Not the Curtain, but the Final Act

[Staking out a Spot | Much Improved | Georgia on My Mind | Seven Months in Review | Inner Country | What Is Yet to Come | 100 Pages | All This Momentum]

Looking back, at least half of these summary bits could be album titles. Now if I just had an album.

Blogs are funny things. There’s a little counter that tracks how many people show up to look at what you’ve written. Yesterday there were five. Today’s count is at 31 visitors, and it’s not even noon over in America, where most of my friends and family are. Curious.

I had planned to knock out most of my tape logging today, and it wasn’t until I announced this fact to Amy last night over Skype that I realized I might need a bit more time. I told her of my plans, and she asked me how many tapes I had left to do. Twelve, I said, rather breezily. And then it began to dawn on me that each tape is an hour of footage. And for most tapes, there’s going to be a lot of pausing and rewinding while I scribble down notes in my little logging book. So unless I planned to put in what would pretty much amount to 24 solid hours of work, I was going to have to space out the labor a bit. (Remember when I mentioned not having enough footage? I’m now grateful to whatever restraining force stayed my hand and kept me from going hog-wild in the B-roll department, because now I’ve got larger questions about putting the documentary together on my plate, and it’s a comfort to know I won’t be trading sleep for tape logging when I get back home).

It wasn’t long before I staked out a spot at the back of a Costa — the U.K. equivalent of Starbucks, it would seem — where there were free electrical outlets. (Enough to power a small metropolis, actually, although I only needed one to charge my spare camera battery.) I got out the camera, brought back a cuppa mud from the counter, and started jotting down notes. All in all, I went through about two and a half hours of tape, which amounted to just about twice that amount of time in labor because I was working with the Yorkshire segments, most of which are an assembly of short clips of a few seconds, which means a lot of pausing and flipping back and forth.

Going back over the footage was, to put it shortly, an interesting exercise. Because it’s been several weeks since I’ve seen most of the shots, I was able to look at them with fresh eyes, with the result that I noticed several things I wouldn’t have seen before. The first of these is just how much I’ve improved as a cameraman. During the first ten minutes of the tape that I logged from my time in York, I found myself on the edge of my seat, murmuring to myself to keep the camera still, just for one second, that shot was almost perfect. (I didn’t realize until the girl at the table next to me started looking over that some of these requests were actually being verbalized, and I was quietly haranguing myself in the third person.)

Looking back through the footage also gave me an appreciation for just how amazing this trip has been. I became awed and excited all over again at shots of the Minster Cathedral in York; the comfortably cluttered stretch downtown they call the Shambles; and the sturdy permanence of the city walls, which remain in remarkably good repair, even though they were built by the Romans. Being mixed up in the day-to-day affairs of a place often has a way of dulling one’s appreciation of its beauty, and I found I was able to reclaim some of that delight as I watched the scenes I filmed last month, re-taking a journey that I’ll share with everyone at home when I get the documentary finished. I’m also pleasantly surprised to see that all the interviews I’ve taken, even under the most trying of circumstances, have turned out better than I could have expected. Especially the one I got during derby weekend in York, with drunken revelers passing by every five seconds and practically drowning out our conversation; you can hear every word he says, despite the dull roar in the background.

There’s one segment in particular that I have to mention. During my travels, I’ve done my best to record the music of street musicians wherever possible; although I plan on splicing in some commercial tunes for the documentary, I wanted to have as many local acts as I could get to strengthen the flavor of the place for the people watching. One of my favorite finds was a street pianist in York that I stumbled across while I was wandering around, completely lost, on one of my first afternoons. You don’t see many street pianists; a piano isn’t exactly something that fits in a case and slides neatly into the baggage compartment of a bus or rail car. But he was out there, with a worn but faithful-looking set of keys, some of which were coming unglued even as he was playing. (At one point I saw him rescue one of the black keys, a low F# I think, from the ground, and settle it back into place entirely with his left hand, while his right carried on a ragtime song as though nothing were going on. Amazing.)

The second song he played, which I captured in full, was a rendition of Georgia on My Mind — the Ray Charles version, of course — bluesy and full of soul. At the time, I was floored to hear it, and fairly certain the whole performance was getting drowned out by a pair of babies babbling to each other in nearby strollers (see my thoughts on cameras, beasts and babies for further discussion of this). But the quality of the boom mic I got from UNC saved the day once again, and I found myself listening to crisp, clear audio of the entire song. It was four and a half minutes long. I cried the entire time.

I can’t say for certain what triggered it. I’m still a little wiped out from the research I packed in this week, and I had also hit a jagged caffeine high from the coffee, probably because I can’t remember having had a cup since January, when I left America for Ireland. But something about that song, even from a pianist a thousand miles from the New World, jumped out of the rickety instrument — out of the speakers of the camera — and straight into my chest, and said, Come home, you idiot. It’s time for you to come home. And before I knew what had hit me, I had just lost it, and the people at nearby tables were starting to sip their coffee a little quicker and dart their eyes in my direction, as though I were growing another head, or mutating into a large and especially fearsome-looking bug. (It happens.) But the whole experience didn’t feel as mortifying as it probably should have; more than anything, I felt like something was sending me a message, and I was just happy to have received it.

(Against the black background, this player looks a little repulsive. But try it out anyway, I promise it won’t bite.)

Georgia on My Mind (sample)

By the time my plane touches down on the other side of the Atlantic, I will have been away from home for approximately seven months. Since the last time I spent more than a week or two in America, Fidel Castro has stepped down as the leader of Cuba. India has set a world record by sending 10 satellites into orbit in one go. Oil prices per barrel have climbed by almost $50, an unprecedented record; and Nelson Mandela’s birthday celebration has drawn almost 50,000 people to Hyde Park — a nearly unprecedented (but certainly deserved) record. It’s been a busy time for the world, and I feel hopelessly out of touch with things on the other side of the pond, from the elections to Exxon prices. I’m looking forward to having the chance to come back into an awareness of all these things when my time here in Europe is over.

And yet, I can’t deny that this trip has given me the chance to do plenty of exploring, both in this lovely country of England, and in a far different realm — the country of my inner self. After a hundred scrapes and sprees in the United Kingdom, involving everything from travel mishaps to the stifling awkwardness of being an American in England on the Fourth of July, I’ve discovered a resilience and fortitude I didn’t even know I possessed. I’ve learned a heap of things about folklore, not just as a form of study, but also as a lens through which the purpose of stories — their capacity to inspire and instruct, to amuse, to cause change — has gained greater clarity for me. I have had the rare opportunity to study tales as mirrors to reality, functions of humankind’s larger story: our quest to understand our world, and ourselves. I might have been following the footprints of the Black Dog, but no matter where I’ve gone, the footprints of man have always been somewhere nearby, running parallel.

It might seem strange to see these meditations here, when my journey is far from over. I still have another week in Dublin, during which I’ll still be logging footage and hopefully getting the odd interview with a folklore professor. There’s still another visit to the UCD Folklore Library in the works sometime this week. But this is my last day in England, and this particular point in time and space is perfectly suited to such thoughts — the half-sunny vista of a late Sunday afternoon, in which the inner landscape and the outer one meet in a mutual rise, affording sweeping views of what has come before, and what is yet to come. My flight from London to Dublin tomorrow will be but the first in a series of homecomings, and although I’ll be continuing the work I’ve done here in bringing this trip home to America as a documentary, it will be work of a different kind: almost a historian’s task, to rebuild a whole world out of the pieces and suggestions that remain.

Many people have commented on the length of my blog entries, and to a certain extent, it’s out of sync with my character. I’ve never been one to broadcast everything that happens on a daily basis via the Internet; I’ve made several good attempts at starting a journal, but always they wind up mouldering in a desk drawer or in the corner of my closet, to be unearthed years later, completely blank except for one or two ambitious entries (“June 22, 1999. I’ve decided to write an entry in this journal every day.” That kind of nonsense).

But the short answer to the question is this: I’ve written so much because I don’t want to forget anything. This has been my first attempt to document any part of my life this closely — in addition to these rather lengthy passages, I have almost 100 pages in a Word document of things I didn’t post here, either because they’re more personal, or because I didn’t have an Internet connection in this barbarian country. The thing was, once I started writing, I just couldn’t stop. I used it as a way to stave off anxiety about coming home when my stay in Ireland was up, and even though I’ve taken the odd break here and there for a day or weekend, I’ve continued, even at this rather startling pace, all through the summer. It isn’t because I don’t have enough to do as it is — the bit about logging tape should tell you that. It’s because I find that I can’t live without that last hour in the day which I devote to putting down my thoughts. It’s become an essential clarifier, a lens I have to polish daily, lest the whole perspective become obscured, or (worse yet) lost.

And there’s the added bonus of all this: that next time somebody asks me what I’ve been up to lately, I can wander over to my filing cabinet, and ask whether they want the short version, or to stay for dinner.

I also find that keeping a journal has played a major part in helping me find my voice as a writer. That whole endeavor can be a tricky business, especially when one’s first starting out. But I find that putting down my thoughts at the end of the day, even in a brief way, keeps all those senses honed that a writer holds most dear: keen skills of observation, the ability to handle mood and tone while keeping a story going, and an open connection between the eye, the heart, and the pen. Writers write, after all. And all this momentum just seems too good to waste.

With all that said, I think we’re finally at an end to this post. (Cheers go up from those still in attendance, which is nobody.) I usually save writing for the end of the day, but I wanted to get it all out of the way before dinner, so I can spent the evening walking around Exeter, reveling in the amazing spell of good weather and enjoying my last night in this beautiful country. I think I’ve said all I need to say at this point, and although there’s going to be more blogging to follow (there always is, it seems), this will do us for now, at least.