Today is a dull, damp day, clouds hanging low and a threat of rain that never quite materializes, a day when one wants nothing more than to run away into a world where there is no workaday, no tiresome dealing with bills, shopping, telemarketers--where there is love that lasts to the edge of the grave and beyond, a world of passion and ghosts and wild wind and weather that echoes like nature itself is yearning for an eternal lover.

Days like this I don't want a novel that confuses romance and sex (those do nicely when, as Miss A would say, Ms. PMS kicks in and the 'mones go haywire). Today I yearn for a romance of heart and spirit, of two people who can declare they ARE each other--

And I reach for WUTHERING HEIGHTS.

In Victorian England, where it was first published in 1847, Emily Bronte's only novel was considered "brutal, dogged, and morose." Her elder sister Charlotte, author of the initially more famous but less accomplished JANE EYRE, left a vivid word picture of a dying Emily chuckling at that description of her character. Part of the oddness stems from its setting, on the moors of West Yorkshire, among gentry and country folk more foreign to the sophisticates of London than another planet's citizens would be to us.

What Emily Bronte did manage to do, in spite of all criticism (including Charlotte's), was to create two immortal lovers, in the mysterious orphan Heathcliff and the willful beautiful Catherine Earnshaw, that no other novelist has come close to matching.

Told by a housekeeper named Ellen Dean to Heathcliff's tenant, Mr. Lockwood, it is an extended fantasy rather than a coherent narrative, told in flashbacks, dreams, and ghostly visitations. The passion between Heathcliff and Cathy--who might be described as "two hearts that beat as one"--is as huge, elemental, earthy and all-consuming as the great moors that lie beyond the threshold of the Earnshaw home, the eponymous Wuthering Heights. Cued, perhaps, by Shakespeare's quip "the course of true love never did run smooth," the two are parted by her flighty insistence on marrying the pallid and rather sissy Edgar Linton instead of her beloved Heathcliff. Heathcliff runs away after overhearing her declaration "to marry (Heathcliff) would degrade me," without hearing her further declaration, "I AM Heathcliff."

The most passionate and sensuous portion of the novel is in the middle, when Heathcliff returns to the Heights after an absence of three years, on which he is forever silent. He returns a wealthy man, gains ownership of the Heights by subterfuge, and sets out to destroy all who stand between him and Cathy. Torn to her very soul by the realization of her folly in having married Edgar Linton and by the enmity between her husband and her true love, Cathy falls dangerously ill. She recovers to some extent; she is pregnant with Linton's child, but her strength never rallies to the point at which she can resume a normal life. Heathcliff, now married to her sister-in-law, the foolish childish Isabella, comes to visit her in early April 1784 to find her dying--and the scene that ensues is almost painfully erotic to read:

". . .in a stride or two (he) was at her side, and had her grasped in his arms. . .He neither spoke, nor loosed his hold, for some five minutes, during which period he bestowed more kisses than ever he gave in his life before, I daresay, but then (Cathy) had kissed him first. . .she was fated, sure to die."

Over the next several pages the two lovers--who never actually make love, such were Victorian conventions and, possibly, the realization of Emily Bronte herself, parson's daughter though she was, that sometimes the most sensuous scenes stop far short of consummation,--berate each other over mutual faithlessness and wound each other with passions bigger than most humans will ever know.

". . .he turned to her, looking absolutely desperate. His eyes wide, and wet at last, flashed fiercely on her. . .An instant they held asunder. . .Catherine made a spring, and he caught her, and they were locked in an embrace from which I thought (she) would never be released alive."

Perhaps the most telling lines in the whole book are when Catherine says to Heathcliff, "How strong you are! How long do you mean to live after I am gone?" and his wail, once Nelly Dean has informed him of Catherine's death: ". . .do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!. . .I CANNOT live without my life! I CANNOT live without my soul!"

In real life, we--at least the hopeless romantics among us--yearn to be swept away by a passion that huge, like an ocean wave that carries us away, lovers clinging to each other like drifting planks after a shipwreck. In the novel, Heathcliff lives for eighteen years after her death, a long agony during which he never sees his Cathy's spirit, although Mr. Lockwood, the tenant, does. Lockwood is completely flipped out when he sees Heathcliff kneeling by the broken window where Lockwood suffered her visitation:

"He got onto the bed and wrenched open the lattice, bursting, as he pulled at it, into an uncontrollable passion of tears.

"'Come in! come in!' he sobbed. 'Cathy, DO come. Oh, do--once more! Oh! my heart's darling, hear me this time--Catherine, at last!'"

On a day like today, gray and dull and bland, that sort of passion, without the strain and sweat and bother of sex, seems the more uninhibited, the more tender, the closest, the most transcendent.

I have seen more than one film and/or TV version of the book, but none of them quite do the novel justice. Better to settle into a corner and a dream and while away the afternoon in that wild insular world a minister's spinster daughter birthed from a wild imagination.

I can, anyway. And on that fantastic note, fair thee well.

That thing about writing blogs about each of my five favorite Christmas songs didn't quite work out. Press of time and events, you might say.

Anyway, my favorite of all time is Doc Watson's recording of "Christmas Lullaby" from his 1990 CD ON PRAYING GROUND. Four very simple little verses such as a mountain mother might sing while trying to lull a fussy baby to sleep; but the back story of the tune to which it is sung is fascinating to me.

Many years ago, when I attended a small Baptist church, the altar call at the end of sermons was frequently a mournfully beautiful tune in a minor key of which I never knew the name or for that matter any of the words. It wasn't until about a decade ago, in a Methodist church I attended at the time, that I learned it was called "Come, Ye Sinners, Poor and Needy", from its opening line, in the Methodist hymnal, in which it was first included in the 1990s. In the old Broadman hymnals, used for many years in Baptist services, it is called "I Will Arise and Go to Jesus" from the opening line of the refrain.

The words to "Come Ye Sinners," as I will call it for convenience, were published in 1759 by their author, British minister Joseph Hart. In 1835, a Spartanburg, South Carolina singing school teacher named William Walker--better known among fans of oldtime music as "Singing Billy"--set the words to a tune called "Restoration" in his shape-note hymnal THE SOUTHERN HARMONY.

The words Doc Watson sings to that tune on ON PRAYING GROUND are taken in part from a poem by the great British hymn writer Isaac Watts. Doc's lyrics, identified as traditional with arrangement by Doc Watson in the songwriter's credits, are:

Hush my babe, lie still and slumber
Holy angels guard thy bed
Heavenly blessings without number
Gently stealing on thy head.

How much better art thou attended
Than the son of God could be
When from Heaven he descended
And became a child like thee

Soft and easy is thy cradle
Coarse and hard the Savior lay
When his birthplace was a stable
And his softest bed was hay

Hush my babe lie still and slumber
Holy angels guard thy bed
Heavenly blessings without number
Gently stealing on thy head.

Doc sings with only his own guitar accompaniment, and pronounces the word "gently" as "gentlie"--a very old mountain way, not uncommon at all in traditional mountain music.

I have at http://www.fragmentsfromfloyd.com/fragments/2002/12/cradle_hymnchristmas_lullaby.html found some additional lyrics for this song, evidently the remainder of the ones written by Isaac Watts, who is best known to most of us as the lyricist of "Joy to the World" and other great hymns of the Christian tradition.

Myself, though, I listen to Doc Watson, shut my eyes and hear a mountain mother, up in the night with a restless little one, perhaps walking back and forth on a broad-board floor, singing in a soft breathy voice, "Hush my babe lie still and slumber. . ."

You can download and listen to this sweet little nothing of an Appalachian lullaby at http://play.rhapsody.com/docwatson/onprayingground/christmaslullaby
if you like.

And on that sleepy note, fair thee well.

Dan Fogelberg has lost his three year battle with prostate cancer. He was 56.

I am not all that familiar with his soft-rock output. Oh, I've heard his hits--"Leader of the Band," "The Power of Gold," "Rhythm of the Rain"--but I would put his 1985 bluegrass album, HIGH COUNTRY SNOWS, up against anyone's in the field of bluegrass.

Inspired by the 1984 Telluride bluegrass festival--this was during his years living in the Rockies--Fogelberg made a wish list of great musicians with whom he would like to record, then built an album of oldies and new songs around that core. The musicians and vocalists included the legendary guitarist Doc Watson, David "Dawg" Grisman, drummer Russ Kunkel, Ricky Skaggs and Vince Gill. The songs included bluegrass standards from Flatt and Scruggs and the Stanley Brothers and new material from Fogelberg and other contemporary songwriters.

I heard about the album (it was still on vinyl when I first bought it!) from my friend Tooey, who was a great fan of his. I was knocked out by it from the very beginning. It still is one of the CDs (yep, it was one I had to have once it was available) I play most frequently. The title song is a beautiful dreamy steel-guitar led waltz. Other pieces are equally impressive; "Sutter's Mill" is a six minute history of the California gold rush of 1849, "Wandering Shepherd" is a stunning little folk-gospel quartet with backing vocals by Vince Gill and the multitalented Herb Pedersen, and "Go Down Easy" is a gentle little piece about a woman whose lover leaves her "in the early part of autumn."

To me, the standout of the whole collection is "Wolf Creek," an instrumental featuring Doc Watson and Fogelberg on duet acoustic guitar. Doc Watson in my estimation has no peers as a guitarist; he even outpaced the immortal Chet Atkins on an album they made together in the late 1970s. It never fails to amaze me that Dan Fogelberg did not embarass himself playing with Doc; master and pupil both play brilliantly. Too bad nobody has ever mined this CD, that I know of, for a movie or TV soundtrack; it would be a very rich source.

And on that sad note, fair thee well.

Schroder from the PEANUTS comic strip was always agitating to make this, the birthdate of the Romantic composer Ludwig van Beethoven, an official holiday.

I'm not quite such a fan, although I do love the little piece Schroder plays in A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS, the "Fur Elise" aka Bagatelle in A minor; the adagio movement of the so-called "Moonlight" Sonata, aka Piano Sonata #14 in C sharp minor; and the Fifth and Ninth Symphonies.

In my younger, more hormonal days, the "Moonlight" sonata inspired me to write the following poem. No doubt Beethoven, also regarded as a loser in love, would jeer at its sentimentality and self-pity, but what the hell, he's dead and I'm gonna share it anyway.

ungovernable
this gall of emptiness
this heart a parched cask waiting for wine
this body new ground never seeded to fruition

giving to hollow fever

I form you out of moonbeams and darkness

eyes shut like a china doll's

my hands seek the night
clutch you, back and flanks,
pull you down drowning to me

drunk to the bone with your scent
heart to beating heart
I cry for the breaking weight of you
to pound me out of my churning soul

I conjure your voice
to hear you
pant and plead
my triumph

love words like sheets of rain
flung from the thunder-heavy air
mingling slick with sweat and tears

dying
drop me headlong into Eden

I wake
having possessed only your wraith

how long can I stare upward
into the dark
broken by your image above me

So much for moonlight on Lake Lucerne, huh? And on that sour note, fair thee well.

Listen, my children, and you shall hear--the tale of how a mob of angry patriots stormed the Boston docks, threw some forty-five tons of East India Company tea into Boston Harbor, and brought down the wrath of the British government on their heads--another episode leading to "the eighteenth of April in seventy-five."

Some background: by 1773 the bewildered British government had removed all taxes imposed on an increasingly fractious group of Americans except the one on tea. Smugglers--among them John Hancock, who would ultimately be one of two men to sign the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776--got around that irksome little fact by buying from the Dutch East Indies company; the British East India Company soon found itself in dire financial straits thanks to this subterfuge. In an attempt to turn East India Company's fortunes around, the British government exempted East India from paying taxes in England on their imports, leaving them to pay only the much lower import duties in the colonies. This enabled the East India Company to undercut the prices--and profits--of John Hancock and others.

Following the arrival of three shipsful of tea in Boston Harbor beginning in November 1773, mass meetings organized by the Sons of Liberty, the local patriot group, eventually led to a plan to destroy the tea. On the night of December 16, 1773, a mob of some two hundred men, poorly disguised as Narragansett Native Americans, boarded the three ships and tossed all the tea aboard into the briny waters of the harbor, then spent hours rowing around punching the mess down into the water to make sure nobody in dire need of caffeine could salvage anything potable. For an eyewitness account of this momentous event, go to http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/teaparty.htm.

Needless to say, a great ruckus ensued once news got back to England of the destruction of East India property. The government responded with the so-called Intolerable Acts: Boston harbor was closed to shipping, effectively strangling the local economy; exempted British officials from trial in Massachusetts courts; housed British troops in American homes; and above all curtailed political assembly--although that last did not silence the Sons of Liberty by a long shot.

The Boston Tea Party, although certainly the most spectacular of the protests against the tea tax, was not the only such demonstration. In Annapolis, Maryland, the following October, a local Tory family attempted to smuggle tea into the harbor aboard the cargo vessel PEGGY STEWART undercover of a legitimate cargo of fifty-five indentured servants. Before the dust settled the Tory family itself burned the ship, with the tea still aboard, to hush the angry rumbles of patriots--then quietly sold up and relocated to Nova Scotia.

It seems to me, though, that the most ornery response to the Tea Tax crisis actually happened in South Carolina. The Boston Sons of Liberty abandoned their legendary Yankee thrift and destroyed a great deal of potential profit in a superb fit of protest theater; in Charleston, tea brought into the harbor there was quietly warehoused for three years, then, on the outbreak of war, sold to finance the Revolution. Talk about stickin' it to the man--

One gathers that Ron Paul, the "libertarian" candidate who is running as a Republican for president, will be holding another of his so-called "online tea parties" to raise money today. Somehow I don't think any of the old patriots in Boston would buy into that notion--the issue was not taxation per se, which Paul purports to despise, but taxation without representation--which we have in plenty between a spineless Congress and a president who's frantically trying to finance a war that's even less popular than the one that broke out in 1776; that one at least had 33% approval among the populace.

And on that ornery note, fair thee well.