There Are No Words

Halifax Explosion, 1917

If Pat will permit me this brief interruption in his week on “Cold Rain and Snow,” I thought it worth taking note of the day, September 11, and how it relates to our ongoing discussion.  Apologies for non-American readers that I’m a bit late in the day.  As always, this post will be as much as possible about the music.

One of the conversations that led to us starting this blog was a discussion about why there was very little cultural or artistic production around the Halifax Explosion of 1917.  The explosion was and is the largest artificial explosion, and the largest non-nuclear explosion, in history.  It led to a tremendous loss of life and thousands and thousands of injuries.  Five years earlier, the Titanic had sunk, leading to the loss of a great many lives.  By contrast with the Halifax Explosion, the disaster of the Titanic led to an enormous amount of cultural and artistic production.  

This led me to think a bit about how people process these sorts of events and attempt to find meaning through music in tragic circumstances–and why there would be such differences between these two events.  Obviously, with the Titanic there were issues of hubris, race, class, and romance, and these were largely not present with the Halifax Explosion.  Also, the Titanic involved a transatlantic voyage between two of the world’s great powers, so there was a great deal more attention paid to it than was paid to the events in a Canadian maritime capital city.  Also, in the latter case, there was a war on (which was a factor in the explosion itself), so in the context of loss of life in France and elsewhere; it was a war story, unexpected and unbelievably horrible, but a war story.  So, several relevant differences.

Aftermath of the Halifax Explosion

But the thing that makes me think that the Halifax was less amenable to processing by music is the sheer enormity and immediacy of the loss–close to 2,000 lives lost more or less in an instant.  Estimates are that some victims experienced in the blast a temperature equivalent to standing on the surface of the sun.  In the face of this, there are simply no words.

This phrase, “There are no words,” was essentially lent to me, however, by folk singer Kitty Donohoe, who used them as a title and a theme for the song that she wrote about September 11, 2001.  I was first introduced to the song through Sing Out! magazine, which featured her work in its January 2002 issue (the first to go to press after the September 11 attacks) and its accompanying CD.  Their article quotes Donohoe:

Kitty Donohoe is a songwriter and singer based in the Ann Arbor, Michigan are. She writes: “In the days following the September 11th attacks, like many other songwriters around the country, I found myself writing a song about the horrible events that shook the nation on September 11th. I had no particular agenda in writing the song, I just kept thinking “I’m a songwriter, I should write something” … then my next thought was always “there are no words or song that could possibly address this horrific thing,” and those words eventually became the song itself.

Here is the song, as performed at the dedication of the Pentagon Memorial to the victims of the attacks.




You can download the song and view other clips and the lyrics at a page on Donohoe’s web site dedicated to the song.  You can also listen to the song on Spotify.

“There Are No Words” by Kitty Donohoe (Spotify)

The context of the 2008 Pentagon Memorial service certainly lends an additional layer of somber pathos to the performance of the song.  I don’t know if it’s worthwhile to engage in any kind of extended analysis of the song itself, as in some respects my memory of that day has me bought in to the song’s central premise–that there are no words.

…At least initially.  I do think that time creates the capacity to get creative purchase on these matters, and some times it’s easier to create these songs as history than as news.

The thing that is worth mentioning, however, relative to the artistic process is that the performance above represent Donohoe’s bowdlerization (after a fashion) of her own lyrics.  The Sing Out! recording, which I believe represents one of Donohoe’s first recordings of the song makes a crucial substitution in the song’s refrain.

In the version above, you hear her sing “Is there a balm that can heal these wounds that can last a lifetime long?”  What preceded this rhetorical question in the earlier version, however, is the statement, bereft as it is, that “There is no balm that can heal these wounds…”  (I believe that I heard a subsequent cover of the song that went “There is no earthly balm…”)  In all honesty, I have to say that I prefer the first version, which leaves us without consolation, as the most faithful to the experience of that day.  Whether or not the phrase is true over the long term, there is something about it that is essentially true to that moment, and probably worth remembering.