
I turn to you whom a morose routine
Saves from the mad vertigo of being what has been.
B. Analogue of me, you are wrong to turn to me,
My country will not yield you any sanctuary,
There is no pinpoint in any of the ordnance maps
To save you when your towns and town-bred thoughts collapse,
It is better to die in situ as I shall,
One place is as bad as another. Go back where your instincts call
And listen to the crying of the town-cats and the taxis again,
Or wind your gramophone and eavesdrop on great men.
A. Jazz-weary of years of drums and Hawaiian guitar,
Pivoting on the parquet I seem to have moved far
From bombs and mud and gas, have stuttered on my feet
Clinched to the streamlined and butter-smooth trulls of the élite,
The lights irritating and gyrating and rotating in gauze –
Pomade-dazzle, a slick beauty of gewgaws –
I who was Harlequin in the childhood of the century,
Posed by Picasso beside an endless opaque sea,
Have seen myself sifted and splintered in broken facets,
Tentative pencillings, endless liabilities, no assets,
Abstractions scalpelled with a palette-knife
Without reference to this particular life.
And so it has gone on; I have not been allowed to be.
Myself in flesh or face, but abstracting and dissecting me
They have made of me pure form, a symbol or a pastiche,
Stylised profile, anything but soul and flesh:
And that is why I turn this jaded music on
To forswear thought and become an automaton.
B. There are in the country also of whom I am afraid –
Men who put beer into a belly that is dead,
Women in the forties with terrier and setter who whistle and swank
Over down and plough and Roman road and daisied bank,
Half-conscious that these barriers over which they stride
Are nothing to the barbed wire that has grown round their pride.
A. And two there are, as I drive in the city, who suddenly perturb –
The one sirening me to draw up by the kerb
The other, as I lean back, my right leg stretched creating speed,
Making me catch and stamp, the brakes shrieking, pull up dead:
She wears silk stockings taunting the winter wind,
He carries a white stick to mark that he is blind.
B. In the country they are still hunting, in the heavy shires
Greyness is on the fields and sunset like a line of pyres
Of barbarous heroes smoulders through the ancient air
Hazed with factory dust and, orange opposite, the moon’s glare,
Goggling yokel-stubborn through the iron trees,
Jeers at the end of us, our bland ancestral ease;
We shall go down like palaeolithic man
Before some new Ice Age or Genghiz Khan.
A. It is time for some new coinage, people have got so old,
Hacked and handled and shiny from pocketing they have made bold
To think that each is himself through these accidents, being blind
To the fact that they are merely the counters of an unknown Mind.
B. A Mind that does not think, if such a thing can be,
Mechanical Reason, capricious Identity.
That I could be able to face this domination nor flinch –
A. The tin toys of the hawker move on the pavement inch by inch
Not knowing that they are wound up; it is better to be so
Than to be, like us, wound up and while running down to know –
B. But everywhere the pretence of individuality recurs –
A. Old faces frosted with powder and choked in furs.
B. The jutlipped farmer gazing over the humpbacked wall.
A. The commercial traveller joking in the urinal.
B. I think things draw to an end, the soil is stale.
A. And over-elaboration will nothing now avail,
The street is up again, gas, electricity or drains,
Ever-changing conveniences, nothing comfortable remains
Un-improved, as flagging Rome improved villa and sewer
(A sound-proof library and a stable temperature).
Our street is up, red lights sullenly mark
The long trench of pipes, iron guts in the dark,
And not till the Goths again come swarming down the hill
Will cease the clangour of the pneumatic drill.
But yet there is beauty narcotic and deciduous
In this vast organism grown out of us:
On all the traffic-islands stand white globes like moons,
The city’s haze is clouded amber that purrs and croons,
And tilting by the noble curve bus after tall bus comes
With an osculation of yellow light, with a glory like chrysanthemums.
B. The country gentry cannot change, they will die in their shoes
From angry circumstance and moral self-abuse,
Dying with a paltry fizzle they will prove their lives to be
An ever-diluted drug, a spiritual tautology.
They cannot live once their idols are turned out,
None of them can endure, for how could they, possibly, without
The flotsam of private property, pekinese and polyanthus,
The good things which in the end turn to poison and pus,
Without the bandy chairs and the sugar in the silver tongs
And the inter-ripple and resonance of years of dinner-gongs?
Or if they could find no more that cumulative proof
In the rain dripping off the conservatory roof?
What will happen when the only sanction the country-dweller has –
A. What will happen to us, planked and panelled with jazz?
Who go to the theatre where a black man dances like an eel,
Where pink thighs flash like the spokes of a wheel, where we feel
That we know in advance all the jogtrot and the cake-walk jokes,
All the bumfun and the gags of the comedians in boaters and toques,
All the tricks of the virtuosos who invert the usual –
B. What will happen to us when the State takes down the manor wall,
When there is no more private shooting or fishing, when the trees are all cut down,
When faces are all dials and cannot smile or frown –
A. What will happen when the sniggering machine-guns in the hands of the young men
Are trained on every flat and club and beauty parlour and Father’s den?
What will happen when our civilisation like a long pent balloon –
B. What will happen will happen; the whore and the buffoon
Will come off best; no dreamers, they cannot lose their dream
And are at least likely to be reinstated in the new régime.
But one thing is not likely –
A. Do not gloat over yourself,
Do not be your own vulture; high on some mountain shelf
Huddle the pitiless abstractions bald about the neck
Who will descend when you crumple in the plains a wreck.
Over the randy of the theatre and cinema I hear songs
Unlike anything –
B. The lady of the house poises the silver tongs
And picks a lump of sugar, ‘ne plus ultra’ she says
‘I cannot do otherwise, even to prolong my days’ –
A. I cannot do otherwise either, tonight I will book my seat –
B. I will walk about the farm-yard which is replete
As with the smell of dung so with memories –
A. I will gorge myself to satiety with the oddities
Of every artiste, official or amateur,
Who has pleased me in my rôle of hero-worshipper
Who has pleased me in my rôle of individual man –
B, Let us lie once more, say ‘What we think, we can’
The old idealist lie –
A. And for me before I die
Let me go the round of the garish glare –
B. And on the bare and high
Places of England, the Wiltshire Downs and the Long Mynd
Let the balls of my feet bounce on the turf, my face burn in the wind
My eyelashes stinging in the wind, and the sheep like grey stones
Humble my human pretensions –
A. Let the saxophones and the xylophones
And the cult of every technical excellence, the miles of canvas in the galleries
And the canvas of the rich man’s yacht snapping and tacking on the seas
And the perfection of a grilled steak –
B. Let all these so ephemeral things
Be somehow permanent like the swallow’s tangent wings:
Goodbye to you, this day remember is Christmas, this morn
They say, interpret it your own way, Christ is born.
I was earlier today rereading some of Auden’s “For the Time Being” and the MacNeice piece sounds rather notably Audenesque, which is of course unfair since the two of them were the same age and had gone to school together and occasionally worked together and thus perhaps should each have equal claim to the style in which they both may have expressed themselves. Yet I doubt anyone reads Auden and thinks him MacNeicesque? And MacNeice’s status as the son of a bishop may have impaired his ability to express himself as clearly on topics adjacent to the Christ Child. Although here’s a nice shorter poem of his that is “seasonal” in a seemingly merely secular (or is it?) winter-weather kind of way:
The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.
World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.
And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes–
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of your hands–
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.
an interview with the great judith wachs of The Voice of the Turtle.
A thousand Christmas trees I didn’t know I had!
……………………………………………………………..
Too bad I couldn’t lay one in a letter.
I can’t help wishing I could send you one,
In wishing you herewith a Merry Christmas.
Merry Christmas and Good Cheer to all!
And MacNeice’s status as the son of a bishop may have impaired his ability to express himself as clearly on topics adjacent to the Christ Child.
Well, he was an atheist …
There is a truly dark streak in MacNeice which appeals to me on some days. (It’s evident in the Eclogue, one of my favourite specifically Christmas-related poems.)
Auden doesn’t have that. (He does like to make your flesh creep on occasion, but that’s not the same thing at all.)
Merry Christmas to all and to sundry especially!
Oh god dammit. I had the Messiah running in my head but now my literal Christmas earworm is “there’s a new sound, it comes from underground…”
Hat gave warning and I should’ve known better than to click.
s/b “it’s deep down in the ground”.
If you need to clear your head of the earworm, Burello wrote some other songs, for anti-opera singer Leona Anderson. “Rats in My Room” is grand. Play it when your holiday visitors need to be gently urged back home.
For that purpose, put on Can’s Tago Mago, or John Cale’s Sun Blindness Music, or Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music.
ulr: if the host(ess) puts on Metal Machine Music, not only do I not feel compelled to leave, I sink back into the couch and suggest that another bottle of wine be opened and another glass be poured for me because we’re all clearly here for the duration. But I may be idiosyncratic.
(Here at our house where everyone has had perhaps a bit too much to eat, my wife is now reading a battered paperback copy of Agatha Christie’s _The Pale Horse_ for the nth time despite having received as a gift this morning that hot new Алекса́ндр Фоми́ч Ве́льтман translation touted at the Hattery.)
i’m with JWB on this one!
(i did not go this year to Holly Jolly Sabbath, in which, on the sunday before christmas, the faithful gather in a black-draped room with a christmas tree hanging upside down from the ceiling and listen to the first four black sabbath albums on vinyl, in order, quite loudly. it’s one of the best solstice rituals i’ve met.)
Many images like this can be found to have classical Chinese antecedents, but wormsong seems purely Japanese.
The words of his teacher Rujing (1163–1228; in Japanese, Nyojō) that Dōgen quotes are in Chinese. Rujing was Chinese and never visited Japan. Adapting the translation in the book that was linked to in Hat’s post:
(‘Entanglements!’ (葛藤) more literally ‘tangled vines’ (‘kudzu and wisteria’).)
Much much earlier, from Han Yu (768–824), Tang dynasty scholar and poet and also opponent of Buddhism:
Roughly:
The drums indicating the closing of the city gates for the night, that is.
The quatrain is in the common qījué form with regular patterning of Middle Chinese 平 píng ‘level’ and 仄 zè ‘oblique’ (rising, departing, and entering) tones. Since the other images in the poem are highly conventional motifs—the light evening rain; the scholar-poet fishing in contemplation away from society; the drums that indicate the closing of the city gates and by extension the regulation of daily life and constraints of society—I should think that the sound of the earthworm had already long been a conventional motif by Han Yu’s time as well. Maybe other LH readers can find earlier instances.
As for music to shut down a party, I agree with JWB and rozele about MMM, but I would guess that it might send some people out the door, especially if played at the proper volume. But Tago Mago??? That seems like classic party-starting music to me, and I’ve heard it at more than a few parties. Would that really push some people to leave?
Mark E. Smith somewhere remembered how he used to put on Tago Mago to “clear the dancing floor” at parties when he was a teenager. I come from the same time, and I can confirm that that would have been the effect at any party I went to.
Tago Mago??? That seems like classic party-starting music to me, …
It appears [I didn’t know either] there are two (at least) musics with the name
* Illa de Tagomago is an exclusive resort off Ibiza.
* In the party-starting category, is yer typical rum-laden pirate-schooner lambada style Dança Tago Mago.
But nobody round here would be meaning something so low-brow, so it must be
* the second studio album by the German krautrock band Can, originally released as a double LP in August 1971 on United Artists Records.
I’d rather dance to Stockhausen, thank you.
ulr –
Huh, that’s strange to me. I’m from a later time, and am talking about parties over the past 30 years or so, where it did not at all have that effect.
Ant C –
This is the record by Can. Two members of Can were students of Stockhausen, so I guess it’s not that far off
C̤a̤n̤–T̤a̤g̤o̤ ̤M̤a̤g̤o̤ ̤1̤9̤7̤1̤ Full Album, if anyone wants to try the effect. Me, I like it, but I’ve always liked Can.
I mean, I love Captain Beefheart, and Trout Mask Replica is presumably even more effective at clearing out parties.
Agreed on both counts about Trout Mask Replica.
Having just come from another post, I wondered if Trout Mask Replica was an English village.
In the Cotswolds, innit? Not far from Chipping Sodbury?
On the way to visit my sister in darkest Lloegr, I usually pass through a village called Old Sodbury. I’ve often wondered who the eponymous founder, Old Sod, may have been.