Sacred Space - January 16, 2012

It was perfectly pleasant this morning when Anya and I went out for a quick walk. It was still warm (around 30°F) at 1 pm, when I took her to the dog park, but you could definitely feel the wind. The sun was shining, but there's only so much radiant heat can do against a steady, cold breeze.

Tonight was the pub sing I started a little over a year ago, at Merlin's Rest, a pub in south Minneapolis. As usual, it was a good time. Merlin's is pretty loud, especially as the evening begins. But it's very welcoming and friendly to us... the owners seem to think we're a good thing, not an annoyance to the paying patrons. So we regularly get 100 people crammed into the performing side of the bar.

What we're basing this monthly sing on, is an old tradition of local performers having a good time down at the local, throughout the British Isles. In our case, it's singing, but a usual pattern is more like the wonderful recording Music at Matt Molloy's. Molloy is the flautist for the Chieftans, and he owns a pub in the west of Ireland that's become a gathering place for musicians, and kind of a pilgrimage for fans of Irish music. The recording is made up of performances, of varying quality but unvarying sincerity, and of the ambient sound of the pub: clinking glasses, foot traffic, and conversation. Because pub singing, and indeed most music in the real world, does not stop the world around it.

Sometimes it does. I tear up a little at the section in A Cricket in Times Square where Chester the Cricket's playing his final tune stops the city in its tracks to listen. Sometimes everyone stops, and that happens some of the time at the pub. But mostly some people are listening, and others are doing something else.

Does this have anything to do with the running theme of this blog? Well, I'd say this: people often assume that a space is somehow sacred, in and of itself. Others find this sacredness in the outdoors. But while it's really tempting to place this sense of silent attention and even reverence in some specific physical context, it's really a collective decision to make this moment or that space sacred. Neither the outdoors or any indoor space is inherently sacred in and of itself. All is context and the respect we are willing to give to that context.