Notes From A Lecture: 2001 (Caedmon V. Beowulf)

Behind The Hymn

The crime, a simple one, common as Caedmon's:

against community.  Venerable Bede

paints his story against a prelapsarian harmony,

a backdrop of high human community.

No one making fun of another's voice.

No mere tolerance either: "Everybody plays the fool sometimes

so rise and fall my friend

and sing to spite the voice you'd have if you wouldn't sing.

No need to wait, no need to stack the deck."

The pre-fall world not simply a man and a woman built from him,

but the gentle perspective edited out of Beowulf,

an alternative community of visionary tenderness

we find in the story behind the hymn.

But Caedmon couldn't take it, out of bashfulness

according to the officials, but there's reason to be skeptical.

He doesn’t appear to me as he appeared in Levertov,

the poor misfit cowherd not let in the exclusive club,

not so much the little drummer boy as the stone

that rejects but has to pretend it is rejected

to be the cornerstone.  Unlike Rudolph,

he was already invited to play in their reindeer games.

Thus he is harder to pity as he hides in his barn

disguised as the isle of misfit toys.

His is the first British rehearsal room.

One could see him plotting revenge, seeking fame.

Sure, his preference for "simple beasts"

over Beowulf-like epic poetry scene preening

is to be admired and even praised,

especially if the songs most of them spoke

were monster stories in which Grendel

always bore an uncanny resemblance to clumsy

illiterate anti-social cowherds (mama's boys to boot).

But there is no evidence in Bede to suggest

that the community from which Caedmon ran

was anywhere near as brutally macho as Hrothgar's meadhall,

and that bit about finding in the barn

the monotheistic god

so supported by those colonizing continentals,

sneaky, absolutely sneaky!      

                                                                                   

And not even for a reason as noble

as the Africans in the American south

taking on the religion of their oppressors

or even Caliban learning to curse in the highest

state of the art Elizabethan English Prospero made available to him.

No, Caedmon answered imagined coldness with coldness,

had to see heaven (“Heofron”) as a roof ("hrofe”)

and not accept the sky, the open air.

Caedmon just needed his space, which I can respect,

but he couldn't even see the tame beasts for the angels

who battered his heart into song.

Heofron was no hrofe but that which protected Caedmon

from his own tendency to abstract angels from beasts.

In his creation song, the earth comes last.

I don't doubt his good measure as much as I doubt his honesty.

No "sudden angel" scared him back into the circle

as but one of a democratic community.

Instead, he went straight over their heads

and used St. Hilda and the good folks at Whitby Abbess

to club the prole art circle, like the Clash

siding with CBS against their mates who used to get in for free

(the nerve of Dylan going electric!),

But more profoundly, since Caedmon set the tone,

broke the ring, changed history, or was bent on it,

and history (as in tribute) now uses him to justify its existence.

The ring was never the same, is now "prehistoric."

Cry, citizens, cry!

For Caedmon was the first Madonna;

God his marketing device.

The first lipsyncher (poor Milli Vanilli).

He ate the apple and the apple was God

and eventually the circle of reindeer faces--

who only laughed and called him names in his own head--

got their revenge on him by making him a star.

They gladly robbed from themselves to do so.

Either there's a sucker born every minute

or he sang so well it didn't matter

that his words were not even as good as "Eleanor Rigby"

(which used to be anthologized as poetry

but which seems to lack the staying power of his hymn).

The music is best lost to us

practically forcing us to make our own,

and buy fourtracks and managers,

and leave the circle behind

even if we don't go so far as to go solo.

And Caedmon sang his songs everywhere--

As he was consistently voted

best singer of 672AD, 673 AD,

some began to resist. They too were "bashful"

or sick of the goody-goody Pete Seegers

and their whitebread songs of solidarity,

and found barns of their own, laboratories in dreams

in which to conjure God and appeal to a creation

that could only happen once, and in the past.

A whole new race had begun, their (secret) motto:

"I'm better than Caedmon because I'm just like him

Sure, he might have been the first singer

to call heaven a roof, god as the barn in drag,

but it was the fruit that caused the fall. Cry, citizens, cry!

Even then, Christianity was capitalism in disguise,

at least from the scant records we have.

Sad world of bare outlines,

of not enough distance between people

at least by contemporary standards."

Caedmon brought distance, found God in solitude

and brought it back to those who never needed it,

who already had it within, or made it like love

without having to masturbate.

But that time is gone now.

"What's he doing in that barn?"

were the last words that community ever uttered in unison.

I'll tell you what he's doing.

No, he's not wishing he were in Scotland fishing tonight.

No, he's out to prove y'all wrong, out to see evil in your peace.

Out to become everyman, get you down in the hole

that he was only in until he got you there.

This is the only democracy he feels he knows.

He'll even act as if he's giving you shelter

against harshness in see-through song.

But the song remains a thing too,

and as such another harshness.

uncomfortable in a circle unless it’s the only center.

He's solo-ing it in the barn when the caterpillar

becomes a butterfly even though it's been a moth, a leaf, all along.

"Get down on your knees and listen"

is one of those revenge fantasies.

I, too, got brass in pocket

for the desire to want to check

the fame game acceleration nozzle

is, in today's society, a denial of life and joy.

The only true murderer's a killjoy

and I wouldn't say Caedmon murdered

anything worthwhile by doing tricks for you,

if I felt his hymn brought me joy

as it presumably does to the medievalist

the academy makes more room for than for the lyricist.

And I would be more forgiving of him

if his songs were available on LP and Cassette

as I would probably be a bigger fan of Duncan's

had I gotten to partake in one of his intense conversations

now lost, when only the writing remains

I'd be more forgiving, too, if Bede could be proved wrong,

if the high human community he painted

was really more like that to be found

in the roughly contemporaneous Beowulf (658-680AD)

that certainly would ostracize a mere lyricist

as a mama's boy, lacking epic ambitions

and there is nothing to disprove this in Bede's account.

So hail Caedmon, and the necessary barn.

Hail the angel or beast that tells us

that competition is not necessarily capitalism,

there's no expression but artistic expression.

Hail the middlemen brought in to keep us from getting too close.

They don't have to be used as psychologists

you go to to complain about the stress of the job

you have to take to be able to afford them,

nor marriage counselors

that prevent some from making love

ever since Caedmon could not prove a lover

and was determined to play professional

or at least use heaven as a middleman to get to earth.

(first published in Combo, 2001; Scratch Vocals, 2002)