With my little temper from the bogs, I always considered that heading South would be like putting water in my wine…or worse, syrup in my Guinness ! Since the beginning of Pianocean, I have only had two headings: North and West. My favorite: Northwest. And despite the malice of the weather there, we went there, to find the malice of the people there. Two seasons on the west coast of Ireland, one season in the Scottish Hebrides. I was at home there, tacking between the black cliffs lined with purple heather, gulping down Guinness like milk, swallowing all the songs and all the stories that our Celtic cousins delight in to tell about. Gaelic is my music, bogs are my dance floor.
Carried by the currents and my eternal credo “To the North, to the North, higher! », we continued the road: Orkney, Shetlands then Norway and its 1000 Miles of winding coast all the way up to Lofoten. But I quickly understood that we were no longer in Celtic land…that the North, here, had all its rights…modesty, distance, cold. And the songs, it was not in the pubs that you would have to look for them but in the depths of the glaciers.
We paid dearly for this dazzling nature. Abused by the polar weather leaving us almost no respite, behind closed doors under the pooring rain, bringing out the piano between two hailstones… we ended up threadbare, wrung out, very damaged. We had to decide: Wouldn’t a bit of the South do us good?
I was petrified by the dilemma. I now think back of my friend Soizic, a painter and sailor, telling me something like : “When it comes to the sea, you have to immediately isolate what has to do with pride… and put it aside”. I see myself brandishing my itinerary: “To the North, to the North, Lofoten, Iceland, Greenland! “. Very proud…
It was then that I understood that going to the South also meant stepping completely out of my comfort zone. No Samuel Beckett, no stout by the peat fire and tweed paddys in the Azores. It’s not my culture, not my roots, I have no landmarks.
And so, Marieke, since when do we travel to find what we know? And an itinerary, it’s good to have one… it’s even better to know how to deviate from it.
So, is it decided? Are we heading south?
Oh I miss you already, my Sean-nós, my dear Irish songs…
By the way, how do you say “Sean-nós” in Portuguese?
Well, we say “Fado”:
“Fado was born one day
where the wind barely blew
And where the sky extended the sea
At the prow of a sailboat
In a sailor’s chest
Who, being sad, sang”
I don’t need more. And I can well arrive there with my nostalgia for Eire and Alba stuck to the skin.
The Azorean is as knowledgeable in nostalgia as the Scottish in whiskey.
They, the people of the “Saudade”, this untranslatable feeling, this void left by those we love and who are far away…and which we fill with music, and which we fill with poems so that it be less gaping.
“Saudade is missing all the things that make us complete”. The Azores. The people who invented a double-hearted instrument, in their image, the Viola da Terra: two hearts, twelve strings, melodies to cross the oceans and find each others.
A people who invented such an instrument can only be exciting.
“Yes, we still have two hearts One that stays And one that leaves” they say.
I could have written that chorus.
People of the archipelagos, pdouble-hearted people, the wind has just turned… You will soon hear a piano tune carried by the trade winds.
Poster by the amazing painter-sailor S