Browsing through the BBC documentary on Irish music, Folk Hibernia, as the ills of the week wear off, it occurs to me that a writer is a bit like a folk musician. I don't doubt that the spread of music and writing aren't related, sharing the same pathways, as it were. It's like picking up a traditional music in your hands, then watching someone play it, then giving it a go yourself. And surprisingly (or not) enough, you can play something that sings to you, such that you'd think that the music is already living in the vessel of the instrument, that you just have to let it out.

And indeed, one might relate his career as a writer to other people through music. He could tell you of a kid laid out in bed on a Friday evening, not wanting to get up and meet his mom at the local church turned into an art center where Vincent, an Irishman, was playing music, a kid raised on Irish music, a kid taken with The Pogues from their first American tour. He was very bummed out, feeling down. And missing things that are like possible paths in life, just make you more bummed out. The thing is, intelligent people do very dumb things, stubborn pigheaded things, mistaken things, often where romance is involved. And perhaps the story of writing is the story of error. To err is human, to forgive divine, it is written. In writing we consider all our mistakes, perhaps somewhat pathetically, perhaps somewhat cathartically, perhaps simply to rattle on because we have nothing better to do, but so focussed in a way that the end product ends up being something that, well, resembles literature. (The economic-minded would, at least jokingly, view the whole project as a tale that could be told in one sentence and left at that, 'oh well, it didn't work out,' so that time could be spend more directly and more valuably.)

But what the kid, sad about some pretty girl harsh whatever and his own clumsy mistakes of disappointing her when the door was open to him, doesn't realize is that he has a friend, and that as he lies there quite helplessly, making his mother sad and angry with him, there is within him some strange Quixotic force that will pick him up out of the dust of being beaten and pick up a pen and write, and that though that writing has nothing much to do the world of economies and usefulness, that he in his silence will come up with folk music. And one does hope that the force will pick him up, or otherwise he would be even more completely useless. At least there will be some rude culture to him, maybe obvious, maybe disorganized, maybe somewhat poignant, maybe somewhat lyrical. Even if that is all he has, all he has to show.

And so an Uilleann pipe and a simple stringed instrument or two play, along with a simple hide over wood drum, play somewhere in the kid's imagination, and he doesn't have to go off and do the usual 'people pleasing' thing that befalls some temperaments some particular evening, and he turns away from the phone and the usual distractions and he looks inside himself and sees what he has. There, down there, like something within a little pot hidden inside him, like a baby animal or bird he has fed and protected and kept warm, over sentiment, and sentimentality not always being our best friend so it seems, is a bit of something.

We all make mistakes. Maybe the more intelligent, the more or the bigger the ones we make, the more they betray fondly held hopes when considered by the clashes of egos that is real life, the bartering, the selling, the lifting up, the pushing down, the attention, the neglect, the respect, the disrespect and all egoish things that we are taken by, even though, even as, we know differently, that in true things we leave the ego behind. We stick to what little true there is within us. And hopefully by fanning the small flames fragile in breezes and the sogginess of real life, that flame stays alive and grows to keep us warm when the world is cold and slow even though the clock ticks fast.

Cursed just so, a kid picks up his instrument, as if that was all that had been left for him in a great fire. And that is human. Softly, he sings to himself, "'Oh, Kitty, my darling, remember, that the doom will be mine if I stay. 'Tis far better to part, though it's hard to, then to rot in their prison away.'"

Why should folk music have a certain shape? Rebellious, free spirited, spiritually honest about things like being a prodigal son and doing dumb things, often about love. Did we get these songs back when we were fish in the sea, fowls of the air, and they kept with us? Maybe they serve us by keeping us from going mad, even though a shrewd doctor would tell us we're being unhealthily obsessive. Just about every creature, snakes, cats, birds, monkeys, elephants, whales, dolphins certainly, seems to sing at one point or another.

The world tells us we have choices to make, decisions to do, and here we are sawing away on fiddles over ancient airs. How typical of us. But, maybe, just maybe, by doing so we reach toward the truest form of expression there is, beyond all the messed up acts.

There is a natural focus on music. It's just a matter of what form it takes, and maybe finding the forgiveness for such within ourselves.

Jesus, how could one possibly inventory all his mistakes? It seems one cannot avoid them, stuck to live them all out one by one in this dimension of time and space. So absolutely thorough and pervasive are one's mistakes, one cannot help but posit that somewhere there must be, must be, a vast sea of forgiveness and charity utterly huge and deep and kind enough to pardon all us devils for all our acts, so that rather than being frozen up by them we live on as examples for innocent children of the sanctity of forgiving and learn to forgive ourselves, as if life were little more than a matter of that.

And so it hurts to be alive, and like the crucifix we do indeed feel certain pains from time to time like splintery rough burdens on back and shoulder, a dull ache of the palm, a chagrin in the silent jaw, the pain of sight of all before us and for what is absent.

Ah, but cheer up. You only make mistakes out of love. Thus the deeper beauty of Yeats' poem about the Irish rebels of Easter 1916, for they were simply expressing human nature. It starts so beautifully. "I have met them at close of day/ Coming with vivid faces/ From counter or desk among grey/ Eighteenth Century houses." So gentle. "Hearts with one purpose alone/ Through winter and summer/ Enchanted to a stone/ To trouble the living stream."

And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse--
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

The poem is called Easter 1916, and it was written that year. Yeats, of course, was steeped in folk tale and folk culture. The juxtaposition of actual men, actual names, of regular people like you and I, with the eternal, is kind of nice. Kind of hopeful.

In this world, one can't live down his mistakes. He is stuck to them, a flawed person playing music.