The Tragedy, Pablo Picasso

One of the things that I happily now spend less time explaining when I describe this blog to someone for the first time, is that our primary purpose is to discuss the creation of meaning through music, not to discuss murder.  That the music draws from depictions of violence and human extremity gives us ample room to explore and a particular angle to start with, but we have thus far, I think, avoided being drawn into the morose and the macabre.  

A close relative of mine recently expressed his concern that working with this content might ultimately induce depression, but my experience has been quite the opposite.  In a sense, what we’re documenting here is a process of finding life again in the artistic and musical response to tragedy, in some cases, and the stark fact of mortality in others.  Just as in the article we posted on our Facebook page a little while ago, we have good reason to think that this area of discussion actually inspires compassion and may be the kind of thinking that could be part of the secret to a long life.

Still, I did think twice before diving into “The Essex” as a musical tale to explore and discuss here, mostly because of the grimness of the story and the taboo-laden discussion of, or at least reflection on, cannibalism that it would require.  Believe it or not, we try to avoid saying “Hey, we’ve never done [insert horrific human behavior here], let’s try it.” The primary point is not to find new permutations of human hardship.

What is interesting to me, though, is the question of why and when people put such incredibly horrible stories to music.  As I discussed in our September 11 post this year, we have a huge contrast in musical and artistic response to such things as the Halifax Disaster and the sinking of the Titanic.  You could even contrast the Titanic and the Lusitania.  Some stories have elements that lend themselves to telling in this way, others do not.  Perhaps it’s the difference between tragedy and disaster.  The former tells us something about our values and the things we hold dear, and invites us to reflect on meaning; the latter relates merely a kind of uninformative devastation.

Consider, for instance, the fact that the sinking of the Essex and the return of its few survivors to the heart of 19th century maritime civilization happened twelve years after the killing of Omie Wise in North Carolina.  It preceded by more than 45 years the killing of Laura Foster, also in North Carolina, by Tom Dula.  Yet, in contrast to those isolated, relatively rural murders we have no evidence that there was any musical production around the Essex story at or soon after the time. 

In some ways, this is completely understandable, and we can attribute it to several factors.  One, within the community of Nantucket most familiar with the details of these events, its survivors were still present in their midst for decades after the event.  There were only victims in the story and no villains, and there was likely a certain measure of shame and haunted regret that these close neighbors had to endure.  Two, it’s completely understandable that a tale involving cannibalism, and the desperation that drove the men to it, would be something that people would want to avoid.  (For the record, I did take a quick check into the story of the Donner Party, and there appears to be a similar decorous silence.)  Finally, I think the contrast between stories like that of Omie Wise and Laura Foster, which made it into songs soon after the events they describe, and those like the Essex, which did not, derives from the fact that the story of the Essex for many listeners would have been much more about raw survival than any particular clash of goods, ideals, or hopes.

On the other hand, there was some literary production–a survivor’s tale written as a memoir, and eventually Melville’s Moby Dick.  The latter touches on the story only obliquely.  

It appears to be a century and a half or more before songwriters pick up the story.  Mountain’s “Nantucket Sleighride” from the early 1970s also does so obliquely.  You can not really tell from the song what became of the the crew or the full nature of the hardships they endured.  Michael Lewis’s “The Essex,” written in this century, does so quite directly.  Lewis’s artistic response to reading Philbrick’s account of the tragedy/disaster rings true to me, and I know of other artists who have written songs as a way to process the power of historical accounts they have read.

Lewis does an excellent job of mining the tragedy out of the disaster, particularly in evoking the contrast between the high adventure and ardent pursuit of the whale on the one hand, and the utter desolation and eventual desperation they feel when the great whale changes their fortunes for the worse in just a few moments.  That Lewis can do so without shying away from some of the grimmer episodes of the story is a significant achievement.

What emerges, I think, is an important recognition of both the fragility of human fortune and, ultimately, the drive for survival.  Along the way, whether we learn them through the explicit detail of of Philbrick’s book or the allusions made in Lewis’s song, there are details about the limitations of human judgment (sailing for South America and not the Marquesas), race and class (African American members of the crew were generally the first to die of malnutrition or dehydration), and the power of human compassion and the potential for self-sacrifice (Owen Coffin’s death).  It is this last piece that is particularly gripping and important–that the sailors draw lots to determine who will die for the others, and to determine who will take responsibility for killing the one who draws that short straw.  

I may have become somewhat inured to some of the horror within the song, through prior familiarity with the story, and now knowing the song as I do, but I think that there is power in Lewis’s explicit and vivid description of the emotional moments of this trial at sea.  He raises an interesting question in our interview with him of whether and how we can ever put ourselves in the boat with these men, and imagine whether we would make the same decisions.

The key thing in this song, as in some other stories I’ll discuss below, is that it is the artistic intervention, or at least the storytelling, that allows a disaster to become a tragedy.  Until we tell the story, it’s only disaster and devastation. As we’re discovering, this can be done through music right away, or sometimes it might take decades or centuries to get a proper distance from it.

As I mentioned in the first post this week, Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea reminded me of Into Thin Air, by Jon Krakauer, and Young Men and Fire, by Norman Maclean.  I don’t know of any musical retellings of the 1996 Mount Everest disaster narrated by Krakauer.  (If you know of any, please add them in the comments).  There is, however, a song tied to Maclean’s story.

Retrieving bodies in the aftermath of the Mann Gulch Fire

Maclean’s book, Young Men and Fire, is an explicit meditation on this very question.  How does disaster become tragedy?  Maclean works through this question by trying to understand the dynamics of the Mann Gulch Fire of 1949, a wilderness fire in which thirteen men (twelve of them parachuting fire-fighters, or smoke-jumpers) lost their lives.  In the attempt to escape the fire, the foreman, Wagner Dodge, spontaneously created an “escape fire,” in some respects an innovation at the time, that would have saved more lives, but his men were not trained to recognize what he was doing, and most died making for the top of a ridge.  In tall grass on a mountain, people go more slowly as the mountain gets steeper.  Fire goes more quickly.

Canadian singer-songwriter James Keelaghan evokes this story powerfully in “Cold Missouri Waters.”  We featured it on our Facebook page a few months ago.





Lyrics

The song became better known in the hands of the folk combo Cry, Cry, Cry, as sung by Richard Shindell.

Coda

Thanks for reading this week, and again special thanks to Michael Lewis for contributing his time and thoughts to our interview in the previous post.  Tom will take up the lead next week, and I’ll be back sometime before the end of November.