In this new column for Atwood Magazine, I explore the impact of one artist and album across the range of my experience in one city or across several cities. The aspiration is that you will resonate with my experiences and how they might intersect with your own life in deepening our understanding and reflection on a particular artist and album in our contemporary world.
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David Sylvian’s ‘Secrets of the Beehive’ stands as one of the most remarkable and stark registers of the journey within the emotional life of a relationship in ways that have probably been never captured in music as to its ultimate form of languishing intensity across the arc of memory in human life.
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Stream: ‘Secrets of the Beehive’ – David Sylvian
We had fallen deeply for each other as the yellow and ochre-tinged leaves crunched beneath our shoes in those autumn days in the most brilliant year of our lives in upstate New York.
We were young and naive, yet full of an idealism that would never be shattered, not even decades later. In those early days of our relationship in September 1987, our world revolved around David Sylvian’s album Brilliant Trees wherein the song “Nostalgia” fostered an omniscient sense of memory of our own selves in living beyond the years. Even though we were young, we were also old souls that were shaped by a sense of nostalgia of a lost time, which was also deepened through our simultaneous reading of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.
Sylvian recounts in “Nostalgia”:
“Voices heard in fields of green
Their joy their calm and luxury
Are lost within the wanderings of my mind
I’m cutting branches from the trees
Shaped by years of memories
To exorcise their ghosts from inside of me
The sound of waves in a pool of water
I’m drowning in my nostalgia”
We carved deeply into an unfettered sense of love that was raw and dreamlike as we were both shaped by years of our own memories and a nostalgia of the slipping time of yesterday in our present moment. At this height of emotional carnality in our relationship, David Sylvian released what might be named as his magnum opus — Secrets of the Beehive on 7 November 1987. After this album, he would rarely return to the unearthly form of pop melody that he could unfurl from the depths of his soul. Our intense love for each other was like no other, and this particular LP provided an unearthly interior canvas that profoundly reflected our emotional life.
Late that autumn, we found ourselves falling more resolutely within the interiors of the world that David Sylvian provided, and that particular immersion was precipitated with the road trip that we took from Syracuse to Montréal.
It was deep into an uncanny upstate New York autumn and in that delightful chill and foliage we arrived into the splendor of urbanity in downtown old Montréal which resonated so intimately in the resiliency of our youth. We felt entirely at home in the bilingual identities, the fashion of regulatory black, beautiful people at every turn, and the sidewalk cafes and bars full of espresso, smoke, and red wine.
We were resolutely in love and it was only fitting that we lodged those two nights at the Hotel D’Amour in a small well-worn but fitting room that seemed to capture Montréal in a different epoch. We did what was best – walked the streets, sauntered into shops, bought slim pants and bolero hats, smoked cigarettes, hung out on sidewalks drinking coffee and wine, and made love in Hotel D’Amour.
It was on our second day, that we came upon a hidden and very appealing record shop with hardwood and black interiors, and it was in that moment that we happened upon David Sylvian’s newly released album Secrets of the Beehive – an album that would last an eternity and that could almost suffice as the soundtrack of our relationship. An LP that would always remain a very intimate and private album for us in those halcyon years and throughout our lives as its traces would always impart a sense of jouissance whenever we heard the echo of his voice singing on the opening track “September”:
“September’s here again…,” and as Sylvian continues to invoke:
“The sun shines high above, the sounds of laughter
The birds swoop down upon the crosses of old grey churches
We say that we’re in love while secretly wishing for rain
Sipping Coke and playing games
September’s here again
September’s here again”
Sylvian’s monochrome yet vibrantly colorful sense of existence fit well within the glove of our shared being in almost encasing ourselves from the exterior world, and only granting permission to the aesthetics and ambience that suited our dream house. We only desired to float and inhabit the space and comfort of this album that almost seemed to be conceptualized as a promise of eternity itself – this music of a “dream house” that Sylvian imagined in his song “Maria.” As Sylvian inspires:
“Climb the stairs
And step into my dream house
These words are yours, Maria
The waters warm (hold me)
The table bare (till the worst is past)
Until the summer nights return
Until we close our eyes
Maria, your every thought’s my heartbeat
Maria, save a thought for me”
These were their precise emotions together in Syracuse and Montréal in that moment of time, but as with the ephemeral nature of life, they would never be exactly replicated beyond the period of those irreplaceable months and years.
In that epiphany of life we were also reading Milan Kundera’s magnificent novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being which almost served as an uncanny touchstone to Sylvian’s Secrets of the Beehive in contemplating the lightness/heaviness of being and the fragility/wonder of existence as to what occurs only happens once in a moment in time and that will always be lost forever. In essence, we only have one opportunity in time with one person, and that moment is always already fleeting.
In that thought, we laid on our bed in Hotel D’Amour in Montréal, as the uplifting clarion call of Sylvian’s “Orpheus” seemed to promise us a different sort of “outlook on life” that would continue to register in our shared consciousness for decades on, as Sylvian profoundly ruminates:
“I wrestle with an outlook on life
That shifts between darkness and shadowy light
I struggle with words for fear that they’ll hear
But Orpheus sleeps on his back, still dead to the world
Sunlight falls, my wings open wide
There’s a beauty here I cannot deny
And bottles that tumble and crash on the stairs
Are just so many people I knew never cared”
Although we did not know it then, this precise “outlook on life” in the continual intermingling between darkness and light would continue to frame our entire lives as although we prospered in the light we only and truly came to life in the darkness.
We sought an obscure sense of beauty that perhaps many others could not sense as it was there in the porousness of late night seemingly illicit conversations that only the darkness could evoke. These immense feelings are encapsulated within the simultaneous fleeting transience and immediate warmth that are evoked in Secrets of the Beehive — an album of paradox and similarity which is life.
As the decades have surmounted one upon the other like clandestine Russian dolls, the passage of time is without an escape, and we remain reflecting on what Sylvian sang all those many years ago in “The Devil’s Own”:
“Underneath the vine
Shaded by the leaves
I still hold you close to me
Beneath the open stars
Beneath the pillows and the sheets
I still hold you dear to me”
The inextricable forms of intimacy and closeness that we created in those colossal years from Syracuse to Montréal holds us so very dear to one another across the decades. In those precious years the perspectival world that we envisioned was framed by a rigorous critical eye saturated with wine and skepticism. We questioned existence and god within our own buoyancy as we dreamed of our own horizons to continue to unfold together. The memories across those years flood our lives till this day in ways that foster a wonderful manner of living intently and intensely in our ephemeral moments. Sylvian captures this dynamic as he evokes in “Waterfront”:
“Watch the train steam full ahead as it takes the bend
Empty carriages lose their tracks and tumble to their end
So the world shrinks drop by drop as the wine goes to your head
Swollen angels point and laugh, “This time, your god is dead”
On the waterfront, the rain is pouring in my heart
Here, the memories come in waves,
raking in the lost and found of years
And though I’d like to laugh
at all the things that led me on
Somehow, the stigma still remains
Is our love strong enough?”
The bricolage of memories in the rapid passage of years often leave us stunned as we continually strive and struggle to create meaning in the semblances of life as we question love and existence itself within the rapidly dissipating frames of youth.
David Sylvian’s Secrets of the Beehive stands as one of the most remarkable and stark registers of the journey within the emotional life of a relationship in ways that have probably been never captured in music as to its ultimate form of languishing intensity across the arc of memory in human life.
This is a monumental album that intricately traces the irrevocable beauty, dynamic forms of self-transformation, the ephemeral sense of happiness that is only left as a vague trace on one’s being. The time and memory that surrounds, the brutal overwhelming emotions of loss in love that leave one in desolation, and the love and friendship that remains in making it possible to live beyond the years from Syracuse to Montréal and into the world.
A gift from my lover, David Sylvian’s box set Weatherbox (20 November 1989) stands as a beautiful monument to all the unfathomable creativity that led towards the wonders of Secrets of the Beehive.
This boxed treasure is always within my sight ’til this very day in peering back through the decades as I imagine us walking in the twilight to our favorite restaurant in Armory Square in our joyous youth in those Syracuse years, and as we cavorted through the centuries in old Montréal in the depths of night all those years ago.
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© David SylvianSecrets of the Beehive
an album by David Sylvian
