Tellus #23: The Voices Of Paul Bowles (1989)

TELLUS #23 is an audio portrait of Paul Bowles, who has distinguished himself as a composer and musicologist, as a conservator of oral narrative and Moroccan music, and as an author of stunning lucidity and originality. With the assistance of the Rockefeller Foundation, Bowles traveled throughout Morocco in the last months of 1959 to record indigenous folk music that, he feared, would soon be extinct despite its importance to a culture of almost complete illiteracy. Excerpts from these recordings, preserved by the Library of Congress, are included here and selected not for their ethnographic specificity, but as they embellish and amplify certain tendencies in the narrative.
Side one begins with the voice of the muezzen, whose haunting call to prayer echoes daily from the mosques and permeates the aural fabric of Islam. From a collection of over sixty short stories, I have chosen three that, while exemplifying Bowles' precise rendering of psychological labyrinths, also
illuminate the nuances of a culture that is often characterized by its incomprehensibility to those of a Western frame of mind. Bowles suggested the inclusion of the lush and elegiac "Secret Words" and explained his realization that many of the themes which were to be later elaborated upon in his first novel "The Sheltering Sky" were contained there. Together with the energetic "Music for a Farce", it should provide some understanding of his work from the Thirties and Forties, prior to his involvement with non-Christian communities. My experience in Morocco has evolved simultaneously over the past decade with my understanding of Bowles' work and with this acquaintance, and this friendship has deepened my assimilation of an enigmatic culture that subverts the security of comprehension. Bowles has interpreted and illuminated this landscape. Throughout the years, Bowles has displayed to us his generosity, benevolence and genteel good humor, in contradiction, perhaps, to the mythology of his detachment and dispassion. This portrait, then, shall serve as gift in return, a modest tribute.