"Give me your beautiful, crumbling heart." A trio of audio and video inspirers: Carl Sagan, Blind Willie Johnson, Kate Tempest
Here’s our occasional three-shot of audio-visual weekend inspirations.
First up, a very soothing and uplifting animation of the astronomer Carl Sagan’s little monologue about our life on the “Pale Blue Dot” (embedded above, YouTube here). We found this via the unfailingly virtuous Brain Pickings blog, and here’s the full monologue:
From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.
The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.
In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
There’s a link between Carl Sagan and the bluesman Blind Willie Johnson, believe it or not - a recording of his performance of Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground (1927). “This was one of 27 pieces of music selected for the Voyager spacecraft’s famed ‘Golden Records’, intended to capture the range of musical expression”, notes Aeon magazine.
Carl Sagan made the music selection, and commented: “Johnson’s song concerns a situation he faced many times: nightfall with no place to sleep. Since humans appeared on Earth, the shroud of night has yet to fall without touching a man or woman in the same plight.” The video is narrated by T-Bone Burnett, the original song appears around 2.51.
From the cosmic vastness, to the teeming potential of the everyday, from the force of nature called Kate Tempest. This is a video from her new album The Book Of Traps and Lessons, the song is called “People’s Faces”, and the lyrics are below. It may resonate, in the current moment:
It's coming to pass
My countries coming apart
The whole thing's becoming
Such a bumbling farce
Was that a pivotal historical moment
We just went stumbling past?
Here we are
Dancing in the rumbling dark
So come a little closer
Give me something to grasp
Give me your beautiful
Crumbling heart
Another disaster. Catharsis
Another half-discarded mirage
Another mask slips
I face off with the physical
My head's ringing from the love of the stars
There is too much pretence here
Too much depends on the fragile wages
And extortionate rents here
We're working every dread day that is given us
Feeling like the person people meet
Really isn't us
Like we're going to buckle underneath the trouble
Like any minute now
The struggle's going to finish us
And then we smile at all our friends
It's hard
We got our heads down and our hackles up
Our back's against the wall
I can feel you aching
None of this was written in stone
There is nothing we're forbidden to know
And I can feel things changing
Even when I'm weak and I'm breaking
I'll stand weeping at the train station
'Cause I can see your faces
There is so much peace to be found in people's faces
I saw it roaring
I felt it clawing at my clothes like a grieving friend
It said
There are no new beginnings
Until everybody sees
That the old ways need to end
But it's hard to accept that we're all one and the same flesh
Given the rampant divisions between oppressor and oppressed
But we are though
More empathy
Less greed
More respect
All I've got to say has already been said
I mean, you heard it from yourself
When you were lying in your bed and couldn't sleep
Thinking couldn't we be doing this
Differently?
I'm listening to every little whisper in the distance singing hymns
And I can
I can feel things
Changing
But it's so hard
We got our heads down and our hackles up
Our back's against the wall
I can feel your heart racing
None of this was written in stone
The currents fast but the river moves slow
And I can feel things changing
Even when I'm weak and I'm breaking
I stand weeping at the train station
'Cause I can see your faces
There is so much peace to be found in people's faces
It's not enough
To imagine we'll be happy when we've
Got enough
Stuff
All this stuff
Is blocking us
I'm neat with no chaser
I'm all spirit
But I'm sinking
Coz the days are not days but strange symptoms
This age is our age
But our age is rage sinking to beige
And yes our children are brave
But their mission is vague
Now I don't have the answers
But there are still things to say
I stare out at my city on another difficult day
And I scream inwardly
When will this change
I'm beginning to fade
But my sanity's saved 'cause I see your faces
My sanity's saved
'cause I can see your faces
It's hard
We got our heads down and our hackles up
Our back's against the wall
I can feel your heart racing
None of this was written in stone
The current's fast but the river moves slow
And I can feel things changing
Even when I'm weak and I'm breaking
I stand weeping at the train station
'Cause I can see your faces
I love people's faces