It is late when I enter the tree. It is new, this business of entering, at least for this year. The empty tree one does not enter. One may clamber up the bare branches alongside the trunk, one may be among the branches, but it never feels like one is inside the tree. But now the foliage is sufficiently lush that one can enter this soft leafy mantle and rise up inside the tree. On a warm dark summer evening, this is as erotic as it sounds. And there aren’t even any fireflies out yet.
Claire and I spent the afternoon at a singing workshop led by Gideon Crevoshay and Avery Book, of the Tenores de Aterue as well as OneBeat and many other musical ventures. We learn a Sardinian song and a Corsican song in the resonant chamber of the Bridgewater Grange. This is followed by a concert by the four Tenores. They sing in the Cantu a Tenore style from Sardinia, building harmonies with throat singing, and the effect is ancient, mesmerizing.
When I reach the top of the tree I encounter an aerial landscape unlike any I’ve seen before. Out past the branches and across the meadow, a heavy curtain of mist has lowered itself to just below the horizon formed to the west by the opposite hills. Trees rise darkly up the hillsides and then vanish into a softly luminous white—luminous because behind me, to the southeast, a slice of the moon shines across the valley. It is hidden by the forest between us, but it is giving the mist a kind of muted glow in the dark landscape.
I cannot remember even one strand of melody from the concert, but the music is still inside me in some way—I am vibrating on a different frequency. The night is full of the sounds of frogs and insects, coming from every direction, and they evoke the harsh harmonics generated by throat singing. The night and I are vibrating together. The world is singing, and it is primal.
I watch the mist lower further as it moves up the valley, and then part, and in that strand of its parting a streak of dark trees appears—stretches and narrows—then vanishes.
Primal too, this emergence from the mist and dissolution back into it.
Its own kind of singing. Its own kind of eros.
