Welcome to Letters from Quotidia, 2024 Episode 8, the July edition. Quotidia, for those who may not know it, is that space, that place, where ordinary people lead ordinary lives. But where, from time to time, they encounter the extraordinary. The tides and currents of the sea wash through this post and it is fitting that we begin with a poem to set the scene,

The sea is calm tonight./The tide is full, the moon lies fair/Upon the straits; on the French coast, the light/Gleams-and-is-gone;-the-cliffs-of-England-stand,/Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay./Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!/Only, from the long line of spray/Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,//Listen! you hear the grating roar/Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,/At their return, up the high strand,/Begin, and cease, and then again begin,/With tremulous cadence slow, and bring/The eternal note of sadness in.//Sophocles long ago/Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought/Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow/Of human misery; we/Find also in the sound a thought,/Hearing it by this distant northern sea.//The Sea of Faith/Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore/Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled./But now I only hear/Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,/Retreating, to the breath/Of the night-wind,-down-the-vast-edges-drear/ And naked shingles of the world.//Ah, love, let us be true/To one another! for the world, which seems/To lie before us like a land of dreams,/So various, so beautiful, so new,/Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,/Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;/And we are here as on a darkling plain/Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,/Where ignorant armies clash by night.//

Dover Beach, written by Matthew Arnold in 1851 is still relevant 173 years later. The first song of this post was written by Michael Peter Smith born September 7, 1941, and who died on August 3, 2020. He was an American, Chicago-based singer-songwriter. According to Wikipedia Rolling Stone once called him the greatest songwriter in the English language.

Mark Guarino of the Chicago Reader wrote, He never became a household name the way John Prine and Steve Goodman did, but his lengthy discography is just as mighty. He sang and composed from the 1960s, and his rich and challenging songs have been recorded by more than 30 performers. Apparently, he had not visited the Netherlands when he wrote The Dutchman! As a thirty-something-year-old,

I remember accompanying a singer in the early 1980s who loved the song. I didn’t at the time, mourning my lost twenties and not caring a whit about life’s sunset moments. Now…yeah, now, I care more about these moments! I reckon a test of the prowess of AI would be to see if it could write something as truly human as this wonderful song about unconditional love, written by Smith in 1968 aged only 27. Here is my version. [insert song]

The next song of the sea is located in the cold waters of the North Atlantic which wash the storm-lashed islands off the west coasts of Ireland, Scotland, and also the distant Faroe Islands. From these depths arise tales of the Selkies; shapeshifters who live as seals in the water and take human form, male and female, on the land.

Wikipedia informs me that Selkies have a dual nature: they can be friendly and helpful to humans, but they can also be dangerous and vengeful. Selkies are often depicted as attractive and seductive in human form, and many stories involve selkies having romantic or sexual relationships with humans, sometimes resulting in children. Selkies can also be coerced or tricked into marrying humans, usually by someone who steals and hides their seal skin, preventing them from returning to the sea. Such marriages are often unhappy, as the selkie always longs for the sea and may eventually escape if they find their skin.

I based the text of my Song of the Selkie on The Great Selkie of Sule Skerry, a folk song of the Orkney Islands, where a woman has her son taken away by the Great Selkie. The woman is fated to marry a gunner who will harpoon the Great Selkie and her son.

The incomparable Joan Baez recorded a version of this song titled Silkie at age 20 in 1961. In 2024, she has tour dates scheduled for Australia! Incomparable, as I said. My treatment of this old folk tale details how the selkie in his underwater world, feels the pull of the woman on the shore. They share a child, and she explains his long absences as a consequence of his distant seafaring. Finally, he leaves taking his son to the cold sea where, as he foretells, fate will deliver them to her future husband’s harpoon.

Is a textual reworking of an old tale really an original composition? Not for me to decide. Here, now, is the result of several hours hammering away at the smithy of my imagination. As Theodore Roosevelt stated at the end of the last post, I’m one of those whose face is marred by metaphorical dust and sweat and blood in a worthy cause, who doesn’t know if the effort will end in triumph or failure but who undertakes the venture rather than acquiesce to a cold and timid existence.[insert song]

Two presentations of love, the first wholly human, the last part-human, part other-worldly. In my youth, beguiled by whimsical notions of the dark Romantic imagination, I would have chosen the eldritch Selkie tale; now, unquestionably, I would choose the quotidian world of Margaret and the Dutchman she loves.

The Dutchman words and lyrics Michael Peter Smith

  C

The Dutchman’s not the kind of man

to keep his thumb jammed in the dam

     Dm                   G

That holds his dreams in,

                              C

But that’s a secret that only Margaret knows.

C

When Amsterdam is golden in the morning

                               Dm

Margaret brings him breakfast,

                    G

She believes him.  

G                          C

He thinks the tulips bloom beneath the snow.

            Dm             G             C         C G C Am

He’s mad as he can be, but Margaret only sees that sometimes,

          Dm                  G               C

Sometimes she sees her unborn children in his eyes. 

       Dm        G            C      G  Am

Let us go to the banks of the ocean

          Dm         G                C    G  Am

Where the walls rise above the Zuider Zee.

     Dm     G            C          G  Am

Long ago, I used to be a young man

         Dm       G                   C

And dear Margaret remembers that from me. (CHORUS In ITALICS)

C

The Dutchman still wears wooden shoes,

His cap and coat are patched with the love

     Dm

That Margaret sewed there.

G                                 C

Sometimes he thinks he’s still in Rotterdam.

   C

He watches the tug-boats down canals 

                                        Dm                   G

An’ calls out to them when he thinks he knows the Captain.

                               C

Till Margaret comes To take him home again

        Dm                       G                    C              G  Am

Through unforgiving streets that trip him, though she holds his arm,

             Dm          G                      C

Sometimes he thinks he’s alone and he calls her name.

(CHORUS)

        C

Ohh the windmills swirl the winter wind

She winds his muffler tighter

         Dm

they sit in the kitchen.

G                            C

And a tea with whiskey keeps away the dew.

He sees her for a moment, calls her name,

                             Dm                  G

She makes the bed up singing some old love song,

                                 C

She learned it when the tune was very new

          Dm                G                   C      G  Am

He hums a line or two, they hum together in the night.

             Dm               G                  C

The Dutchman falls asleep and Margaret blows the candle out.  

(CHORUS X2)

The Song of the Selkie (words and music Quentin Bega)

I feel the pull of your summons dragging me

up through the kelp forests to the shore

You hold my skin, and I cannot refuse

as now you run to meet me from the waves

 I hear you calling from that lonely windswept strand

                     You know I can’t for long abide the land

The Milky Way shone bright above your bed

                        on our love making our sweet child

The neighbours often ask where I am-

            faring far away at sea you say

How I long now for the touch of your warm caressing hand

                     For which desire I fear I must be damned

Now I must return and I must take my son

                        back to the blue-green depths of home

Your husband that-will-be will kill us both I see

if you ever use my skin to call us back

Yet I poor fool must rise with our son at your command

                      Our deaths only you will understand- Oh!

Credits: All written text, song lyrics and music (including background music) written and composed by Quentin Bega unless otherwise specified in the credits section after individual posts. Illustrative excerpts from other texts identified clearly within each podcast. I donate to and use Wikipedia frequently as one of the saner sources of information on the web.

Technical Stuff: Microphone-songs Shure SM58; (for the podcast spoken content) Audio Technica AT 2020 front-facing with pop filter); Apogee 76K also used for songs and spoken text. For recording and mixing down: 64-bit N-Track Studio 10 Extended used; Rubix 22 also used for mixing of microphone(s) and instruments. I use the Band in a Box/RealBand 2023 combo for music composition.