Children of Water (from David)

(all photos © Timm O'Cobhthaigh estate)

Since I ended up with Timm’s laptop, I’ve had the task -- and privilege -- I finding out about my brother’s life and ways, at least as they were committed into a computer’s gigabite silo. Living in great measure, as most of us do nowadays, with fingers on the keypad, committing thoughts to a digital medium, working, processing, creating, praying, our computers do hold a great measure of the recordable life, creating a personal Alexandrian library of keystrokes, some banal, some dutiful, others meaningful, and many more that are even now invisible, ghostly commands for steerage through a cyber Otherworld ...

Timm went digital in his photography in a few years back, so there is substantial record of his work here, on his laptop and also the external hard drive he lugged around in his pack. Tons of stuff. Many gigs of pics, in raw form (I’ve yet to crack the .CR2 format) as well as finished, his freelance work catalogued fairly carefully but then a lot of loose ends too, folders with only dates on them, the same shots showing up everywhere, in various versions, sizes.

I owe Timm an amends which, having failed to fully do when he was alive, take on fully now. Back in the early 80’s Timm loaned me, from the payout he received from the insurance company from his near-fatal car accident, a thousand bucks to buy a Nikon FG camera (at the time, leading edge hobbyist-level technology), a lens and flash. It took me a decade of partying and then sobriety to pay back the first half; I never got around to the second. So I’ve taken on the responsibility of organizing Timm’s archives, as best as I can, and helping to best propagate Timm’s photographic estate. I figure it will be many, many hours before I’ve paid back, with interest, on my brother’s old generosity.

***

As I’ve gone through Timm’s laptop, I’ve found other stuff. Some of this writings will appear here. I understand that Timm had hoped to write a novel; there are some chapters of a work. He tapped out some poetry, too. His love of music can be found in a folder crammed with guitar ligatures for songs ranging from the religious (“I Will Call Upon The Lord,” “Be Glorified”) to classical (Pachelbel’s “Canon in D” and Bach’s “Air on a G String”), contemporary stuff by Michael Hedges and Pat Matheny, and even patriotic tunes like “The Star Spangled Banner” -- those were a surprise.

Maybe someone out there could send in a post about Timm and his guitar. Did you know he played a song he had written for my first wedding, performed outside my aunt and uncle’s house in Florida? Impatient to be on with the ceremony, I cut Timm off around the third or fourth stanza -- another amends I owe to Timm’s memory ...

***

Another way of tracking Timm through his laptop was in his library of iTunes songs, begun, it seems, in late 2005, probably when he got this Powerbook. (I have replaced my ancient iMac with this laptop now, use it for my own writing -- having copied most of my files over to it, now when I search for something I get a strange blend of my work and my brother’s -- we are certainly twins now, if only in the digital sense ...)

Chris Botti’s “Forgiven” is the most listened-to track on Timm’s iTunes library, something he’d been keeping, apparently, since late 2005. (#2, “Benedictus,” #3, Jeff Johnson’s “Gaugin’s Dream.”) Man, what a track -- the ache of the yearning in it has haunted me since I first listened to the tune on Timm’s laptop. I can’t get the sound of it out of my ear. It’s like a soft, distant shore, tiding a bittersweet beauty that comes from deep in the heart -- Timm’s heart, my heart, I dunno: ours.

Never having heard the song before, I thought at first it was a Christian song -- the title would have lent it that way -- but the lyric sheet I downloaded gives the impression of a darker yet brighter, deeper and perhaps crazier faith:

These are the chances we take
Reasons that we can’t explain
Follow your heart everyday
Pray it’ll be forgiven

Don’t let go
Until all your days are broken
We were one
Now I’m standing
In the rain and you are gone
I gave up everything

A torch song about that lost or never-to-be fully requieted love; love that maddens the soul because it awakens harmonies deep in this life resonant of that shore where the Beloved walks and waits for us. In its brighter sense, this is the soul of art, the heart of beauty; in a darker way it is the insuppressible thirst for More which the drunkard nurses to death. Halves of an inexpressibly beautiful, unslakable, heart, for better and worse ...

I don’t know in which way (or ways) Timm sang along with “Forgiven,” but he sure listened to it a lot, obviously enthralled with it in a way I deeply identify with. Maybe it’s just a great song. My wife hates these longing weepy songs -- sacchyrine perhaps (what she would call a “guilty pleasure” when talking about those chick flicks she hates yet loves), but I know that the deep stuff disturbs her too much to tears. We don’t usually watch wrenching dramas of love and death on DVD.

Archetypally -- to my way of thinking in that manner -- “Forgiven” belongs to the singer’s tradition of yearning which goes back to Orpheus, whose song which delighted nature so and yet failed to woo back his lost wife Eurydice.

It is a music which goes deeper than its words, resonating in something first like birth, in full rapture of love on its wedding night. A sea-sounding, blue empyrean, yes: a haunting melody which we can never forget, no matter how far we blunder away from that first shore.

Something about that music is uterine, of the sea, resonant of a sound which is maternal, something we recall from the womb, are reminded of as conch shells whisper the sound of the sea: I think Timm was a deep lover of that music, heard it near and far, sought to sing it, play it on his guitar, be one with it as walked to mountaintops and down shores.

* * *

All of us Cohea brothers -- perhaps sister Molly too -- were deeply stung or moved by that kind of music. When we were 14 and 12, my older brother Will and I used to lay on the living room floor listening, at full volume -- over and and over -- to the song “Watching and Waiting,” off the Moody Blues To Our Children’s Children’s Children album. We lay there as if adrift in the hopelessly sweet and bitter magnitude of longing, expressed in that tune with majestical washes of early ‘70’s synth rock.

I don’t know what Timm thought of that music, at 6 back then, but surely he was pickling in that sound as it filled the house (Molly was endlessly aggrieved at the volume, hollering over the gorgeous blast to TURN IT DOWN.)

We were sure of something back then, gripped and birthed in a sweet sounding womb of sound: loved that stuff, and so, apparently, did you. Almost all of your iTunes library I would have selected myself, at some time in my history. Maybe then the music is genetic, riding aboard that fish that crests our father’s heraldic coat of arms. (You renamed yourself for that family which dates far back to the centuries before Christ.) Or maybe we just heard it on the wind, like everyone else did. You wanted to play that music on your guitar. You wanted to conduct it (“Benedictus,” which played at your memorial service, was a tune you were planning to conduct to your church choir.)

When our older brother and I were young, we used to watch the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra on TV, enrapt with the sound. In a well-told family tale, one day our older brother was conducting the orchestra with an imaginary baton, sitting on and then rising from a small stool set by the TV. Jealous of that music myself, I slowly crept up from behind to steal his stool. I wanted to possess the music that badly. Obviously so did you. I’m sorry I discover this so late. We could have talked so much about this ...

Rilke, a poet who taught me much about in-depth conversations with ocean-borne longings, wrote about our shared love of that bittersweet sound in “To Music.” I think it sums our love of music up well, brother, as well as the places it takes us -- perhaps finally took you.

... O you the transformation
of feelings into what? --: into audible landscape.
You stranger: music. You heart-space
grown out of us. The deepest space in us,
which, rising above us, forces its way out,--
holy departure;
when the innermost point in us stands
outside, as the most practiced distance, as the other
side of the air:
pure,
boundless,
no longer habitable.

-- transl. Stephen Mitchell

* * *

There is a tale I never shared with you but I suspect would sound achingly familiar, perhaps even now ... It comes from Fiona MacLeod, the pen name of the late-nineteenth-century writer George Sharp, who wrote much about the rich Gaelic heritage which you cast an anchor into when you changed your last name to our original spelling of O’Cobhthaigh. (Bardic roots in that name, ‘tis said, harpists and singers and poets, and, failing all that, lawyers ...)

Our love of music washes together and forth at a shore where I and Thou are one -- an impossible place, one which we can only dream, long for, sing, our lives long. Smile for me in those vast blue waters they summon if you agree ...

CHILDREN OF WATER

Fiona McLeod

From The Collected Works of Fiona McLeod, Vol. 4
London: William Heinemann, 1912

"O hide the bitter gifts of our lord Poseidon"

—Archolochus of Paros

… Long ago, when Manannan, the god of wind and sea, offspring of Lir, the Ocearius of the Gael, lay once by weedy shores, he heard a man and a woman talking. The woman was a woman of the sea, and some say that she was a seal: but that is no matter, for it was in the time when the divine race and the human race and the soulless race and the dumb races that are near to man were all one race.

And Manannan heard the man say: "I will give you love and home and peace." The sea-woman listened to that, and said: "And I will bring you the homelessness of the sea, and the peace of the restless wave, and love like the wandering wind." At that the man chided her and said she could be no woman, though she had his love. She laughed, and slid into green water.

Then Manannan took the shape of a youth, and appeared to the man. "You are a strange love for a seawoman," he said: "and why do you go putting your earth-heart to her sea-heart?" The man said he did not know, but that he had no pleasure in looking at women who were all the same.

At that Manannan laughed a low laugh. "Go back," he said, and take one you'll meet singing on the heather. She's white and fair. But because of your lost love in the water, I'll give you a gift." And with that Manannan took a wave of the sea and threw it into the man's heart.

He went back, and wedded, and, when his hour came, he died. But he, and the children he had, and all the unnumbered clan that came of them, knew by day and by night a love that was tameless and changeable as the wandering wind, and a longing that was unquiet as the restless wave, and the homelessness of the sea. And that is why they are called the Sliochd-na-mara, the clan of the waters, or the Treud-na-thonn, the tribe of the sea-wave.

And of that clan are some who have turned their longing after the wind and wave of the mind--the wind that would overtake the waves of thought and dream, and gather them and lift them into clouds of beauty drifting in the blue glens of the sky.

How are these ever to be satisfied, children of water?

-- How am I ever to get the sound of that song out of my head?