Everybody Knows

Sunday claustrophobia can creep up relatively unnoticed, like a stray cat with no voice.  The day's television newscasts were relentlessly alarming... not just the Afghan crisis but the hurricane which felt like a terrifying deja-vu.  For those of us with the disease of crippling empathy, it's difficult to convince ourselves that the sidewalks are actually safe; we are the lucky Americans at whom no one is shooting, and we are at least spared for now by the scourges of Mother Nature.

The reservoir at sunset was as smooth as an ice rink.  Not even ducks and geese disturbing the surface as though they were collectively observing the world catastrophes-- the fires and the floods, wars and famine-- sitting it out and celebrating the uptown calm of urban habitat on a summer weekend.  

Indulging in my pandemic television habit, I caught the Elizabeth Murray documentary, Everybody Knows, assuming the Leonard Cohen reference... who knows, I was mildly distracted since I've seen this one before.  I remember Elizabeth; I visited her studio once and was not as much impressed as inspired because she was one of those fortunate people with both a calling and a pathway.  Not only did she rarely doubt her work but she seemed to know exactly where she was going.  Also she had a wonderful husband-- the second-- but he 'got' her... and there is nothing better in this world than a partner who is truly that.  

Seeing the art world of the 70's and 80's is always jarring... there was clarity and importance.  There were critics and gallerists who had a point of view.  There were women gallerists who understood their artists-- who supported and promoted in just the right way-- not intrusive and not pushy and corrupting.  Art from the beginning was generous... it was expressing something without thought of compensation.  Yes, there were commissions and grants along the way but somehow it was the audience who profited, not the dealers.  It was the art world, not the art market.  I loved New York... the studios and the musicians practicing in drafty lofts... making my way up steep flights of old wood, kicking aside the garbage and scraps of fabric that littered the hallways... work was being done.  People with cigarettes hanging from their mouths were mixing colors and hammering things, with vinyl on their turntables-- the shiny black discs often spattered and fingerprinted with pigment.  

I remember being invited to a fancy dinner honoring the sculptor Noguchi who arrived wearing a flannel shirt and khaki pants.  One of his friends took me home to a raw space in Soho where I sat on an old mattress and watched him peel back canvas after canvas like a desert rug merchant.  It was a dream of enchantment-- like seeing the Stones in a small club with barely anyone there... the palpable sense of invention to a backbeat that came from some deep ground soil like audio Delta mud.  I left his place feeling my insides painted.

The death of Charlie Watts this week was another knoll in the endless dirge of my generation.  Like most bass players, I longed to share a stage with him.  In the early 90's when Bill Wyman had had enough, I was sounded for the audition.  Of course they were a male-dominated organization and I couldn't imagine it was anything but tokenism, and I refused.  Besides, I'd been called for famous auditions and the 'stars' were rarely there for the first elimination.  I wasn't going to fall for it.  Their sax player called me day after day-- I'd been lucky enough to share an all-night stage with him, and he pressured me.  Their manager...  but I had a child in nursery school... I couldn't leave.  We've got babysitters, he said... but it wasn't my 'trajectory'.  I wasn't like Elizabeth Murray and those other people with a 'team'.  I was alone, doing two jobs-- three jobs, sometimes.  And this is not about me... 

We'll all miss Charlie.  We have so much of him left behind... and I was also lucky enough to have stopped into Ronnie Scott's during the 80's when he was playing his 'heart' with various local jazz musicians.  He had his calling, and a pathway.  I wonder whether these youtube sensations with their hot licks and their virtuoso renditions of Bonham and Moon, the nine-year-olds who weigh less than an average bass drum but can play every single fill on every single Foo Fighters track.... do they have a pathway?  When you asked Charlie about his playing, he replied simply he liked making people dance.  

Circling the reservoir tonight there were few runners... as though everyone had returned to their nests for the evening to witness more of the drama on CNN.  It is compelling, disturbing and difficult to ignore.  Everybody Knows, Leonard Cohen sang, for the last time, at some point... and yes, we all know he had a co-writer... which matters little, because it is sort of the anthem at the bottom of my catalogue-- the funereal hymn, the accompaniment to every tragedy and nightfall and sunset... I could write endless alternate verses but it wouldn't matter... it suits the time-- the Plague, the racism, the economic divide... infidelity... failed and fragile love-- he covered it all.  For the rest of us-- the 'remainder' I think is the technical word for what is left after the subtracted... what we leave undone does little good and unfortunately not everybody will know.  

August Thresholds

The threshold of sleep is fragile; on one side there are dreams, relief... on the other, the exhausted edge of living effort-- work, sorrow, anxiety, worry.  And on the far side, like unexplored ocean, there is death... or we hope so.

Waking these days in harsh light I feel the summer waning like an old moon. Oppressive heat in August is a little more bearable than July.  I memorized Jane in these evenings just one year ago gathering her various delicacies idiosyncratically...  me knowing it would be her last heatwave.  I have learned not to take things for granted... sunsets, weather, annoyances..shade.

Saturday I stepped outside on 12th Street to the distinct scent of animal-- hot fur, sweaty jungle skin... almost as though the street population of Union Square had migrated a few blocks down... the pungent phantom of exasperation-- of disappointment and failure, inequality and bad hygiene.  The park is filled with demonstrators, vendors, farmers' stalls and sidewalk deal-makers... shoppers, eaters... tourists and thieves... Across the way there is the department-store marvel of Whole Foods-- the behemoth horn-of-plenty of the bourgeoisie... the massive cooling machines bless you as you enter... the color-coded cashier lines humiliate you as you exit... back to the steamy sidewalk lined with defeated people of all shapes and colors with signs and cups and stories... the contrast is a shock.

Today I recall the palpable humidity of Neptune, New Jersey-- a car trip at one of those moments when your relationship is wilted and deflated... and you try some vintage honeymoon clichés-- the shore, the old Asbury Park landmarks.   You stand in the surf being photographed with your flowered dress clinging, your hair blowing in the hot breeze... knowing this is the end of something.  Meanwhile, nearly out of cash, we negotiated a basement room in a cheap motel at midnight.  I climbed the fence and swam naked in the concrete pool while everyone slept.  Even the room-conditioned air was soggy... as though our spoiled love had soaked into the walls and there was nothing left but the horrid turnpike back in a rental car that smelled of someone else's stale beer.  

Years before cell phones, when you were virtually alone with whomever... even with a sense of doom and personal despair... the low ceiling of crushing heartwreck hovering like a storm cloud... the summer was somehow the season of homesickness... of being sent away, of lonely nights in tents or cabins or sleeping bags... staring at the moon, longing for something you knew even then you'd never have.  It was as though you could feel love like seawater evaporating on your skin.  There was even a song, that Neptune summer... waiting for me to change your mind.  I didn't understand, and I let the tide run out, as it does.

In the early morning on the threshold of sleep I can hear the hum of air conditioning in the courtyard, the soft sounds of people stirring in their apartments... no longer putting a kettle on, as I do, but making coffee.  They say some children suffer night terrors because they fear death-- like a premonition, a memory from previous lives... Waking in August heat is disorienting; leaving a late-summer day is inherently sad for some of us... we blink in the darkness of rooms and lose our timeline.  Some of us regret.  

Some nights I imagine myself a desert child dreaming of surf... a deaf child hearing his own song... the far-off whistles of trains.  Stuck in the city-- deprived of beach and horizon vistas, I miss the sea like a lover.  It is the 'missing' that haunts my edge of sleep... the missing of things-- of people, the sense of being loved.  "If ever I would leave you,' my Mom used to sing to me... 'It wouldn't be in summer'.  I was safe.  Yesterday marked four years since she passed away... on the threshold of sleep, into another eternity she left me.  I will follow her one day... everyone leaves, someone said... as I drift in and out I remember so well watching her sleep, at the end; it was all she had left...