Darśana, Leonard Cohen and Levon Helm

I recently got to see two of the great aging bearers of the (North) American tradition of words and music. And see is about right because in both cases I didn't get to hear much of them. I may have told you that Magdalen got a migraine within a few minutes of getting our chairs set up and hunkering down for the Leonard Cohen show in the rain. We got to hear "Dance Me to the End of Love" and then "Take This Waltz" as we headed for the exit, Magdalen weaving limply on my arm and the rain beginning to fall in sheets on those unlucky ones who weren't under the pavilion. I was surprised how little it mattered to me, actually, and how almost proud I was to be outside the feast. The main thing was I got to see the man. He was dressed in a black, wool Italian suit. Jowly and thin as he was he carried himself with great strength and flexibility and even power. As we walked past, he knelt on one knee and held his finger to his lips, dropping nearly to the bottom of his gravelly range to whisper across the night, "Take this waltz./ It's yours now,/ It's all that there is."

For Hindus, enlightenment can be conveyed by seeing a great master or by seeing the divine in a person. It's called, apparently, and not in Roman letters, darśana. And these two experiences helped make sense of it for me. I was oddly grateful to see Leonard Cohen, and his image on stage has taught me something about how one holds oneself when one is a pilgrim but finds oneself in the black Italian suit of a cabaret singer. And how one holds oneself when one is a sensualist whose body is aging and failing. Stretch, bend, invite the body to continue finding postures for the eternally youthful, eternally restless soul--these postures must change as the body changes, they will be abbreviated, more cautious, but they can work just as well as the postures of the young body, confounded as it is with so much energy and so little decisiveness or knowledge or stillness.

And then this past Sunday I got to see Levon Helm. He came on stage with a young forty-year-old's thick head of white hair but the stooped shoulders and wiry, slightly bandy-legged gait of a much older man than I'd expected to see. His singing voice is strained and scraped but normally very strong, or at least very determined. He sat at the drums, suddenly full of strength and succinct skill, counted off the 9-piece band and lit into "Tennessee Jed". Only after Helm had pounded away at four songs did the guitarist, Larry Campbell, who had been singing lead so far, allow as how we would have noticed that "Levon hasn't been doing much singing today." None, in fact. There was no vocal mic anywhere near him, because his doctor had forbidden him from singing. Helm didn't even talk in the course of the show, including at the end when he walked back and forth at the front of the stage touching the hands of maybe a hundred people in turn, while his bandmates and the stage hands looked on, seeming puzzled and maybe a bit put out. Everybody wanted to touch him. All the younger performers mentioned him as they played their sets. We all felt the significance of being near him.

And at the end of the show nobody seemed bothered that he hadn't sung. We had gotten to watch him, his obvious physical pleasure as his wonderful band played these songs that are his but also belong already to the American tradition. The songs and the feel of his drumming under his voice are all now a part of the lineage, they are more than just a man or the work or the voice of a man. If someone is playing "The Weight" in the next room, you can feel Levon Helm's presence coming through the wall to you--that restless sweet talk on the snare as his drums leave space for the chorus to catch up to the beat. It's what Frost said about how the "sound of sense" of a well-formed sentence can be heard just as clearly from the next room. I mainly felt grateful to be in his presence. And his presence is actually more proof than I needed of his existence. The sight of him showed me that I already knew him quite well. I can feel his existence every time I cop the descending baseline, the one that weaves hillbilly-wise down to the truth of the chorus, and that I recently took my turn stealing from him. Twice; in two recent songs. Thanks for giving me something to steal--honorably and goddamn well for good--from you, Master.

I'm taking both your waltzes, and I hope that someone will take them from me.

To One's Self

Dear Self,
I was going to say that I know what you must be thinking but that really isn't true. I don't know how you view my pattern of bragging and mythologizing and then, for long periods, ignoring you. I really couldn't say if I've ever seen you clearly. I don't know what kind of attention and support you might need. Would you be just as happy to live in complete obscurity? Do you have ambitions? Are you lonely?Is there something that you need?

I've mainly seen you as a fire, sometimes as a useful fire, often as a dangerous or perplexing fire. I get very frustrated with you because just when it seems pretty clearly like the main thing is to control your hunger for everything, you get very dim and I worry that there isn't enough energy in you to keep me alive. Which is it? Or do I have this whole image wrong? I thought you were supposed to serve me; I guess I thought you were me. So what are you?

I now think that the part of me that is talking to you, maybe still trying to bargain with you, is sort of what can be seen in the visible spectrum. That what I would call me at any particular time is a function of how the eyes work and how I am focusing my attention. It changes over time, it always has some particular project or it falls into despondency, it is not still unless something overwhelms it, stuns it. This thing that is talking to You, is it You? Do you accept it as part of Yourself? I recognize the insistence and the prim method of this voice so well. God, it would rather be right in some narrow way than be with what is real. But it's made that way, made to do work, and it's really pretty efficient. Maybe I need to let it off the hook, clean it off in the evening like a gardening tool and lean it in some cool, dim place for the night? Except I don't know how to do that: it's always hungry. I would say I am always hungry, restless, watching. So would you come and be with me if I put the shrill voice away?

I began by approaching you and already I'm thinking about my own care again. But this whole thing is so circular, this whole question of how to manage alone, of how to care for us without any outside attention or stage. I really don't know if I believe it's possible.

All I can think to do is try to see you clearly and listen to you as I would listen to anyone else. Weirdly, your desires are really easy for me to dismiss as illusions. But maybe when you say you want things, even dumb shallow stuff, it means that you really want them. To go outside, to drink coffee, to talk with a friend, to pick up the guitar and make a D chord. I'll try to listen to you very literally. We need to start preparing, or maybe it's just me who does, for when the fantasies of greatness and importance have gone and the physical mojo is a useful, elegant reading lamp and no longer a spot light. I don't even want to plan for this, or think about it.

And it would help if you would try to be mundane, try to use your words. I do know, and I'll try to remember, that you aren't made of words and that words don't describe all of you. There's this image of you as a sort of primordial valley where you exist in an indefinite, inexhaustible form before you rise into the light and take shape become part of the discrete processes of the language world and the mechanical world. I'll try to think of you there and regard your peace and great lambent energy as mine. But I don't know if I can understand you without words.
Love, K

Myles Murphy and the Build-Your-Own-America Kit

When I was in my early twenties a towering and ambiguous friend sent me a peculiar present. Three 90 minute cassette tapes recorded front and back, more than four hours of original music. Titles were recorded on the folded up paper inserts but outside that, partly visible from the outside of the case, there was also a large geometric pattern done in water colors and cut into three parts with 1/3 included in each case. And the most amazing part was the box. The cassettes were--entombed? enshrined? installed?--in a triangular cardboard box that sat upright like a pyramid, painted all over with trippy neo-Navajo designs in red and black and green.

And on the tapes were these brilliant meandering songs, mostly fragments of legends about odd characters. Dan the Pharmacist Fan, Elvis whom everybody loves, the Thunderbird. But also there was ambient sound, bird song, car engines, the sounds of things being found or knocked over or thrown together, rattlings and shudderings and quaverings of all kinds, the equivalent of thinking aloud. The vocals were not only sung but also moaned, whined, slurped bits of odd dialogue read in hysterical voices from all distances, from around corners, through improbable substances. Sent to me on my birthday. The whole thing was a token of grudging respect, or a capitulation to the need to be understood, much more than it had anything to do with affection. Or at least with personal affection. I was something of a second or third-string recipient but was finally deemed the most likely to understand the music.

I think maybe I do. But it took years for me to be able to listen to it as a whole thing. Partly because the sound quality is very bad but as much because of the heterogeneous, meandering quality of it. It kept needling me, more or less night and day, with its prickly brilliance, its oblique self-importance, its heedless facticity. Myles had made this music and given it physical form as well and now it irreducibly and essentially Was. It contained not only music but Facts of all sorts, pleasant and unpleasant. It is a shrine to omnivorous Americanness. And I now think I see why it was such an affront to me at the time. At a time when I was very self-protective and assembling my own fantasy version of the world, The Box accepted and held out to me everything: drugs, homelessness and insanity, bravado, self-destructiveness, restlessness. Cruelty as well as tenderness, tedium as well as wit, discord and melody, huge raw civic conscience and the anger that arises in those who have it, pettiness and charity.

So I played the first of these tapes as my daughter Emma and I drove down to the Smithsonian American Art Museum this morning to walk through another brilliant and heterogeneous version of America. I turned Dolby on and off, fiddled with bass and treble, gave her synopses, repeated good lines, trying to make it clear. I wheeled her past the faces of John Brown and Joseph Smith, the redwhite&blue collage with Obama's hopeful face, busts of Lincoln and Jackson, WPA cityscapes, weathervanes and walking sticks, statesmen and madmen and prophetesses and kept women, Sodomites, saints, suicides and dandies. All the parts have to be there. And arriving back home I see that my room is another version of the Build-Your-Own-America Kit, and my heart yet another.

A Scene from Old Weird America

I took the boys to church yesterday. After opening hymns, the call to worship, and a reading from Exodus there was "special music" listed in the bulletin. Our town's former chief of police walked up front--bare footed, wearing Bermuda shorts and a Hawaiian shirt opened up to reveal a necklace of wooden beads. Now, it should be said that when this man was chief of police the rest of the force despised him and he was basically forced out because the sergeants beneath him said they had no confidence in him. Why? The story they sited was an incident where a robber ran into a house and took a woman hostage. The police surrounded the house and then called the chief. When the chief showed he took off his uniform, put on civilian clothes, handed over his weapons and walked inside the house to talk to the frightened fugitive. An hour later, the chief walked out with the woman and the robber. Apparently, this act was totally against protocol and the rest of the force resented him for it.

At church the ex-chief stood in front of the congregants with palms open, turned outward. His wife sat next to the piano with a middle-eastern hand drum, the pianist (the town mechanic) began to pound out an island melody and sing out in Hawaiian. Immediately, the fifty-something ex-chief began to do a hula--hips moving side-to-side, arms and hands rolling like the waves of the ocean. Smiling broadly, the Chief stepped toward the congregation, holding his hands over his heart and then opening them wide in a gesture of welcome. He made signs of the sun and moon, boats paddling on the ocean, skies opening up, fish jumping, birds crossing the sky. At one point the chief cupped his own heart and then held it out for all of us to see. The movements were so lovely and vulnerable that if the chief had been a young woman we all would've fallen in love with him. But the chief is a white man with a balding head, a hairy paunch, and tattered mustache and so the dance, at first, was simply odd and startling.

In the front pew, the chief’s teenage, autistic son, who normally fidgets and whispers and counts fingers sat mesmerized watching his dancing father. I too sat mesmerized--at times with horror, at times with restrained, snot-blowing laughter at the strange audacity of this guy dancing a hula in church...but the more the man danced, so honest and full of heart...well, I noticed a strange joy, a joy that burned off the shame that often shrouds my interior. I wondered, once again, about the many fears and prejudices that hem me in. Why are they there? What's the evolutionary explanation?

After church, when I asked my sons what they thought of the dancing chief, they smiled and said, “that was cool,” and I could see they meant it. I recalled this past fourth of July when these two middle school boys ran from our house to meet their friends on a terrace at the local college, to hear a salsa band play. I remembered them scanning the clusters of people, then excitedly rushing over and grabbing the hands of their dance partners, making their way to the dance floor, eager to try out their new Latin steps, while fireworks sprayed the black sky.

Some Stuff About Home and T-Shirts

Man, I wish there had been food for you. Leaving for a trip is always stressful, as much as I don't believe in that word, and I didn't do anything about leaving food.
I'm back at this desk looking at that ugly tree blocking out much of the world up against that house that blocks out much of the rest of it from here, and I realize how much of my mind is controlled by that tree. Some sort of scraggly cypress that doesn't belong here and has a vine climbing up it and strangling it. Impossible to ignore. Clear incitement to leave this desk and mobilize.
I had a dream this morning in which I met Patti Smith and she seemed to recognize me and gave me a big hug. We walked around a sort of industrial building by a rural highway, talking comfortably and in detail about things I don't recall. It seemed very normal but I was also intensely grateful for the warmth and the recognition. I told her how I saw her once in City Lights Books in San Francisco and how I was embarrassed to bother her, and about how I just smiled and bowed and turned away. She didn't remember of course but said that oh I should have come over and spoken.
America is very much on my mind, my need to regard America not as a finished thing but as scattered parts of a Make Your Own America kit that I'm working on. The girls and I stopped for ice cream in Lewisburg, PA this afternoon as we made our way back down to Baltimore from Rochester. It was a muggy Sunday afternoon and the place was swamped with post-church Americans and non-post-church Americans, so that nearly everybody was wearing either an unbuttoned dress shirt or a t-shirt with an image of the American flag on it. One said, "Tattered Glory, 2008." Not sure what that meant. Another said, "The Best Things in Life Are Free." That I get, although I wondered if the shirt's owner and I could have a real conversation about what it meant without both of us getting all embarrassed and reactive and tongue-tied and dumb. We all stood there sweating sea water and amniotic fluid, thinking about our horse in the race, waiting for our ice cream, rehearsing our orders. The ice cream was really good.
The mountainous parts of PA and NY are gorgeous, and this morning as we drove down a mist lay in the low areas which always makes the hollows look deeper, the peaks look more distant, higher. Beautiful and deep, so much beyond what you can see.
Stopping in these places reminds me so much of the earthiness and suspicion of the people I grew up with, and of how I love them and hate them. Of course there is no them, exactly, but there sort of is when they're in groups.
I'm going to go out tomorrow and buy a t-shirt with an American flag. Serious. And maybe I'll write "The Old, Weird America" across it. That phrase, half from Kenneth Rexroth and half from Griel Marcus, has been so much on my mind.
I think of Bob Dylan saying that he was born a looong way from home and he's been trying to get back ever since. Exactly right. So it's good to drive, even to the wrong place, good to see things, even if you hate some of them, good to be challenged with the raw fact of what exists, maybe especially t-shirts with American flags. American Fags: feels like that's the team I got drafted by long ago and I'm gradually coming to see the backwards logic of it. A fag and a Jew, I am, in the long, woman-hungry body of an American Southerner from California.