Karine Polwart, Folk Singing and the Prophetic Imagination

It's becoming an enjoyable if unpredictable habit. Innocently driving down or up the road to Paisley listening to the radio and there's a moment of illumination, or a coincidence of mood and music, or the fusion of idle thought and good ideas, or the interruption of the complacent routine by the unsettlingly different. It was the last of these this morning. I was ambushed by a song that compels our consideration of an unsettlingly different view of ourselves, our world and our responses to life around us.

On Radio Scotland I heard the haunting voice of Karine Polwart singing Better Things, the lyrics deceptively gentle in their subversive questioning of the way things are. And that lyrical gentleness and acoustic melody pushes ideas through our road metal defences like patiently persistent green shoots whose life force won't be denied the life giving sun even by the tarmac surface of minds hardened by the endless traffic of excess experience, information overload and sensory saturation that is our post- modern networked, globalised, rapid-feed culture. And yes, that is a long sentence, and a few over-wrought metaphors - perhaps.

The truth is that some of our best folk singers fulfil the role of prophet, and speak truth to power. They do this by calling in question the assumptions of the powerful, they dare to interrogate the ethics of political decisions, they refuse to accept that the economic bottom line has some kind of absolute veto on human compassion, is the reality check for kindness, or makes an ethical generosity foolish, unrealistic, or even worse, unaffordable.

The song Better Things does several of these things in oblique poetry that is at the same time a profound questioning of the wisdom of the world. Here are the words, and Karine polwart's own reasons for writing them given at the end:

So is this the best that we can do?
Oh I can think of better things - can't you?
Yes I can think of better things
That hands can make and hearts can sing

For now we deal with those for whom
A life is but a carnal tomb
In which the darkness holds no power
And neither does the final hour

So is this the best that we can do?
Oh I can think of better things - can't you?
Yes I can think of better things
That hands can make and hearts can sing

We may lament the deadly art
Of tiny atoms torn apart
Of visions that we can't return
And future fires in which we fear we'll burn

So is this the best that we can do?
Oh I can think of better things - can't you?
Yes I can think of better things
That hands can make and hearts can sing

Yet this is the art of those before
Who found a cure within the core
The noble mind behind the ray
That eased our earthly cares away

So is this the best that we can do?
Oh I can think of better things - can't you?
Yes I can think of better things
That hands can make and hearts can sing

Words & Music: Karine Polwart (Bay Songs Ltd 2007)
I wrote this for the "Bin The Bomb" campaign in protest at the UK Government's decision to re-commission the Trident generation of nuclear weapons. I just think maybe there are a few imaginative and constructive ways to spend £30 billion or so that don't involve weapons of mass destruction.

Swords into ploughshares, spears into pruning hooks, and technology turned towards the healing of the wounds of the world - I too can think of better things that hands can make, and hearts can sing.

Comments

[Cristian C.]

I am a big fan of your blog, I read it with great interest. I particularly like the series about the 'texts you travel with', and I like the remarks about Brueggemann.
Cheers from a Romanian Greek Catholic.