When I first wrote the story for this photograph, it didn’t have the question mark. It was simply a fairy-tale ending, “So they lived happily ever after.” Yet I couldn’t escape the troublesome feeling that in fact the story was one of great desolation and this innocuous, almost playful-looking brick was atop a pile of devastation. I had this vision of the brick sitting out in the rain, season after season.
It occured to me to punctuate the story with a question mark, and suddenly the whole six-word story came into focus. A tragedy had happened, and there was a question over the fate of all involved.
In writing all the stories for the calendar, I made a deliberate choice not to ask Steve about the background to the photographs. I wanted to see what would happen if I wrote entirely from intuition. The synchronicities that came about were quite astonishing, not least in this photograph. It turns out while bushwalking in country Victoria, Steve had chanced across the remains of a house lost to a bushfire. A brick survived, but it was sitting on charcoal and burnt debris of what must have been a wall.
When it came time to write the music, what stayed with me was the rain – the brick and the charred remains sitting in a rain that came too late. And it made me think of all the great stories of rain and tragedy, such James Joyce’s masterpiece The Dead. At the end of a party, Gabriel Conroy notices his wife Gretta listening emotionally to a tenor sing an Irish folk song. Later he finds out she used to hear this song sung by a sick young man named Michael Furey who loved her. On the night before she was to leave her home for the convent, she didn’t go see him. So Michael Furey, though sick, walked through the heavy winter rain just to say goodbye. Later at the convent she learned that he died. She’s carried her guilt ever since.
The folk song was The Lass of Aughrim. It’s far from well-known. I have yet to meet an Irish person who knows it. I’ve found that anyone at all familiar with it knows it by a James Joyce connection, either from the original novella or the 1987 movie that was made from it. In the movie, the great Irish tenor Frank Patterson sings a version of the tune and it’s that beautiful variant I’ve used here. A lord has seduced a young woman and she gives birth to his child. She carries the baby through the rain to see him, but he won’t let her in.
There’s a slightly glib saying that goes like this: “Everything will be all right in the end. If it’s not all right, it’s not the end.” And there’s a more profound one that says “The only difference between comedy and tragedy is where you end the story.” When I read sad stories – and when I write them – I know that in the end, life is simply a collection of experiences. I have the same love for sad stories as I do for happy stories. They all deepen the experience of life. And if there’s one simple goal to have in life, it’s to deepen the experience of it.
This tune is one of the most beautiful I have ever known. I felt my job here was akin to that of a gemsmith’s, to create a setting for an exquisite precious stone. I’ve given it a flowing, rippling texture, delicately balancing the inherent douleur with a belief that there is a serene ending we have yet to know.
Two verses relevant to the story I told above from The Lass of Aughrim are here:
The rain falls on my heavy locks
And the dew it wets my skin;
My babe lies cold within my arms:
Lord Gregory let me in.
Oh Gregory, don’t you remember
One night on the hill,
When we swapped rings off each other’s hands,
Sorely [variant: surely] against my will?
And this is James Joyce’s beautiful closing passage from The Dead, where the rain motif gives way to snow.
“It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
