Saturday, April 30, 2022

TV Husbandry

For a time in my life I thought I'd marry a scientist.  This of course after the phase where I longed to marry a fisherman... a woodcutter... a machinist... to simplify, become a wife in the true sense... to fulfill some biological mandate, cut out the subterfuge and intellectual noise and strip down to what really mattered.  To wake at dawn, fry herring and eggs and pack a hearty lunchpail.. To taste the oceanous salt on my husband's skin, cook his wares and share the damp sheets of his sea-worn exhaustion... inhale the ropy, woody scent of whomever.  

I think it was the Tom Verlaine thing that drew me in like campfire smoke.  The Scientist Writes a Letter, on which Andy Newmark plays the most devastatingly minimal drum-fill.  'I find I have no other lines,' he writes.  Magnetized, I was... over and over I played this track-- the vinyl.  'We men of science---' the confession... and suddenly I understood poetry-- from the mind of someone who could create a universe every time he dreams. The way he would invent-- postulate, discover, turn over brain matter... a man who sleeps with his eyes open, staring through phantom windows, who sees galaxies in a rock. I could hand him something I pick up on the street-- he would explain... he would find me.

For a while I hung around with this research doctor I'd grown up with. He was a narcissistic music fan who held court at gigs and briefly charmed my bandmates with his wide-eyed jargon and exaggerated hand-gestures. They quickly tired of his MO.  He played jazz piano and annoyed his neighbors.  Real musicians do not do this; we are quiet offstage. But he introduced me once.  Where are the scientists, I'd begged?  In their labs... sleeping... dreaming of ways.. of theorems, of methodology. I failed again... Besides, I postulated, In the Beginning was the Word.  That was everything.  I went back to my books and spoke in silent tongues.  

At your highest point, the Devil comes for you.  Fuck the damn Academy awards... and the Grammies.  I cannot get this out of my head... maybe because the Devil is everywhere. In the Procul Harum song, he came from Kansas. He elects himself, he positions and even submits when he must, to re-emerge like smoke.  He is in your bed some nights.  You come for him, try to convince him that even among the wicked, there can be kindnesses.

When a man opens to you-- truly opens-- this is a rare and terrifying thing.  In my father's day, this happened only among the weak, and on battlefields or operating theaters.  In my lifetime, I have had a man pour himself into me as though I were a glass.  These phonographic moments, as I designate them, remain in my architecture like a wedding.  If I monetized them, they might be worth something.  After all, some of these people were important-- from a time when names like Chevrolet stood out-- designations on which you could hang ornaments.  When music mattered-- when the man who turned himself inside out-- well, he was good-- good enough, the way things no longer seem to be.  He met a terrible end-- no one could predict, but his sorrow seemed prescient. 

Time does not heal; it makes things worse. We learn things before we are able to understand and by the time we begin to understand, it's too late.  First there is Church, then Belief.  By that moment, all of us have sinned, and in a secular life this counts. In versions, love becomes pain.  Some pain is unbearable. 

Last week I watched the Anthony Bourdain documentary-- the one which apparently his family did not embrace.  Yes, in between the farmers and typesetters, there were the chefs.  The gentle, doughy ones.  Not Bourdain who was much closer to the husband versions who failed me... but like all tragic figures who come for the Devil first, who beat him at his game, even love was a terrible bloody battle.  This man of knives who could butcher a giant alligator could not manage his heart and took himself down. 

It occurs to me now-- maybe rather than a wife, I have become husbandly... maybe a little tougher, a little wiser (whyser).  Or maybe, like the inevitable theoretical melding of yin and yang, I have become my own 'couple'.  Having failed at the science of husbands, I've become a sort of husband of science myself... the Verlaine version-- writing a sad letter of farewell to myself, perhaps-- confessing regretfully how attractive (in the magnetic sense) indifference can be. 


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