Her Mom (looking more worried than I think I’ve ever seen her), her Dad (looking more stunned into tenderness than I’ve ever imagined seeing him), and grand-niecelet Madison (looking oblivious), 2012-05-12 (two days after her birthday).
The Propagational Library (8): Dreamtime
See the latest installment in the ongoing Propagational Library series, here:
…in which The Librarian (having discovered four additional dimensions of time)
drifts off to sleep, and more than one light winks on as he encounters someone very familiar.
As always, if you’re unfamiliar with the series, I encourage you to begin instead with the Table of Contents/Overview page.
Who, What, When, Where, Why, How, and Whether to Ask (or Not)
[Image: Many Questions No Answers, by Norwegian artist Trine Meyer Vogsland
(acrylic on watercolor paper; 24x32cm)]
From whiskey river:
LXXII
If all rivers are sweet
where does the sea get its salt?How do the seasons know
they must change their shirt?Why so slowly in winter
and later with such a rapid shudder?And how do the roots know
they must climb toward the light?And then greet the air
with so many flowers and colors?Is it always the same spring
who revives her role?
(Pablo Neruda [source])
…and:
Self-inquiry is simple. It does not require you to do anything, change anything, think anything, or understand anything. It only asks you to pay careful attention to what is real.
I have two sons. When they were about four, they both went through a phase of having nightmares. I would go into the room and switch on the light. Two small eyes blinked at me from the corner.
“What’s the problem?” I’d ask.
“Daddy, there’s a monster in the room,” a timid voice would reply. Now, I had more than one choice of how to respond. I could tell my frightened boy that it was not true, there was no monster, go back to sleep. That response is the equivalent of reading a book that says, “We’re all one, there is no problem, just be with what is.” Fine ideas, but they don’t help much. I could also have offered to feed the monster cookies, talk with the monster, negotiate. That approach is like some kinds of psychotherapy. Treat the problem as real, then fix it on its own terms. But the only real solution I ever found was to have a good look. Under the bed, in the closet, behind the curtains, we undertook an exhaustive search.
Eventually my sons would let out a deep sigh, smile at me, and fall back to sleep. The problem was not solved but dissolved. It was never real in the first place, but it took investigation to make that a reality.
(Arjuna Ardagh [source])
…and:
XIV
And what did the rubies say
standing before the juice of pomegranates?Why doesn’t Thursday talk itself
into coming after Friday?Who shouted with glee
when the color blue was born?Why does the earth grieve
when the violets appear?
(Pablo Neruda [source])
…and:
The best way to find out things… is not to ask questions at all. If you fire off a question, it is like firing off a gun; bang it goes, and everything takes flight and runs for shelter. But if you sit quite still and pretend not to be looking, all the little facts will come and peck round your feet, situations will venture forth from thickets and intentions will creep out and sun themselves on a stone; and if you are very patient, you will see and understand a great deal more than a man with a gun.
(Elspeth Huxley [source])
Midweek Music Break: Cowboy Junkies, “Angels in the Wilderness”
[Image: Cowboy Junkies (from top: Alan Anton, bass; Margo Timmins, vocals; Peter Timmins, drums; and Michael Timmins, guitar)]
Cowboy Junkies was the first band I ever listened two who’d been dubbed “alt”-anything. (It may have been alt-country, but I’m pretty sure it was plain old alternative rock.) This made me feel all, y’know, not quite dangerous, more like adventurous — life on the edge! — because I tend toward the plain-brown-wrapper end of most spectra. For starters, I couldn’t imagine ever talking to anyone I knew about a band with the word “junkies” in its name. My family and friends would wonder with whom I’d been hanging out.
In truth, I don’t remember. I may have first heard of the Junkies from a magazine, Rolling Stone maybe, in a review of their great Trinity Session album. (I’ve featured one song from that album here, a good while ago, as one of the selections in the first What’s in a Song post, about “Blue Moon.”)
Well, whatever the circumstances in which they first crossed my radar screen, Cowboy Junkies have continued for around twenty-five years to crank out whatever music they want to make, and to tour widely in its support. And they still consist of the same four members (two brothers, a sister, and a childhood friend). Most recently, they challenged themselves: write, produce, and release a series of four interconnected albums… in eighteen months. It actually took them a couple-three months longer than that, but the final piece of the Nomad Series, the album called Wilderness, finally dropped a few weeks ago.
Here’s one number from the new release, which (to me) feels very comfortably both familiar and, yes, alternative.
[Below, click Play button to begin Angels in the Wilderness. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 4:42 long.]
[audio:angelsinthewilderness_cowboyjunkies.mp3|titles=’Angels in the Wildernss’|artists=Cowboy Junkies]
[Lyrics]
If you’re a Cowboy Junkies fan, you’ll almost certainly want to see their Tiny Desk Concert recorded at the NPR offices recently. It’s a fourteen-plus-minute session, featuring both “Angels in the Wilderness” and “Fairytale” from the new album, bracketing the one number which has come closest to a hit for them, from that Trinity Session album: “Misguided Angel.”
The Propagational Library (7): Thenward
See the latest installment in the ongoing Propagational Library series, here:
…in which The Librarian learns what it means to lunge, just so —
and discovers a previously unknown sense.
If you’re unfamiliar with the series, you almost certainly will prefer to begin instead with the Table of Contents/Overview page.
Sleepwaking, Blindsighted, and a Little Bit of Movies in the Night
[Video: one of the best cinematic commentaries on ignoring (and paying attention to) the wrong things turned 71 the other day. Above, its trailer — complete with telephone commentary not actually in the film… and not showing its title character for even a single second.]
From whiskey river:
Solar
On a gray day, when the sun
has been abducted, and it’s chill
end-of-the-world weather,
I must be the sun.
I must be the one
to encourage the young
sidetracked physicist
working his father’s cash register
to come up with a law of nature
that says brain waves can change
the dismal sky. I must be the one
to remind the ginger plant
not to rest on the reputation
of its pungent roots, but to unveil
those buttery tendrils from the other world.
When the sky is an iron lid
I must be the one to simmer
in the piquant juices of possibility,
though the ingredients are unknown
and the day begins with a yawn.
I must issue forth a warmth
without discrimination, and any guarantee
it will come back to me.
On a dark day I must be willing
to keep my disposition light,
I have to be at the very least
one stray intact ray
of local energy, one small
but critical fraction
of illumination. Even on a day
that doesn’t look gray
but still lacks comfort or sense,
I have to be the sun,
I have to shine as if
sorry life itself depended on it.
I have to make all the difference.
(Thomas Centolella [source])
…and:
Eyesight
It was May before my
attention came
to spring andmy word I said
to the southern slopes
I’vemissed it, it
came and went before
I got right to see:don’t worry, said the mountain,
try the later northern slopes
or ifyou can climb, climb
into spring: but
said the mountainit’s not that way
with all things, some
that go are gone
(A.R. Ammons [source])
…and:
Your problem is how you are going to spend this one and precious life you have been issued. Whether you’re going to spend it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it and find out the truth about who you are.
(Anne Lamott [source])
Midweek Music Break: Water Liars, “Dog Eaten”
[Image(s): Water Liars. You’d never imagine that a couple of guys who look like this would
write, play, and sing so sweetly, would you?]
I don’t know how the duo who call themselves Water Liars came up with that name. I do know, however, that it’s the title of the first story in a collection by the late Mississippi writer Barry Hannah, 1978’s Airships. You can read the story here or here; briefly, it’s a first-person narrative of a man who’s come to the sudden awareness that he was not his wife’s, y’know, first. (In short order, he remembers that she wasn’t his, either — but he seems to dismiss this little dissonant factoid with ease, not to say convenience.)
Before coming together as Water Liars, the two guys — Justin Kinkel-Schuster and Andrew Bryant — had been performing alone or with other bands. For their first album, Phantom Limb, they just sort of shut themselves away in a room in a small Mississippi town, with a single microphone, their instruments, and a handful of songs. Among them, the lovely, haunting “Dog Eaten”:
Lyrics (if anyone can fill in the gap for me, I’d be grateful!):
Dog Eaten
(by Water Liars)The smallest hours of the morning,
When I was busy dreaming
Of tender-hearted girls
And the world without end
Forever and ever amenMy father was quietly takin’
The money I was makin’
From the dog-eaten wallet
He gave me that yearOur blood is our own but it does what it pleases and there
Ain’t much more to say
I’m alive on the highway
Dead on arrival and that’s no way to live this lifeWe lay on a Mexican blanket
[…inaudible…]by a carillon and some roses
And I was an owl’s ghost
And died on the side of the roadShe laid her head on my shoulder
She nibbled on my ear lobe
And that was about allMy blood was my own, it done what it pleased to, and there
Ain’t much more to say
I’m alive on the highway
Dead on arrivin’ and that’s no way to live this life
Whether or not Water Liars intended the connection, it’s not hard to trace a dotted line from Hannah’s story of broken, childish illusions to the sorry tale told by this song’s protagonist.
____________________________
P.S. From a good interview at No Depression (the speaker is Andrew Bryant):
Lately, my biggest influences have been writers. We all love music of all kinds. That’s should go without saying. But I’ve been really into stories and poetry lately. My favorite writer at the moment is a Mississippi writer named Barry Hannah. He wrote this book called Airships and it really shook me. He did his own thing, and he did from his gut. I’d never read anything like it.
I guess the connection between the band’s name and Hannah’s story isn’t so coincidental!
Update 2012-05-05: I’ve received a genial email from one of the members of Water Liars to “de-mystify a couple areas you touched on.” First up was a clarification of the lyrics (I’ve made that correction above). Second, no need to wonder further about the band’s name:
…we did in fact name ourselves after Barry Hannah’s “Water Liars”. It’s one of the best book-opening stories of all time, not to mention one of our favorite stories in one of our favorite books by one of our favorite writers of all time.
Thanks, Pete!
A Return to Whatever “Normalcy” Is
We got back last night from a blitz of a trip to Miami, having driven down there, stayed two fast nights, and then driven back (the latter by way of Sarosota, which made the return a twelve-hour marathon). So I’m still reeling a little.*
This caps off a crazy month-long period of household repairs and retrofitting and entertaining guests and… And we’re not quite out of the woods yet — another trip (the annual New Orleans jaunt) comes up in a few weeks. But for now I also look forward to getting back into the swing of things (such as it is, and such as they are) online. Expect a few sputters and coughs from the old engine here while I engage in virile (albeit 100% metaphorical) activities like replacing the plugs and points, cleaning out the carburetor, adjusting the timing chain, flushing the radiator, wiping axle grease from my hands, cussing at the old alternator (which hasn’t worked reliably since I bought the goddam thing at eBay), swilling Budweiser while framed in the sunset light streaming in from the mouth of the garage, and wolf-whistling female passersby.
I’ve got a lot — a lot — of catching up to do at your places, too.
_____________________
* After each of the last few times we’ve taken long road trips, I’ve spent the next day or so unconsciously certain that some sort of heavy machinery is operating, without ceasing, in our neighborhood, down here at the end of our quiet suburban cul-de-sac, if not actually in our house. The floors and walls vibrate, you know; they thrum with industry. And then I realize that the vibrations are those of a six-cylinder rental car with good steel-belted tires, running for hours over unbroken stretches of limited-access-highway pavement. I previously wrote about the so-called Hroom Effect™ about three years ago.
And Counter-Intuition Replied…
[Video: studio version of “I’ve Seen All Good People,” by Yes]
From whiskey river:
Not a few, but everyone, makes art. There is no art beyond the sensibility of the people confronting it: art is an interaction between object and beholder. The idea of a human being forced to concede the superiority of a work of art without in fact being able to participate in judging that quality is a surrealistic idea. In my area, the coyotes are still the best poets.
(William Stafford)
…and:
learn to say “I don’t know”
learn to say “I can’t say” “I don’t remember”
learn to say nothingtrain your memory to fail
recognize that you have the right to make mistakes
to stay muteinsist that the noise in your ears is due merely
to history’s winds or to the changes in pressure
that make mirages out of daily life
(Urszula Koziol, To a Young Man)
…and:
In a dream I meet
my dead friend. He has,
I know, gone long and far,
and yet he is the same
for the dead are changeless.
They grow no older.
It is I who have changed,
grown strange to what I was.
Yet I, the changed one,
ask: “How you been?”
He grins and looks at me.
“I been eating peaches
off some mighty fine trees.”
(Wendell Berry)
Midweek Music Break: The Band, “Rockin’ Chair”
[The Band (circa 1969), left to right: Richard Manuel, Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Garth Hudson, Robbie Robertson]
I‘ve posted about The Band exactly once, and barely then — tacking “All La Glory” onto the end of a whiskey river Friday post in December, 2008. I’ve not been ignoring them offline; in fact, as with (to take one example from a whole ‘nother musical universe) Madeleine Peyroux, I sometimes go for weeks listening to no one else. Artists like these (whatever “like these” means!) just sort of tingle in resonant sympathy with something inside me. But personal taste isn’t always something you can expect others to share, and I try hard not to overplay them here.
The death last week of Levon Helm, The Band’s drummer and probably its signature vocalist, gave a lot of casual (and otherwise) listeners an excuse to dust off the group’s albums for a listen. And this does seem like a good occasion to mention The Band again.
Whether the work of the moment is writing, editing, Web work, or software, I’ve always found their music difficult to work to; its drive and its characteristic electrified-hillbilly sound make it push to the forefront of my conscious mind — especially in rollicking favorites like “Rag Mama Rag” and “Time to Kill.” (Helm’s voice in particular punches through, very hard not to attend to.) So when I’m working, you won’t usually find those numbers in rotation. What you’ll find instead is the quieter ballads, for which the lead singer was often Richard Manuel or Rick Danko. “All La Glory,” from that long-ago post here, was one such. Right up there with it is today’s choice, “Rockin’ Chair.”
The title apparently name-checks both a Hoagy Carmichael tune from 1929 and — more of a stretch if you ask me — the (common but unofficial) title of a 1962 blues album by Howlin’ Wolf. The Band’s song (written, like most of their music, by Robbie Robertson) is deceptively simple: an old-timer looks back, wistfully, on his life. Apparently a sailor, he drifts back and forth between being at sea and wishing he were home, and being at home and wishing he were aboard again.
But the confusion between where the narrator is and where he wants to be masks a deep subtlety — a shifting chiaroscuro of metaphor overlaid on statements of apparent fact. The old sailor (with his companion “Ragtime” Willie Boy) is gripped by confusion himself, fading in and out between past and present; he seems almost to trail off into frightened, hallucinatory dementia, as though babbling I’m dying! I’m not ready to die! I’m so ready to die! Willie! Willie!, the Flying Dutchman, Willie!…
Levon Helm didn’t sing lead on this song, simply providing harmony (with the others) for Richard Manuel’s voice at its most wistful. Even in photos in which he’s smiling (like the one on this page), Manuel seemed to me to bear a mantle of sadness on his shoulders. In the photo which tops this post, that’s him on the left — the only one not dressed in dark clothing, but that doesn’t make him “lighter”; his demeanor appears almost fearful. This is just 20-20 hindsight conjecture, though: he spent much of his offstage life plagued by depression and substance-abuse problems, especially with alcohol. (His drink of choice: Grand Marnier. Wikipedia says that he maxed out at an average of about eight bottles a day. And reportedly, when he left one residence in 1976 the people who cleaned up afterwards had two thousand empty Grand Marnier bottles to dispose of. One doubts that these were the 50-ml “minis.”) By the time The Band filmed their farewell concert for Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz, in 1978, Manuel could barely sustain his sweet but heartbreaking voice through more than a few songs. He committed suicide in 1986. He was then on tour with The Band, reunited (without Robertson), and had just left Levon Helm’s motel room; indeed, Helm and Danko had to lift him down from the bathtub shower rod where he’d hanged himself (I can’t even imagine the horror).
Band members and others always insisted it had to have been an accident, or maybe a bad joke gone wrong. (According to People Magazine, Helm told police, “I don’t know what got crosswise in his mind between leaving the foot of my bed and going into his own bathroom.”) But it’s hard for an outsider, at least, not to picture him asea and drifting, pushin’ age forty-three, suddenly dashed on some reef rearing up out of the fog.
Here’s “Rockin’ Chair”:
[Lyrics]
Addendum: A 1997 BBC documentary, an hour-plus in length, explored the making of The Band, the album on which “Rockin’ Chair” first appeared. The entire documentary (first released in the UK, in partnership with the VH1 music channel) was for a time available at YouTube in a single clip. Speakers included Levon Helm, John Simon (one of the album’s producers), Robbie Robertson, and Rick Danko. It’s not on YouTube anymore, alas, but here in the US — at least as of August, 2023 — you can find it on DVD, or streaming via various services (Amazon Prime, Pluto, Tubi, et.).
____________________________________
Minor gripe: the only thing marring this song, I believe, is the way it ends. Others (including many other fans) have commented that The Band’s songs often don’t conclude, so much as plain-old stop; and this is particularly egregious in “Rockin’ Chair.” Compounding the weird abruptness of the close is the mandolin (wielded by Helm, I think), which plucks out something very much like a playful Shave-and-a-haircut, two bits! rhythm completely at odds with the elegiac melody and loose, ropy lyrics which preceded it. (In the BBC/VH1 documentary I described above, Helm asks producer John Simon, How’d we come up with that Chinese ending?!? Simon replies, I don’t know. Makes at least three of us then!
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