Perfect Pitch

At first I thought of blogging about beautiful singing voices, grassy playing surfaces or clinically clever advertising campaigns. But then I figured I'd take an oblique approach (for a change, ha ha) to the given theme of perfect pitch, you know, get down and dirty with a sticky mix of chemistry and folklore, covering everything from bitumen via pitchblende to tar babies. I hope you're okay with that. Are you sitting comfortably, Saturday? Here it comes...

slouching towards ecotastrophe

Pitch or tar (the words can be used interchangeably) can be derived from a number of sources including coal, oil, peat and certain woods. It is a dark brown or black viscous liquid and gave us the term pitch black. In common usage, tar generally refers to the more fluid, and pitch to the more solid, forms of this viscous mixture of ever so slightly dangerous hydrocarbons; (it's the benzene, mostly). Traditionally  pitch or tar has been used as a form of water-repellent coating on the hulls of boats, the walls of sheds, the roofs of houses, the surface of roads, and in the making of tar-babies. 

The 'Uncle Remus' stories of Joel Chandler Harris are not as popular as they were when I was a child and living in West Africa in the 1950s, but they were a memorable part of my early reading, books gifted to me by an American missionary family of our acquaintance, and the tale of Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox and the Tar Baby in particular has always stayed in mind.

Harris, an American journalist and folklorist of the deep south, carried out field research in the 1870s among his country's African-American plantation workers and wrote their tales up originally for newspaper serialisation so as to "preserve in permanent shape those curious mementoes of a period that will no doubt be misrepresented by historians of the future." Of course the oral tradition of the plantation workers had its roots much further away and longer ago in Africa, where I was born and was living, not that I knew of their provenance as a five-year-old.

There are quite a few 'tar baby' folk tales to be found in African folklore. The one about Anansi is the most widespread. I'll paraphrase it here:

Anansi was a greedy and lazy character. He lived on a farm with his wife and children, who went to tend it every morning while he sat in the house and gorged himself. Instead of helping around the house or on the farm, he became fat from consuming all the fruits of his family’s labour, causing them to become thinner. After a while, his wife decided that she'd had enough and came up with a plan to weed Anansi out of the house. She made a tar figure and left it outside in the yard, calling it an intruder. Anansi went outside to order it off his land but the tar figure would not reply or move, so  Anansi got very angry and punched the tar figure with both fists. However, his hands got stuck in the tar, causing him to become even angrier. He continued to assault the 'tar baby' until he was stuck completely and, ashamed, remained in that state until death.

I hope the moral of that cautionary tale is abundantly clear. 😉

Closer to the Brer Rabbit story is a version from Mozambique. Again, I'll paraphrase from the French:

There was a pesky rabbit (more correctly a hare - lièvre) who, by means of false alarms of war, had repeatedly robbed the ground-nut patches of a certain village. Eventually the  inhabitants became suspicious, and decided to lay a trap for him. The first step was to gather tar (in this case la glu noire) from which to make the 'tar baby'  (un mannequin de femme) which they set up in the garden. The next time the pesky rabbit gave the alarm that the enemy was coming, the villagers all ran away; but, seeing the 'tar-baby' still there, the rabbit shouted for it to scram too ("Va-t-en, femme!"). When the figure neither replied nor departed, the rabbit tried to move it bodily and became stuck fast. The people then came up, extricated the rabbit from the Tar-Baby's embraces, and informed him that they were going to kill him. "Very well," said he, "but don't kill me on the ground, kill me on the chief's back!" They returned to the village and spread a mat on the ground, on which the chief obligingly lay down, and the rabbit squatted on his back. A strong warrior then prepared to spear the rabbit and, as might be expected, ended up killing the chief, for the rabbit leaped into the air at the critical moment and made his escape without any difficulty. The indignant villagers then massacred the warrior.

That one's for the MAGA dunderheads who have voted the reprehensible Trump in not once but twice. 😡 

And while we're on the topic of bombing Iran, let's not forget that it was the Americans and British who first destabilised Iran by prompting and supporting a coup d'etat in 1953, enabling a military junta to overthrow the democratic Iranian government which had recently nationalised the country's oil production capabilities so that Iranians, rather than exploitative British and American oil companies, would actually benefit from the country's natural resources.  And it's still the West's thirst for middle-east oil that underlies most of the turmoil in the region and was the major geo-political factor behind the disastrous Gulf Wars of recent memory.

Colonialism, imperialism, economic bullying, we can't keep our sticky paws off the perfect pitch, it seems. It has become a major reason why the Arab world distrusts the West. And now the flow from the middle east is growing increasingly unreliable, the pro-fossil fuel lobby is redoubling its efforts to increase drilling in the USA and under the north sea in defiance of all the scientific evidence that climate change from increased greenhouse gases is endangering the entire planetary ecosystem. Just read Bill McKibben's 'The End of Nature'.

"Drill, baby, drill" (Donald Trump)

If we're not careful, we will die, like greedy Anansi, in the sticky embrace of the 'tar-baby'.

After all that, you want a poem? OK then. Here's my latest mytb-busting word bomb of an ecoblast. It's a pastiche after Don Mclean, and it's for my friends in Just Stop Oil. You know the tune. It doesn't matter if you haven't got perfect pitch. Sing along....

Tarry, Tarry Night

Tarry, tarry night
Paint the future black and grey
No more sunny upland days
This darkness in our souls won’t ever lift

Fossil fuel kills
Scorches trees and animals
No more breeze to cool our ills
We’re cancers on this once so pleasant gift

Now I understand
What they were trying to say to me
As they campaigned for our sanity
And how they tried to set us right

We would not listen, did we not know how?
Too late to listen now

Tarry, tarry night
Portraits done in heavy oils
Shameless heads on corporate walls
With greedy eyes for all that they could get

Dangerous and yet
Voted for by all of those
Without the courage to oppose
The lies that in the end have brought us low

Now I think I know
What they were trying to say to me
As they campaigned for our sanity
And why they said to let oil go

We would not listen, didn’t want to know
Too late to listen now

For we could not love the earth
Although its love for us was true
And when no hope was left in sight
On that tarry, tarry night

It did what jilted lovers often do

Gave up the will to fight. In truth

This world was wasted
By the likes of me and you

Thanks for reading, S ;-)