Christmas Eve
I was sitting up in a dark room in the middle of the night, staring through the darkness between yards, transfixed by these brief and beautiful bursts of flame in a window across the way. Every thirty seconds or so there would be another flare in the window frame, small, intense, and then dying back down into darkness. I couldn't put myself to bed, could not pull myself away from the window. It was like watching fireworks --the gaps between bursts were exactly like that, the anticipation. And there was also the mystery of it. What was happening there in that house inhabited by total strangers? What was I watching? Letters being burnt? Secrets destroyed? Manuscript pages? A drunk playing with a lighter?
At some point --I don't know how long it lasted-- the window across the way went dark for good. I waited, increasingly disappointed, for a good long time. And then I was left sitting there, staring out across the lawns at the darkness. In the distance I could see the Conoco sign at the edge of town, and a few forlorn displays of Christmas lights still flickering in the neighborhood. The house beneath me and all around me was silent except for the underhum of the furnace, and I was left with one strange and wholly inexplicable desire: I wanted to go out into America and tear up golf courses. Just tear the living shit out of every golf course I came in contact with. It seemed like a mission, some important responsibility given to me to execute, orders to be carried out.
How could I have expected that after a long life I would understand no more than to wake up at night and to repeat: strange, strange, strange, o how strange, how strange. O how funny and strange. (Czeslaw Milosz, Unattainable Earth)
The Price You Pay
People pay for the what they do, and still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it simply: by the lives they lead.
--James Baldwin
Norbert Weiner on Equality:
By which what is just for A or B remains just when the positions of A and B are interchanged.
Lost Books of the Bible, Part 1
Seven times the Bull of Divine Undoing brought down disaster and calamity on the Hamlet of the Unbelievers, and each time, spasmed by their grief and loss the Infidels turned once more their broken teeth to God in pitiful supplication and issued forth cries and pleadings that were as the sound of nothing to the ears of the Creator.
Seven times the villagers dispossessed by the Bull of Divine Undoing ran hither and yon in the ruins of what had been their streets and their homes, and upon each visitation of wrath their fits of lamentation grew louder and more coarse with accusation. On each occasion the Almighty proved ever more resolute in His indifference to their suffering, and ever more impervious to the roar of their indignant bawling.
Eventually, after an interval of confused bereavement, the impious citizens of that cursed town would rebuild once again and pray for deliverance from another trodding.
And God in His heaven was disinclined to trust their avowals of repentance and humility, so accustomed had He grown to their wanton and hypocritical ways. Yet He also had grown weary of playing the role of the Vengeful God, so one fine day in the late spring He led the Bull of Divine Undoing into a valley deep in the mountains and there gave it its freedom. To the villagers He sent, rather than wrath, deliverance in the form of dogs, that the sinners might learn at last the lessons of love and loyalty.
The magic that gleams an instant between Argos and Odysseus is both the recognition of diversity and the need for affection across the illusions of form.
--Loren Eiseley, The Unexpected Universe
You may never get to touch the master, but you can tickle his creatures.
--Thomas Pynchon
It is evident that if a man practices a compassionate affection for animals, he is all the more disposed to feel compassion for his fellow men.
--Thomas Aquinas
The First Mouse of the Season
I don't like to kill anything. I don't care what it is, how small and seemingly insignificant; I believe that breathing creatures want to live, and that gets me every time. All the same, I can't let my house get overrun with mice, and every year I set traps, hopeful that the mere presence of these things will drive the mice into safer sanctuaries. It doesn't work, of course; mice apparently don't recognize the basic principles of determent. Every year they refuse to abide by the terms of my cold war, and every year somebody has to pay.
It's an ugly business all around. You can try to abstract it any way you want --people don't kill mice, traps do-- but the brutal truth is still staring you in the face in the morning: another little gray bastard who got it in the night, a strangled martyr to be dragged out back and flung into the bushes.
They come inside every year, fleeing winter, I suppose. Someday perhaps the government will have to set traps in Arizona and Florida to kill the flocks of elderly that invade every January.
Where's The Boss?
I returned home from the holiday hustle to a couple emails from friends slagging me for not finding room for Bruce Springsteen's The Rising on my list of favorite albums of 2002. Maybe it was an oversight; perhaps literally so: I'd completely forgotten about that record. So apparently did lots of other people. The Rising, I notice, doesn't even make an appearance in the editor's list of the 100 best CDs of the year at Amazon.com. That does seem a little ridiculous, given some of the seriously marginal product that take up space on that particular list.
Maybe I should go back and give the Springsteen record another listen, because there were a couple months in the late summer when The Rising was pretty much permanently installed in my car deck. I think the problem, though, was that I never quite overcame my initial suspicions regarding the disc; it irritated the hell out of me the first half dozen times I tried to listen to it. For a record that was clearly striving to be significant, it seemed almost gallingly artless and calculated --and flabby. I'm not sure I ever actually managed to listen to The Rising all the way through in one sitting. I had dozens of conversations with various friends about the record, and the verdict was decidedly mixed from the beginning. Still, I actually worked at it; I was predisposed to like something that seemed to be up to something so virtuous. I couldn't, however, quite buy the notion --which was peddled in so many reviews, and in much of the uncharacteristic pimping that Springsteen himself engaged in to promote his new product-- that the new record was somehow necessary. The subject matter seemed to demand a rawer, less mannered approach. Ultimately nothing on the disc accomplished much in the way of helping me sort out my own feelings on so many difficult issues, and it also wasn't loud and angry enough to provide the pure catharsis I expect from music that purports to be either deeply personal or political.
What my reluctance to fully embrace The Rising boils down to, I think, is that I don't fully trust Springsteen's instincts anymore. I don't necessarily believe that he understands any more about the world and the suffering of average people than you do. I think he reads a lot of newspapers and magazines and feels the same sense of helplessness and futility that everyone else does, but I also believe that his success has insulated him in a way that he can't even begin to comprehend. He's a rich, soft motherfucker, a major label artist who's made boatloads of cash, and while that's not his fault, it nonetheless subjects the stuff he does to a different sort of scrutiny. It's not like I think Springsteen took the easy way out; there's nothing really jingoistic or knee-jerk on The Rising, but there is an awful lot of what feels like lazy bombast, and even lazier poetry. Scanning the lyric sheet there are countless lines that would not be out of place in a volume of Susan Polis Schutz's miserable verse. And from a strictly musical standpoint, it's high time that someone pointed out that the synthesizer is the worst thing that ever happened to Bruce Springsteen. Again and again on The Rising a decent song is ruined by the incessant wash of synthesizers.
At some point --just as I was beginning to respond to The Rising-- I would sense that I was being manipulated and I would pull back. I understand that all decent art is about manipulation at some level, but when you're feeling fully conscious of and complicit in that manipulation something isn't working. I suppose it's just the old class chip on my shoulder, the adolescent residue that still runs roughshod over my bullshit detector, but as much as I have loved Bruce Springsteen in the past, and as much as I've lost myself in his music over the years, I've found myself increasingly aware of the man behind the curtain who so carefully orchestrates his every move. Listening to The Rising I couldn't help wishing he was a crazier, less apparently well-adjusted guy, that he was a little messier and more dangerous. For years I've been waiting and hoping for his real dark-night-of-the-soul meltdown, for the day he delivers his genuine and purely personal masterpiece, his Tonight's The Night or Big Star's Third. To accomplish that he's going to have to stop believing that he's "needed," and that what he has to say is so damn important. He's going to have to wake up one morning and realize that, like so many of his heroes, from Hank Williams to Elvis, he's just one more lost, haunted fuck-up who doesn't even recognize himself in the mirror.
Or maybe he could just get up in the morning and not think so carefully about the clothes he puts on. That would be a decent start.
My friend Steve also took a shot at the inclusion of Solomon Burke's Don't Give Up On Me on my list, which he dismissed as "Solomon Burke Sings For Frat Boys." Based on that comment I'd say it's a safe bet that Steve hasn't even heard the album, which is a collection of mostly spare, down-tempo ballads that showcase one of the greatest singers on the planet. It's as quiet and sexy a record as Frank Sinatra or Tony Bennett ever made, and the subject matter is as universal as anything recorded in the last year. Joe Henry's simple production puts all the focus on Burke's unreal voice, and on the songs (new tunes by a stellar cast of writers, including Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Tom Waits, and Elvis Costello), and this bare-bones approach provides a perfect antidote to the fussy overkill of The Rising.
I don't know, maybe if I could be really honest with myself I would put the Springsteen record somewhere on my list. Maybe it does belong there. But the truth of the matter is that when I sat down and tossed off my selections I went with the stuff that either surprised the hell out of me or made me revisit the oldest pleasures of music --records that had me singing along in the car or bouncing off the walls at home or simply sitting quietly marveling at the fact that in a year of shitstorms and personal loss and global insanity there are still people making music that can drive me into purely private pleasure zones in the deepest reaches of my skull. And in 2002 I guess I discovered that I didn't really need Bruce Springsteen.
4:32:22 PM 
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