Dreamtime

I never thought I'd care about football... but raising a sports-minded son, as a single parent, I had to indulge in his passions.  For a boy without a father, athletes are family-- role-models, personal legends. The recent near-tragedy of Damar Hamlin was world news.  As a family friend told me years ago, part of the appeal of sport is that it is among the few things in life with a clear winner and loser; games are black and white.  

Politics used to be similar, but no longer.  Election results have become arguable and not absolute.  Plus I am learning from Shadi Hamid's recent book that democracy is not the guarantee of human rights and freedoms, but just a majority vote which we all know can be manipulated, debated, miscounted.  The obscene number of voters who do not go to polls guarantees that winning candidates do not necessarily even reflect popular preference. And of course, our electoral college system allows that the winner does not necessarily have the popular majority.

Yes, there were some bad calls and replays tonight, but the Chiefs outplayed the Bengals.  The margin does not count.  There will be one winner in the end. Billions of dollars will be spent on this; Super Bowl Sunday is close to being an American holiday.  The morning after, there is a letdown... some of us watch the Grammys and others dive back into March Madness basketball. And there are statistics. Unlike other realms of entertainment, record-breakers keep their status.  We all remember Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, Michael Jordan.  

Fame and celebrity is a tough business.  There is not always a statistic or a hierarchy.  Musicians-- even award-winning ones-- do not always stay current.  We watch documentaries, discover and rediscover, but in this instantaneous minute-culture, we have short memories.  Song-plays are often interrupted and brief; gone are the days of album-listening, lying on window seats and reading liner notes, absorbing into our being these landmark creations which linked with our personal history.

No sooner have we swept up the confetti of New Year's Eve, than the deaths begin to accumulate.  January always seems the cruelest month.  The litany goes on and on.  Jeff Beck was a wound... Lisa Marie Presley a shock... people like Gina Lollobrigida, hardly known by my son's generation, passes and is compared to Marilyn Monroe. We listen and listen to the Yardbirds, to every Beck performance on album and YouTube-- there are millions.  We mourn and celebrate, celebrate and mourn.  Lisa Marie-- well, I'd scarcely listened to her music, but now I have. Sadly, in a culture where things are quickly processed and discarded, death is like a second chance. It makes one relevant.

The horrific and culture-shaking death of Tyre Nichols eclipsed all others.  For us mothers of boys who have misbehaved and wandered, who have been misapprehended and misunderstood, this is the most terrible of all griefs.  Heartbreaking were his mother's words that her son assured her he would be famous. Murder makes one not just relevant but unforgettable.  The victim of a brutal inhuman event is historic.  People will wear his face and name on their shirts; they will take these into the streets and try to reckon with justice.  It's all wrong.  All we want is to wake up and have our sons beside us, spilling their food on the sofa, trekking mud on our floors... smashing up the car... giving us a birthday bear-hug.

On top of the book on democracy, and Miss MacIntosh, My Darling which will be the slow/constant literary under-accompaniment of winter-spring 2023, I have borrowed the new Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger.  I get only a week with this, so I am binge-reading. The hallucinatory passages entwine with the Marguerite Young in a unique way-- like an opium dream or an ectoplasmic swim in an alternate reality.  But the death theme is relentless.  The longing for family... the absence or presence of God, or his alternate-- Quantum Physics, the esoteric explanations of reality-- it is another McCarthy expedition through a nostalgic geography and endless descriptions. Empty people, sad people.  People with souls who are alone, people who are legendary and forgotten, people who are brilliant and suffering, tough and heroic and poignant and terse.  

The death of Tom Verlaine wove itself into my insomniac literary hallucination yesterday in a way he might have appreciated.  He was mysterious and evasive, shunning the spotlight but often haunting the same stacks of books as I.  I worshipped his playing; I have every vinyl... saw every performance I could, back in the 70's.  His personal exploration of guitar was gutting and somehow familiar.  It was tasteful and edgy, deeply musical and poetic.  For years I fantasized about his collaborative blessing to my songwriting, but never approached.  I think he did have one or two of my poetry volumes, not that he might have cared.  Once or twice I shared a cigarette with him, exploring the dirty piles of books outside the Strand.  We brushed shoulders often in the 90's, Friday nights in the Proofs section, in the Strand basement.  My son was small and liked making piles of things.  It was dusty and mice often appeared behind the shelves. We almost never spoke but occasionally Tom would make a small stack of things for me on a Friday... once or twice there was even a note.  I've kept them all.

I've brought his name up with some young guitarists-- the kind that know about Hendrix but not that much... his recent occasional personal appearances in Chelsea were unremarkable.  He had lost his relevance to the current generation.  He was probably glad of that. His death, as he might have known, brought a certain celebrity he'd never enjoyed.  The name-dropping of other more conspicuous peers and admirers piqued interest with those who had perhaps forgotten his music.  His assumed name rings a bell, of course... there are those who went back and looked at the poetry.  Once he left me a book--   

So I wept all night-- as we do, sometimes, for ourselves, at the loss of someone.  Dreamtime-- that album-- it is not yet bearable for me to listen.  But I stayed awake reading... thinking perhaps being the reader he was, that he'd taken the same recent trip through the McCarthy.  I know he knew about Marguerite Young... few people have read this one; he might have.  I'm sure it is there among the piles and piles of books in his place.  When music is unbearably emotional and difficult, books are less painful.  

There was a quotation I read this morning-- something about having read a quantity of books in common with someone creates a bond stronger than blood.  There is a certain generational commonality in the literary requisites of the old New York music scene... I was less obsessed, post-college, with the French poets and more into the New York School-- like Frank O'Hara, whose personal charisma maybe helped cement his literary legend.  These people haunt my rooms at night-- their words, the memory of the ringing guitar of Tom Verlaine, the person he created to protect the fragile musical soul he was.  His death was shattering... but it occurs that his absence was well-anticipated.  He prepared us, with his elusive presence... and as I wander still down the dark hallways of the literature we had in common, his melodies accompany my dreams like living ghosts.