Terminal Advice, from the Sage of Warwick, Rhode Island
"We should not attempt to understand the world," said Harald Malmgren, about three weeks before his passing on February 13 of this year. "It just is."
And yet Harald had an indefatigable moral compass. He sinned, no doubt, many times, but it mattered to him that he sinned. He belied the old maxim that "a good man cannot be a great man."
At Cross Purposes
On the one hand, I have an urge to discard all of my unneeded factoids, like a bomber crew frantically tossing stuff overboard because a fuel leak otherwise may leave the plane crippled, short of its goal.
What factoids? Oh, for example, in the heat of summer, the clarity of the water inside the burst tar bubbles that lined the very edge of the road where I grew up. The myth, or reality, of the head of Ted Williams sitting in a frozen vault. But at least 100,000 more. And "Everything Must Go!"
Without the factoids, does anything of me remain? Perhaps that's the point. Let it all become confetti.
And yet, when an artist labors to create meaning from a blank canvas, the meaning is built up from the meaningless. Consider, for example, this first paragraph of a Leonid Rankov story, with its details almost all of which could be otherwise, as he leads us towards things of more importance -- dolphins, idiots savants, the diaspora:
Already a light rain had begun to fall. It was the first October rain, always unexpected after the close humidity of summer days. It mixed in with the smell of asphalt and the swollen blades of grass in the lawns, spotted the windshields with beads, hung in the air from the grey clouds to the very earth.
"Speak, Memory!"
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..."
