Critics Who Know Jack Page 9

  Songs mean something sometimes. And sometimes they don’t. Sometimes people just want to dance and sometimes people want to burn down palaces. All signs of a “normal” world. Or, better put, the world we have. And yes, before I segue out — One, two, three, O’Leary. . . — Who was O’Leary? I don’t know? Maybe an IRA captain? I’m gathering O’Leary was Green. Doesn’t sound Orange to my ear.

  THE IMAGE THAT A SOUND CREATES

  Screen projectors used to rattle, and before you even saw an image related to the sound of the moving picture, that hum and rattle created a sense of “what was coming” — an exuberance of sorts — an expectation! In those moments sound created images of imagination.

  An airplane cracks Mach One as you are walking home from work and you can’t see the plane. You think of the last vacation you took to Florida or Europe and the faces of the passengers and the manner in which you rushed to make sure you had packed everything you needed. You still can’t see the plane, but the sound has created a bevy of images. An aural signifier.

  In reverse. You take an early morning walk and the full moon is hanging over the houses and trees. The moon (as far as you know) makes no sound. But you recall the whispers of your loved one from a previous encounter. At that time the moon seemed to hum in its waxing, and mute itself as it waned. But the moon neither hums nor mutes.

  You sit in front of your television set and begin the sorting of channel by channel to avoid the onslaught of images and sound that distract you from engaging in the narratives of certain TV programs or newscasts. You are arduous in your intent to find something interesting to watch but you become aware of your fingers and the illusion of power that you can control your viewing. You look further at your fingers and ask yourself if you haven’t something better to do? Question? For all its commercial enthusiasm can TV programming create tedium and boredom? Can it offer comfort? Is it a contemporary hearth, easing you into the late evening and preparing you for your dreams and rapid eye movement?

  Think of fire. Think of fire’s aroma. Now you have an olfactory experience that enthuses your senses in the moment and for the most part allows a recall of the last time ‘round this pleasantry. Now you realize you can have both — the power of your fingers (or the illusion of power to control your viewing) and — the pleasure of a fire in the fireplace. So with the wood crackling and wood smoke rising, the plane flying overhead (unseen), the moon hanging over the eaves, your senses are filling though you feel sleep just around the corner. Then — a car scoots down your street and the big box sound of heavy rap throws your heart up to your throat. All peace gone as you wait for the car to get to the end of the street and fade into the neighbourhoods beyond. You imagine some idiot kids making noise for fun.

  The truth is, a young woman’s driving home from a party but you only find this out in the morning news as you read of a car smashing into a traffic post. In your head, you hear the sound of her smash-up. You are not surprised as the sound of the music the night before seemed ready to “explode” somewhere, somehow. Sound and image. Image and sound. But you did not expect it to be the woman who worked at the coffee shop and smiled each morning with a happiness and flair for easy conversation.

  WHERE POETS FIGHT

  (Whitman, McCrae, Rimbaud)

  There are numerous schools in the American system of education named after the Civil War poet, Walt Whitman. As a poet of the transcendentalist movement, Whitman with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau opened the spiritual heart of the United States and explored alternatives to denominational belief systems — i.e.: Puritanism, Protestantism arenas — and challenged belief in God for material gain.

  Whitman’s well-known Leaves of Grass with “Song to Myself” may have, or may appear, a fundamentally vain title. That is if you withdraw the meta-language. The metaphor. The working of Whitman from man to myth and the intoxication of the landscape in his pantheist nature. Like Emerson and Thoreau, finding himself alone in the vastness of the American soul made the difference between unique insight into spiritual/visceral experience and experience dictated by forces above (God). There is prayer in Whitman but not in the traditional sense. Prayer for him is honouring the wonder of the land and the people who inhabit it.

  The breadth of the landscape and the movement of souls within it, be it war and industry or love, became the vital centre of Whitman’s Bohemia. Weary, fatigued and almost beatified by his own intuition, Whitman was the precursor to the American Beats of the late 1950s and early ‘60s. To be down-trodden and in doubt. To be hurt and full of both psychological and physical pain was human. And perhaps the landscape and sense of wonder and intrigue could help heal the guns of brotherly war. Whitman, by all accounts, worked as a field nurse during the war. He did not take up arms but tended to those injured in battle. His recordings (his poems) of the atrocities of war sit alongside his celebration of “self” — America which is hard to believe is the same country.

  There is little of the Republican in Walt Whitman. And as an artist of his time, perhaps more left than the Jeffersonian Democrats before and after him. His “fight” was for freedom of the spirit. He was Woody Guthrie before the 1930s dustbowl. And he was not as contained as Thoreau and Emerson. They were more the philosophers of transcendentalism. He as a poet, the spirit and the soul of it. His popularity vast as compared to the two. A combination of populism and soul of substance.

  • • •

  John McCrae, the Scots-Canadian best known for “In Flanders Fields,” was a traditionalist poet. His sentiment, though unique to the moment, is full of platitude, does little to inject the reader with a sense of catastrophe of war. He is the West Point bugle rooting out Taps for the umpteenth time. Though this time in Belgium and the loss of Allied sons, he is still asking us for vengeance and to “take up the torch.” For him, we must remember war and why we fought it and honour the men who gave their lives. The polar opposite to Whitman looking for a healing spirit and a desire to render war unnecessary and celebrate the higher aspects of the American conscience. To acknowledge the hurting of a country by its own violence within.

  In McCrae, we have a poem akin to high school reverence with not even a hint that war just might not be a good idea. “In Flanders Fields” is a justification. It, in fact, always wants and needs the dead to exist as a cultural expression. Whitman, on the other hand, tries to find the sleeve between the damage and the progression out of it by transcendence. Making in his paradigm an argument against the nature of human violence.

  • • •

  French symbolist poet Jean Arthur Rimbaud wrote close to the same period America was in its Civil War. A child of a small French village, his poetry garnered attention for its vivid articulation of the disorientation of the senses. A cultural aesthetic — synesthesia — where revelation into experience and imagination came through perspectives that did not rest any laurels or depended on the laying of wreaths. No one had to die for Rimbaud’s poetry to achieve its stature. Breaking away from the traditional French Academy, Rimbaud “sensed” his way into psychological terrain very few poets ever have. How could a child of sixteen, and a young man in turn, turn the mind into a cacophony of dissonance and dissension?

  The excitation in Rimbaud’s work stems from a non-acceptance of the norms of traditional verse and aesthetic impulse. When one reads Rimbaud, it is confrontation through which he seems to gain his trajectory. From early more conventional poems through to “A Heart Under a Cassock” on towards the “Illuminations,” he strips away at his denominational small town French Catholicism and by the time of “The Drunken Boat” has journeyed great distance from the horror of colonial France.

  In contrast to Whitman, Rimbaud is not a man of inner peace. There is no wholesome intent. There is no “greater” America to be discovered and experienced as in Leaves Of Grass. In Rimbaud there is spite and revulsion at small-minded, small-townish-ness and its repressive nature. In short, Arthur Rimbaud sets out to un-cloister himself and his mind and pu
rsue an unarticulated paganism. But his true release is to wander and experience even at the cost of madness. Here though, there is such a structural technique that precedes his “madness” that his target of doing away with traditional concepts of forms of thinking and imagining comes to clarity. Anything that constrains the mind and its ability to feel is the enemy.

  Unlike Whitman, Rimbaud has no mythology to enter. Nor one he wishes to embrace. His “fight” is for survival. And, as I write this, I highly doubt that many schools in the French education system are named for him. His fight was to fly the coop of the Academy and produce a poetry with no aesthetic precedent. Though there are aspects of Rimbaud’s challenge to the Academy in the works of his contemporary Baudelaire, and later Antonin Artaud, he was a much younger man than they when his most vibrant verse was created.

  In his later years Rimbaud took on the vocation of gun-runner to Algeria and North Africa. There was little doubt that this choice of “occupation” had much to do with not giving la merde for his native France. So as we have an optimism with Whitman and over-dedication with McCrae, Rimbaud is a poet of abandon and contempt. All fighters — all against a different foe. Poets who fight do not rest with war. Nor with peace.

  AN INTERVIEW WITH ROCK STAR ROBERT ALLYN

  Q: Welcome. Your conversion to Christianity? How did it come about?

  A: Conversion?

  Q: Yeah, your conversion from . . .?

  A: Well, we don’t wanna talk about that, do we? I know it’s your interview and magazine. You tell me. What’s it like to have had a magazine for this many years?

  Q: Robert? Can I call you Robby? Robert, what was it that gave you a sense that things had to change with your music?

  A: Things change. But they don’t really change, you know? They don’t change like the seasons. Not unless you’re an Eskimo.

  Q: So it feels like you just built on where you were coming from?

  A: You build but you don’t really build, you know? Unless you’re a bricklayer. You don’t really build, you know.

  Q: In your song, you sing: You may be a bricklayer working on a home . . . You seem to be calling to a higher place. A place where all is answered by servitude. Is that a biblical draw?

  A: Cain and Abel weren’t really brothers, you know. At least I heard that they weren’t.

  Q: And in your new recording, you touch on that. Is there something you want us to understand about the biblical stories and the present day state of our culture?

  A: Well, I don’t wanna say I was the first one . . . couldn’t be. There musta been someone, somewhere who said them stories. They need to be got down and said. You can’t pretend, you know?

  Q: But when you say: Nobody’s gotta fight the rain. The rain it knows your name. . ., do you mean you can’t twist the truth. It’s inevitable?

  A: Yeah, who said that? My eyes can’t twist the truth. They need no legislation. . .

  Q: Barry McGuire. In “Eve of Destruction.”

  A: Barry who? He stole my song. What a great line!

  Q: Did you sue?

  A: I guess. You know, there’s something greater available.

  Q: Are you saying: Beware. There will be judgment!

  A: Yeah, I mean you just can’t go on. Look at Lennon. He tried and what did it get him. You gotta serve.

  Q: Do you think you’ll ever write an opera?

  A: I could, you know. I mean I could if . . . well. I could if you wanted one. If you wanted but if I can’t I’d find someone to write one for you, you know.

  Q: Will you still be writing, say five years from now?

  A: Someone’s got to. Yeah, maybe it will be me. Hard to say. I mean I don’t wanna say.

  Q: Is there anything you’d like to tell your fans? Any advice?

  A: Good luck. You know. No envy. No time to lose. Good luck. Ha!

  DOES THE SNAKE WILL THE SHEDDING OF ITS SKIN?

  This wonder of ophiology. This slider and creeper and giver of apples. This ‘anacondic’ choker and all ‘round rattler is known to shed its skin and once in a while make a good light jacket or belt or boots. When does the snake decide to let its skin go and help the accessories and fashion market kick in its new season?

  Eve? Such a lovely in the catechism yet so weak and complying in her nature. A wicked vamp that changes the direction of man’s fate from his ease, appointed by Heaven to thrive in glory and eternal bliss. Why this Eve? Because of a snake? A serpent? An air-licker? A bringer-down of empires? Let me loosen my belt . . . If she crossed the line — really sinned — what does that say about her? And more so, about the snake? Is it possible the snake was merely sliding towards the apple and Eve saw the slide. Took it as a sign? Had she never seen an apple before that moment in the Garden? Was there absolutely nothing metaphysical going on? Was the snake maybe more interested in a worm in the apple? Was it skin-shedding time and he was rolling tree to tree to find the best place to slip into new spring wardrobe?

  I can only answer that questions linger. And they linger whether I want them to or not. One small fault in a will-less woman seems to have comforted many a man and woman over the centuries. For that matter was she without will? And was the snake, and its Maker? If the Maker had a will, why do we assume the snake did not? I almost wish that in my agnostic self these questions had no place. I have no reason to doubt the existence of a Maker. However, I have no need to believe a snake has will and a woman and a man in a garden either. It all counts, I say. I accept the will to good and I accept the will to evil. That someone oversees all this is compelling. And I have no interest in loitering in a purgatorial dilemma. But did the snake shed its skin by its own design? And, were snakes on the Ark when Noah set out? Two of everything, right? Sounds like Charles Darwin to me coming back from some far-off island. Was Darwin just Noah shedding his skin?

  • • •

  The guy at the corner of my street is yelling: God is all! Avoid temptation! The day is coming! Repent! It’s not too late brothers and sisters! I wince. Is it the volume of his voice? The aggression of his warnings? Or is it the great odds he faces as the restaurants and bars prepare for the evening’s Babylon that cause this wince?

  The hawk flies at noon, I think to myself as I recall my last visit to a cabin in the woods. It waits for the highest of suns before it glides and gyrates upwards for its call. I have never seen a hawk’s egg. I have listened to its “Creep! Creep!” call and turned my eyes down to the autumn leaves that hold back no song. From whispering leaves, twirling to their rest, to owls and wolves securing the night, no sound comes close to this on the corner, rendering the pavement with fear and loathing. There is never a laugh from this man. A smile once in a breath to relieve his ingestion and exhalations.

  He is as much tortured as he is in the state of revelation and epiphany. Given the time of year, he has a bushel of apples and is offering them as a representation and reminder of sin. The food bank is down the road and is waiting for him to leave his post. He usually leaves the apples behind as he has many books and paraphernalia to carry home. His relentless belief to instil horror makes the honking of horns blasting from passing cars, a balm. He knows no season but the one of hell, of salvation. One and the same. Un-separated by turn of weather. And he seems to have no one he returns home to which hastens his step in an odd way. His life is a sacrifice to belief. Whether distortion or truth, his life is being given to something “outside his own skin.”

  Shortly it will be evening. His interest in you will return after a rest on a rotting cot and a piece of cheese to eat. He will be given bread by the Korean Christian at the convenience store who recites a line of bible verse in a nearly sing-song rhythm with glee. Nothing stipulates that the pain of Christ not be saluted with joy. Yet whether he (the Christ) was to return or not, our boisterous friend would. This is guaranteed. In the hour he has taken to have that piece of cheese and rest, a small dog is circling in the space the man calls his corner. The dog sniffs. He squats on his hind legs. He is about to
do number two when at the last second a high-heeled woman in lingerie yells: “Christ! Not on the street Mickey!” — and heads for the close-by park.

  An hour or so later our Christ-talker seems to have come prepared. He throws some powered soap detergent onto his space and with a scrub brush, goes to his knees and cleanses the spot where Mickey stood. Mickey returns there with his owner every day at the same time. His owner says the same thing every time. The day that Mickey’s owner and the Christ-talker were married, Mickey peed on the church steps as he waited for the service to end. Mickey has a limp from his right front paw. He usually barks at strangers but, when he crosses the corner where street salvation is offered every day, he stops and hisses first then moves in for his dog-ly matters. In this, the woman is never blamed. Instead, policemen offer rides and whistle. Young and old men alike gawk. And pigeons flutter without the voice of doves.

  HELIUM WORLD — “HOLY CRACKERS!”

  (The Bee Gees, Robert Plant and Pee-Wee Herman)

  At first the ear’s infuriated! Then Rush — Geddy Lee!? Better — Robert Plant! Particles fun and balloons at the Fair behind the stands looking up and sucking in. Hi, I’m Pee-Wee Herman — hee hee!

  How the Adam’s Apple chortles this time of year! Bustle and hustle and sales and microchip bliss! Subway rides full of high-pitched squeals ain’t only from the track screeching in and out of stations. It’s a seagull world. “Oh and my boyfriend — well not really my boyfriend — but he said he almost lost my number and I was so running out of the clothing store and he called to say — hello? . . . hello . . . Jenny? . . . hello . . . — oh shit I thought I lost you — yeah — no I’m at — shit — Jenny?”