What Will Susan Sing Next? & Saturday Flowers April 25

I read in the morning paper a piece about Susan Boyle, and the news is about hair and brows, and the meaning of putting on one's best, natural face.  I find no popular speculation, however, on what Susan might sing as she makes her way to the next stage of "Britain's Got Talent," in May.

It is important to take the long view of things.  The flowers I arrange on Saturday mornings for the kitchen table remind me that everywhere there are people composing their lives and steadying themselves for their rigors ahead.  Preparation may be a simple contemplative task or a patient examination of each step yet to unfold in a big work, so as to guide the unfolding progress to completion.  The smallest steps taken today on behalf of tomorrow put one living forward.

May I offer you a suggestion, Susan?  I believe that England, and all Britain would love to hear the hymn Jerusalem. The song captures love and ineffable longing for transformation, and it has become a patriotic anthem. I see no argument against singing a beloved song everyone in the live audience will know. The piece is a William Blake poem set to majestic music in 1916. The song is so popular that it has been adopted as the anthem of the rugby union. Here is one version:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJRojmvlE6U

The William Blake who could explicate with a few words reality and transformation is a friend of mine.  Blake was a mystic, and I know that he believed in the potential present in every moment for sinlessness, but he also saw clearly present suffering.

Blake died in 1827, a few years before the Sadler Commission Hearings on child labor would in 1832  reveal to the larger world what he had understood with a poet's grace: the newly industrialized regions of England had been transformed by the time the poem was written in 1804 into dark Satanic mills of smokestacks and factories, and countryside where little children pushed coal carts through narrow, stifling tunnels deep in the mines. Susan will not sing about that. 

The world is awash in songs of suffering workers, and of people and lands despoiled by industrialization.  When the people of the British Isles migrated to the United States and found work in the coal mines of Appalachia, there arose amazing songs that chronicled their travails. I urge you to listen to this Web site: http://www.musicofcoal.com/music.htm  (Please see my note at the very bottom of this piece.)

Susan will sing a song, instead, which will unite the British in their longing for something better, and it will be a song that arises from their respect for poetry and the past and their identification with the opportunity of transformation inherent in music.

Here are the words of Jerusalem, a whale of a patriotic song.

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear! O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire.

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.

 

The ruggers would vote for Susan.

_______

It would be fitting, providing you as I am with a link to music of coal mining in the United States, to tell you that the link comes from an organization in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, the Lonesome Pine Office on Youth.  It is a public, non-profit agency to help kids.  www.lpoy.org

The music in the coal mining country of early industrial England and that of the Appalachia has striking differences that speaks to the strength of the people, but a book could be written about it, not a blog on Susan Boyle.

Comments

[techwriter]

I think everyone should look at the URL http://www.flowersexpress.com.ph to see Fern's website. She lives in the Phillippines, and her flowers offered for sale in Manilla and well beyond are quite beautiful.

[philippine flower delivery]

Yeah! Susan Boyle become really popular nowadays and many people are waiting for her next song to sing on stage. I saw her at the news last night that she is preparing a flower while she is in interview by a newscaster. She loves flowers and her fans keep on sending her a flowers. I also wish for your success Susan.

-fern-