To Leonard Cohen

Years ago, when I was new to California, a freshman in college during the fall of The Summer of Love, I woke the first morning in my dorm. It was 6:30 AM. A voice was spilling words into my ear that seemed part of my dream, and yet they were not. I remember the beauty of the voice, the language, and my disorientation from both.

The singer was Judy Collins. The song was Suzanne, by Leonard Cohen. See the link below to a Rolling Stone article and a performance of the song.

Through the years, I held on to the lyric and the lovely guitar and voice. Then late one evening in the late 90s, I sat in the dark, listening to a recording of myself and my bandmates in Passenger, my band from the early 80s. It was a live performance, and Jeannine’s voice floated over Ashley’s keyboard and my acoustic guitar. On the choruses, unlike Judy Collins’s version, we sang three-part harmony. It was good. Michael, our drummer who sat out for that song, is heard to say, “Beautiful,” as the applause rises behind.

That night, I was struck by the way that song had continued to weave its way into my life through the years. Not by accident, for certain, but perhaps unappreciated. So I began to write a poem in which I incorporated some of the lyrics from Cohen’s song into three verses, three stories from my life. The first was my college dorm. The second, that performance, transposed into a bar we used to play in Point Reyes Station. And the third, that night, in my home in San Rafael, with my daughter asleep upstairs, and the 18-year-old recording playing in the background. So it’s a “found poem” in a way, obviously owing a great debt to the original. But I wanted to capture the way the words of the song blended with my world.

Here’s the poem, which I offer as a tribute to those people who shared the song with me over the years, to Judy Collins, for her beautiful rendition, and most of all to Leonard Cohen, who wrote those words and placed them in such a beautiful melody: one his own voice couldn’t quite convey, but which he clearly heard.

Thank you, Leonard. Thank you, all. Below is the poem. Italics indicate my additions. The rest, Cohen’s lyrics.

Leonard Cohen on the Clock Radio, 1967 and Thereafter

1.

Waking by the river late summer of love,

her voice, cascading in tea and oranges,

in golden light that comes all the way from China,

waking in adobe, the heat like honey,

dawn-red roof tiles, hissing lawns,

Martin still living and Jesus was a sailor,

you want to travel blind when dreams come nearer,

waking with her among the garbage and the flowers,

trusting in the seaweed morning, her mind.

2.

And in the denim Western, there are children mourning

and cowboys leaning out for love, nursing a Coors,

and she, certain only drowning men can see her.

Black velvet trios walk blues like chimes,

like shadows upon the water,

and she shows you where to look,

outside of all this, where a lonely wooden tower

is run by roses, where the sun pours down,

where you travel with her, blind.

3.

Rocking white wicker this night forever,

half crazy, half sleeping,

where the night air pools beneath the trees.

Silence hisses, applause rises on tape,

and you hear the boats go by, slowly up the hill,

and a voice you don’t recall, calls

through memory all the way down

to one cricket in the darkness.

You know you want to be there,

perfect, perfect it seemed, body and mind. 

Here’s the link I promised.

My Journey

I admit up front that this is the sort of rant that writers make, and some may find it a little arcane. Like the word “arcane.” But here goes: Have you noticed how everyone is on a journey these days?

I began noticing it while sitting with my wife through episodes of The Bachelor. Everyone on that show talks about “my journey” as if filming a six-week reality show is some epic, an Odyssey, replete with headwind, salt spray and maybe a Cyclops or two.

I began rolling my eyes (both of them) months ago.maloan_10

Then things got worse.

Every contestant on every show, every person interviewed on GMA or on the nightly news, it seems, is on “a journey.” Then this morning I looked at the side panel of my Corn Chex box and saw the headline, “General Mills is on a Journey.” Arrrgh!

I wonder what we used to say in these instances. “What is your story?” “Tell us about your experience?” No matter now.

These things happen, I know. As a writer, as a former teacher, I’m particularly sensitive to language trends (or as we would say today, “what’s trending in language.” More on that another time, another time.)

I recall the shifts in usage certain words went through during my years in the classroom. “Tight” did frequent 180’s in meaning in the 70s and 80s, lurching from “unfair” to “cool” —maybe “dope” in today’s vernacular— then back again. Saying, “Wow, that’s tight!” was a crap-shoot. I would try to keep up, so as not to embarrass myself.  Better still just to stay away from using teen slang.

I am amazed sometimes that contemporary slang dips back centuries for expressions that were common long ago. I remember talking to a student in the early ‘80s about a new piece of writing I’d done over the weekend. Monica looked askance and said, “You must be some kind of full poetry guy.” I think “full” was an early alternative for “total” and “totally” which have ruled the roost pretty much ever since. I haven’t heard “full” used that way in many years.

My curiosity then was that “ful” (with one L) was a common adverb in the Middle English of Chaucer’s work, meaning “very.” Here’s an example from The Miller’s Prologue:

3150    This dronke Millere spak ful soone ageyn
(This drunken Miller spoke very quickly in reply)

400px-canterbury_tales_-_the_miller_-_f-_34v_detail_-_robin_with_the_bagpype_-_early_1400s_chaucer

How a usage from the late 14th century wound up in the mouth of a high school freshman in 1982, I don’t know. But there you are. Of course, when I excitedly told Monica about all this, she rolled her eyes. Like me, watching The Bachelor.

So I guess we all have our peeves, pet and otherwise. I’m just more inclined than some to take notes and make public my complaint. That’s my journey, I guess.

Virtual Wilderness?

             I’ve been reading a lot lately about Virtual Reality and how our lives will be forever changed when we can be immersed in virtual scenes, whether these be business meetings, movies with friends, games, or trips to far off places.

Having seen the Internet move from text-based content to photograph-heavy content, and knowing that video content is already moving in (a website project I was working on lately in the end involved little work for me because the owner wanted videos (of himself) to carry his message), it isn’t hard for me to believe Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg when he claims that VR will be the next step beyond video. He revels in the thought of “be[ing] able to stream what you are doing live and have people to able to interact in that space. . . .  Humans are fundamentally social.”

And Yet

There is something missing here. I don’t want to push against the tide, but moving to a virtual reality is not a complete human experience. One of the scenes Zuckerberg imagines is sitting around a virtual campfire with friends from around the world. The social aspect of that, the human social aspect of that may be valid. Meeting somewhere in real time, and interacting with those someones, both verbally and visually—so that gestural, “metalinguistic” communication is intact as well—that’s all good.

The missing piece is what’s not human in that scene. A constructed version of nature and wilderness is neither one. I’m seeing an article this morning (yes, on Facebook) about a bison calf that Yellowstone Park visitors “rescued” because “it looked cold” and they thought it had been abandoned. The result? The calf had to be euthanized because it quickly developed the habit of begging for food from humans and gravitating toward human contact. That’s cute in a 65-pound calf. Not so much in a one-ton plus adult bison.

Normal Trees

The point is that we often don’t understand what we see in nature. And if and when we try to construct what we do understand as nature in Virtual Reality— well, I’m not optimistic. Even the vegetation could be an issue. Many folks are so deprived of experience in nature they don’t know how to describe it. I had a student a few years ago who was writing a scene with trees. In the interest of aiming him toward clearer, more precise description, I asked, “What kind of trees are they?” He answered, “You know, normal trees.” I fear that our virtual reality would be populated with “normal trees” and “normal creatures.” I shudder to think.

Of course, what I know about VR would rattle inside a hollow aspirin tablet, and maybe engineers are already uploading all sorts of data I can’t imagine to create a more real virtually real. But a larger issue remains. Nature is not a human construction. The better you know that, the more strange and wonderful nature becomes. Sometimes it seems utterly alien. So be it.

Romanticism

The Romantic poet William Wordsworth famously wrote, “Nature never did betray the heart that loved her,” but despite all his long walks in the Lake District, Wordsworth was wrong, I think. I don’t think that “nature” cares much about me, frankly. Nor should it. I am a part of nature, yes. But nature isn’t here to provide me with feedback about myself, or to stand as a metaphor for my life process. I need to be curious, and attentive. Respectful, and learn to keep my distance sometimes, as those Yellowstone tourists maybe learned the hard way.

Since it hasn’t worked in the real world, I don’t have much hope that that attitude can work in virtual reality.

The Noise of the Village

The Chippewa song, Noise of the Village, reads, simply, “Whenever I pause, the noise of the village.” The context, understood by the intended audience, is the point of view of someone walking on foot on trails on a hillside above the settlement of his people. That context, missing for us, was immediately accessible to whoever heard or sang that song, centuries ago. The song/poem is a sort of haiku, American-style, which influenced many poets of the late 60s.

It’s common for us to feel marginalized by songs, poems— literature in general— of other cultures. It’s good for us of the dominant culture, I think, to feel we missed a handout somewhere. We are accustomed to having our literature pre-digested for us. We expect it to be easy.

In celebration of Indigenous Peoples’ Day, more commonly Columbus Day, then, I acknowledge the People who came before us here, and who gave the world here its first words. Even the Spanish city and street names here in my neighborhood are a secondary layer of language history. I accept the fact that there is much I will never get, never understand, no matter what. Heck, it’s true of Shakespeare, too. Celebrate.

My Village

That said, I also felt on that particular evening that I shared the experience the song describes, in a very contemporary, personal and authentic way. I was walking my dog in the late heat of the October day on the open space behind my “village.” The view going up the hill is grand. I can see the maze of gently curving suburban streets below me, the fire station just now springing to life with sirens and swirling red lights. Beyond that, Highway 101 going north/south as always, a river of traffic that never rests. And beyond that more streets of a business park, the canals of Bel Marin Keys, and finally, serene in the still and heat, the Bay—San Pablo Bay, the forehead of San Francisco Bay. As I turn to survey all that, and as my dog notices and decides she can explore the surrounding grassland, I hear the sound of the village.

I also imagine from my sentimental perspective that the village sounds the song commemorates were richer, more aesthetic. They were human sounds of a purer nature: children laughing, women grinding by hand a pestle of wild wheat with a stone mortar. A pair of dogs barking. A baby crying. Human, except for the dogs. My village is the traffic.

I was going to say that my village was silenced by the traffic, and that is true, I suppose. But these days we do our living, our work and play, inside thicker walls, walls which conceal our joy and our boredom, our pleasure and our pain. No, the noise from the freeway is legitimately ours, is us, is our village. If, in a few centuries, someone were to study today’s American culture, the car would certainly be a star player.

And this evening, as I pause on the hill overlooking the village, for better or worse, it speaks for us.

The Sound of Silence

Hello, Darkness

Like many my age, and especially my generation—my g-g-generation— I have hearing loss. My ears literally, “whisper the sound of silence.” And to add insult to injury, as I was first writing this, longhand, my pen started to run dry. The words got fainter and fainter as I pressed on. Not funny, universe.

SoundSilence      

What’s on my mind is the quality of sound when I’m in Vermont, as I was last month. People talk about a passing car being an event. Some, being so unaccustomed to the silence, are actually frightened by the absence of noise. But my fear is not being able to hear the silence.

What passes for silence for me now is a constant buzzing hum, especially in my left ear, thanks to a friend’s very loud band one singular night about ten years ago. Leaving, I thought the sprinklers were on outside the club. Nope. Just my ears.

That Frog

The old adage of the frog in the cook pot comes to mind. As my hearing gradually gets more compromised, I am only occasionally aware. Because the rate is slow (like the increase in temperature around the frog) I am not aware of what I am losing. And I have nothing with which to compare my hearing at any one moment. I just notice the cicadas that are not cicadas singing away in both ears. Once in a while, like now when I notice the wind is blowing but I hear no sound of moving leaves, I realize that there is something I’m missing. Or like when I’m out for a walk with my wife and she asks me, “Do you hear that?” Always a hard question to answer. I have to scan what passes as silence and seen if there’s anything noticeable about the background hum. Depending on the frequency, of course, there may be. But usually not. Sometimes this amazes her. “You can’t hear that?” (Whatever it is.) Nope. Sorry.

Dues

Yes, I am a musician, and yes, I played too loud for too long, probably listened too loud as well, and this is those chickens coming home to roost. But I continue to play, although at much lower volume. I think.

I remember the day I first noticed “floaters” in my vision. Maybe I had always had them. Maybe one day they just appeared, the way an ache in certain joints just seems to be there one day, for no particular reason that you can fathom. All of this, I know, is aging. Being part of a generation that once mocked “anyone over thirty” as hopelessly old and out of touch, there is an ironic payback here. I don’t believe I openly mocked anyone, but I, like most people I imagine, never could grasp what getting old would feel like.

In my head, of course, I’m still a young man. I read recently that once we reach a certain age, a certain stage of development, we don’t really change that much in personality, in the way we feel, think, or react. I know brain science has trumpeted the plasticity of the brain in recent years, dooming the old dog and his new tricks to the scrap heap. All good. I will do some brain training online after this, I promise. But meanwhile, I sit here in California, midafternoon, in brilliant sunshine, hearing the sounds of the peepers in the twilight of New England in my ears. At least that’s how I choose to think of it right now.