Incarnation: All Flesh is Grass

The late Colin Fletcher’s books, most notably The Thousand Mile Summer,  inspired legions of backpackers, myself among them.  He extolls mountains, deserts and forests, places where he finds solace in solitude.   

I love to read about the joys of solitude.  Fletcher, Thoreau, Odell Shepard, Annie Dillard -- writers whose rhapsodies on the subject have swept me along, page after page.  

But solitude itself?  A little goes a long way.  I'll accept a few hours of solitude as an occasional condiment with the meat-and-potatoes of life.  But solitude as an entree?  No.  Give me people.  Lots and lots of interesting, curious, passionate, quirky people.  

Oddly enough, that's what draws me to Fletcher, Thoreau, Shepard, Dillard.  I cherish their company.  We love writers who bring us into their presence and gift us with the opportunity to know them,  what they think and feel.  Their subject may be solitude but it's their companionship we enjoy, their wit, their passion, their wisdom. their delight in a well-turned phrase.

Fletcher is a cordial grump.  In several of his books, he praises the simple honesty of a quotation he chose for his epitaph:  “Organisms themselves are relatively transient entities through which materials and energy flow and eventually return to the environment.”   That's the epitaph of a curmudgeon, bless his soul.  He doesn’t give the source of the quote, only that it came from what he says was an otherwise dry piece of scientific reporting.

When I came on that quotation in Fletcher's writings, it reminded me of a text by the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus which I had been meaning to set to music.  I read it again and -- bingo! -- this time, it sang to me.  All I had to do was put the notes down on paper.  

It features the phrase, “All flesh is grass.”  We know that phrase from grim, old Ecclesiastes and Brahms' great, dark setting of it in his German Requiem.  "Denn alles Fleisch, es ist wie Gras."  

But Heraclitus' meaning is not grim.  Quite the contrary.  Like the quotation Fletcher admired, it can be read as a joyful affirmation of the unending cycles of life.  Heraclitus says it, we feel, with a smile.  "When you think about it, all flesh is grass!"

For my setting I used this translation:

"All flesh is grass.  The rain falls, the springs are fed, the streams are filled and flow to the sea.  The mist rises from the deep and the clouds are formed and break on the sides of the mountains.  The plant enfolds the air, water and salts, and with the aid of the sun, expands by vital alchemy into the bread of life, enfolding this into itself.  Animals eat plants and a new incarnation begins.  All flesh is grass."

In my piece each line is presented and repeated with the next line layered over top of it until, just as in Nature, all the phenomena are happening at once in an exhilarating jumble.  Then the texture thins, clarity returns, then complexity returns, then clarity once more.  The piece ends as simply and quietly as it began:  all flesh is grass.

Grass being incarnated as flesh, I titled the piece "Incarnation."

I dedicated the piece to Colin Fletcher and sent him the score.  A month later I got a letter from the man himself, thanking me very eloquently, saying he felt honored.  He confessed that he could not read music but that the text spoke to his heart.  Later he wrote again to tell me that a pianist friend had played the piece for him and that he had been moved by the music.  

To find out whether or not a performance by the 16-voice Cincinnati Camerata under the direction of Chris Miller moves you, click here:

http://www.sowash.com/

To see a PDF of the score, click here:

http://www.sowash.com/