XC Ninety Choral Marches
by
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DANAË After field crops, division of labor appears. 062
But our genes are still nomads. Though ten thousand years
They have sat on the land, then in towns, they retain
Their old thrust: "Up! The Other World beckons again!
ANDROMEDA From the Old-Stone-Age hunters whose shrines underground, 065
Though for ages forgotten, in ours have been found,
Down to us, many pilgrims have followed a track
All the way to an Other World, all the way back.
PERSEUS There were still others, whose many journeys recall 067
A remote human past, before farming at all,
And perhaps even hunting, when folk lived on grain.
For they followed grass ripening over the plain.
DICTYS So the proverb’s not trite: it’s the stuff of our dreams. 068
The grass yonder looks greener, the brook bluer seems.
For we’re programmed from long ago, time out of mind,
To believe there’s an Other World that we must find.
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Eurasia was settled from Africa, later America from Asia and, still later, from Europe. We travel space today and are unlikely to stop tomorrow. All this is both fact and the stuff that dreams are made on. For the universal myth of the human race, not of the last millennium only, is the pilgrimage: the Quest for an Other World. XC narrates five quests in the form of ninety choral marches. Each quest is told as a story that may be sung to the same eighteen march tunes. Singing on the march is traditional with pilgrims and, as Thoreau says, the only real pilgrims (unlike that Canterbury bunch) are those who walk. The universality of the quest is borne out by the fact that the five quests appear as games in which women’s roles are decisive or controlling. Those roles are found, moreover, plainly stated in traditions not noted for equality between the sexes--Confucian China, Epic-Age India, Pre-Homeric Greece, Arthurian Britain--the scenes, respectively, of Games Two to Five. Even space flights today do not exemplify that equality by a 1:1 sex ratio, the crucial fact in Game One, set in the next century or two.