I know it was not a dream, anymore than life is

Just as we exit 2019 I have a little something to add. 

In connection with the previous post Dreamed lake? Dreamed river?, we now have a live recording of Ve'ulai to listen to. In the unexplained absence of the recording engineer, my friends in Canaria had to make a homemade recording. Not the best sound, but a lot better than a computer demo. The performance itself is expressive, tasteful and lovingly prepared. Thank you, Canarias!

Faraway cats, home cats

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In my remote location – a temporary one, I hasten to add – I find myself, as I did during my recent stint in Fenham, in frequent interaction with the local feline population. In this town cats lurk in unexpected places, and it is almost always they who are sitting there in the place I come to, looking bored or vexed, as if the wait had been long and as if it had been my fault for taking so long.

Last night there were three sitting atop a wall and one down on the pavement. As I approached the spot, one jumped down from the wall. Naturally I could do no less than bend down and stroke him. Before I knew, all four were around me. The only touchy-feely one was the one I was stroking, a tabby who purred and walked around my leg like a self-appointed spokescat for the rest. The others hovered, not looking at me but making it clear that this was our meeting.

Eventually I had to move on. But the cats would have none of it. The spokescat got between my legs with such persistence that once he got himself kicked by one of my walking steps. All four were coming with me, some in front, some alongside. This was flattering, but also worrying, all the more so as I approached an avenue with heavy traffic. How was I going to stop them crossing with me?

Fortunately I had been flattering myself. They were only keeping me company as far as their own place. The last building before the corner was some kind of workshop or disused car park. It had a metal gate, quite solid, but with a gap underneath, high enough for cats to pass. One by one my four companions went under the gate and out of sight. Quite a relief.

This calls to mind another memorable interaction I experienced with a cohort of four cats. It was on the eve of the trip to Romania for my honorary doctorate, in May 2018; K was away for work. I had dropped the children off at the house of a relative who was to look after them for a day or two. For one night I found myself in the unusual situation of being alone in the riverside enclave.

The four surviving cats – Tiger had passed away five months earlier – were no fools. they knew something was afoot. I was not aware of any of them seeing me pack a suitcase, but somehow they had caught wind of what was happening. They had more water and more prey to hunt than they could wish for, and the hunting skills of seasoned predators. But that didn’t mean they liked the prospect of being left without human company.

When, late at night, the time came for the Bouvier’s last walk – I was due to drop him at kennels in the morning, on my way to the airport – an eerie sight greeted me outside: the moon was out and the four cats were assembled, sitting in quite solemn postures, all looking at me intently. They cut four totemic figures, casting long shadows on the grass. I don’t remember them being particularly upset – they did know how to express concern when they wanted to. They seemed, how can I put it, serenely reproachful. Disappointed, even. And, not meaning to shed retrospective light from later events, I think the cats were showing me an awareness of the fragility of life. We were the closest of friends, yet there we were, about to say goodbye for an unspecified time. Cats have no watch and no calendar, and a detailed explanation from me as to K’s imminent return would have meant little to them. For them, regardless of any wordy explanations, an unwonted absence was a threat; something that should not be happening.  

Dreamed lake? Dreamed river?

And here is the famous Ve’ulai.

It is a poem written by Rachel (1890-1931).

Also known as Rachel Blaustein, or Rachel Bluwstein, Rachel is often referred to as the national poet of Israel, even though she was born in Russia and technically she never set foot in Israel, since, although she emigrated to Palestine, she died there well before Israel’s foundation in 1948.

She wrote her early works in Russian. She grew up speaking Yiddish. The works of her maturity – if one can use this word about somebody who died at forty – are in Hebrew. She knew hardship, rejection and illness.

Rachel’s poetry records the life of hard work and idealism of the early Zionists in Palestine. It also deals with her own sense of displacement, loss and unfulfilled dreams. Although she deals with some of the deepest questions of life and death, those who know her and her language tell us that she uses simple, conversational Hebrew.

Lake Kinneret – the Sea of Galilee – features recurrently in Rachel’s work. She loved it. She asked to be buried near it – in a poem, as a matter of fact: If fate decrees. Upon her death, her friends and followers complied with her wishes.

I discovered Rachel before I turned twenty and fell in love with her poetry, first in Spanish translations. I set three of her poems for choir in 1976.

Why am I saying all this here and not, for example, in my composer’s blog? Read on.

I have been keenly aware of Rachel and her work lately. Some aspects of her life make her a sympathetic companion to think of. In particular, Rachel’s best-known poem, Ve’ulai, has been haunting me in the context of thinking about my much longed-for Redesdale home.

Although I have not been assiduous, I have written a fair amount in this blog about life by the Rede. Rachel uses many fewer words, but she expresses better the kind of feeling I have struggled to convey.

Ve’ulai is not one of the poems I set in 1976; that would have been redundant, since there was already a beautiful setting of it by Yehuda Sharet. I wrote an arrangement of Sharet's song in 1983 and a reconstruction of that arrangement this year – just completed. Another humble homage to Rachel, and another way to say “I love you” to the place and the people I think of so obsessively.

In more than one way, the land of my memories and dreams has rejected me. Even though recent developments would suggest that I may not be setting foot on that blessed place again, I find that impossible to accept.

There is no guessing how things will stand by the time I die. In any case – since I am, almost literally, borrowing a leaf out of Rachel's book – I want to say that, "if fate decrees" that I should stay away, when I die I would like to be cremated and for my ashes to be scattered into the river Rede. Ideally from the spot of the riverside fires of yore, by the rock where my children sat and played. 

If the house's occupants at that time object, then from the Rede Bridge, which is a public place. 

I will leave no tangible trace that may inconvenience anybody. I will pass, like the river. But first I will have returned, even if only for an instant. The prospect of that eventual return will reassure me, for the remainder of my days on this world, that all that life, all that love and all that work by the Rede were not just a dream. 

Or, as Rachel puts it:

If fate decrees
that I should live far from your space
- I shall return, Kinneret, 
to lie in your resting place!

Ve'ulai (And Maybe) 
a poem by Rachel

And maybe these things never happened?

And maybe I never rose at dawn to the garden

to work it by the sweat of my brow?

And never on long and blazing days of harvest

atop a cart full of sheaves

did I raise my voice in song?

Did I never cleanse myself in the calm azure

and innocence of my Kinneret?

Oh my Kinneret! Did you exist?

Or did I dream a dream?

Last Sunday of August

Gorgeous, bright, sunny morning. Tomorrow’s bank holiday adds an extra luxuriance to the sense of here and now. The future can wait; the present is here.  

A tone-poem of colour is playing outside, with clear pre-echoes of autumn. The birds sing their part in this anthem of celebration with only a hint of elegy for the departing summer. The morning air, still crisp, heralds the warmth of the day with the safe certainty that noon will follow morn. The river, not at its quietest but well down from its recent disquiet, plays its gentler counterpoint of stony, light-reflecting, life-giving melody.  Even the old dog, resigned to his duty to walk, looks, smells and listens with curiosity at this miraculous symphony of the season.

“Daddy, may I come with you?” – “Only if you let us listen to the sounds of nature”. My free hand receives and holds the trusting, warm, comradely hand of the angel of my days. Behind us, there may be a pair of eyes sending us off with approval.