Atlas — Transcending Man-Made Borders
By Safina Center Fellow Priya Parrotta
Priya Parrotta’s new album, Atlas, is available now on Bandcamp.
On a December afternoon ten years ago, I chanced upon a little meditation center adjacent to Blackwell’s Bookshop in Oxford, UK. Inside was a small room, open to anyone. Though the time was only about four pm, the space was already dissolving into darkness. One of the few objects in the room was a vase made out of tiles—a Byzantine-style mosaic, a quiet testament to the meeting of East and West. I settled down in front of it, took a few breaths—and then had an experience which I have since learned is part of our collective unconscious, repeating and reverberating in mythologies and dreams around the world.
Looking at the vase, the way it glittered in the darkening room, I had an all-pervasive feeling that we, humanity, had once been unified, in a state of harmony. But then we were shattered, broken apart by the forces of violence and division and separation, seeded in the desire to be bigger and better than other living beings. And ever since that breaking apart, we have been trying to find our way back. It was not a feeling of any kind of literal history, but rather of our spiritual, mythological trajectory as human beings on this Earth. It was as though the vase, made of hundreds of glinting, separate pieces, had become a symbol for the world.
Interior of Ayasofya Hagia Sophia Istanbul Constantinople Christian patriarchal basilica. ©Raimond Klavins via Unsplash
After a time, I left the meditation center, and walked out into the street, already glittering with holiday lights. College choirs across town rehearsed their Christmas services, and one could almost hear their harmonies in the cold air. Several blocks away stood Oxford’s School of Geography and the Environment, where we, a small cohort of human geography postgrad students, were learning—often in rather obtuse ways—about the differences between natural and human borders. To put it broadly, we were studying the ways in which humanity has created spaces, established boundaries and binaries, and devised narratives to, ultimately, separate human beings from the more-than-human world.
There was something paradoxical, and therefore stirring, about studying the drawing of maps in a place that has for so many centuries been seen as an epicenter of intellectual, colonial, and imperial might. After all, Oxford is a place that, for so long, had done precisely what we were learning to critique: create borders that reinforce power. This unsettling contradiction made me reflect persistently on how the lines and hierarchies which we continue to defend affect the more-than-human world. These reflections took me far away from the classroom, and towards a series of generative and tumultuous encounters—which, in many ways, have led me to my new album, Atlas.
Atlas is an album which, rather like the Byzantine vase, is a mosaic of elements from long-standing musical traditions from both East and West. It is about ancient and contemporary power—as well as our deep-seated and enduring ability to recognize and respond to it. Its name has at least two meanings for me. Atlas is a figure from Greek mythology, one of many who, to paraphrase the words of mythologist Joseph Campbell, continue to stand as evidence of how deeply Man and God are interwoven in the European imagination. Also denoting a book of maps, the title of this album is meant to evoke the man-made borders created by those of great wealth and influence. These borders, though invented, lead directly to the abuse of the more-than-human world. Such borders often live within our minds, too, separating us from each other, from the Earth, and from ourselves. I sought to write songs that are directly pertinent to the fault lines we live with today—songs about recent wars, about “development,” about the rise of a new elite. But at the same time, I wanted it to feel ancient, connected to something deeper than the specificities of our time.
What has been happening in our politics lately is, in so many ways, a ridiculous circus that could only occur now. On the other hand, there is something archetypal in what we are experiencing. For so many generations before us have experienced what we feel today, in the face of abuses of power across the vast landscape of human history. Out of this pain arises a sort of transcultural mysticism—a sense that, though immense and formidable, the outer forces of power in our world are nothing in comparison to the strength and wisdom that resides within all life.
There is a great deal more I could say about my reasons for writing each song, and the choices made within them, but here I will provide a brief description of each. “Mapmakers” introduces the idea that power deeply relies upon division. The song “Atlas” is a reinterpretation of the classic myth. Atlas, the Greeks have told us, was a Titan who was forced to carry the world as punishment for leading a war against the Olympians. In this song, however, the male protagonist chooses, out of ego, to carry the world—unwisely ignoring the magic and insight of humbler voices.
“Love Not War” meanwhile, is a song rejecting the idea of “us versus them,” as innumerable social movements have done in the past. Prompted in many ways by coming of age in Washington, DC during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the song seeks to confront the tactics of fear and mistrust which helped to “sell” these wars to the public. “Construction” was provoked by the extreme waves of new construction and real estate “development” which have taken place around the world in the past few years. It challenges the idea that such “development” and commercial activity are to be praised over natural ecosystems. There is a long genealogy to this, an idea at the heart of capitalism that says that land that is “improved upon” is better than land “left idle.” This song is meant to return us to the soil, where, to use a line from the next song, is “the infinity where life starts.”
“Metamorphosis” is set during a “dark night of the soul.” It is a song about the powerful, cosmic transformations that can happen within us, often when we find ourselves in a personal crisis, or at a spiritual crossroads. It tells of a shift in consciousness which, in this case, occurs over the course of a night. The lines that the protagonist has established to make sense of her world dissolve, and are replaced by an all-encompassing sense of belonging to a shared creation. With this insight comes a deeper ability to connect to, and serve, the more-than-human world.
In a world so divided and conflicted, our spirits can feel broken—but after that, we may be reborn. The album’s last song is dedicated to that process of rebirth within us. Its name, “Preamble,” is meant to suggest walking—creating our own routes, tracing our own spaces, rewriting the map, with compassion and sensitivity and love.
The album also contains instrumental versions of several of the songs, which are meant to take us beyond language, beyond the concepts that we have to make sense of what is happening around us, and into a transcendent place. For I believe that it is in transcending man-made borders, rather than defending them, that we may connect more deeply not only to each other, but to all the Life that seeks harmony around us.