Charlie Rauh

Charlie Rauh: Amizdel (Book Review)

| Tyran Grillo

“One tries to cure the signs of growth, to exorcise them, as if they were devils, when really they might be angels of annunciation.”
–Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

To receive the world is to allow it to leave a mark. In Amizdel, Charlie Rauh approaches that vulnerability as a practice of attention, gathering a year’s worth of memories and encounters into a record of learning to remain open. His introduction locates a quiet source of strength in the willingness to accept what others offer and to live with the knowledge that hardship may arrive as unexpectedly as beauty. The question guiding this undertaking is how such openness might sustain us through both. Beneath it stirs another, more elusive inquiry into what becomes of the self when its conditions waver at the edge of uncertainty.

The book takes its title from Hildegard von Bingen’s word for “armor,” preserved in her enigmatic lingua ignota, or “unknown language.” The indeterminate purpose of that language gives Rauh’s reflections a suggestive point of departure, allowing protection itself to remain a question. Awareness and connection become ways of inhabiting an exposure whose terms we cannot dictate. Such armor acquires the delicacy of a membrane, carrying the world’s pressure into the being it encloses. Beautifully illustrated by his sister, Christina Rauh Fishburne, Amizdel also brings a familial dimension to this exploration. The collaboration places an actual relationship within the book’s meditation on receptivity, giving its concern for others a material presence before any philosophy can float free of the hands that made it.

The only way to find what is lost is to become lost oneself. This profound lesson, learned early in a childhood anecdote shared as the book’s opening, sets the tone for everything that follows. A mother drops a coin into the grass to locate a missing necklace, entering the object’s predicament through an imaginative adjustment of scale. The mind kneels until the blades become corridors. Drawn from that formless yet inexhaustible wellspring we call consciousness, Rauh’s subsequent contemplations repeatedly loosen the coordinates and the proverbial map on which they are plotted. Their mystical irony resides in the compass that continues to guide him, equally immaterial yet central to his existence. Direction emerges from intimacy with what has eluded him. Later, his missing keys reappear during the clearing of an apartment destroyed by fire. Their recovery leaves the destruction intact, placing a difficult limit on the consolations of seeing. A revelation can illuminate the ashes without returning them to wood.

“We are born explorers,” he writes, locating our questioning nature in the accumulations of thought and experience through which answers become possible. In that sense, reminders and remainders approach synonymy, bringing something important to the beds of our internal gardens. Seeds and fully grown plants occupy different moments in a continuum whose circumference we cannot see; even the smallest remnant carries a subterranean proposition about what may grow. Yet exploration also depends on the stillness to enjoy having no destination. Rauh’s practice of sitting at successive bus stops, leaving each when the bus arrives, quietly detaches waiting from the obligation to board. The interval acquires a life independent of whatever might end it. This “joyful waiting” is where we so often forget to dwell, having surrendered the present to the appointment it is supposed to keep.

Such a practice helps explain the book’s form. Its longer essays give way to fragments that allow impressions and aphorisms to become entities unto themselves, endowed with a cognition and will of their own. Not every story needs a biographical fingerprint. Whether meditating on flight or mortality, Rauh becomes less securely positioned at the center of his observations as they compound. A window can have a perspective; a room can shelter a silence that survives its occupant. The recurrent second person further unsettles the distinction between observer and observed, admitting the reader into an address whose original recipient may remain unknowable. Intimacy gathers around this uncertainty. To enter the conversation is to accept that some part of it will always belong elsewhere, beyond the reader’s appetite for disclosure.

The shoreline offers a particularly charged version of that encounter. In Ocean, Rauh recalls his residency on Captiva Island and the music that emerged from his proximity to the sea. These liminal zones of contact are nature’s affordances, places where the immense permits our touch without becoming manageable. Memory washes into composition, and the body discovers how readily an invitation can contain danger. His nighttime floating eventually enters into conversation with Hans Scholl’s writing and resistance to Nazism. The distance between voluntarily confronting uncertainty and suffering political persecution resists lyrical compression, giving the meditation its moral charge. Beauty can demand an answer from someone who has every reason to feel abandoned by it. “Courage is not the absence of fear,” Rauh notes, “but the disarming of its paralysis through love.” Against our habit of turning prayers into contracts, the sentence leaves courage vulnerable to an outcome it cannot purchase.

Grief makes that vulnerability more intimate. Certain emotional registers cast permanent shadows on our lives that never quite capitulate to the sun’s willful shine. Rauh’s recollection of Connie, who taught him to take pleasure in breathing, gives this permanence a corporeal articulation. Her lesson survives within the action of a chest rising and falling, allowing the absent teacher to participate in another breath. For a musician, the implications extend beyond technique: sound begins in a body’s willingness to make room. Remembrance, however, is a conscious act that must be brought forth through intention. Habit can carry what the mind has ceased to name, and attention grants that inheritance a moment of audibility. Somewhere beneath the ribs, an unfinished instruction continues opening its small door.

In thinking about and through time, Rauh attends to rhythms we cannot control. Morning arrives with a relentlessness that complicates our declarations of allegiance to the night, while the same hour holds utterly different lives within it. His personal ceremonies, whether lighting a candle or watching people pass by, are hugged by the rising sun without acquiring a claim on everyone else’s experience. This distinction becomes especially consequential when Morning turns to the poetry of Phillis Wheatley Peters. The recurring dawn meets a voice formed under enslavement, and the act of beginning another day takes on an ethical demand that exceeds the pleasures of illumination. Rauh hears a summons to creative responsibility. What will we make with the life that has reached us? The question gathers force from the particular person asking it, whose circumstances enter the light and change its meaning.

The most important things in these pages can only be fully understood in the moment of their unfolding because they belong to those who experience them. In that way, they have a voice. Old rooms retain a character that cannot be replicated elsewhere, just as these curious assemblages of mind and body that house what we call “souls” acquire a withered architecture all their own. Rauh’s imagined visits to sparsely furnished interiors preserve the darkness in their corners, granting even an unoccupied space a measure of privacy. Fishburne’s portraits offer another form of this restraint. Faces held within quiet borders, some edged in gold, remain distinctly themselves amid the prose’s more fluid intimacies. Their presence gives the book’s spiritual inheritance a human countenance. The voice of creation may be deliberate, but it doesn’t shout into our ears; sometimes it waits until we have ceased furnishing every silence with ourselves.

Even in the absence of a promise of glory, something keeps us striving, with beginnings that carry endings in their hearts. The brief pieces gathered under Cloud-Moving Wind-Filled place that impulse, each an overture to an opera that never sings, whose unperformed passages accumulate within the reader. “I know what you are after,” Rauh observes, “and it isn’t glory or money. You are after a mortar.” The word holds the binding agent beside the weapon, bringing the longing for cohesion into dangerous proximity with the wish to destroy whatever threatens it. Wholeness, too, can harbor aggression. In the adjacent Curious Architect, building begins with the willingness to ask how things hold together. One senses a “mysterious architect” working through these pages, although the structure remains exposed to the desires of whoever inhabits it. The book’s armor must contend with the violence concealed inside our own hopes for protection.

That complication becomes harder to evade in Recollections, where Rauh’s tenderness passes through morally unsettled terrain. In Shoulders, an apparent rescue develops the momentum of a getaway, only to leave the narrator questioning what he has done. Good intentions survive here with their authority diminished. Elsewhere, an emptied dwelling fills with ghosts the speaker acknowledges having created, and departure requires him to sit among them until their work is finished. The uncanny gives memory a laboring body, capable of resisting the meanings we would assign it. These passages leave pieces of unfinished futures and unfinished pasts needing time to sit and ruminate. Their darkness deepens the earlier invitation to receive, as another person’s suffering may enter our lives without becoming available to our preferred story of ourselves.

Near the close of I Don’t Live Near the Fairgrounds Anymore, a misspelled name bears the weight of an attachment language could never quite preserve. The spaces between its letters become places where love and loss unravel, carrying the ache of everything a name can summon and everything it cannot contain. Here the opening search for a necklace acquires a more difficult afterlife. Some absences will remain beyond the reach of the most attentive hand. History is where secrets are buried, and eventually we contribute our own to the soil. We feel heard in the unwritten blankness around them, where our own unfinished lives can settle for a moment. The compass continues its inaudible turning. In the garden beneath the page, a seed holds open the dark.

Charlie Rauh: Simply, Patiently, Quietly (Book Review)

| Tyran Grillo

It would be easy to say that guitarist, composer, and producer Charlie Rauh charts a territory all his own. But to fall into that cliché would risk eliding the tender graces that have fueled his endeavors from the beginning. He averts his eyes from the road less traveled, setting his heart instead on that still bearing the footprints of ancestors related either by blood or artistic heritage. Whether tuning his guitar like a microscope to the poetry of Phillis Wheatley or Anne and Emily Brontë or flipping it around like a telescope in the warmth of such albums as Viriditas and Hiraeth, he never lets go of the human condition as a central concern.

This debut musical treatise bears the subtitle “An Approach to Creating Intentional Music.” And yet, what is so refreshing about the narrative offered in these pages is that you need not be a musician, intentional or otherwise, to benefit from its insights. Central among them is that we tend to back down from the passion projects we hold dear in our youth. As time tempers these into rote platitudes (“hobbies at best, hidden out of embarrassment at worst,” he notes in the Foreword), we treat their recession as inevitable. This is, perhaps, one reason why literary works and all the paratextual experiences they entail have been integral to his oeuvre for so long. In that sense, he is as much a translator as a composer.

In the first section, “Simply,” he reflects on his time studying improvisation with jazz pianist Connie Crothers. Instead of bowing to the (relatively recent) convention that tells us simplicity is a bad thing, he embraces it as “a pure distillation of identifiable quality” that allows complexity to breathe. I cannot help but liken it to a line drawing of a wing versus a massive Baroque painting filled with saints and cherubim. The burden of proof on the creator of the former is deeper in the sense that every line speaks nakedly on the page, whereas in the latter, the margin for self-indulgence is greater yet more easily concealed. What Rauh realized at a key turning point in his growth as a musician was that complicating matters with business wasn’t the end goal. It was tapping into the childlike curiosity that such veneers, fragile as they are, do a surprisingly good job of hiding. This does not mean that one must “devolve” but that one must be willing to be vulnerable. And when we are vulnerable, we confront the question of who we are in spite of ourselves.

“Patiently” brings us into the spiritual weeds, through which every glimpse of sunshine becomes a tether to hope. More than that, it is the ultimate expression of love (think, for example, of the long-suffering God who stays his hand so that we might learn from our mistakes). And so, patience is not about proving your limits of tolerance but about faith as the evidence of things unseen. As Rauh humbly admits, “This is easier said than done, and despite my best wishes, I cannot claim that I am fully in tune with the concept as it applies to my life.” Amen, and amen.

Patience, too, is a mode of healing. It is the promise of strength fulfilled and renewed through the perseverance of the human (and animal) spirit. By tempering our fears, it gives room to stretch out our egos and cut them into millions of pieces. On the practical side, patience makes it “not only acceptable but optimal to leave spaces in your workflow.” Without those spaces, we lose sight of ourselves and what we are capable of. The moment we say we have arrived is probably when we need to check our assurance at the door and start singing again for its own sake.

The book’s third act, “Quietly,” is where the soul comes most readily into play. That said, quietude isn’t some mystical state of being in which one achieves unity with the universe but rather a recognition that the melodies of our lives need volition to seek one another out. And that is where the youthful essence from which we have distanced ourselves must be fished from within. Children are nothing if not intentional, and such clarity of expression is where we get our profoundest ideas. To be silent is to see ourselves no longer through the filters of camera lenses and computer screens but rather in the naked truth of the proverbial mirror. In so doing, we realize just how noisy we are inside.

I am reminded of an anecdote involving John Cage, who stepped into an anechoic chamber with the intention of experiencing true silence, only to discover that the faint sounds of his circulating blood and nervous system rendered that concept moot. This experience happened to be the inspiration behind his infamous composition 4’33”, for which the performer sits quietly in front of a piano for the titular duration without playing a single note. In hindsight, what was so disturbing about the piece’s premiere wasn’t necessarily that Cage was poking fun at the academy or even philosophically questioning the very definition of music; it was the fact that the performer ceased to matter. Thus, to experience 4’33” live is to be flooded with all sorts of internal voices. In wrestling with this same tension, Rauh concludes that the result of quiet music isn’t boredom or relaxation but power. It also tests our mettle as listeners and clues us in on the creed of patience. “When the rest falls away,” he observes, “all that is left is all we can give.”

No review of this superbly rendered meta-statement would be complete without mentioning the contributions of his sister, Christina Rauh Fishburne, whose illustrations are the glue that binds. By turns whimsical and contemplative, they work in counterpoint to the text without ever intruding. One in particular, which appears on page 24, speaks to the nostalgia of this reader/viewer. Its depiction of curiosity, stripped of all the baggage that adults bring to this impulse, teeters on the edge of interpretation. It is also the first of a sequence of images that home in on key aspects of the words preceding them.

Whether in the domestic comforts of a life without clear and present dangers or in the wider view of time and its inevitable entropy, Fishburne’s ability to pull out memories we never knew we had is a blessing and a comfort. As a segue into the scores included herein, they are denizens of a time capsule that is itself the curio of another time capsule. Of said scores, the musically inclined among us get access to a swath of moods. From lullabies to choral settings, they offer plenty of soil in which to plant and water seeds of communion, assuring us that we can rest our heads on pillows of wonder every night, knowing there is only more to come when day breaks.

Charlie Rauh: The Silent Current From Within

| Tyran Grillo

If Life must be so full of care,
Then call me soon to Thee;
Or give me strength enough to bear
My load of misery.
–Anne Brontë, “If This Be All”

In the soft yet indelible wake of The Bluebell, an acoustic solo album articulated around echoes of the Brontë sisters, guitarist Charlie Rauh reclaims a kindred power in his latest musical web, The Silent Current From Within, now joined by vocalist Ess See, drummer Ken Coomer, and bassist Jonah Kraut. Spinning his radii of inspiration via sister Christina Rauh Fishburne, Canadian poet Anne Carson, and Anne Brontë, whose words take nonverbal form through the capture spiral of these expanded readings, Rauh positions the listener as the anchor point of a pattern that has left its glyphs of fatigue on all of us in these times of social isolation.

The project at hand emerged when Coomer reached out to Rauh for a long-distance collaboration, adding Kraut for good measure as the songs took on new life. Thus were born three pieces around themes found in the work of Fishburne and Carson, each lending its own shade to the protracted dawn that is the album as a whole. The brush of a morning breeze is audibly felt in “A Marked And Mended Sign,” over the course of which the sun raises its eyebrow just high enough to clear a distant mountain range, while “Until The Charm Fades” crafts its light into a pair of hands pulling vegetation from the soil. “As Simple As Water” nourishes that crop with emotional nutrients, opening the sky like a heart primed to receive wisdom unfettered by the acrobatics of dead philosophies. Likewise, in these contexts, Kraut’s bassing and Coomer’s drumming don’t merely add to Rauh’s guitar, but rather draw out fruit from within it.

All of this is framed by the voice of Ess See, who guides an unaccompanied thread of improvisation through the title track and a multitracked choir with Rauh’s fretwork in the concluding “If This Be All.” In the latter, she unleashes cries at once born from and at odds with nature. She seems to question the tragedy of the pandemic even while bowing to its biological sovereignty. Such conflicts are central to the human condition, each standing like an abandoned building through which these songs have passed and left their fragrance, thus bidding the ears to inhale the incense of what came before. 

Temporally speaking, these are vignettes, the longest of which falls shy of the three-minute mark. Spatially speaking, however, these are vast oceans in which vessels of possibility sail in every direction a compass can imagine. The only question that remains: Will we burn our bridges or rebuild them before they fall?

The Silent Current From Within is scheduled for a March 12, 2021 release on Destiny Records.

Charlie Rauh: The Bluebell

| Tyran Grillo

Bluebell_Album cover

Stern Reason is to judgment come
Arrayed in all her forms of gloom:
Wilt thou my advocate be dumb?
No, radiant angel, speak and say
Why I did cast the world away;

Why I have persevered to shun
The common paths that others run;
And on a strange road journeyed on
Heedless alike of Wealth and Power—
Of Glory’s wreath and Pleasure’s flower.

These verses, which come to us by way of Emily Brontë and the history woven into her surname, light candles in a shadowy world. She and her sister Anne are the subjects of this wordless tribute, evoked through the strings of Charlie Rauh’s acoustic guitar. Recorded in the very home where he learned the instrument, The Bluebell is more than a collection of miniatures (each track averages about a minute and half) inspired by poetry. Rather, they are devotionals bound by the metaphysical leather of tribute, meditation, and emotional transference.

Two versions of the title track, one drawn from the veins of each sister, are as genetically distinct as they are seamless. Not only do we feel the stem, leaves, and petals of this bulbous hyacinth, but are more importantly lured by its fragrance. Indeed, scent abounds in the source texts, which Rauh inhales as inspiration and exhales through the compact wonders of “Watch Through The Darkest Hours Of Night” with nary an errant note.

Whether channeling doubts of biblical proportion in “Though Weak Yet Longing To Believe” or donning the protection of divine assurance in “Faith Shines Equal Arming Me From Fear,” the sentiments at hand show that such armor, known only to the God in whose name it is worn, is hidden from view, girded as it is about the soul. And so, if the feelings of uncertainty we encounter in “Careless Gifts Are Seldom Prized” are indicative of anything, it is that wisdom is made manifest in holy illumination. And as reflections of time in “We Were Not Once So Few” spread horizontally into the vertical regard of “With Purpose Pure And High,” we find ourselves alone yet unafraid. Only in that state of openness can we accept “A Little And A Lone Green Lane” as a reminder that our flesh is but the garment of pilgrims passing through.

And yet, the bluebell still stands, head bowed as if in prayer, holding on to its hymn of persistence. Thus, these melodies stare poignantly into the eyes of decay and smile as if to say, “It’s easy to hear music in the poetry. Let us never forget to hear poetry in the music.”