Circles and Rooms
by Sally Anne Morgan
Ralph Waldo Emerson is the most quoted writer in America, and early in his life, was a slaveowner. Can he be redeemed by finally coming around to abolitionism? It is never too late to become an abolitionist, though I lay no claim to anyone’s redemption.
My friend Elaine Bleakney, who is a poet, suggested I read Emerson’s essay “Circles” as the circular theme kept, well, circulating, in my previous record. I like to take the advice of poets. I brought a copy of the essay along to the cabin where I was recording and tried to let it infuse the music. I was surprised at the mysticism abound in “Circles”—it is wise and vast and spiritual and vague in a way that I like:
Under every deep, opens a deeper well
I am God in nature, I am a weed by the wall
The field cannot be seen from within the field
Blessed be nothing
O circular philosopher
Draw a new circle
Elaine told me, too, how long it took Emerson to become anti-slavery. He was in his forties and already a notable figure when he found his stance. His child had a school assignment to draw up plans for building a house, and was showing his drawings to his father. Emerson (maybe in that very moment deciding to be anti-slavery) told his child: you must always build an extra room in your house, so that you may hide fugitive slaves.
May we all build extra rooms. In our music, in our writing, in our art, and leave these rooms open. I would like this to be more than metaphor, but I am struggling with the materiality. Is building a room a physical, material project? Yes, though it doesn’t have to be. Music afterall is immaterial, and definitely telepathic. Building a room can be a psychic project.
How is a room built? I don’t know exactly. Is building a room liberatory? Yes. The best art is a process of self liberation, but room building is for the liberation of everyone.
Is everyone an artist, given the opportunity? Yes. Is art for art’s sake, in the face of oppression, enough of a room? No, I have never thought so.
Can protest music be wordless? (yes)
Can music stop a genocide? No. No. With immense grief, no. Music is part of our collective action, but we are not powerful enough, not yet.
Can music be in service to a principled struggle? Yes. Making music is not passive. And it can light you on fire.
How does one start building a room? With stone.
Once you start seeing circles in everything, it is hard to stop. Everything, even the straightest line, becomes a circle. It is dizzying. But I find upon zooming in, the circles are easing, becoming less perfect, becoming harder. Perhaps they are becoming stones.
My newest record, Second Circle The Horizon, is more landscape than house. There is an encompassing quality, a spatiality, grounded in location. Randomness that becomes its own pattern. No right angles. A vast horizon. Possibly a couple of stones, built into the hillside, the beginnings of an extra room, left open, for whoever needs it.
Quarter Notes Magazine 