Wherein we keep you apprised of making our way down the dark roads and dark, dark woods on our saunter around the continent on these Nights of Grief & Mystery.
The Church of What’s Happening Now
We made a deal with ourselves, with each other, with whatever brought us together a few years back, that – having tried, mind you, tried and tried again – we wouldn’t play churches. Call it bad faith: I’m not sure I’d argue. Call it a fall from whatever grace would have us: a case could be made. But we put it in the contract: No Churches. No Used-to-be-Churches either.
Obviously a good number of people have associations with such places that won’t or can’t be overcome, and so are deeply dissuaded from darkening the doorways. Given even the documented histories, that’s understandable. And I for one have spoken or played or performed under more crucifixions, tormented stick figures, metaphorized and raptured butterflies rising from the rack, back lit by incontestable stained glass vignettes, than is wise. But the tactical strategy for the prejudice is this: for reasons unknown to me, they built these places in the old days so that people in the pews couldn’t quite make out what was being said at the front of the hall. The sound, almost always, is swimming, turgid, swampy in all the ways you wouldn’t want, and unwarm. And entombed.
So we pull into Portland, Maine yesterday, and we adjust the set list to bring back one of our operatic favourites: Never Be a Poet. We’ve done so because we’ve been booked into the Maine Irish Heritage Hall, and the story is about my first trip to Ireland, and about all the weather of fatherhood and frailty, and because Portland has a noble history of welcoming ragged survivors of The Famine in the mid-1800’s. Beautiful confluence. Until we pull up to the Maine Irish Heritage Hall. And it is a proper Gothic pile, a nineteenth century used-to-be-a-cathedral, in fact. Oh oh.
Without our man in the house, Charles, we’d have been in the shit, in every way that can be imagined. But his chops with the knobs, and a way-too-long sound check, and a quick dressing room revamp of the set list to accommodate the utter lack of light on stage and cut down on us moving around, and a band that trusts itself now to rise, and faithful Erin-led local organizers/workers, and especially a curious, slow to warm but beautifully locked-in crowd of the children of the children’s children who Came From Away in those ruinous days: all of that wound itself around this once and only night granted to us to grieve and be mystified, and for a while all was marvellous and well. Street legal devastation of the uninvestigated life proceeded. The people in the book signing line testified to it, were strangely grateful for it. Elegant praise. Generosity of spirit. Burgundy in the back room afterwards. Reasons to live.
Amen.
SJ
Gregory Hoskins 