The Soundtrack, Track One: "The Parting Glass"

"The Parting Glass" is one of my favorite folk songs ever. In recent years, I've decided that it's high on the list of excellent memorial service songs -- morbid though it might be, in the same way that some people think of ideal songs they'd play at their weddings, I think of the perfect songs to play at my funeral. It also strikes me as an excellent song for the penultimate number in a set. Like, fake 'em out with a mellow song of goodbyes in the interest of goading the audience into an encore. But mostly I think that the best application for this song is that it be sung among friends as the sun is coming up after spending all night together. In the Scottish and Irish traditions, this is just how it's done.

Memory often fails me when I try to think of where I first heard "The Parting Glass". However, whenever I hear the song again, in my mind flicker vague shadows that make me think I had to have been in Ireland when first I was introduced to this tune.

While I have no concrete memory of having heard it there, I of course have so few concrete memories of Ireland to begin with. Yes, particulars exist; the gypsies I met when frequenting The Brazen Head, the night Robbie Williams made me sleep in a train station, the lonely psychic I met in Galway (or was it Dingle Bay?). And, of course, I remember the crazy girl who stalked me across an ocean as if it were something that young couples in love did all the time. As if, indeed, we were really in love and not just sick together in terrible ways. I remember the twenty-five hundred dollar CD I liquidated so I'd have enough money to support us while we were stuck in Ireland for that last month. I remember what once was almost clever insidiousness in her efforts to take control of my mind and body had descended into malice, spite, and madness. I remember the way she read through my private journal on the laptop I'd brought with me, and slammed it on the ground in rage upon finding an entry expressing regret that I hadn't been stronger and told her to stay away. I remember writing a cute poem about animals in a food fight, but I don't recall the words of it. I remember the leather jacket she bought in a little streetside shop with the very last of her own money before we started in on exhausting all of mine.

Beyond these and other little things, the land of Éire otherwise began, in the years that followed, to blur into an indistinct green-and-gray smear in my memory. Rather than events and specifics, a swirl of vaguenesses and nonspecific images come to mind. I remember the lilting patter of the native people who spoke to me with such kindness when I was miserable, but individual voices have lost distinction. I know I spent a lot of time at The Brazen Head, but I only vaguely remember what it looked like -- for years, in fact, I misremembered its name as "The Goat's Head" for some reason. I remember the behavior of the streets and sidewalks, but I couldn't now tell you any of their names, or what lay on them, or which directions they ran.

And through it all, I have the vague but persistent image of a boy I saw when I looked in the mirror, and the sensation of learning to sincerely hate his face. The weak little man-shaped creature's dull and defeated eyes would stare back at me, and I'd mutely marvel at how pale and ghostly he'd become, wasting away in the only bout of depression during which he'd ever actually LOSE weight. There's the image of that boy waiting up until the girl went to sleep. He'd then sneak out of wherever hostel they were staying at that week so that he could spend all night trudging around the dimly-lit streets of Dublin, wearing out his shoes and finding some odd place to settle and drink until early morning came. Having already discovered the drink, I can see his descent from "a young man who takes a beer or two here and there" into what most civilized people would call "a drunk". He'd shamble back to the hostel where he left the girl to sleep, sleep a few hours himself, and spend the whole day following just waiting for his next opportunity to take a small meal, or get a drink, or simply curl up and die.

There was music everywhere in Dublin. And it wasn't just for the tourists, either; while Americans in tennis shoes and short pants sporting their new "I [Shamrock] Dublin" tee-shirts enjoyed how "quaint" and "rustic" sounded the bodhrán drums and uilleann pipes, the more enlightened among us were coming to appreciate the music truly, on its own merits and for what it was. Going to pubs and discovering the tradition of the Irish drinking song and the "pub session" made me realize there was something missing in my upbringing: a community of people who knew all the same songs. It's such a little thing, you'd think, by the sound of it. But as much as I came to love and value the Irish for the wisdom and kindness they shared with me even as total strangers, those same strangers made me feel even more isolated and alien when I discovered that I was the only one in the pub's lower tier that hadn't brought an instrument and didn't know any of the songs. Men and women of all ages -- literally all ages, I discovered when a mother and father with a guitar and a fiddle brought in their preteen son still in his football uniform straight after practice -- would come and gather in some convenient corner of the room. With no clear leader appointed, they nevertheless started in on this song or that. A small orchestra of plucked, strummed, and bowed strings might form around a drum line four or five pieces strong, while the occasional ambitious musician dragged a squeezebox or a set of pipes into the place to fill out the ensemble (or just show off). 

Early on in the evening, the many players in attendance wielding a sundry multitude of instruments could add something fun and kinetic to "The Star of County Down" and "Irish Rover", and all other kinds of tunes to dance to. Occasionally people did. The night would wear on and the ensemble would suffer attrition, the older set doing an upbeat but still sober rendering of "Erin Go Bragh", and a calmer still mood would set in and the group would slightly condescendingly but still sincerely answer some American tourist's request to do "Danny Boy". There was always a song of parting when the band would break for the night.

I say all this as though I remember the specific songs, other than that American favorite "Danny Boy". In truth, I don't. It was only in succeeding years of exploring this music and relearning its depth and sincerity that I found titles to fill in this little corner of my memoirs. They're popular enough songs, so I assume I must have heard them. I feel it's sound enough reason that, not being well-versed in Irish history, the significance of "Erin Go Bragh" and "Fields of Glory" would have been lost on me and I therefore wouldn't have remembered them well. As absorbed as I always was in my own troubles, my own ignorance persisted to the point that I can't think of a single song I actually learned while I was there.

It's the best I can do to remember these stray images, scattered as they are like so many puzzle pieces across an already cluttered room, and associate sounds with sensations. Every time I hear a new Irish song, I try to find as many versions and variations on it that I can find and listen through them all; fairly often a small sting of familiarity with strike and images will spring to mind, or feelings will, that are linked to the lyrical patter or the instrumental hooks. I remember, after much meditation, that I seemed to hear "Rocky Road to Dublin" almost every time I went out for a walk; and as I descended deeper and deeper into the pit of surrender I'd been digging myself, every successive playing of it that I heard seemed to be faster. Or perhaps I was simply slowing down, my senses dulling under the abrasive touch of a possessive, poisonous girl, and dampened by whiskeys and beers and rums already beyond numbering.

So in recovering these memories, all I have are these flickers that the music brings back to me. I find new significance in these songs based on what I must assume the old significance was as I piece together my fragmented and booze-soaked mental diary of those dark days. It's the best I can do to simply listen, feel, wonder whence that feeling came and see if there really is a memory attached to it.

Which brings us, finally, to "The Parting Glass".

There is no balm for the soul in despair to match a song of melancholic sweetness. "The Parting Glass" still resonates, and with the same difficulty as I have with recovering my other memories of Ireland, I can only try to piece together why. But as it's a parting song the likes of which a pub session might finish with, and given that most nights in Ireland I was awake well past any decent hour, I have to assume I'd heard at least once. For many years I'd forgotten about this song, and I was suddenly moved to tears when I heard it again. What a summation of my life during and after Ireland was the line, "All the harm that e'er I've done / alas, it was to none but me"; how meaningful to my more recent frustrations with my failing memory the line, "all I've done for want of wit / to mem'ry now I can't recall". Indeed, I can't think of a single line in the song's verses that doesn't apply to the life I've led, either earnestly or with that bitterly chuckling Irish irony that I'd come to adopt as my own.

But it was the chorus that drove me to tears when I heard it after (what I assume was) so long. There's something about the phrase, "Goodnight, and joy be to you all," that stings terribly when I hear it anymore; I have to wonder if it's an old sting from the dark time I spent there, being wished joy when I knew what lay before me were a thousand promises of misery. After all, every English-speaker I met in all of Europe said "cheers" as a parting, to the point that the word lost most of its meaning. It was not a literal wish for cheer, it was simply an acknowledgement that myself and my conversation partner were parting ways. But then there was that damn line -- after a sweetly sad song about all things past, the word "joy" was too much for me to handle. That anyone would wish joy on a stupid, trapped, ghostly young drunk who was becoming rapidly incapable of joy was an exercise in futility. I must have been aware of it at the time, if I was aware of anything at all.

Now I hear "goodnight and joy be to you all" and remember a my swirling, hazy vision trying desperately to focus as I staggered into the cool air of the Irish summer, promptly to vomit in the garbage bin amidst an uncontrollable torrent of tears. Rage and misery erupted from my body as my bar tab likely went unpaid, and as music was squelched by the rush of cool air and the sound of a city at night rushed past my ears. My throat and eyes burned as my stomach turned inside out and barbs of unremitting sorrow burrowed tightly into my brain. I knew in that moment, beyond all shadows of any reasonable doubt, that I'd never be happy again.

In the years that followed, although I'd forgotten that moment itself, it happens that I was proving myself right.

I forgot music. Love became a myth. Dreams died quick, ignominious deaths. And a bright-eyed, intelligent boy was smothered out of existence by a weak-willed, fat drunk interested in very little other than shuffling through each day without any challenge or confrontation. Memories of Ireland grew dim -- understandable, I am able to say in hindsight, because if I were in an airplane that suddenly went into tailspin, I'd pay more attention to how soon I was going to die than I paid to where exactly my downward spiral began. My descent into depression and booze was swift; clawing my way back to a point of normalcy has been slow.

But little by little, spring returned to my step. I remembered that there is joy to be had in this life, and I became more aggressive about seeking it. The battered tapestry of my memories slowly mended itself as I discovered and rediscovered the old songs and stories. I was writing again, and performing, and socializing, and not getting mixed up with horrible women (usually), and most of all I was learning to enjoy life again. Bit by bit, song by song, I was recovering my old life and building up my new one.

And lately, as I plumb the musical libraries of the world seeking inspiration for the music I mean to write now, I was finally reunited with "The Parting Glass". It was a moment of poetry, as Wordsworth would have defined it: "Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility." I wasn't trying to do anything other than see what music I could learn from -- I just wasn't prepared to learn what I already knew, what I'd already been through. The moment of utter misery recalled to me upon hearing "The Parting Glass" made me weak in the knees and returned ancient and abandoned tears to my cheeks.

As with other bouts of musical research, I looked up many different versions and listened to them many times over, still in that weirdly crippled state, alternately battling tears and surrendering to them, unable to do anything but bond with the music and let the memory rattle around in my brain -- the memory of when the boy truly died and the sad excuse for an adult, nearly incapable of doing anything right and dead to any emotion but misery, was thrust, sobbing and vomiting, into the world.

And I thought to myself... why?

Why this song? Why these memories? Or, as the poor sick stalker girl would say every time she crippled me into an unmanly crying fetal position and then attempted to gaslight me over it, "Why the waterworks?"

It took me a while to answer myself, and when I did I started laughing. I laughed because where once I wanted nothing more than to crawl into a bottle and wait for my next chance to crawl into another, I now want nothing more than to make art and then make more art. I laughed because even when I'm at my angriest or most melancholy, I still slap a thick slice of humor on whatever trouble I'm having, minimizing it rather than dwelling on it. I laughed because there is no sound more beautiful to me than human laughter; I love to evoke it from others, and I regained the ability to do it myself at last. I laughed because I tell people, upon parting, "Take care, have fun, enjoy!"

I laughed because -- at last, through the thick, dark veil of time, and probably by happy accident -- the kindness and wisdom of the Irish finally struck me in the brain when I was finally strong enough to understand it, and understand how important it is that I spread it to others:

Joy be to you all.