Goodnight, Moon

The last moments of the year always seem rushed.  They should feel weighted, as though the cumulative burden of 364 days compresses in an inverted hill on some temporal grave.  We are given the post-Christmas week like a winter denouement in which to inventory or regret-- to grieve and mourn or steel ourselves for the coming challenge.  In my image-bank-- probably an illustration from some childhood advent calendar or storybook-- I imagine these days as a chain of painted skaters-- hand in hand, colored hats and scarves flying backward in a joyful procession... waving goodbye eternally as their silvery blades speed them into another chapter.

It seems someone always dies on Christmas-- or just before.  It's a kind of superstitious dread probably left over from early childhood when the death of some relative precluded a family vacation-- death in those days meaning little but a nuisance-- having to forego some pleasure to attend some service and having to whisper around my stern father.  No one bothered to explain anything like it, and except for Bambi, I had little sense of loss-- only obedience and absence.

My son happened to have been born on the brink of a decade, so for him the 2020 demarcation has a certain synchronicitous resonance.  For me, it falls oddly between two strangely marked personal years-- one a prime number which seems wrong, after all this accumulation.  Doesn't anything rhyme with my age anymore?

Nothing, I remember discovering, composing a grade-school poem, actually rhymes with Christmas.  I do remember once trying to write a limerick which began 'You can take the 'Christ' out of Christmas...' but nothing ever seemed complementary enough.  It felt like one of those songs Ezra Pound wrote at some point, and the philosophical and semantic implications were more than I wanted to take on.

I always hated holiday vacations, actually... I longed to be in my room, to linger over my gifts and inventory my toys and closets-- get ready for the coming year in which I would presumably grow and progress.  On trips there was no solitude... and I worried about pets and things which remained at home.  I remember once asking my mother on arrival at some mountain: 'How did the moon know we were here?' And she assured me that it would follow me till the end of time.  It would be there, as she would never leave me.

But she did leave me, my mother... and although I still have my wonderful son to think about, there was no one like my mom for receiving gifts.  She'd sit in an armchair by the fireplace wearing one of her succession of elegant bathrobes (they have all blurred in a vintage fashion-fantasy) and pretend to be completely delighted by whatever awkward article I'd create or buy and wrap up in elaborate boxery to prolong the moments of the opening.  It was as though I'd bestowed some royal honor on her-- she couldn't thank me enough or love it more.  It was everything.

My son just ended a relationship-- at least I think so, and despite the fact I splurged on some fashion faux-pas he craved, I could see there was no joy in his face.  It's fine, he always stoically insists-- or the ubiquitous 'no worries'-- the millennial motto.  I wanted to ask him-- Have you ever missed someone so much you sit and watch the traffic-channel for hours, on the off chance you might see their car or taxi pass in front of one of the street cameras?

But I didn't... and they have their Instagram and GPS...  their thousands of daily messages and I have only my memories and images... a few old letters and photos-- not nearly enough from the days which seem to have grown in importance.  Looking at the calendar, 2020 seems so wide-eyed and innocent... but I am no longer sure that I'll last this one out.  2021 is already winking at me and I have yet to discover its meaning... it now seems unfathomable that twenty years have passed since the millennial timestamp.

This end-of-year interlude of rain has given the moon a chance to rest behind the cover, here.  She has not aged a day since we first met-- her solo act is still the main celestial attraction for me despite what I have learned about the infinite galactic spectaculars.  I've surely tipped the balance of what remains from what has been.  And I've been lucky;  certainly there will be not so many new years ahead.  Most of what I read has been written by dead people, as my teenaged son used to remark; much of what I listen to has been recorded by dead people, and grace to technology, we can still 'see' some version of those we miss the most.

There is a book I used to keep in which I recorded my Christmas lists; besides family, a great number of the names are unfamiliar now-- the fickle trajectory of our life-acquaintances.  I no longer need to list; I am piling up those things I want to 'gift' the world under some imagined tree... it seems unbearable and inevitable that I will leave behind more than I will befriend this year... but the moon has yet to complain... and I will, in her image and the sense of rain, God-willing, walk bravely into the next year with all the rest of you.  Amen.

What a Wonderful World This Would Be

Tuesdays are trash nights in my neighborhood.  This week the Christmas trees are stacked high for mulch trucks; recyclables are bagged up, and discarded household items-- furniture, bathroom fixtures, books, framed posters and old appliances-- are piled up like flea market dumpsters.  On one corner, an almost-new baby walker sticks up-- clean and unmarked, with its Elmos and Cookie Monsters, rattles and spinners... I couldn't help patting the muppets on their little plastic heads, and wondered how these young parents could have left them cruelly on a garbage-pile.

Okay, maybe it was never a preferred beloved plaything but a space-hogging despised gift from someone the family disliked.  Maybe it caused a household accident and left a scar on their perfect son or daughter.  It tugged painfully at my worn heartstrings, and reminded me that parenting, one of the commonalities in all our lives, comes in all varieties.

I just finished reading Savage Beauty, the biography of world-renowned poet Edna St. Vincent Millay.  Few women writers of her era reached the kind of star-status she held for some time, entwined as it was with her femme-fatale/girlish image.  One of three intelligent and complex sisters, she was raised by a mother who was multi-talented and a little narcissistic, and who will be remembered mostly for her illustrious offspring.  She is a photograph-- a letter writer-- in the Edna St. Vincent Millay archive.

Recently I've read several statements by 20th-century women of achievement in the arts.  Most all of them contend that motherhood holds little place in the trajectory of a serious and committed artist.  Not one of the Millay sisters reproduced.  Single parenthood is near-impossible.  I suppose I am forced to concede that my career was pre-empted by parenthood... not that I have regrets or bitterness or even second thoughts.  What I do know, most of all, was this 'skin' of sentimentality that descended on the day my son was born.

Pregnancy was fine-- I was tough, a veritable icon of feminism with my bass onstage and my leather boots and rock and roll attitude and huge stomach.  I ignored audience comments and journalist's criticisms about exposing my unborn child to not just excessive noise and jumping around onstage, but the thick cigarette smoke that filled clubs and venues in the unhealthy 1980's.  Then came birth... and somehow all those inborn natural hormonal instincts came in like high tide.  All bets were off-- not only was I protective and 'attached' to the baby, but every single television ad, sappy movie, crying child in a supermarket aisle brought me to tears-- like some latent Pavlovian response.

The biological co-dependence of mothering is a function of nature.  Animals require no instruction in caring for their young, but some of us humans seem to have lost our instincts.  Child abuse, family dysfunction and issues are common; while marriage requires a license, childbearing does not.  As I weathered the various storms of parenthood, I became more aware of the emotional challenges and less quick to criticize others.  I have also realized that everyone has their own parenting 'style'.  For some, it is compatible and peaceable; for others, the needs of children and parents are at odds.  We the parents, one would think, have the burden of adapting or handling the dynamic... but in many families there are immaturities and resentments that disrupt the hierarchy.

While I took responsibility for many of my son's objections, I also know I empathized-- agonized, at times-- disciplined not quite enough, but tried.  My heart was smitten.  It was difficult at times to focus on my own life's work, so entwined I was with the equilibrium of this growing person.  But most of all, I am accountable.

Every year I interview prospective freshman for my alma mater at this time.  It fascinates me to see these kids becoming adults-- their dreams, their local accomplishments about to become maybe global.  Maybe not.  Many of them have parents who were role-models; many do not.  I can remember myself on the brink of college-- my parents seemed to have little to do with my academic soul, although they claimed bragging rights when I achieved something that was traditionally impressive.  Most of what was valuable to me was not so to them.  Music? Poetry?  Not a viable tradable commodity in their world.  Were they responsible for my life?  Not really.  I have friends who were accountable-- who raised amazing humans.  Some take credit for their child's achievement; they brag, boast.  A few of them, tragically and irrationally lost children-- to complex emotional and mental labyrinths, addictions and fragile compositions that lured them to the darkest destination of all.  I don't know how these people recover; they don't.  But life goes on.

While I could never blame my child for anything-- excluding premature grey hairs and umpteen sleepless nights-- I find it most absurd that my adult friends have persisted, through middle and now older age, to hold their parents accountable for their own failures-- even when those failures manifest as a kind of success or creative output.  I used to have a cartoon on my refrigerator of a girl at her desk, penning a letter home--'Dear Mom and Dad... thanks for the happy childhood; you have destroyed any possibility of my becoming a successful author.'  Irony?  Still,  two or three friends of mine go on and on about their issues, despite the fact that fathers have been long defused by age, and narcissistic mothers have been reduced to nursing-home patients.  Ironically, they have usually not become parents themselves; or they have become fallible parents--either overdoing what they lacked, or failing in some other way-- expecting....

There is always someone to blame; ask Donald Trump.  But the most effective problem solvers are ourselves.  We must let go-- on both ends.  Isn't that what love is?  We must do our best, and then withdraw, let things happen.  Accept responsibility but also foster independence-- let the apples fall as they may, we of this culture that values 'eye-candy'... who watch the Kardashian babies becoming style icons before they can walk, who see our friends buying their children guitars, coaching games-- wanting so much for their kids to succeed maybe where they did not.

I have two friends with trans-gender kids.  The bravery of these families is inspiring.  I'm not sure how I would have managed this, being alone.  But there are no guarantees in life.  Despite our illusions, there is an awful lot of improv-- of unknown passages and discovery, accidents and wrong turns; there is no real GPS for the 'lost in the woods' thing.  Parenting is a vague map... some walk, some ride, some fly and some crawl.  Some spend most of their life retracing steps, regretting, analyzing... wasting energy.  We are biological entities... but we have heart and soul.  Lost dogs find their way home, despite odds.  If only we loved one another the way we love our dogs....

I Want the Angel

A few of my friends are hoping for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  I heard a radio DJ lamenting the other day the 'slim pickings' of this year's pot.  Somehow the recent nominees (and I am personally guilty for my blues Hall of Fame induction) don't have the 'weight' of Chuck Berry or Elvis or the Stones.  Kurt Cobain.  But they will hang on the wall nevertheless.  There's got to be an internet abbreviation for that.  NTL.

Same with R & B.  Somehow I don't process the Las Vegas-style spectacle of Beyonce as deserving the same category of a Sam Cooke or Otis Redding.  What was it she received at the VMAs?  The Michael Jackson Vanguard award? Entertainer of the Year.   Her husband bestowed this on her, having reserved this title previously for himself.  Awards and accolades have become cheap.  The Halls of Fame should be closed.  Let's skip a Nobel prize year.  I can't see that Patrick Modiano has the resonance of say Neruda or  Eliot or Hemingway.  Tagore.  When I was a student I anticipated this award with the greatest interest.  Now…I can't get through too many Alice Munro stories without craving some 'meat'.  It's literature 'lite'.

The night of the VMAs someone sent me a video of a Nigerian kid playing a funky home-made drum kit.  He was about 11, with true rhythmic brilliance and innovation.  I nominate him for Entertainer of the Year.  He didn't seem to have a TV and the dancers in the dirt didn't give a shit about Beyonce.  Anyway, with the Ebola crisis it would be too difficult to bring his family and friends over here.  That kid definitely has some kind of fever.  The good kind.

I met this painter at my gym.  The self-designated kind, who claims great success.  He's a health freak, so already he doesn't make it in my book where chain-smoking, self-destructive behaviors and utter disregard for dangerous toxins are kind of an industry standard.  He uses acrylics.  No turpentine or oil-based fumes for him.  Artists are dumb, he tells me.  They have no broad vision.  Isn't that the very definition of an artist?  Do we really think those Nobel laureates set out to win a Nobel Prize?  They wrote because they were compelled to write, because their demons kept them awake at night stabbing their heart and informing their lovemaking and wrecking their homelife.  Do I have any need to see this guy's paintings?  I do not.  I have already seen them, about a million times over.

How often have you read that we only use ten percent of our brains, and that is surely twice the national average? I vouch for the fact that I use one percent of my computer, but my keyboards wear out way before the cpu.  I have become 21st-century co-dependent partly because I am often unable to read the lyrics I ink-scrawl in the dark.  But have you ever watched one of those 1970's prison-escape movies?  Those guys used at least twenty percent of their brain figuring out how to make tools, and strategizing their one-shot-of-a-life.  It knocks me out.  Or when you love someone-- really, really crave and long for to the exclusion of all normal human need…what part of our brain is that testing?  Or those dogs that make it back across country, to their rightful family?  I want that GPS.

Just because some random genius existed who warranted the invention of some award category--- it doesn't mean that this is going to become an annual red-carpet event around which the media can create another fashion extravaganza.  This is what art was meant to be.  The rest of us are just hacks in an industry.  A Babe Ruth or Lou Gehrig didn't have personal trainers and coaches but they hit the proverbial ball out of the park.

When I was really small, my Mom took me to see The Music Man with Robert Preston on Broadway.  I was absolutely hypnotized.  This was of course a kind of prototype of the now-standard music industry hoax.  But as I get older, I begin to see the truth in his 'think method'.  I'm essentially just a blue-collar bassist… I learned to play not from Juilliard or Berklee… but by belief.   I still play once a week in one of those NYC jams… and I hear plenty of musicians struggling with their egos--- some hacking away at some kind of mediocrity which still evades them-- some ineptly executing some idea which has validity.  But most of them are up there because they think they can play.  They watch these award shows, and they hear the non-auto-corrected performances on late-night TV and they wonder why they have a day job.  Why no one calls them for a gig.

Go to Chelsea on any Saturday.  Galleries are filled with gapers and collectors.  Prices are rarely on the wall because it is a kind of financial obscenity.  People used to ally themselves with a particular dealer or POV because they loved art and needed to understand, needed to see.  Now it is cheap and overabundant, like crude oil, and seems to have outlived its own purpose.  There is too much of it, there are no filters… like music… and we are seeing the visual version of the youtube and American Idol phenomena.  The rich artists have become whores and jump from gallery to gallery because they are a brand not a genius.

There is a kind of artist's heaven.  I believe this.  Not a hall of fame, and you will be brought there if you have created something worthy and new-- if you have had the patience and strength in this culture to have nurtured your 'egg' until a tiny creation pecked its way out…. no matter if it croaked or sang or flew or was bought or recorded or adopted by anyone.  You will be judged naked and without make-up.  An angel will be sitting on a kind of carved throne with a parchment book and will write your name with a quill and celestial blue ink.  Not gold.  Even if you have made mistakes and injected drugs and are guilty of all seven sins simultaneously.  Maybe that will actually be a prerequisite, because we are after all humans, we who 'think' and occasionally envy and then go hungry and alone into our dark cork-lined closet-rooms with the traffic noise and the banging and the ghosts and the party next door  and the perpetual winter ahead.

When my son was 2 years old, we belonged to a church which had an annual Christmas pageant/service.  All the small children dressed up as some character in the manger, and went up to the altar when their character in the story was mentioned.  So my little boy, wearing a home-made star costume, was having nothing to do with the procession… fine.  Suddenly, during the sermon,  he must have toddled up the aisle, and in front of the TV news cameras and the crowd, I see him tugging at the minister's cassock… and the great man (he was 6' 4") bends down, and my little boy who was precociously verbal and referred to himself in the 3rd person--  has suddenly connected some mental or religious dots, and announces … He needs to see the star.  So to everyone's amusement, he is lifted up to the top of the great tree and this is not enough because he says audibly and clearly, with gravity…He needs to TOUCH the star.   And he is lifted up, way up-- to touch the glittery decoration on top of the wonderful tree, after which he matter of factly toddles back to our seat at the rear of the Church to great applause.

My son, who was totally unaware of his congregational '15 minutes'  at the age of two,  became a great athlete.  Aside from the trophy-culture,  and some genuine life-ambition, he never really had the need to do anything audience or award-worthy.  But I like to think about that Christmas Eve every so often, especially watching some faceless starlet in a blingy gown coming up to some over lit stage to receive some cheap moon man.  As for me,  I want the angel.

I Only Loved You When It Rained

It's always raining in my songs.  When I love someone there is always rain-- blessing the moments,  slurring the shadows.  Wet nights feel safe.  There is nothing more to wait for, to dread.  The endings... they have moved in.  All those blues songs...the Sky is Crying... etc.  My very first poem was titled 'I only love you when it rains'... even then... it felt like a cliche.  It was.  But all these years later--- less so.

Among the paper scraps where I jot down inspirations, thoughts, during the day-- one I found last night-- it was a list... more than a year old-- maybe 2 or 3--for a clueless schmuck I'd been dating:  one of those guys who sweeps you off your feet, calls you Baby, breathes in your ear as he whispers things you can't quite hear in dark clubs, plays like an angel, fucks like an animal.  But the list--- it was so pathetically sad--- a list of things I needed to talk about--- as though the guy cared about anything that wasn't in his pants or mine...

It sat by the phone, that list... for maybe a year--- a year when it was unravelling--- when the only 'intimacy' (one of the items) I had was listening to his version of whatever it is men think you want to hear while we lay in a dark room, me adding things to the list... knowing better than when I was 20 that the exit is best without dialogue... that it had all become a monologue with me making vague disconnected responses, that the guy never noticed, had never listened (another item), even during the 'Birthday Sex' episode (another item).  That despite his melodramatic 'attentions' and chestbeating and solos 'just for you, baby', that it was all just 'content' for another memory, maybe another song... another bird for whom I left the cage door open, waiting for the sigh, the shadow and the rain.

So today I came across the list at the bottom of a box in which I keep unfinished songs-- things I write when I lose people--- things written with pain (rhymes with....) in dark rooms with sometimes illegible scrawl-- which is part of the recovery... not being able to decipher words-- the way you miss things in life, and it is too late to ask--- 'what was that you said to me when...?'  And if you did, it would no longer be true, or it never was, or it is gone like everything is gone, no matter how painful or happy.  You heal, or you do not heal.  You miss the perfect moments, you do not miss the terrible ones--- but there they all are, in one of these boxes--- written or unwritten, sung or not sung.

The list was so cliche'd and juvenile-- like something one of my son's exasperated girlfriends might have written--- or my niece (I have a post-it souvenir I leave by my kitchen phone with a number she deleted from her phone (just in case) and an arrow and the words ''---'s asshole ex non-boyfriend"). So teenaged and so perfect.  Like my own  personal Tracey Emin.  My niece doesn't know who Tracey Emin is.  Nor did my list-guy.  In fact, in a few more years, I might not even know who the list-guy was.

Do you ever think people are faking their memories?  The way that girl used to tell me all about her relationship with Bob Dylan and I knew she was lying... but it was funny, or pathetic... the way my list was pathetic... because so often we breathe meaning into these moments.  Like you are walking down the street--- and a cab stops, and you answer--I want to go somewhere taxis don't.  But it is just a cab, and you didn't really say that, and the list-guy--his solos weren't soulful, they were just coming out of his auto-pilot musical repertoire which was not familiar to you and after a few nights you started to hear them again and realized the guy is a fraud.

But he isn't a fraud.  It is you.  Or me--- who is expecting some revelation--- like a poem I have never seen which is amazing, and then I look at the others, and they dilute that one until you put the book back and that is that.  Is life disappointing?  It is our own failure to turn over the card and find something extra-terrestrial or ultra-nuclear... and maybe there was only that one love for me--- the one who died, so the dream never does-- the hero who never got old, the face that shined, the passion that was perfect, the loss that taught me everything about loving the rain, because he was the rain-- -the dark, and the wet and the hidden, the technicolor underside of my skin.

There is a girl beside me in this cafe, reading a book called 'The Inheritance of Loss'.  We hold onto our losses because they are really the only lessons we have learned, the reverse blessings we do not comprehend, the best and the worst.  And no matter how many times we think we are winning, we will lose-- -all of us.  We are all lost, with our GPS's and our perpetual instant instructions and ubiquitous internet connections.  Loss is our great common denominator-- our guardian angel, our past and future.

So we learn to love the rain... the B-side, the thing that 'isn't'--not the pretentious loneliness and ravenous despair of  histrionic poets and socio-analysts of loss but the simple imprint, the wet shadows of missing angels-- and we learn to love the empty room with the ghost windows which in damp quiet with the perpetual virtual soundtrack of everything I have ever heard tells me everything I need to know.

Under the Net

I've come full circle to this pedestrian realization that the universal absolute LCD is spending every minute essentially making memories.  The ones that stand with accuracy are of course witnessed, photographed, etc. The witnessing process in our culture has ballooned to full-blown clutter.  The evidence now eclipses the fact that the experience is what mattered-- so much of this slips by while we are texting and recording, forgetting to use our mind to 'set' the moment and relying on technology while life evades us.  

I am currently obsessed with the prospect of mental atrophy, of dementia as I watch my Mom desperately trying to cope.  I think about Iris Murdoch-- her impeccably clever literacy, the way it left her brilliant mind a damaged shell on one of the most coveted intellectual beaches.  I just reread Under the Net--- a small book, in a way, but the intelligence is indelible.

My Mom constantly reviews her memories--- like fading photographs of an old lover, they are; she cannot bear the pain and yet she must.  My uncle is in a box; she refuses this version.  Digital memories-- things on a computer--- are meaningless;  like cartoons in some gibberishy language, she distrusts them and will not look.  They are things in a box.

We who still have everything--- faculties and taste, that is-- we wait in line, we primp and text, we fail to look.  Women spend their lives playing sex games instead of learning to love-- and writing about these things, so other women can waste their time reading about them.  Television-- the final drug.  How many still read Iris Murdoch?  No one is counting these things in New York Magazine's lists of events and celebrities ranked by income, star power and categorical royalty.  People who cannot form a grammatically decent thought earn more in a week than poor Iris earned in a lifetime.

I worry about experience as I stay awake all night....not geographic but static experience.  It is always daylight in my house, or perhaps always night.  I am digging in, surrounding the moments.  This confounds the roaches and rats---they seem to have given up wandering.  Some nights I wait for my muse; some nights I begin without her.  Some nights she cheats on me, doesn't show up until daybreak and we are both cranky and resistant.   The next night she may punish me like the truant mistress she is.  I am teaching her about love, by example.  Or maybe I have traded her flirtatious tease of art for a kind of madness.  Madness is a faithful companion, once you have become friends (not lovers).  In the end you can trade madness for ignorance, but you will regret this.  My muse has been forbidden to bring her mortal enemies or ex-boyfriends,  Boredom and Apathy. I cannot afford to cater to their luxuries.  On the other hand,  I am tired of fighting my causes, of defending the undefended.  I am disappointed in my candidate and hate his opponent.

So I've been reading Burroughs this week.  I miss the broken boundaries of language, the feeling of it--- the discomfort.  Language has become abandoned and misused.  I also miss naked hatred and naked love equally.  We have traded addictions for other addictions.  There is no longer any cure, just the waiting.   I miss the learners and crawlers, the needle abusers, the mad scientists of last century, the unkempt and slovenly poets and paint-martyrs, the stabbed and abandoned, the decomposing kings of the unfamous.

Has anyone ever entered 'death' in their GPS?  I wonder.  I have tons of email inviting me to join 'Women Who Write' from one of the Women Who Write About Men and fail to realize they are not the first to speak about having a man inside them while they are thinking about their mother.  Have these people forgotten James Joyce? They are maybe the literary equivalent of a Beatlemania tribute band... which was actually playing next door to my last night's gig.  Molly Bloom never bought make-up at Sephora or hung out at Flow.  Would she?  She didn't even have tampax.

My poor Mom is so innocent now, so sad and so desperately still trying to put on  her 1950's good face, even though her marriage was a challenge, the familial alcoholism hovering like a black shadow dress in her closet.  She was busy worrying that I was maybe taking a shower with my best girlfriend--- when my pederast uncle was threatening to do all kinds of evil things to us-- that kind of innocence which she has maintained.  She now pretends to read the paper, is so prepared to give me the unconditional love one did not offer in my childhood.  I love her for this, try to share my personal madness with hers;  I can confess things to her now, tell her things she couldn't handle.  This constitutes a kind of truth, even though they just fall through the damaged net of her present.

Some nights I pretend she is Iris; she likes this.  I reinvent a private charade of sisterhood; it is an intimacy I could never have tasted when she was still 'Mom'.  I facelift her onto some kind of beach where she is beautiful and running and my father is a handsome soldier watching her with desire and promise of a future that never really became a past.  It has all has been whitewashed and mentally photoshopped into a version that is a kinder companion, while the clock ticks and the future no longer rocks her to sleep but dissolves into a common past which will undoubtedly wash us all clean in the final tide and hopefully leave a few things of beauty on the shore for our children to find.