“Human beings are attached to everything in this life; attached to their imagination, attached to their ignorance, attached to their fear, attached even to their own suffering — and possibly to their own suffering more than anything else.

A person must first free himself from attachment. Attachment to things, identification with things, keeps alive a thousand false I’s in a person. These I’s must die in order that the big I may be born.

But how can they be made to die?…It is at this point that the possibility of awakening comes to the rescue.

To awaken means to realize one’s nothingness, that is, to realize one’s complete and absolute mechanicalness, as well as one’s complete and absolute helplessness…So long as a person is not horrified at himself, then a person knows nothing about himself or life.”

— P.D. Ouspensky quoting G.I. Gurdjieff
 

Part of the extreme sport-like difficulty of being a music mixer is attempting to blend contradictory styles of music. The segues must remain germane to the integrity of the entire playlist. It’s no easy feat, and often, like painting a painting it’s the accidents that turn out to be best parts of the canvas.

On this second volume of yuletide tunes (even more so than on Volume 1), I attempted to do just that: Have happy accidents. So you’ll hear Big Band blasters dovetail into country songs that shift into solemn carols, and classical instrumentals giving way to polychromatic pop numbers.

Some words about some of my choices:

The Carpenters‘ Merry Christmas Darling is, to me, the last really stellar Christmas song to make its way into the honorable holiday music canon. The title alone calls back to the 40s or 50s; and Richard’s arrangement makes it work in ways that other contemporary Christmas tunes can’t duplicate. And anything with Karen’s vocal is transformed instantly into something golden. Instead of featuring a cut from the last truly great modern Christmas album, 1963’s A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector, I chose this song.

The most beautiful non-secular Christmas song is O Holy Night, from the French Cantique de Noël. And its history and transformation over time is fascinating. The elegance of the melody married to such compelling lyrics: Fall on your knees! O hear the angel voices! O night divine, the night when Christ was Borne — makes for something astonishing. We’ve heard the song so many times — usually delivered with blaring glory notes and glissandi — that the song’s impact has dulled. But country singer Martina McBride, with her open, clear tone and natural annunciation brings everything that’s mystical about the song into high relief. This is the finest version I’ve experienced. Read more

“The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.” ― Joseph Campbell

I’ve always put up a Christmas tree. Despite the halfhearted participation (and groaning) of my boyfriends, I’ve faithfully, right after Thanksgiving, headed out and bought (or here on Vashon, cut down) a tree to lug home. It’s a ritual I rarely miss.

After visiting India some years ago I returned home in the winter and the notion of putting a bauble-laden tree on display felt absurd. This is a rite of passage for anyone who ventures to India: Your brain cells are rearranged and you never view your world, or its customs, the same. I know that was true for me as a Westerner. Christmas in America, after the dust and squalor of India, felt gluttonous. So I skipped the holidays that year — though I missed having a tree in the house.

I enjoy the act of arranging the colors, textures and lights on a tree. It’s similar to making a painting, the alchemy of conjuring art. Simpler, but no less magical. I especially love the ricochetting of light amidst the ornaments, as it envelops the tree at nighttime. As I’ve grown older I’ve come to understand that the ritual of displaying a tree is a sacred act — although I’ve never fully understood why.

Most of us are familiar with the historical origins of the Christmas tree. Its association with the pagan rite of celebrating the solstice. When the light of the Sun ‘returns’ in the Northern hemisphere and begins its increase and ascent, the radiance grows stronger and longer through the ensuing months. Trees would be displayed to honor the burgeoning of light and life. And the fruits and trinkets that would decorate the tree honored the bounty, the wish of a successful harvest in the year to come.

And yet the historical perspective never impressed me much. I mean, none of those facts would drift through my mind as I’d lounge on the couch in the evening — no matter my age — and stare at the tree until I fell asleep. Nope, another set of mysterious associations would encircle me and send me into a reverie. And it wasn’t until I came to the conclusion of one of my favorite books this year that I began to make sense of my devotion.

Martha Heyneman‘s book The Breathing Cathedral is a fantastic interweaving of the cosmologies of Gurdjieff, Dante, Aquinas, Stephen Hawking and others, into a new model, a new interpretation of the universe we inhabit. I was drawn to the book because, as a longtime student of Gurdjieff’s teachings, I was intrigued to see how Heyneman, a zoology student turned poet, was bringing Gurdjieff’s teachings forward and marrying them to the world of science.

The last chapter of her book is titled O Christmas Tree, and at first the subject — the family Christmas tree — seemed an odd way to summarize all that she’d explored in the previous chapters. But in the end I understood completely. Read more

This poem? I’m stunned, in the same way that you want to follow and retain a shooting star’s trajectory (but can’t), with the way Levertov forces silence into place, between the words, merging both sides of your brain while you absorb the essence of her secret code — honestly, a transcendental incantation.

Once Only

All which, because it was
flame and song and granted us
joy, we thought we’d do, be, revisit,
turns out to have been what it was
that once, only; every initiation
did not begin
a series, a build-up: the marvelous
did happen in our lives, our stories
are not drab with its absence: but don’t
expect now to return for more. Whatever more
there will be will be
unique as those were unique. Try
to acknowledge the next
song in its body-halo of flames as utterly
present, as now or never.
 

December 15th was always a big day for me when I was a kid, it was the date a small radio station in West Covina, California, not far from where we lived, converted their playlist to non-stop Christmas music. Holiday tunes that played 24/7 until the stroke of midnight on December 25.

Today, that sounds like one of Dante’s Circles of Hell, but back then (and when you are 13-years-old) it was novel and something unique to anticipate. Christmas music hadn’t been commodified into a haunting, unrelenting prompt to shop.

Both of my parents in that household (my dad and my stepmom) were heavy drinkers, especially around the holidays because my dad despised the season (it meant spending money; my dad being a parsimonious Aries, with Moon in Cancer [why are Cancers so often cheap?]) and my stepmom, a sort of ‘fallen’ Catholic, liked to throw ’em back to forget about having abandoned Jesus.

As the oldest sibling (and most sober person) in the household I had to manage everything “Christmas”: Pestering my dad to purchase a tree, goading my brothers to help decorate it, forbidding our two Dobermans from entering the living room to gnaw on the garland. Have you ever seen tinsel entwined in a dog turd? I have.

Anyway, that station that played Christmas music non-stop kept me on point. Aside from the usual excitement kids have about that “magic day”, I was also a music aficionado — so a cycle of songs that returned annually, always sounding pristine, fascinated me. It also honed my ear for really good Christmas songs versus the obnoxious shrill stuff — which eventually mutated into an epidemic right around the time of Mariah Carey‘s first holiday album. Nothing against that LP, but it seemed to open the floodgates on all of the glissando-manic, glory note-chasing kitsch that’s ubiquitous today.

I’m putting together three mixes for you this Christmas. This is the first one. Volume 2 will follow next week sometime, and then towards solstice I’ve a collection of sacred music that should make for a perfect audio detox after you’ve dragged your ass home from the last mall to chill and attempt to connect to that eerie voice of the silence that coincides with the longest night.

In the interim, enjoy some profane stuff today. Here’s volume one: