When I Was The Forest
A man playing a kantele in 1930s Finland
Sinikka Langeland’s new record, Wolf Rune, is stripped back to its essentials - her voice and the kantele - and among its sources of inspiration are the ‘rune songs’ of Finland, which are based on epic, lyric, or shamanistic folk poetry. Langeland is Norwegian and comes from Finnskogen, which has long been inhabited by Finnish immigrants; the kantele is the Finnish national instrument, first mentioned in the Kalevala, where the hero and mage Väinämöinen fashions one from the jawbone of a pike and some hairs from a stallion. The instrument is found in many sizes and forms, varying from five to forty strings; Langeland plays different versions, although she tends to favour the more substantial ‘concert’ kantele, which can be tuned. All of them are plucked and are generally held horizontally; they have some similarity to the zither and psaltery, and close variants are found in Russia, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.
On her earlier albums Langeland borrowed lyrics from several poets, including the luminous Edith Södergran, the Swedish-speaking Finn who grew up in Karelia, where Langeland’s mother also had her home. On this recording, although she includes words of her own as well as those of other writers, greater prominence is given to Meister Eckhart, the mediaeval German theologian and mystic, who is credited with the short introductory verse on the CD’s accompanying leaflet and the lyrics of the longest song on the record, ‘When I Was the Forest’. Intriguingly, the latter, written in English and then translated into Norwegian, are said to be ‘after’ him. They read as follows:
When I was the stream,
when I was the forest,
when I was still the field
when I was every hoof,
foot, fin, and wing,
when I was the sky itself,
no one ever wondered
was there anything I might need,
for there was nothing
I could not love.
It was when I left all we once were
that the agony began,
the fear and questions came,
and I wept, I wept.
And tears I had never known before.
So I returned to the river,
I returned to the mountains.
I asked for their hand in marriage again.
I begged - I begged to wed
every object and creature,
and when they accepted,
God was ever present in my arms.
And he did not say,
‘Where have you been?’For then I knew my soul
- every soul -
has always held Him.
These agreeable verses, which have something of the melodious cadence of ever-popular poems by Kahlil Gibran or Jalāl ad-Dīn Rumi, work well in the context of the gentle sound and the pantheistic tone of Langeland’s album, but they are far from being typical representations of the writing or thought of Meister Eckhart. It is possible that they were taken from, or inspired by, a recent publication called Eckhart’s Book of the Heart, which, according to the authors, includes ‘attempts at voicing - or re-voicing - his thought. They take the first-person confessional form, with the occasional self-reflective poem written as if by Eckhart to himself’.
Meister Eckhart - more than other early Christian mystics, with the possible exceptions of Hildegard von Bingen and Julian of Norwich - has been comfortably integrated into New Age thinking, and references to him are frequent and widespread in that context. This is because of his emphasis on metaphysical ‘oneness’, which caused him problems with the Church during his lifetime. Eckhart, reflecting aspects of Neoplatonism, aspired to complete union with the divine, to the point where even the idea of unity with God disappears and separation is neither known nor remembered. In that light, it is reasonable to find connections between many of his thoughts and Buddhism or non-dual ‘advaita’, but Eckhart himself might have been surprised to discover the extent to which his teaching has drifted away from its origins. He wrote sermons and theological treatises, not poems or aphorisms, and his more original thinking was always rooted in conventional Christian language and ideology; as a Dominican friar, even though he came close to being accused of heresy by the Catholic Church, this was to be expected. It is unlikely, too, that he would have been comfortable with his contemporary status as a spiritual guide for the New Age, particularly as he considered hard work, physical seclusion, and utter detachment from the self and the world to be the preconditions of enlightenment.
For further exploration:
From ‘Wolf Rune’ by Sinikka Langeland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fF7cdOth48
Sinikka Langeland: http://www.sinikka.no/
A contemporary Catholic view of Meister Eckhart: https://magazine.nd.edu/stories/a-mystic-for-our-time/
A New Age view of Meister Eckhart: https://www.stillnessspeaks.com/here-now-living-love-meister-eckhart/
Fra Teodoro of Urbino as St. Dominic by Giovanni Bellini