You've been a fool and so have I But come and be my wife And let us try before we die To make some sense of life
We're neither pure nor wise nor good We'll do the best we know We'll build our house and chop our wood And make our garden grow And make our garden grow
I thought the world was sugar cake For so our master said But now I'll teach my hands to bake Our loaf of daily bread
We're neither pure nor wise nor good We'll do the best we know We'll build house and chop our wood And make our garden grow And make our garden grow
Let dreamers dream what worlds they please Those Edens can't be found The sweetest flowers The fairest trees Are grown in solid ground
We're neither pure nor wise nor good We'll do the best we know We'll build our house and chop our wood And make our garden grow And make our garden grow
Tonight I listened to the Stravinsky Ragtime for the first time in 20 years, and for some reason cracked up laughing for most of it: that dour, sour, dissonant cimbalom and complaining clarinet and doomy percussion reminded me of someone striding along with his head down, someone who has given up, and for some reason I found it hilariously funny.
Then I kept thinking: this piece reminds me of something. Or someone. I've been reading up on Bernstein again, an old hero/obsession, and wondering anew why he wasn't considered a "significant" composer (or significant enough) because he "only wrote for musical theatre" (not true anyway). But this wild and wacky version of Wrong Note Rag, the best I have ever seen/heard, flashed into my head, and it was only when I posted the video that I realized that OF COURSE the two pieces had a spiritual kinship: both were slightly crazed, off-kilter experiments in ragtime. In Stravinsky's case a rag with a wooden leg, and in Bernstein's, a rag breathing flaming helium.
This is just another one of those strange things. A while ago I wrote about buying an old hard-cover copy of Colleen McCullough's novel The Thorn Birds from Amazon, and discovering that between its browned pages were sprays of flowers which had been pressed and dried, their colors still faintly apparent even after God-knows-how-many years. It made me wonder who cut these slips from their garden, and where (Australia?), and what possessed them to place them in a volume, a beloved novel I assume, and leave them there, forgotten. For that matter, why was the book sold? Had the owner passed on, faded away along with the mysterious flowers? My questions just multiplied.
But then I dug out this book - and I swear to you, I do not remember when I bought it, where I bought it, and it's just possible I got it from Amazon, meaning it was used when I got it. Maybe. But it seems to me I've had it longer than that. It's a rather dull tome which I thought I'd read again to help me get to sleep at night. Written by the controversial journalist Joan Peyser, it was considered a stick of dynamite in the music world because Peyser dared to state that Bernstein was gay. There erupted a firestorm of vehement denials, shock, horror, dread, etc., while no one even stopped to think how homophobic that particular reaction made them appear. Oh, no! they seemed to be saying. We just don't want HIM to be gay.
And speaking of. Peyser also wrote a controversial book about George Gershwin, suggesting he was at very least bisexual and certainly in no hurry to marry any woman he knew. The book was thundered at and railed at and denounced, as was Peyser, who now seemed to be a scarlet woman of musical biography. She'd have her comeuppance decades later, when a dry, scholarly tome which claimed to be The Ultimate Gershwin Biography actually quoted her book, somehow rendering her academically acceptable. (Peyser was also the first writer to posit the veracity of Alan Gershwin's claim that he was George Gershwin's illegitimate son.)
But that's not what this is all about. Neither is this clean copy of the gorgeous cover photo Peyser used, in which Gershwin's elegant narcissism is on full display. The slightly sneering "fuck-me" mouth is particularly disarming, not to mention provocative.
NO! It's about THIS.
THIS, which tumbled out of the Bernstein book as I began to flip through it in preparation for reading it (trying to find, in vain, the sexy or salacious parts).
THIS, of which I have no knowledge, no idea of its provenance. WHAT THE HELL IS IT DOING HERE? Who cut this out of the New York Times on Sunday, November 10, 1985 and taped it to a piece of green plastic with multiple pieces of Scotch tape? And why? I had no access to the New York Times then. I don't know why, if someone DID clip this out, they chose one of Lenny's more pretentious little acrostics or whatever they're called. (Like a monkey, he had a mind for puzzles.) Like the gay Copland, the gay Bernstein (who later came out as flamboyantly as one might expect) might be trying to establish his place in the pantheon of greatness by sucking up to the boss. Could that explain the enigmatic reference to "Organ of Cecilia"?
I keep finding things I don't understand! They keep falling out of books, found objects. I wondered just fleetingly if it was something my dead sister did, though why she would do something so strange, I don't know. Certainly if I had done it and given it to her, she would have called me completely insane. But she is dead now, so I don't need to worry.
But it would be nice to now what the hell this is and where it comes from. Who knows what will tumble from the next old book I open? Undiscovered Gershwin scores? Condoms? Pressed and dessicated after-dinner mints?
ADDENDA. St. Cecilia, virgin, martyr, and patron saint of music, which is why she is holding a weird sort of violin or cello. This kind of explains it, but for a virgin saint, she sure shows a lot of cleavage.
Not written in the '20s, not even for a show set in the '20s, but rather the Swing era of the 1940s. Yet it's full of all that '20s jazz, when jazz was still exciting and new. I think this was Leonard Bernstein's first musical, Wonderful Town. And you'll never get this one out of your brain, out of your brain, out of your brain. . .
It surprises me how often things are joined together, even chained, or branch ever outwards yet back into each other. Or is it like one of those plants that puts down new roots along its runners, like a spider plant or a banyan, thus recreating a baby plant complete in all its parts?
Whatever. It's Sunday, I made a few discoveries that I found intriguing, and I want to capture them before they melt away like a Creamsicle on a hot sidewalk in August. As I wrote in my last post, my little lovebird Jasper got sick and nearly died, until he suddenly popped back into vibrant health. This brought to mind the old Elizabethan round, Ah Poor Bird, which I had not thought about in. . . oops, half a century. Jesus, I'm getting old.
Then I remembered something my brother Walt said about Mahler: that a melody in one of his symphonies was actually Frere Jacques in a minor key. Bing-bing-bing: I realized that Ah Poor Bird (or something like it) may have been the original source.
Try it. Hum or sing Frere Jacques (and I don't know for sure if Americans even know it, but to Canadian children it's more familiar than O Canada). Then try Ah Poor Bird, as in the last post with the three singers. Compare and contrast.
Then we have the Mahler, conducted by Leonard Bernstein who is worthy of a post on his own. But he makes me sad, and he makes me sad because he had everything a person could ever want, including worldwide fame, and yet he was. . . sad.
He died of cancer at 70, I think, but it's a miracle he lived that long, smoking obsessively, drinking with ever-escalating ruthlessness and popping pills like candy. In his later years he seemed like a blurred version of himself. It affected his conducting. I heard a very late version of Beethoven's 9th that he conducted when the Berlin Wall fell: it lumbered, it galumphed, it didn't move along swiftly the way Beethoven desperately needs to to prevent it from sounding like Brahms on a bad day.
Beethoven has a heavy and profound and even dense and solid aspect, to be sure, but (being a paradoxical genius) there was also a mercurial quality, quicksilver and fire, and he was unpredictable. He did things that shouldn't have worked, and wouldn't have worked for anyone else. He was definitely the father of Mahler, as twisty and bizarre as Mahler can be. Mahler is the bad son, like Beethoven on acid.
Speaking of dying too young, Mahler keeled over dead from heart disease at 50. A sad loss for the music world, though much of his stuff was too impenetrable for me to enjoy. Simply unlistenable. I don't expect Readers Digest compilations of Strauss waltzes, but I must be able to find a point of entry somewhere. When music repeatedly pushes me away, I can no longer stay in its presence.
OK then! Bernstein, Mahler, and oh, who was that other guy. . . I mentioned Alban Berg, and he's a good example of being pushed away. His opera Lulu, which has nothing to do with To Sir with Love, is a lulu all right. It's a mess, a theoretical exercise that does not work in actuality. Not for me, anyway.
But it's interesting how much he resembled Stephen Fry. Almost no one resembles Stephen Fry. His face is like something you'd find on Easter Island, craggy and monumental. Kind of like. . . Beethoven?
For more years than I can count, I carried a little slip of paper around with me with a few lines of what looked like poetry on it. I remember what it said by heart, but cross-checked it on the internet just now. The title is, "I don't know".
I don't know where to start There are scars I could show If I opened my heart But how far, Lord, but how far can I go?
I don't know.
What I need I don't have What I have I don't own What I own I don't want What I want, Lord, I don't know
What I say I don't feel What I feel I don't show What I show isn't real What is real, Lord - I don't know No, no, no - I don't know
Once in a while I risked showing this slip of paper to someone, and they read it in blank puzzlement and handed it back to me. One woman - God, how I regret giving it to her - read it out loud in a sweet, querulous, schoolteacherish voice, the final "I don't know" in a fluffy little voice out of a '50s sitcom.
All right, I don't know. I don't know what this piece is going to be about. The quote is from Leonard Bernstein's Mass, a mammoth undertaking that was a cross between a formal Latin mass and the hippie-ish Hair sensibilities of the day. It had only mixed success, and I have never actually heard it.
I got thinking this morning about Fate. God is kind of beyond me right now, though I will blushingly admit there was a time not so long ago when I thought I understood God, or knew what God meant. Now I wonder. Is there a "something" that shapes our ends, rough-hew them though we may (to paraphrase/massacre Shakespeare)?
How many of us get what we want, what we really think we want? Might it be true that on our deathbed, we will suddenly sit up and cry, "That's it!" - then fall back lifeless? (For a long time I had this odd vision of a monk in that situation exclaiming, "I could have had a woman!", then collapsing backwards forever.) Conventional wisdom says things like, "You can do/be anything you want to, so long as you want it enough and work hard enough." But what if one day your doctor calls you up and says, "I'm sorry. It's MS." (Or ALS, or pancreatic cancer, or schizophrenia, or . . . ) What if your lovingly-raised children, hopelessly embroiled in a miasma of drugs and despair, can't look after their children, and you suddenly find yourself raising them instead of retiring to a carefree life of sun and surf?
I'm talking about the curves life throws at us, some of them fatal. I'm talking about a beautiful young woman shot in the back just as her life is starting, with a "loved one" suspected. If this is love, how do we define hate? Almost all murders take place within families. Most of them are perpetrated by spouses, with husbands predominating. What am I trying to say here?
Another trope that bugs me no end is, "Everything happens for a reason". People say this at memorial services all the time, and it makes me want to scream. If a baby has a convulsion and dies in her mother's arms, it happens for a reason. If a person finally commits suicide after 40 years of endless turmoil and failed dreams, it happens for a reason. If the bottom falls out, people whose lives still have a bottom spout this bit of cowardice and ignorance, then, having done their philosophical duty, go home.
What's reason? It's an explanatory thing, isn't it? Or else something logical, almost cerebral. Isn't this just people's way of rationalizing and taming a reality which can be ferocious and terrifying? Does God keep score, have a little abacus up there (and it's always "up there", not inside us or around us), and dole out lessons as per our spiritual needs?
I can think of a worse thing. These tin-plated philosophers secretly believe that because the tragedy has a reason behind it, it's - well - almost deserved, isn't it? It's all part of a mysterious higher reality or karma or Fate, and whether the person has done something in a previous life or just stepped on a crack in this one, God has just decided, well, that's it - I'm really tired of all this transgression, intended or not. For what else could this "happens for a reason" mean?
I also have trouble with angels. The angel fever has died down somewhat, but for a while the books were so stupid, one of them had instructions for finding your wings. I mean it, trying to find the actual spot on your shoulder blades where the wings sprouted out, or would, I assume after you croaked.
The idea was, if someone was falling off a 70-story building and fell on an awning and didn't die, their "angel" must have been looking after them. It came rushing up underneath the person like Superman catching Lois Lane.
OK, then. . . you know where I'm going with this, don't you? How then do you comfort the agonized family of the guy who fell without an awning? No doubt, many would just fall back on the familiar escape clause, "Everything happens for a reason," then go home.
Did September 11 happen for a reason? If it was a lesson, and most Americans are incensed at the very idea, then what was it? For it provoked the same old human reaction that has kept us in chains for millennia: REVENGE.
I have dreams. Yes, I have them, and I've been told from the very beginning that I have potential, but here is a confession. I never fulfilled that potential, because struggle as I might, I just can't do it. There are obstacles in my path that no one told me about because they were too busy saying I could do/be anything I wanted to be if I only tried hard enough.
I have been put somewhere, and don't get me wrong, it's the best place in the world because it is the bosom of my family. But why can't I do other things besides that, why can't I fulfill my dreams without some sort of blood sacrifice? I see other women doing both. They're not trying to steal it from their families, or from other writers. They just have it, they do it. They sign contracts, they don't sit in the starting gate slowly dissolving from the acid of unfulfilled promise.
This is probably the most personal thing I have ever written here, and I know I take a risk in making myself look like an impotent loser who never got beyond being a housewife. I swear to you, I don't know what I have done or not done to miss the magic that seems to happen to other writers, the sort of magic that creates "buzz" before their book even leaves the starting gate.
I have reviewed hundreds of books, literally hundreds, many of them wildly successful, but when does it get to be my turn? Am I wearing some sort of invisible pink chiffon bridesmaid dress, now tattered from a few decades of use?
It's fashionable to ignore me, in spite of the sometimes-rapturous reviews I received for both my novels. "Well then, dear, just be happy with that," the sweet little Betty Crocker voice tells me. "East, west, Home is best."
Then take it out of me, God, take it, rip out of my chest the desire and uproot it forever. "What I need I don't have/What I have I don't own/What I own I don't want/What I want, Lord, I don't know/No, no, no, I don't know."
Except that I do know. The "reason" for everything, that mysterious force that orders the universe and every person in it, has somehow or other never happened to me.
