Traveling Sprinkler (17 page)

I
'M DRIVING HOME NOW
from Federal Cigar with all the windows open and the air shuddering through the car, and as you can see it's one of those days in which visual beauty has been laid on—lain on?—has been laid on with a trowel. There was a new man at Federal Cigar, a serious chap with a zip-up vest. I asked him to recommend some cigars that were like Faustos but different. “I might try the Skull Breaker,” he said. “Or the Bone Crusher.” I bought both of them—they were cheaper than the others—plus eight Faustos and a fourteen-dollar top-shelf creation with a pointy tip. This could get expensive. On impulse I drove down Chapel Street past the gray-and-pink-striped door that leads into Stripe, the dance club that Raymond told me about. I had a moment of thrilled apprehension. It's not really for fifty-five-year-olds, I don't think. I've hardly ever been to a dance club. Even back when I was writing dirty poems I was more of a dance-at-home kind of guy. I had some good twirly moves, though.

I just listened to Cormac McCarthy—not the novelist, the musician—sing one of his songs, “Light at the Top of the Stairs.” He's got a voice that can do everything. I met him once. He lives near here. He writes songs that tell whole stories, the way Pat Pattison wants us to. He plays at the Press Room sometimes. I'm jealous of him.

I'm going to park and try a Bone Crusher. I'll save the Skull Breaker for later.

•   •   •

A
MY
L
OWELL,
queen of the Imagist poets, said that you prepare a cigar for smoking the way you seduce a woman. First you unwrap its tinfoil wrapper. That's like removing her dress. Then you take off the label—that's like the shift. Finally you're down to the nude cigar. Amy Lowell would have enjoyed smoking this Bone Crusher. It's true to its name, good gracious.

Archibald MacLeish paid court to Amy Lowell in Paris. He was an assiduous suckup—he wrote her, “I have even seen your long library in my dreams, & in my so-called waking hours I spend hours there”—and with Lowell's help he got Harriet Monroe to publish some of his poems in
Poetry
. Then later, when he'd become a hotshot Pulitzer man and had fallen under the spell of Eliot's
Waste Land
and Hemingway's marlin fishing, he dismissed Amy Lowell as a self-publicizer who wrote tinkly verse. And then came the CIA, which began rewarding Jackson Pollock for painting meaningless paintings. Nicolas Nabokov, a minor composer who was a friend of MacLeish's, was the CIA's liaison with the musical world. Nabokov used the CIA's money to fly the entire Boston Symphony Orchestra to Paris—in the company of crateloads of abstract paintings—where the orchestra performed
The Rite of Spring
and other advanced works, to prove that American democracy was more hip than Communism.

The Cigar Inspector has a long and thoughtful review of the Bone Crusher. I've just read it on my phone. The Cigar Inspector loves it. He wrote that initially he'd assumed it was a descendant of a memorable Viaje limited-edition cigar called the Skull and Bones, but it isn't. It's made from Nicaraguan weed, grown in volcanic Nicaraguan soil and wrapped in a broadleaf wrapper raised in the wilds of Connecticut. “It starts out pretty tame,” he says, “with its power kicking in near the end.” The power kicked in for me about halfway through. Wowsers. Shit on a Popsicle.

Terrible things happened in Nicaragua when Oliver North sold drugs and weapons for the CIA and used the money to fund the Nicaraguan contras, with Reagan's blessing. Thousands of people, including many children, were massacred in the fighting in the highlands near Esteli, where the good tobacco grows. Once the CIA stopped arming and training the contras, the country calmed down. Now it makes many good cigars, including the Bone Crusher. Peace reigns.

I have a strong craving to read a book that doesn't exist, called
The Manic Factor
, which diagnoses the heads of corporations who buy up lots of companies, one after another, as men in the grip of straightforward manic sprees. They're people for whom normal human spending levels are insufficient. They want to go to the big corporate tent sale and spend in the millions or billions per purchase. They don't care that they're accumulating an enormous debt, because they're manic.

I want to read a book or an article in which someone goes around and talks to board members and people in the investment business, and psychiatrists, and tells the whole story of each of these corporate self-destructions from the point of view of the buying high of their leaders. Maybe it's been done—probably it has been done, and I'll never know it because I don't read business books, or even
Forbes
.

Mania is the best way to explain the CIA, too. The manic high of knowing that you can change the history of a country by selling crack and arranging killings and handing out weapons like peanuts, all the while calling it “intelligence.”

I'm eating Planter's trail mix and I'm not killing anyone. Like most people, I live my life and don't have any interest in spending secret government money trying to overthrow inconvenient regimes. I like this trail mix, although it's a little too heavy on the peanuts. We have to forgive Planter's for that—they're a peanut company, after all. The peanut guy with a monocle and spats. But the peanut taste is, to the tongue, a cliché. What you want from a trail mix are tastes that are a little less familiar—more cashews, more dried pineapple, maybe some almonds. I don't like raw peanuts, frankly—they make me feel slightly sick. Peanut butter crackers are a whole different ball game, though.

•   •   •

A
T
Q
UAKER MEETING
the clock ticked for thirty minutes before anyone spoke. Then the wild-turkey woman got up. She said that before meeting she was out near her well, at about eight-thirty, when she saw about seventy goldfinches clinging to tall weeds with many yellow flowers. She didn't know what kind of weeds they were, but they were very tall, maybe seven feet tall. She wanted to tell us about them. There were long spider filaments stretching between them, shining in the sun, she said, and fleabane flowers below them that had still not opened for the day, and then in among the yellow weed flowers were all the marvelous goldfinches, which looked like things you'd find in cages, but they weren't caged. They were just there because they chose to be there.

Twenty minutes of silence followed. Everyone in the room was thinking about birds and weeds and the color yellow, but nobody spoke. I listened to the clock ticking, and suddenly I wanted to tell them about the click track in Paul McCartney's “Blackbird.” Gabe, who volunteers at the prison, shifted in his seat and cleared his throat. I thought he was going to speak, but he didn't. It's a little like
To Tell the Truth
, the old game show, in which the contestants had to guess which of three guests was not an impostor, and at the moment of revelation one of the impostors would pretend to start to get up but then wouldn't. I began to feel the nervous fluttery feeling that meant I was going to have to say something. Finally I stood and got my balance and said that I'd heard my next-door neighbor sing the Beatles song “Blackbird” recently, and that I'd been struck by how perfect and simple a song it was, and then I'd listened to Paul McCartney sing it. It was about a man who hears a broken-winged blackbird singing at night, I said, and it's a very short song, as all the Beatles' songs were back then—just a guitar and Paul's singing. Except for one unusual thing. In addition to the music of the song, the Beatles included the click track, which is a private audio track that plays metronome clicks that the musician can hear on his headphones, so that he can keep to the beat. Normally the click track was removed in the final mix of the song, I said, but here they seem to have left it in, and in that way the song became the blackbird of itself. Its wings were broken—i.e., folded—and then comes the moment it's been waiting for, and it takes off and flies through the night forest, which is silent except for the click track of the trees. I said, “The bird has to negotiate, singingly, syncopatedly, around the trees—not hitting them, obviously—and learn to fly given the steady beat, the clock, the click track of what he's been given. We have something small and broken and we just have to wait for the right moment and make something of it and allow it to fly, and that's what Paul McCartney did, and did for us.” I sat down, feeling shaky and stupid because the end was too pat. There was more silence, and then meeting ended, and everyone shook hands.

Donna said, “Thank you for choosing to come here today.” There was a visitor from Saratoga, New York, who introduced herself. We said, “Welcome.” There were announcements. And then the wooden wall came up and I dropped a twenty in the wicker donation basket. The woman from Eliot, Maine, was there, and she said to me, “I used to listen to my parents' record of ‘Blackbird' over and over. You forgot to mention my favorite part, though. He says, ‘Into the light of the dark black night.'”

I drove home thinking, That's true, that's the best thing about the song. Singing into the lit blackness of Tennyson's black-bat night, when suddenly his voice goes high and gives it a bluesy turn that is astounding. He meaning Paul, or Sir Paul as he is called now, and why not? Better that Paul McCartney is knighted than some petroleum baron or air marshal.

I
MAILED ROZ THE BOOK
of Mary Oliver's poems and a CD with some music on it. I was going to include some of my own songs, but I thought better of it. I sent her “Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5,” plus Kate Earl's “Melody,” Tracy Chapman's “Change,” McCartney's “Blackbird” in case she didn't have it, George Clinton's “Atomic Dog,” Lennon's “Imagine,” DNA's remix of Suzanne Vega's “Tom's Diner,” and also, what the hell, Paul Jacobs playing Debussy's “Sunken Cathedral.” I've got “The Sunken Cathedral” coming into my headphones right now. I'm listening to it all the way through for the first time since I began writing this book, if it is in fact a book, and I think it is. You have to be careful not to overlisten to a piece of music you love, or you'll wear it out—it has to last your whole life. You know it's there—the weight of the piano is there—but sometimes it's backstage, covered in quilted padding, waiting for the tuner to arrive and tighten its screws.

I have eight different versions of “The Sunken Cathedral” on iTunes. One version is played by HÃ¥kon Austbø—moody and sonorous. One is by Ingrid Fuzjko Hemming—interestingly murky, with good swinging bell-clanging. One is by Elaine Greenfield—brisker and lighter, performed on a 1907 Blüthner grand piano very similar to the one that Debussy owned. One is by Julian Lawrence Gargiulo—a live performance, with a distant energetic piano and audible chair creaks from a fidgeter nearby. One is by Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli—part of the BBC Legends series, with a wrong note enshrined in it two minutes from the beginning. One is by Noriko Ogawa—full of nervous, restrained brilliance and unusual tempos. One is by Claude Debussy himself, playing distantly on a Welte-Mignon player piano in 1914. But my favorite version is by Paul Jacobs, the pianist for the New York Philharmonic, who died of AIDS in 1983. The microphone seems to be right inside Jacobs's piano. That's the version I'm listening to now. It's so closely miked that when you swim into the center of the cathedral about halfway through and look around, the chords are almost unbearably loud—and at the end, when everything's much softer, and mortality has been faced and accepted, you can hear the felt pads come gently down to dampen the strings as they ring out their last sound.

This piece was Debussy saying good-bye to everything. It isn't specifically about the lost cathedral city of Ys, off the coast of Brittany, possibly near Douarnenez. That's a crude, programmatic interpretation that was imposed on the music after the fact by a young critic named Dane Rudhyar and an older pianist named Alfred Cortot, neither of whom knew Debussy well or understood the way his imagination worked. Saying that “The Sunken Cathedral” is about the sunken city of Ys is like saying that “Footsteps in the Snow” is about the Abominable Snowman. It's true that there is an opera by Édouard Lalo called
The King of Ys
about the flooding of Ys, based partly on a forged Breton ballad by Théodore Hersart de la Villemarqué, and true that Debussy had wildly applauded Lalo's ballet
Namouna
while at the conservatory, and had memorized parts of it, including perhaps the scandalous waltz in which Namouna rolls a cigarette for her paramour—but he was less fond of Lalo's son, Pierre, who became a powerful and malicious music critic for
Le Temps
, writing, of Debussy's
La Mer
, “I neither hear, nor see, nor feel the sea.” “The Sunken Cathedral” is bigger and blurrier, more overdetermined, than the story of Ys. It's really about all sunken frightening beautiful artful ruined human things. It's about Poe's city in the sea, and about the cathedral cliffs in Tennyson's “Sea Dreams,” and about the sinking cathedral and the rising lake in Rimbaud's
Illuminations
, and about the real flood of the Seine in 1910 that submerged a railroad station in Paris—a newspaper writer called it the “Station of Ys”—and lapped at the foundation of Notre Dame Cathedral. And it's about the fearsome ruined abbey H. G. Wells saw in his undersea story “In the Abyss,” and about Swinburne's crumbling, wave-gnawed cathedral town of Dunwich—Debussy admired Swinburne, who was translated by his friend Gabriel Mourey and championed by his friend Pierre Louÿs—and about the watery bells in Brahms's lost city of Vineta. And it's about Gerhart Hauptmann's
Sunken Bell
, and about Verlaine's and Huysmans's cathedrals, and about the
“ville disparu”
in Victor Hugo's
Légende des Siècles
and the underwater reef with “the sublimity of the cathedral” in Hugo's
Toilers of the Sea
. And it's about the article Proust wrote for
Le Figaro
on the death of the cathedrals. If France's cathedrals were allowed to fall into ruin, Proust wrote in 1904, the country would be like a beach strewn with giant empty shells. It's about the loss of nineteenth-century certainties. It's about all these things. And it's about Chopin's preludes, too, which were submerged and dissolved and remade by Debussy, with new harmonic flavors and fragrances, and it's about the two operas that Debussy knew he would never finish, one based on the Tristan story, and one based on Poe's “Fall of the House of Usher,” and it's about the Gothic arches of the inner harp of the piano that he knows he can't play forever—the black box of hammers that outlives the hammerer. It's about death and what survives death. It's about burial at sea. It's about all the plans and loves and flaxen-haired singers of Debussy's idle youth that are now no more. It's about the time he and his friend Gabriel Pierné cut out pictures from a bound edition of
Le Monde Illustré
and put them up in his room. It's about the time that Debussy and his wife, Emma, and their young daughter, wearing a big floppy hat, had a wicker-basket picnic in dappled woods. It's about morphine and despair and undersea sponges and the long-gone days of focused effort when he was a soon-to-be father composing
La Mer
. It's about wanting to be a young prizewinning improvisational genius again, and knowing that this moment in C major was the best he could do now. Debussy didn't normally write in the key of C major. He chose C major this time, I think, because C is like water, clear and simple and bright and transparent, composed entirely of white keys, but if you hold down the pedal and play the clear white notes together in a certain way, the sound becomes blurred and pale blue and lost in haze, like a distant monument seen through water. He swam closer toward the cathedral, and its image became more clearly defined, with pounding, towering, unblurred C major chords, until he reached middle C, or middle sea. That's what the sunken cathedral is—it's the piano of his whole life.

•   •   •

O
N
M
ONDAY
I
woke up feeling dull and lost, as sometimes happens on Mondays, and I drove to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where “The Sunken Cathedral” was first performed in the United States a little more than a hundred years ago, on July 26, 1910. The pianist was Walter Morse Rummel, a then famous songwriter who was the grandson of the inventor of the telegraph. Also on the program—I guess it was a long evening—were some Chopin pieces, some Couperin, some Handel, Rummel's own piano sonata “To a Memory,” and two compositions by Edward MacDowell, “From a Wandering Iceberg” and “To the Sea.” Rummel was Debussy's favorite pianist. Once Debussy wrote Rummel a praising letter, in his tiny, almost indecipherable handwriting, about a performance Rummel had given. “One doesn't congratulate the sea for being more beautiful than cathedrals,” he said.

I got to Stockbridge at about noon, and after a lot of GPS'ing and driving around—always being careful to use my turn signal—I found the former Casino building where Rummel had played. In the twenties the building was moved to a quieter place out of town, and it's now the main stage of the Berkshire Theatre Festival. It was designed by Stanford White. This was where the cathedral first submerged itself in the United States. I looked at the white building from the car for a while, parked near a young birch tree, and I ate a carrot and felt very little emotion. Then I climbed a set of steps to a permanently locked door. Its windows were covered with a layer of rubberized diffuser, painted black, as were the three large arched windows on the front façade. They wanted it dark inside. An abandoned wasps' nest was tucked into the doorway's lower left corner. I took some pictures and got back in the car. I considered putting on my headphones and listening again to Paul Jacobs play “The Sunken Cathedral,” to beef up the occasion, but the building had been moved, after all. You have to choose your sunken occasions carefully.

Instead I read an interview that Debussy gave to a woman from
The
New York Times
that same summer of 1910, soon after he had himself first performed “The Sunken Cathedral” and three other of the preludes in Paris. Debussy, who was wearing a blue suit, left the Blüthner piano when the interviewer arrived and sat at his desk, which was immaculate except for a few ink stains on the blotter. The interviewer asked him how he composed. Debussy said that he really didn't know how to explain it. He had to begin with a subject, he said. He concentrated on the subject for a while. “Gradually after these thoughts have simmered for a certain length of time music begins to centre around them, and I feel that I must give expression to the harmonies which haunt me. And then I work unceasingly.”

Did he always like music? the interviewer asked. Yes, he was always fond of music, he said, although he was no child prodigy. He didn't always agree with what he was taught at the Conservatory, but he kept his opinions to himself—he wanted to graduate. He didn't care for genres and classifications—he just wanted music to be beautiful. “Beauty in a woman—and in music—is a great deal, a very great deal.”

I banged the steering wheel. Right on, Claude! I kept reading. He said he couldn't live up to the ideals he tried to put into his music. “I feel the difference there is in me, between Debussy, the composer, and Debussy, the man. And so, you see, from its very foundations, art is untrue. Everything about it is an illusion, a transposition of facts.” The interviewer disagrees. By the end of the article it's clear that she—I think it's a she, I think it's a writer named Emilie Bauer—has fallen in love with Debussy. “He spoke with such warmth,” she writes, “he was so carried away, that one felt how the work of the French composer is exactly a reproduction of his soul—a sensitive, delicate soul, yet determined and firm.”

I turned on the ignition and drove home a different way, and here's what I saw: town, town, town, town, town, town. None of the towns made sense anymore because the needs that had brought them into being as towns were no longer needs. The flow of the river, the spire of the church, the little cluster of stores, they were none of them important. What lasted was the clustering itself—the grouping of houses and the fiction of the center of town, and then the miracle mile outside town where people really shopped. The supermarket with the bakery in it with passable octopus muffins that killed the real bakery. I drove by the abandoned road that led down to the lost town of Enfield, flooded in the forties during the building of the Quabbin Reservoir. I got some gas in a convenience store and went inside to buy a bag of salted almonds. A kid of maybe eighteen was walking around the store with his mother, cracking his knuckles. He was one of the loudest knuckle-crackers I've ever heard. He had a gift for it. The sound was like those clacking balls that were in vogue for a while when I was in grade school. He held one hand up, as if to support a violin, and with the other hand he bent his thumb back, and then bent his finger, and from his hands came a ghastly clacking. I stared openly at him and he ignored me, and I realized that like me he was doing his best to let the world know that he existed. I drove off toward New Hampshire, thinking maybe I should rent a bassoon and start playing again. Then I thought of the ache in my jaw. Good-bye, bassoon.

•   •   •

O
N
R
OUTE 16,
I saw a yellow banner on the back of a truck that said
OVERSIZE LOAD
. I turned on my recorder. “He was driving down the road with an oversize load,” I sang.

It was big

It was bad

It was round

It could explode

Yeah, he was driving down the road

With an oversize load.

I remembered a talk I'd gone to at the University of New Hampshire once. Rebecca Rule, who is Portsmouth's jolly postmistress of literature, was in conversation with Charles Simic onstage. Simic hadn't yet been appointed Poet Laureate back then. He read a poem by a Serbian poet named Vasko Popa, part of the poet's “little box” series. Poets sometimes write a series of poems on one subject. Ted Hughes did it with
Crow
, the book he published after his wife Sylvia Plath killed herself, which has frightening Leonard Baskin illustrations. I tried to do it with my flying spoon poems but I finished only one of them. Vasko Popa's poem was a story about a little box that grew and swallowed up the cabinet that it, or she—she was a female box—was in. She got bigger and then the room was inside her, and then the house, and then the town, and then the whole world. And now there's a little box that you can put in your pocket that holds everything. It's easy to lose it. “Take care of the little box” is the last line of the poem.

I passed the truck, which was carrying half of a modular house. The driver had an elbow on the door. He was relaxed. He knew his job. Ahead of us there was some slow traffic and the driver pulled on his jake brake for a moment. He pulled it almost lovingly. And I suddenly understood about jake brakes.

A jake brake is a method of somehow using the truck's compressed air system to slow the truck down, rather than using the friction on the brake shoes. It makes a blatting, flatulent sound. The faster the truck is going, the louder the flatulence. And I knew that this driver was in the trucking business partly because he liked jake brakes. They made a lot of noise, and they sounded like motorcycles, and they were basically a way of having a wonderful huge powerful trumpeting farting sound emanating from where you were.