With Your Eyes

On Inauguration Day, the cold air like a knife seemed to split the country in half-- those who celebrated, and those who tried to concentrate on the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. It was like a warning or a judgment-- for those of us who were anxious and upset, the arctic air was not reassuring. 

Unable to sleep, I watched an old film called Crisis-- a documentary featuring President Kennedy and his brother Robert handling a civil rights crisis.  It was another version of America... our leaders, presented in black and white like a home movie... having breakfast with their families-- fathers, credible men... going to work to challenge unlawful segregation traditions.  They were leaders... taking the country from prejudice and injustice into some kind of better future. It felt not just right but righteous.

The confirmation of POTUS 47 felt to me like a TV show-- from what I watched, apparently a badly produced tragic comedy of errors and mistakes, but a show above all-- and the installation of a version of America that feels eerily like the death of Hope. The promises feel like threats, and the concept of justice feels like a kind of volley back and forth between oddly distorted principles.

Seeing our 1963 Attorney General at his desk, waiting for a call... there was a solidity-- the desk, the room.  It was human-scaled.  No one had make-up or airbrushing... there was sweat, there was conversation in real time.  For me it went beyond nostalgia; it underscored this new sense of defeat I have shared with close friends.  We are betrayed, we are slipping somehow. The news is everywhere and overwhelming; the media-- rather than the message-- accompanies our life and we, it.

Continuing my interviews by telephone, I miss the heavy black instrument with the rotary dial... it somehow felt like truth. I speak to these enthusiastic and slightly nervous students and occasionally feel I am selling them a dream-- I am describing things that no longer exist, explaining realities that have evaporated into digital screens. They will never know the version of a woman who misses closing herself into a phone booth in a dive bar and making a romantic call-- a confession, an intimacy.

I've been reading Cesare Pavese. His novels are surprisingly colloquial, although one feels the tensions of fascism, of the German occupation, and the scars of WWII.  I look at maps of northwest Italy... at pictures of Turin... his places, too, perhaps no longer exist. I am listening to and absorbing the author's version of his nostalgia. Pavese suicided at the age of 41, just after he was acknowledged for his writing. Among his best poems is one (translated) line 'Death will come with your eyes'.  It haunts me. His disappointment, his sorrow, his obsession in one novella with a suicidal character-- his empathy.

My friend Elizabeth died very early Monday morning, in the dark.  In her hospice room it was surely lit, as medical rooms are.  She had not been herself for several weeks now. During her illness of five years, we became friends... she called me nearly every night for a year or two... and we gossiped, we laughed, we became intimates over the telephone.  I have a landline, still; it's necessary for this kind of communication. We'd had little in common before, but we grew together.  I miss her terribly; what we created, together, is completely gone. She deteriorated, over the years, but she was brave and never tried to escape her fate.  She was incredibly sympathetic when I had my accident; she joked that I'd ruined my arm just to experience her parallel paralysis.  We laughed and talked about men. It was like an affair... and now it's done.

For months now, I pick up my 12-string at night and play a few songs... the one that comes, every night, is the Free song, Soon I Will Be Gone.  In the year before Alan's death, at one of our back-to-back solo gigs, Alan sang this.  It was withering. I wept. Do not sing this, Alan, I warned him... and he answered me... it is a prediction, with this rare dark look in his eyes that were usually laughing.  But I've taken it up-- it's become my personal anthem that I sing every night in the dark, at 4 or 5 AM. It binds me to him, maybe.  

Tonight brought a fatal plane crash. We who will be gone sooner rather than later are shaken by this kind of news.  We are heartbroken for the fire victims, for the children of Gaza, for the undocumented Mexicans in East Harlem who are afraid to pick up their pantry items because they might be arrested. One mother told me she is keeping her children home from school, from fear they will be somehow seized.

Last night I walked home from a gig in Harlem.  An insane man on 113th and Lenox grabbed me... Read the signs, he kept yelling, with his sour breath. At last he let me go.  Shaken-not-stirred, I'd heard at the bar; it became my mantra for the last 20 blocks. There are people in this city who do not go out in the sun; they are pale and many wear black. It's sort of an unspoken cult-- some are women who with vanity preserve their skin; many are writers and musicians. Some wear sunglasses at night.  When I walk home late, I imagine they are at their sills, looking out-- blessing the dark empty streets and keeping me safe, like black angels... my witnesses.

I am glad to be home. Elizabeth will no longer phone me at 3 AM and I will no longer sit on the floor in the dark trading stories until her drugs put her to sleep. But tonight I will pick up my guitar and like a sort of trance I will sing the song... the dark anthem, the funeral hymn, the Inauguration song... 

Bookends

Like a blot on our conscience, the fires burn on in California. A kind of hell ironically consuming the City of Angels, we are reminded to one degree or another that we are vulnerable-- hurt, touched, concerned, destroyed. The emotional 'noise' of human trauma seems constant, and like a warning punishment, this one is close. There is looting... the military presence... and the blame game, too-- the politicizing and weaponizing of catastrophe.  There will be recovery narratives and those who profit from them. Like Hurricane Katrina, some of the deep human damage is unseen. 

Yesterday walking through the Harlem Meer at dusk, I nearly stepped on a small stuffed animal... a little squirrelly thing, wrapped in a tiny blanket... I picked it up and ran ahead toward some strollers leaving the park... but no one claimed it.  It's a damn toy, one woman scolded me.  

When my son was a baby, his first 'cradle toy' was a stuffed sock with a kind of stitched face... with tiny felt antlers.  It was cheap and squishy and small enough for even an infant to grasp.  As he fell asleep, he waved it back and forth and watched it. Ghee-ghee, he called it. It was his first baby-word. In those days when I dragged him to work and back... loaded with baby stuff and my own, we logged so many miles the carriage manufacturer replaced our wheels at no cost.  One night in a soaking rain I had to hail a cab and in unloading everything outside our door, we must have dropped Ghee-ghee on the taxi floor.

I called every medallion company in the city... they thought I was crazy.  Ghee-ghee, my baby boy kept repeating... nothing else.  He refused to eat, cried himself to sleep. He woke many times... inconsolable, exhausted.  Next morning I began a diligent search of stores for this toy... I'd naturally memorized the label and phoned the company in South Carolina... it had been discontinued, but they were sympathetic.  Maybe fifty phone-calls later (pre-internet days), we at long last located one... and arranged a fedex shipment to their showroom here in midtown.  Our Ghee-ghee had been washed and squished so many times, it little resembled the brand new one but I wheeled him into the showroom, three days after our loss, and he happily exclaimed 'Ghee-ghee' when they offered it, with a kind of casual grab. The whole place broke out in applause.  

Seeing footage of displaced children... much more fortunate than those in Gaza who were left completely without, and sometimes physically wounded-- is maybe easier to process than the deep, catastrophic loss of life and property.  It is the small things that touch us-- the man combing through rubble for his missing wedding ring... or someone's cat that managed to survive a fire and jumped out of steaming rubble... a cup.. a small symbol of survival in the wake of massive loss. Children, we are told, are resilient.

During the pandemic I often passed a mother and her severely autistic teenage son in the park.  He walked, waving his hands and making sounds... he cannot be touched, she warned, or he would tantrum.  But he had an old stuffed bear... and a matching scarf he kept tightly around his neck. It occurred to me a fire event strips these ultra-sensitive children of their only comfort. How does one fix this?

In a drawer somewhere I have my two wedding rings... these things apparently survive fires but not so relationships.  A kind of sentimental irony: one has nearly no meaning. Underneath my bed-- an old guitar with the capacity to bring to life all those songs I wrote and played... like a magic lamp.  It would not last a minute in a fire. There was a time people wanted to hear my musical stories on a stage... we nervously debuted our hearts, took turns on stages.  I am attached like an old sentimental child to things which with any luck will outlive me-- and will surely be discarded by the next generation as empty and without value. 

This time of year my student interviews engage me. Yesterday I spoke with a boy who left Afghanistan in 2021; his family was in some danger, and his sisters would have had no educational future, had they remained. They fled, with few possessions... were moved from one encampment to another.  In the process, he lost his pen.  He used this to write stories and to study and learn English.  Worried, and finally placed in a school here, he was shocked to be given a Chromebook. So he adapted... and his English was wonderful... his gratitude and love for his sisters... his father has finally found work in a large store, despite the language difficulty; his mother works in a bakery. He thinks about his pen, he said. 

Throughout history wars and catastrophes have forced people to hurriedly pack a few possessions and leave.  Home is so much more than a shelter. Old people and children are attached to things that cannot be replaced. In the end, life prevails... survival. There was a moment on camera this week of Bruce Willis thanking the firefighters. His luxurious home is safe, but he simply has lost everything... another version of what is missing. 

I am not sure what is coming for us all now... the constant visual drone footage surveying the Los Angeles damage.  The ruined homes make the destruction live for all of us who fear what we can lose-- our things, our minds.  Maybe we are all slated for a kind of devastation;  maybe a renewal of some version of faith and compassion. Had I been able to cross personal boundaries in my official interviewing role, I would have shared with the Afghan boy the Paul Simon song from Bookends.  I was 15 when I heard it, the age at which he was violently torn from his home. From the warm safety of my teenage room, with my plastic stereo... the record... it opened and closed with the lyrics that haunted me throughout my life... a kind of prophecy... 'preserve your memories... they're all that's left you.'

Thirty-five years ago I often wheeled my baby stroller into a church... I was struggling and it gave me a little strength.  One day I approached the altar to contemplate the unfathomable Crucifixion.... my son was maybe 10 months old.  He leaned forward and looked; he loved the church, too.  He pointed his little finger up at the suffering but calm Christ figure. 'Ghee-ghee,' he pronounced, with a kind of absolute certainty.