Renaissance in Three Acts

It's said that when a theoretical physicist or a grandmaster turns 30, the greatest personal triumphs of the person's career will be, even then, in the rear-view mirror.

Not so for the giants of popular music, or at least for some of them very roughly of my generation.  They produced what I would consider their best work in their forties and fifties, after having made a big splash in late twenties/early thirties and fallen fallow, at least for a time.

I speak of Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon and Leonard Cohen.  Early on, each fell into the category that the Soviets used to call "bards" -- simple songsters with no more elaborate accompaniment for their voices than a humble guitar.  (Joni rather famously had hers "open tuned," because childhood polio left her not very dexterous (sorry) with the left hand.)  A man named Bulat Okudzhava was the king of the hill among Soviet bards of the high Cold War era.

My thesis here, to which I adhere with very little confidence, and mainly for the sake of having a thesis, is that in each of these three cases an ambitious and captivating musical branching out in middle age propelled more personal power and passion on the poetic side of the ledger than had shown itself in the earlier years.

The consensus view is that Blue, released when Joni Mitchell was in her late twenties, is her best album and, indeed, one of the greatest popular albums ever recorded.  To me, Night Ride Home, released when she was in her late forties, has it beat.  Her voice by 1991 had sunk from a piercing soprano to contralto (all to the good).  She was no longer a bard per se, rather venturing into jazz/syth/fusion territory.  (The very first thing one hears in the title track is a pulsing simulacrum of crickets that carries one all the way home on the magical and very Hawaiian Fourth of July that inspires the song.):

Round the curve, and a big dark horse with tail lights on his hide

Is keeping right alongside, rev for stride ...

And elsewhere on the album her lyrics move far beyond her old themes of broken romances and general self-absorption to more broadly spiritual and philosophical palettes.  "Passion Play" has me completely drawn in from its opening, perfect metaphor -- "Magdalene's trembling like a washing on a line ..."  And then:

All around the marketplace

The buzzing of the flies

The buzzing and the stinging.

Divinely barren and wickedly wise

The killer nails are ringing ...

Tragedy ... now you tell me

Who ya gonna get to do the dirty work

When all the slaves are free?

And Joni tops it off with a faithful yet free reworking of Yeats' "Second Coming" in "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," the apocalyptic verses punctuated by synthetic sirens and a booming, explosive timpani on the fade out.

Simon's rebirth can be sourced to his gravitation to so-called World Music when he was in his forties.  About 20 years before, with Art Garfunkel, he had had the top-selling album of all time, at the time, in Bridge Over Troubled Water.  That album had its strengths and its beauties but, let's face it, it sank into sappiness from time to time, as in the title cut, which seemed impossible to escape in 1970 if the car radio was on.

But the flowing musical freedom of South Africa (Graceland) and Brazil (Rhythm of the Saints) seemed to liberate Simon lyrically just as jazz fusion catapulted Joni to a more exalted lyrical space.  As proof I will cite not "Proof," which is on the same album, but rather "Further to Fly," because in my view it is among the most unsung masterpieces of popular music of all time, both rhythmically and lyrically:

And maybe you'll find a love

That you discover accidentally

That falls against you gently

As a pickpocket brushes your thigh,

Further to fly ...

There may come a time when I will lose you,

Lose you as I lose my sight

Days falling backward into velvet night.

The Open Palm of Desire,

The Rose of Jericho,

The soil as soft as summer,

The strength to let you go.

Leonard Cohen, in his youth, was almost a caricature of the bard.  A soft and hesitant voice and just a few chords -- "Suzanne takes you down to a place by the river ..."  But his lyrics were phenomenal even in the earlier days --

The Sisters of Mercy they are not departed or gone.

They were waiting for me when I thought that I just can't go on.

And they brought me their comfort and later they brought me this song.

I hope you run into them, you who've been traveling so long ...

If your life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn

They will bind you with love that is graceful and green as a stem.

Yes, taking the entire body of work, it is Leonard and not Bob Dylan who should have won the Nobel Prize in Literature.  And it is a sin and a bit of a scandal that he is known to most in the 21st century only as the writer of "Hallelujah," not least of all a scandal because those who take the song as a religious anthem, which is to say nearly everybody, have never bothered to understand it.  They think it is some kind of more sophisticated, more hip version of "Drop Kick Me Jesus Through the Goalposts of Life," when it embodies one of Cohen's most recurrent themes -- romantic, sexual passion as a flawed and futile window into what we are really after, which is merger with the Divine -- 

They say there is a God above

But all I ever learned from love

Is how to shoot at someone who outdrew ya.  (Hallelujah)

It's bitter, but amen to that.

My main point about Cohen, though, is that he hit his artistic peak only in his mid- to late-fifties, with I'm Your Man and The Future, and that the catalyst for those brilliant albums was his embrace of synthetic enhancements to his music and also of seldom-heard and exotic natural instruments, such as the Middle Eastern oud, which we minstrels might call a form of lute.

"Hallelujah" is a fine song, but some of the tunes on these two albums leave it in the dust, frankly, and far more deserve to define what Leonard was up to:

A man never got a woman back

Not by begging on his knees,

Or I'd crawl to you baby and I'd fall at your feet

I'd howl at your beauty like a dog in heat

I'd claw at your heart;

I'd tear at your sheet;

I'd say "PLEEZE!!"

(I'm your man.)

And of course the title tune on The Future, seemingly inspired by Cormac McCarthy:

When they said "Repent! Repent!"

I wonder what they meant...

And now the Wheels of Heaven stop

You feel the Devil's riding crop

Get ready for the Future

It is murder...

There'll be the breaking of the Ancient Western Code.

Your private life will suddenly explode.

They'll be phantoms, they'll be fires on the road

And a white man dancin.'

You'll see your woman hanging upside down,

Her features covered by her fallen gown,

And all the lousy little poets comin' round

Tryin' to sound like Charlie Manson.

(And the white man dancin.')

Which of these great voices will still be heard 50 years from now?  From whence came their inspiration, and will it come again?

 

In the Place of God's Own Loneliness

Zoltan Bathory is a Hungarian-born heavy metallist and martial artist.  He is also what you might call a part-time shaman.  His particular shamanic magic carpet is DMT, sometimes called "the spirit molecule."  Bathory has inhaled it many hundreds of times.  Where he goes on the carpet depends on multiple variables -- how much he takes of course, his state of mental preparation, and also, it seems, the whims of the Others that he sometimes meets in his travels, in alternative "consensus realities," each as valid as our own.  Sometimes, for example, the Others ask him what is the purpose of his visit, and they don't take kindly to the answer "Just passing through!"

How deep can one go on DMT?  According to Zoltan, in the ultimate journey there is complete ego death.  The Pure Light is not so much experienced; one merges with it and there is nothing else; there is no experiencer.

Perhaps more interesting than this, though, because Bathory thinks that it explains the life mission of all creatures, is an intermediate place that one can reach on DMT, where one experiences a loneliness that is God's own.  It is the pre-creation environment of God.  It is magnificent, but the sense of isolation is overwhelming, devastating to the ego.  (Even Robinson Crusoe could talk to a sand crab from time to time.)

In Bathory's telling, God Him/Herself felt this same isolation in this same space, and it was to escape it that (S)he created all creatures great and small in a vast and variegated cosmos.

In the here and now, and at every moment, we are tied, subliminally, to the Source that is God.  As if via transmission of a computer code, we feed back to the Source everything that we experience.  In this way, it is never lost.  Our immortality lies in the infinitesimal contribution that we make in our communication with the Source.  (Intimations of Carl Jung here.)

I have difficulty with this cosmology.  I have difficulty with the idea that there was a Before and After for God, but more fundamentally with the idea that things were set up seemingly incorrectly, at first, for a God who is assumed to be perfect.  But it should go without saying that I know precisely nothing.

 

A Question Answered

"Why in the world would you read The New Criterion?"

Two sentences, intended to explain the relationship between Clarissa Eden, Countess of Avon and the wife of Anthony Eden, and Pamela Digby Harriman, the wife of Averill Harriman -- "The woman who became Pamela Harriman, and la plus grande des grandes horizontales, died after taking a swim in the pool at the Ritz in Paris, where she was serving as the American ambassador ... Lady Avon could not resist observing that Harriman 'died staring at the ceiling of the Ritz: as so often in life.'"

 

That's All, Folks!

In Japan they sell more diapers for seniors than for babies.  In South Korea, the birth rate is so low that the population is expected to shrink by 90% in the next three generations.  For reasons that are difficult to explain, once these trends take hold, it is said that they almost never reverse.

Jim Morrison, who cheated the gods by dying at 27, raised his fist in defiance --  "Before you slip into unconsciousness, I'd like to have another kiss, another flashing chance at bliss, another kiss, another kiss..."

 

As If Through a Kaleidoscope

It is said that in a near-death experience or NDE, one reviews every moment of one's life.  The same is assumed to be true of the actual death experience.  This is impossible, of course, if the time constraints of ordinary life are not suspended.  It is also true that one's "life" for this purpose must end before the NDE, or else we would get an infinite regress; we would spend eternity reviewing our reviews.  (Only Gloria Swanson can do that.)

If true, my own life review will include a very hot night in 1962.  I sat in the back seat of the family Buick with my three siblings.  The windows were open.  We were all six of us very tired, having come from my cousins' house where we kids played all day and our parents raised teasing and alcohol-infused banter from folding aluminum chairs.

My dad was negotiating the often-chaotic rotary known as Wellington Circle.  For a few brief moments this spot afforded me a glimpse, from perhaps a half-mile away, of the twin screens of the Wellington Drive-In, the size of postage stamps and bathed in technicolor.  Always I tried to spy them in hopes of seeing a half-naked Sophia Loren doing the hoochi coochi before King Herod in some half-baked biblical epic.  (The hormones were even then kicking in.)  But all I saw on this particular evening was a single screen -- Lee Marvin grinning a greasy and sinister grin beneath a giant yellow sombrero, the only Mexican no doubt for miles around.  I sank back into my seat, and the car was silent of conversation until we reached home.

 

Why Should I Care?

About the fate of S.S. United States that is?  She lies as I write this astride a dock in Mobile, Alabama, awaiting a final scouring of environmental hazards before she is towed to a spot off the coast of Florida where she will be sunk, with due ceremony and fanfare, her demise no doubt to lead the "evening news," except that there is no longer such a thing as the evening news. 

At just shy of 1000 feet in length, the United States will be the largest artificial reef in the world.  Those responsible for her fate, who tried in vain for decades to secure for her a more dignified retirement, like that of Cunard's Queen Mary, which is now a first-class dockside hotel in Long Beach, California, spin her nestling into the grave as a fine thing, relative to all other financially-viable alternatives that is.  But to me it is as if Jim Thorpe, washed up as an athlete at age 40, were offered a painless suicide so that the taxidermists could prepare to display his magnificent form at the Museum of Natural History, Washington, DC.

In 1969, the United States was withdrawn permanently from passenger service, rather abruptly, by her owner/operator, which was U.S. Lines.  Competition from jet aircraft had erased her viability, and U.S. Lines was facing other financial challenges.  The principal business of the company was not the transportation of passengers but the transportation of freight.  It owned a large fleet of old-school freighters, all of them called either "Pioneer X" or "American Y."  They themselves were losing their viability, as it became apparent that the future lay in large container ships because of their efficiency and also the protection that the containers themselves offered against pilferage.

In the winter of 1966-67, I was a high school sophomore living in Winthrop and schooling under the tutelage of the Salesian Brothers in adjacent East Boston.  On a cold evening in March of that year (perhaps as cold as the first few days of this March of 2025), S.S. American Ranger might be passing through President Roads with a Boston Pilot aboard to guide her through the islands and the shoals that dot the outer harbor, just as U.S.S. Constitution passed through President Roads after her triumphs in the War of 1812.  Someone at U.S. Lines just then might have picked up his rotary-dial telephone and dialed 846-3102, my home number in Winthrop that is.  The message for my dad would have been simple -- "Four and one in the morning."  Four common dockworkers and a foreman to oversee them, all to appear at 7AM at shipside, Pier One East Boston.  (The outline of the massive warehouse at Pier One can still be seen in aerial photos of the city, although the surrounding neighborhood is finally giving up its Italian and Latino roots to gentrification -- high rises with spectacular views of the city within two subway stops of Boston's Financial District.)

My dad's job was to supply not only the muscle but also the paraphernalia to facilitate the loading and unloading of cargo at Pier One, as well as the Boston Navy Yard -- lumber, barrels filled with ten-penny nails, rope, wire and huge turnbuckles.  He was also the man whose expertise was needed to ensure that the "shoring" of the cargo was safely executed.  But it seemed that much of his time on the job, in a little shack just adjacent to Pier One, was spent making payroll and keeping the books for The Marine Company, the contractor principally to U.S. Lines that was founded by his father and owned in the '60s by his older brother, my Uncle Connie.

And so, when in 1968 or so U.S. Lines, facing those same financial straits, decided to shut down its freight operations in Boston, The Marine Company was doomed.  My dad, fast approaching 50 with four kids and only a high-school education, had to re-invent himself.  After many months he managed to do so, taking on a job as a file clerk for an insurance company in Quincy, Massachusetts.  He made about the same amount of money at the new job as at the old one, which wasn't much, but after a time he got his dignity and his good humor back.

The same forces that mothballed S.S. United States, I mean to say, knocked my dad off the docks as well and soured all of our spirits at 66 Cottage Park Road in Winthrop.  If he were alive and alert today at age 105, Alpheus Donovan would be following the last voyage of the United States with great passion and a keen sense of her special place in nautical history.

 

Bidding Adieu to America's Ghost Ship

As the S.S. United States, the most beautiful and the fastest of all of the 20th century ocean liners, makes her way under a long, single tow line, with no one aboard, down the East Coast and around the Florida peninsula to Alabama, where she will be fitted for her transition to the world's largest artificial reef, I dream of her.

In my dream, she speeds through crowded New York and New Jersey waters with abandon.  Her bow is made of wood and it is splintering at the water line.  At flank speed she shudders and shakes.  All aboard fear that she will founder mid-Atlantic.

All of this is nonsense of course.  From 1952 until 1969, she made the transatlantic passage every five days or so with elegance and ease.  My dream reflects a general angst and sorrow at her fate, at the pictures we will soon see of her iconic funnels, vibrant in her heyday but now a very faded red, white and blue, sinking beneath the waves.