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.
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