Enya

At Hampshire College, I started getting into a philosophical argument with one of my teachers. The crux of the argument revolved around an assigned reading of Laura Mulvey’s landmark article Visual Pleasure & Narrative Cinema, in which she lays out, through an almost impermeable jungle of jargon, her plans to kill beauty. This just struck me as all wrong. I like beauty. I was interested in constructing media more than in deconstructing it (or, at least, I was more interested in deconstruction as a tool to help me construct better), and was clearly in the wrong school for that, but I was getting along fine until this blasphemous article. I argued to my professor that if you destroy beauty, all that’s left is ugliness. I wasn’t saying everything was beautiful or should be, but that a world without beauty is not one that I would want to inhabit for very long. I invoked the quote I had heard years ago about killing a bird to learn how to fly. In the end you have a dead bird and you still can’t fly, so why not let the bird live? Of course, my words fell on deaf ears and I was dismissed as a hopelessly naïve sell-out, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t trying to change her mind; I was just strengthening my own convictions. And one of my convictions is that I like beauty. I also love ugliness. There’s room enough in this great grey world for both.

Enya makes beautiful music. It is so lush and romantic and sweet and slippery that many people hate it. “Too dolphiny,” a friend once said. But dolphins are cool.

I was first exposed to Enya by Kristen, G’s best friend throughout college. G and I started becoming friends about the time that G and Kristen’s relationship started to sour, so they never seemed like best friends to me, but that’s what G always said. Kindred spirits, even. College is a good time to reinvent yourself, and I know a few people that took that opportunity to change their name, turning from a Don to a Dorian or from a Sue to a Sayer or from a Julie to a Rio, and, in the process, giving themselves a new, exotic (to them, anyway) persona. Kristen went further than anybody else I know. She was from Oregon, but pretended she was from Ireland for her entire first year of college. And she apparently did it so convincingly and seamlessly that it was a complete shock to her friends to discover it wasn’t true when her mother came to visit and dispelled that myth. Although it’s kind of creepy – and her friends were understandably pissed at her deception – there’s something admirable about that. I was always tempted to do that – invent a persona for myself when in unfamiliar surroundings, but I don’t think I could pull it off for a weekend, let alone an entire year.

There were some sparks flying between the two of us, which may have strained her relationship with G. I liked her and thought she might like me (my attraction radar is so poorly calibrated that if I sense somebody might not completely hate me, chances are they’re actually willing to bear my children). But two scared virgins do not a promising couple make, both waiting for the other one to move first, so nothing ever came of it.

Anyway, Kristen had come to visit G and me and Matt in our apartment in Brooklyn a couple of summers after graduation (a trip during which she lost – or rather, gave away – her virginity), and she brought this tape along with her – some music from the olde country. I was immediately enchanted. Combining new age sensibilities with Celtic traditions may seem tired and cliché at this point, but it was a wonderfully fresh combination at the time. Although I will gladly grant that her oeuvre is pretty small, and each of the later albums sound redundantly like the one before, thereby pretty much negating the need for an Enya collection. The one exception to this rule is the first album, originally called Enya, and then repackaged later as The Celts. It’s the soundtrack to a British television series about (you guessed it), the Celts, and as such, it has a wider range of material – including some wonderfully medieval and renaissance-sounding tracks. The best of the bunch is the unpronounceable Boadicea. It is an unusually sparse arrangement, although the vocals retain her trademark lushness. The melody is so wonderfully evocative and timeless and there’s so much space in the track that one can easily imagine wide-open places and lush scenery. This is archetypically Celtic to me – beautiful, open, tragic, mythical, poetic, emotional music, as old as the verdant hills and as vital as the pink-cheeked baby in your arms, even if that baby did come from Portland instead of County Cork.