In preparing my recent Beltane post, I came across the following in Caitlín Matthews’ book, The Celtic Spirit. It’s about faeries, the “people who live between the worlds.” The illustrations I’ve chosen to accompany this excerpt are by the New Zealand artist known as St-Jinx.
The faeries are the race of beings who live between the worlds, making their home upon the earth but usually apprehensible only to otherworldly vision. Every country in the world has stories about the faeries as the “people between” who inhabit quiet country places but occasionally interrelate with human beings, exchanging favors for small gifts and courtesies, such as gifts of milk or food.
Within the Celtic countries there is still a great respect for the faerykind. People and faeries are considred to be neighbors who must live in mutual respect. People are careful to build their houses away from routes frequented by the faeries, and refer to them only as “the good folk.”
Many stories relate how musicians have learned tunes from the faeries, or how human have wandered into faery domains and lived with them there. Such tales may seem fabulous to those who have clichéd images of tiny, gossamer-winged faeries who flit about from flower to flower, but faeries within the Celtic tradition are considerably more robust, some being even taller than humans.
At [around the time of] Beltane (BEL’tenn-a), faeries becomce very active. It is believed that now and at Samhain, the doors to the faery hills are open, and that the faeries make their progress through the land. It is a time to be sensitive about our movements and intentions so that we do not disturb the fair folk about their business.
It just so happens that lately I’ve been listening to Marianne Faithfull’s 2018 album, Negative Capability, on which there is a beautiful track called “The Gypsy Faerie Queen.”
Following is the music video for this track. Enjoy!
Today is Halloween, which here in the U.S. has become a horrendous commercial spectacle. This despite the fact that the day has roots in the Catholic celebrations of November 1, “All Hollows Day” (or “All Saints Day”) and November 2, “All Souls Day.”
Deeper still . . . elements of Halloween developed from a pagan holy day, the ancient Celtic feast of Samhain (pronounced sow-in), which was the eve of the new year. It was a time when it was believed the veil between this world and the next was at its thinnest, and people and spirits could “cross over,” could pass back and forth between the two worlds. Huge bonfires were lit on hilltops – some say to frighten away evil spirits; others, to warm the souls of the departed. Perhaps both.
Personally, I like to gather up all these names, origins, meanings, and dates and speak simply of Hallowtide, and emphasize the transformative power, the witch power, the time calls to mind.
And so to mark Hallowtide this year at The Wild Reed, I share Marianne Faithfull's haunting song, "There is a Ghost," accompanied by an artful video by Christina Bon.
There is a ghost, and it goes out
On the land, on the land
It's lifted up, it feels and floats
On many hands, on many hands
Oh, my lover, oh, my lover
Never was there another
Where has my lover man gone?
There is a dream you've had before
And forgotten many times, so many times
When you remember who I am, just call
When you remember who I am . . .
There is a tree and its leaves have gone
For what it's seen, it stands alone
Oh, my lover, oh, my lover
Go now, go now find another
Where has my lover man gone?
Away, away . . . across the land
Across the land
Across the land . . .
For 'music night' this evening at The Wild Reed I spotlight one of my favorite vocalists, Marianne Faithfull. I begin so by sharing an article I wrote about her for the April 1995 issue of the Dignity Twin Cities newsletter. (I was editor of this particular publication at the time!) As you'll read, I'd actually met Faithfull the previous September.
___________________
British singer Marianne Faithfull performed at Elton John's star-studded AIDS benefit earlier this year and, as Ray Rogers notes, "gave new meaning to the lyrics of Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive." The song fits Faithfull well.
In the sixties Faithfull was renowned not for her music, but for her "scandalous" relationship with Mick Jagger and the notorious drug-bust at Redlands, the country estate of Rolling Stones' guitarist Keith Richards. By the early 1970s, Faithfull had parted company from Jagger and was living on the streets of Soho, London – destitute and addicted to heroin.
In 1979 she recorded the dark and profane Broken English – an album that was lauded as an artistic triumph and which generated a cult following. The 1980s saw Marianne again on the edge – living a junkie's existence in a run-down apartment in New York City. An almost fatal overdose prompted her to seek help at the Hazelden Rehabilitation Center in Minnesota. Recovery and healing were slow, but in 1987 Faithfull recorded the plaintive Strange Weather and was again critically-acclaimed.
Last September [1994] I met and briefly spoke with Marianne at a local bookstore (left). She was in the Twin Cities signing copies of her autobiography – simply titled Faithfull. We spoke mostly about her haunting recording of the song "Ghost Dance." She said a friend, who has since died of AIDS, suggested the song to her, and that she believes that much of the power in her recording of it was other-worldly inspired.
Faithfull also discussed "Ghost Dance" with journalist Ray Rogers: "The friend I used to come here with, Scotty, died of AIDS last August. It was Scotty's idea that I do "Ghost Dance" . . . He made me a tape of it, and when I put it on, there was nothing there. He was dead by the time I played it again. I found it. It was on the tape, but it wasn't on at the beginning. It was like unwrapping a present."
Recently, Faithfull collaborated with Twin Peaks composer Angelo Badalamenti to make A Secret Life, a collection of lush and reflective ballads. "Writing [my autobiography] meant I had to plow through emotional territory I normally wouldn't want to," Faithfull recently stated. The reflective mood of A Secret Life can be viewed as the culmination of this sorting through one of one of the most notorious lives in music.
Faithfull's autobiography details her affairs with women as well as men, but she notes that "in the '60s, you could be anything you wanted – gay, straight – it wasn't so nailed down at all." Ray Rogers notes that her narration of the glory days drew mixed reactions, most vociferously to her allegation that Mick Jagger once shared with her his sexual fantasies about Keith Richards. "I was amazed when people were so astounded by that. In the straight world, that was the most dodgy area."
Faithfull also contains Marianne's response to the dubious honor of being officially denounced as a witch by the Vatican Press:
The article cited Mick Jagger, Anita Pallenberg and myself – Mick as a warlock, and Anita and I as his coven of witches. When I showed it to Anita she shrugged it off as the complete absurdity it is, but then Anita has always been much less bothered by other people's opinions. Still, we wondered why this was happening all these years later. The unmanageable woman has been seen as a very dangerous quantity from the dawn of time, or at least since patriarchal religion clamped down on us.
Living a quiet life in a country cottage outside of Dublin, Ireland, Faithfull today relishes a life outside the "center of the hurricane." She plans to tour in support of A Secret Life and, later, to commence work on her next literary project – the story of her parents' love affair. To Ray Rogers she declared: "I have the title, and I believe at the moment that everything is in this title: Chance and Necessity. . . . That really does say everything, doesn't it?"
Tonight's Faithfull-fest continues with some wise words of Marianne's from a 1987 interview with music journalist Kris Kirk, followed by the video of her haunting 1987 re-recording of her 1964 hit "As Tears Go By."
A "scandalous and sensational" life
Being a woman and having led a scandalous and sensational life, it's easier to consider me a victim than to accept that I've done what I've done and taken the consequences. Of course I have regrets and I have remorse and, in some ways, I think I've damaged myself irrevocably as a woman and as a human being by doing things high that I might never have done straight. I've brutalized myself by letting people brutalize me. And I'm not talking about sexual slavery and bondage, really – just the wear-and-tear of the situation of a woman who never put value on herself, who accepted all the put downs.
But now I'm beginning to discover that my value as a human being has nothing to do with what I read about myself. That's just my ego-protection; I invented Marianne Faithfull and obviously people will do all sorts of things with that, including making me a stereotype, though it's the stereotype that's so hard to deal with.
. . . Did I have relationships with women? I sort of did, and I'm sad to say that I've been particularly abused by my own sex. I didn't really have a relationship with a woman; I had drug relationships. Like any other addict or alcoholic I would do practically anything for dope. I look back on a lot of things that I did in those days and find them very hard to accept; it's painful to think I allowed them to happen. What did I think I was doing? Yet I can't blame anyone else. That was me then.
Ireland, Catholicism, and guilt
I love Ireland and I made some really good friends there. I felt accepted by the Irish where I wasn't by other people. I don't know if it's the Catholicism or alcoholism or both, but they don't condemn; it was the first time I truly felt that I wasn't being condemned for my past. I guess they related to the idea of a good girl gone bad gone worse! Sometimes I look at myself and wonder if I'm a recovering Catholic as well as a recovering addict and alcoholic, because when I was younger I swallowed all that dogma and I guess I carried a lot of it into my adult life. Mind you, I don't do guilt anymore. Guilt is a self-serving emotion, just a way of whipping yourself.
Sex
I find I'm much more conventional and straight than I ever thought I was, and it's shocked me. I didn't expect it. But I live alone, I don't do sex. It's not something I'm advocating for anyone else, but what works for me right now is to stay away from sex and intimacy. I'm scared, really scared of sex. Because it has such a lot of personal power things in it and I don't want any longer to live in such a way where I'm either dominated by or I dominate another human being. And it's normally sex that puts me into either one of those situations so, until I've found some way of being true to myself within sexuality, I shall live without it.
. . . Promiscuity and permissiveness didn't really work for any of us. [In this era of AIDS] we're all gonna have to change our attitudes to sexuality; something has to happen on this planet of ours. Sexuality is a gift, and I sometimes think I've thrown it away.
Broken English
I remember when I did Broken English that I felt real rage and though it was cleansing and good to express those feelings, just to splurge out with emotion like that isn't enough. There has to be a building-up after the knocking-down. There has to be growth.
Quentin Crisp
[Quentin is] one of the top people I really respect and I feel I've learned a lot from him. He talks a lot about acceptance and self-acceptance; he's really got it sussed. Because that's what it's all about. After that all we can do is put one foot in front of the other and do the best we can, honey.
Today is the tenth anniversary of what has come to be known as "9/11" – the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States.
I remember once reading thatMarianne Faithfull’s song “Before the Poison” was inspired in part by the shock of these attacks and how they changed things irrevocably for many people and communities. I share today this song from Faithfull’s 2004albumof the same name, along with links to various articles and reflections on 9/11 – ten years on.
I dedicated this post to everyone, everywhere, whose life has been irrevocably changed because of some traumatic event – the “poison out of nowhere” in Faithfull’s song.
. . . Before the poison I'd lost my fear. Maybe too happy, to even care. Safe in my dreams, couldn't see the fall coming on,
coming from nowhere, my name to call.
No more to say, nothin's coming my way. No you, no me, no more, how can it be? Nowhere to run, out of nowhere, poison . . .
I established The Wild Reed in 2006 as a sign of solidarity with all who are dedicated to living lives of integrity – though, in particular, with gay people seeking to be true to both the gift of their sexuality and their Catholic faith. The Wild Reed's original by-line read, “Thoughts and reflections from a progressive, gay, Catholic perspective.” As you can see, it reads differently now. This is because my journey has, in many ways, taken me beyond, or perhaps better still, deeper into the realities that the words “progressive,” “gay,” and “Catholic” seek to describe.
Even though reeds can symbolize frailty, they may also represent the strength found in flexibility. Popular wisdom says that the green reed which bends in the wind is stronger than the mighty oak which breaks in a storm. Tall green reeds are associated with water, fertility, abundance, wealth, and rebirth. The sound of a reed pipe is often considered the voice of a soul pining for God or a lost love.
On September 24, 2012,Michael BaylyofCatholics for Marriage Equality MNwas interviewed by Suzanne Linton of Our World Today about same-sex relationships and why Catholics can vote 'no' on the proposed Minnesota anti-marriage equality amendment.
"I believe your blog to be of utmost importance for all people regardless of their orientation. . . . Thank you for your blog and the care and dedication that you give in bringing the TRUTH to everyone."– William
"Michael, if there is ever a moment in your day or in your life when you feel low and despondent and wonder whether what you are doing is anything worthwhile, think of this: thanks to your writing on the internet, a young man miles away is now willing to embrace life completely and use his talents and passions unashamedly to celebrate God and his creation. Any success I face in the future and any lives I touch would have been made possible thanks to you and your honesty and wisdom."– AB
"Since I discovered your blog I have felt so much more encouraged and inspired knowing that I'm not the only gay guy in the Catholic Church trying to balance my Faith and my sexuality. Continue being a beacon of hope and a guide to the future within our Church!"– Phillip
"Your posts about Catholic issues are always informative and well researched, and I especially appreciate your photography and the personal posts about your own experience. I'm very glad I found your blog and that I've had the chance to get to know you."– Crystal
"Thank you for taking the time to create this fantastic blog. It is so inspiring!"– George
"I cannot claim to be an expert on Catholic blogs, but from what I've seen, The Wild Reed ranks among the very best."– Kevin
"Reading your blog leaves me with the consolation of knowing that the words Catholic, gay and progressive are not mutually exclusive.."– Patrick
"I grieve for the Roman institution’s betrayal of God’s invitation to change. I fear that somewhere in the midst of this denial is a great sin that rests on the shoulders of those who lead and those who passively follow. But knowing that there are voices, voices of the prophets out there gives me hope. Please keep up the good work."– Peter
"I ran across your blog the other day looking for something else. I stopped to look at it and then bookmarked it because you have written some excellent articles that I want to read. I find your writing to be insightful and interesting and I'm looking forward to reading more of it. Keep up the good work. We really, really need sane people with a voice these days."– Jane Gael
"Michael, your site is like water in the desert."– Jayden
