Thirty years ago I lived briefly in Latham, N.Y., north of Albany along the Mohawk River. The river there is serpentine and the city paved a walking path along its southern shore that smoothed out some of the curves. Every day I walked two miles along the asphalt trail, turned around and walked two miles back, usually early in the morning. I often saw egrets and herons. Once I saw a turtle laying her eggs in the ground a few feet from the water, and I always saw boats on the Mohawk, once a part of the Erie Canal system connecting the Hudson River and Lake Erie.
Near my
turn-around point was the town’s water treatment plant. One Sunday in summer I was
walking there at sunset when I heard a loud, harsh, crashing sound. In the
dimming light, between the plant and the path, stood a solitary man playing bagpipes, the sonic opposite of a bucolic soundtrack. He was middle-aged,
balding, with glasses and not wearing kilts. In appearance he reminded me of
Philip Larkin. I walked over, we shook hands and chatted. His wife wouldn’t let
him play in the house or even the backyard. The only nearby practice site he
could find that wouldn’t bother people was next to the water treatment plant, which emitted a faint scent of sewage. He could perform at the Capital District Scottish Games held every year in nearby Altamont but couldn’t practice at home.
He seemed an unlikely symbol of the scorned and misunderstood artist.
I remembered
that lone bagpiper while reading Maryann Corbett’s “Unexplained Bagpipes” from
her 2020 collection In Code: Poems
(Able Muse Press). It comes with this note: “After reading that white-supremacist marches are often led by pipers”:
“A skewer
through the ear,
it spits you
to the spot
until you
suss it out.
It’s
unexpected here:
“back
garden, mid-Midwest
midsummer,
-week, and -day.
Ripping the
aural chintz
of airborne
oldies airplay,
“it groans a
jaunty grind.
The kids
turn cartwheels, smitten.
The sound
itself has forgotten
the quarrel
it trawls around.
“Garish,
clownish, bizarre,
still blocks
away, it hauls
over your
ivied walls
the
rack-nerve rumor of war.
“Work now.
Gather the spent,
blood-spattered
peonies.
Daylilies
crowd the fence,
desperate.
Like refugees.”
3 comments:
A random literary thought:
Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) and Jane Austen (1775-1817) were born just four years apart - members of the same generation. Yet, they had opposite literary careers: Scott, in his time, was a famous and very prolific novelist whose novels were well known in his day. Austen, on the other hand, wrote only a small handful of novels and had a small success in her lifetime. Her first burst of major fame didn't occur until about half a century after her death.
Today, the two writers still have opposite literary careers, but in reverse. Austen's novels are beloved and read throughout the English-speaking world (and, no doubt, in translation, too). And they are rarely, if ever, out of print. With Scott, however, his novels are as dead as he is: all of them long out of print (as far as I know) and virtually unread. I don't think that "Ivanhoe" is required reading in high schools anymore. And there aren't any signs of a Scott revival. "Those creaky historical novels," I'm sure people think.
Funny how two writers of the same generation can have such completely opposite careers.
I read Ivanhoe a few years ago and enjoyed it thoroughly - an absolutely ripping yarn. Let people ignore the worthy things that surround them; it leaves more for me.
Sorry, Patrick, the bagpipe reference recalled two jokes from my mental database:
Why do bagpipers walk while they play?
They’re trying to get away from the sound.
A bagpiper leaves his bagpipes in the car and begins walking down the street. Suddenly, he remembers he left the window open. He rushes back but is too late. Someone has put another set of bagpipes in the car.
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