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Tuesday, August 30, 2005
MORE HOT AIR
A friend made a wisecrack about my “solipsistic” ways, and he was entitled and justified to do so. However, it gets one to thinking. Specifically, what was I on about in the last entry? Was I proposing that the deity had arranged events so that I could commune with Seamus during an idle viewing of some Hollywood picture? Well, no. It’s true that I felt my Dad’s presence during the events described, as I often have these recent times. But if there is a point to be made, it’s not about mysticism, it’s about tuning into a frequency. There are certain mindsets, over which we have a fair degree of control, that determine how we perceive and interact with our surroundings. For example, I’ve occasionally enjoyed a kind of “blank” mindset, where I view the world around me objectively. I am not “present” in it at these times; it’s all just going and going and I am only seeing, hearing and smelling it. This is refreshing.
One such moment was on New Year’s 2000. At midnight, after all the kisses and well-wishing with Shelley and my folks, I stepped outside the house. It was a clean, cold night and my folks’ neighborhood was oddly quiet, as if everybody was off at a party somewhere else. The ruckus of celebration surrounded me, as if the world was a vast doughnut of “whoop-de-doo” and this block was the hole. There were several discernible layers of sound: the quiet of our block, the distant cacaphony, and local noises from inside the house and nearby. I was able to separate them and tune in and out of each at will. None of it involved me at that moment, and any emotion or thought was supplanted by the odd pleasure of disassociation. It’s a very nice, calm feeling, like the deep quiet after a passing storm has caused a blackout. There is a very rare counterpart to this, which is a sublime state of connection with everything. In a spiel about an Ives concert, I described that kind of rushing sound and fury signifying who-knows-what. I guess some religious types often have these experiences through meditation or peyote or something. More often though, that ol’ devil solipsism intrudes, and then there are dark portents and grim signifiers everywhichway. The usual response to things is “yeah… figures.” Every cocksucking thing is more proof of the conspiracy.
What I described in the Mo Cuisle spiel was the counterpart to this. Ordinary things and events take on a numinous quality. In the incomprehensible web of things real, unreal, lost, invented, known, unknown, a-bornin’, ad infinitum, all these states of perception are correct. If there is a line between sanity and insanity, it is probably smack dab at the point where one is able to draw from them without attempting to influence them, become unduly influenced by them or imposing them upon others. Brian Wilson, making the music of Smile, tapped into the ecstatic state and put it on tape. This is called “artistic genius.” When he then concluded that his piece “Mrs O’Leary’s Cow” caused actual fires, he crossed over the line. (Being benign, he only harmed himself through this hallucinatory blip; had be been a bad guy he might have bypassed making the music and gone out lighting fires) Too commonly, we learn of people hearing the voice of god and perpetrating horrible acts. Even more commonly we learn of people obeying the voice of their own little Ids, calling it religious duty or political necessity or something else, and fucking over someone else’s life.
Everyone lives in a more or less pragmatically determined delusion. Wrong means your delusion led you to fuck up someone else’s shit and Right means it did not. Gradations of Wrong scale down to gradations of Evil and gradations of Right scale up to gradations of Good. More pragmatically determined gradations of Good/Right lead folks to acts of selflessness and heroism, and less “pragmatic” gradations lead to Art. Upwards awaits Genius or Sainthood, depending. Most of us, I hope, are down in the neighborhood of “talent” or “decent person.” Pragmatic Wrong/Evil examples are everywhere, but let’s agree that your Hitler/Grice/Ceausescu extreme is uncommon compared to your everyday prick driver/rock critic/phone solicitor standard. (Pragmatic Evil: taking from others for one’s own gain, as opposed to a pointlessly destructive “wings off flies” motivation). This is all sorta slapdash and semi-serious, but there is a point I’m making, I think.
I left AA many years ago after witnessing a room full of fellow recovering drunks, all going gaga over one woman’s photo of her kitchen, where she claimed to have captured the image of Jesus in a reflection over the sink. I couldn’t believe it: they all agreed this was Christ, rather than a coincidence of light and schmutz creating a vague likeness of Kenny Loggins. Then and now, I reckoned they’d all be better off getting a damn drink and arguing over the Mets than deciding that the King of Kings dropped by to inspect Betty M’s dirty dishes. So what’s the difference between that and me claiming that a bad lightbulb and a Clint Eastwood DVD got together to forward me a candygram from the dearly departed? Well, you figure it out. If that gal thought she saw Jesus, and this affected her in some positive way, hell, yeah. But when she hightailed it to Town Square to share the glad tidings and everyone there said “BEHOLD! IT IS TRULY HE WHO AM WHAT AM!” …well, that’s when the line got crossed. So I’d prefer anyone smiling about my tale and thinking me a crackpot over anyone saying “Whoah! That’s heavy!” But I’d REALLY welcome someone reading it and glimpsing the fact that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophies. As there had fucking better be; our philosophies are pretty weak tea.
Every philosophy I’ve ever “studied” (a kind work for the dilettante browsage that amounts to all I can stand of such dead-end labor) is wrong. Every religion I’ve ever examined is silly. People who embrace them are not necessarily silly, though, because usually people pick and choose. People decide for themselves what part is metaphor, what part is sound and what part is p-tuie. And that’s where my solipsism comes in. To use Judeo-Christianity as an example (because it’s familiar; not because the “eastern faiths” are any less ridiculous): Joan of Arc. Noah. God speaks, they act. Everyone says they’re nuts. But we know, via hindsight via dogma, that God DID speak to them. So they are Saints or Patriarchs or something. Real or invented, these people were fuckin’ nuts, and YOU would number among the nameless scoffers in their tales. Of course you would. Or maybe you and I would not figure in at all… we’d ignore them. We would be like the characters inhabiting unseen parts of films. Who dat?
The crowd hanging out at Martini’s bar the night BEFORE George Bailey stumbles in and begins his ordeal. Ordinary people living in Sweden during the events Cervantes covers in Don Quixote. Another deer in another wood far from Bambi. We have selected the particular story in that book/movie - or it has been selected for us – from an infinite number of possible others, and an infinite number of permutations of that choice of cast and setting. (This all gets very stoned-sophomore, and is not especially original or profound, I know. So eat shit: this is my blog, not fucking Spinoza. The pursuit of some mathematically precise ideology is the exact opposite of my… uh… belief) Joan of Arc and those who love her (as literal patron saint, as poetic metaphor, as sex fetish, as illustration of religious principles, as political figurehead) are choosing their story, its meaning, and all that. The more dogmatic one is, the further from that differentiation and the possibility of “god.” I personally view the “gift of faith” as a corral that comforts because it contains… swaddles. For that, it’s perfectly acceptable. But if your Mohammed or Jesus says “go tell it on the mountain” so others “know” the “truth” I’m not interested in listening (naturally, if you want me to die because I reject it, I want you dead first; zealotry is another whole story). People who are into this are OK, as are those who have no faith or need for any. But when they announce their specific convictions about God or Nothing they bore me as truly as all those insufferable political partisans who yell at one another on cable TV. I don’t believe in God and I don’t believe in Nothing.
That stuff is a roaring ocean I don’t belong in. I have a swimmin’ hole that suits me. I read old TV guides. I listen to airchecks of long-ago radio broadcasts. I live in a past of my own choice, to create a present of my own preference. I may be accused of retreat, avoidance, solipsism, etc. However, I make my music and art as a gesture of connection to the world and faith in the future; it’s how I impose meaning on this life. As badly as I’ve wanted to commune with my dead brother Bob or my dead nephew Pete, I could not contrive any self-persuasion that such contact ever happened. My Dad is another story, and I think that has something to do with the parental bond and the nature of our relationship in life. My Dad is literally with me. In and around me. And for all the “I, me” filling these entries, it is YOU I’m speaking to. These are travel snapshots… yours are just as interesting, I’m sure. I can only talk about the view from here. It changes all the time, and it never does, but with the seismic intensity of life and death around here these recent years, it’s (I hope) understandable that talk turns to this stuff. Such ponderations may or may not have any interest or value, but these matters matter to me. And answers, thank heaven, are few. I tell you all this because I love you in sickness and in health. Of course I'm full of shit. You're not? I only know I’m healthy when I can laugh, and alive when I can sing. So la-de-da-de-har-har-har.
A friend made a wisecrack about my “solipsistic” ways, and he was entitled and justified to do so. However, it gets one to thinking. Specifically, what was I on about in the last entry? Was I proposing that the deity had arranged events so that I could commune with Seamus during an idle viewing of some Hollywood picture? Well, no. It’s true that I felt my Dad’s presence during the events described, as I often have these recent times. But if there is a point to be made, it’s not about mysticism, it’s about tuning into a frequency. There are certain mindsets, over which we have a fair degree of control, that determine how we perceive and interact with our surroundings. For example, I’ve occasionally enjoyed a kind of “blank” mindset, where I view the world around me objectively. I am not “present” in it at these times; it’s all just going and going and I am only seeing, hearing and smelling it. This is refreshing.
One such moment was on New Year’s 2000. At midnight, after all the kisses and well-wishing with Shelley and my folks, I stepped outside the house. It was a clean, cold night and my folks’ neighborhood was oddly quiet, as if everybody was off at a party somewhere else. The ruckus of celebration surrounded me, as if the world was a vast doughnut of “whoop-de-doo” and this block was the hole. There were several discernible layers of sound: the quiet of our block, the distant cacaphony, and local noises from inside the house and nearby. I was able to separate them and tune in and out of each at will. None of it involved me at that moment, and any emotion or thought was supplanted by the odd pleasure of disassociation. It’s a very nice, calm feeling, like the deep quiet after a passing storm has caused a blackout. There is a very rare counterpart to this, which is a sublime state of connection with everything. In a spiel about an Ives concert, I described that kind of rushing sound and fury signifying who-knows-what. I guess some religious types often have these experiences through meditation or peyote or something. More often though, that ol’ devil solipsism intrudes, and then there are dark portents and grim signifiers everywhichway. The usual response to things is “yeah… figures.” Every cocksucking thing is more proof of the conspiracy.
What I described in the Mo Cuisle spiel was the counterpart to this. Ordinary things and events take on a numinous quality. In the incomprehensible web of things real, unreal, lost, invented, known, unknown, a-bornin’, ad infinitum, all these states of perception are correct. If there is a line between sanity and insanity, it is probably smack dab at the point where one is able to draw from them without attempting to influence them, become unduly influenced by them or imposing them upon others. Brian Wilson, making the music of Smile, tapped into the ecstatic state and put it on tape. This is called “artistic genius.” When he then concluded that his piece “Mrs O’Leary’s Cow” caused actual fires, he crossed over the line. (Being benign, he only harmed himself through this hallucinatory blip; had be been a bad guy he might have bypassed making the music and gone out lighting fires) Too commonly, we learn of people hearing the voice of god and perpetrating horrible acts. Even more commonly we learn of people obeying the voice of their own little Ids, calling it religious duty or political necessity or something else, and fucking over someone else’s life.
Everyone lives in a more or less pragmatically determined delusion. Wrong means your delusion led you to fuck up someone else’s shit and Right means it did not. Gradations of Wrong scale down to gradations of Evil and gradations of Right scale up to gradations of Good. More pragmatically determined gradations of Good/Right lead folks to acts of selflessness and heroism, and less “pragmatic” gradations lead to Art. Upwards awaits Genius or Sainthood, depending. Most of us, I hope, are down in the neighborhood of “talent” or “decent person.” Pragmatic Wrong/Evil examples are everywhere, but let’s agree that your Hitler/Grice/Ceausescu extreme is uncommon compared to your everyday prick driver/rock critic/phone solicitor standard. (Pragmatic Evil: taking from others for one’s own gain, as opposed to a pointlessly destructive “wings off flies” motivation). This is all sorta slapdash and semi-serious, but there is a point I’m making, I think.
I left AA many years ago after witnessing a room full of fellow recovering drunks, all going gaga over one woman’s photo of her kitchen, where she claimed to have captured the image of Jesus in a reflection over the sink. I couldn’t believe it: they all agreed this was Christ, rather than a coincidence of light and schmutz creating a vague likeness of Kenny Loggins. Then and now, I reckoned they’d all be better off getting a damn drink and arguing over the Mets than deciding that the King of Kings dropped by to inspect Betty M’s dirty dishes. So what’s the difference between that and me claiming that a bad lightbulb and a Clint Eastwood DVD got together to forward me a candygram from the dearly departed? Well, you figure it out. If that gal thought she saw Jesus, and this affected her in some positive way, hell, yeah. But when she hightailed it to Town Square to share the glad tidings and everyone there said “BEHOLD! IT IS TRULY HE WHO AM WHAT AM!” …well, that’s when the line got crossed. So I’d prefer anyone smiling about my tale and thinking me a crackpot over anyone saying “Whoah! That’s heavy!” But I’d REALLY welcome someone reading it and glimpsing the fact that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophies. As there had fucking better be; our philosophies are pretty weak tea.
Every philosophy I’ve ever “studied” (a kind work for the dilettante browsage that amounts to all I can stand of such dead-end labor) is wrong. Every religion I’ve ever examined is silly. People who embrace them are not necessarily silly, though, because usually people pick and choose. People decide for themselves what part is metaphor, what part is sound and what part is p-tuie. And that’s where my solipsism comes in. To use Judeo-Christianity as an example (because it’s familiar; not because the “eastern faiths” are any less ridiculous): Joan of Arc. Noah. God speaks, they act. Everyone says they’re nuts. But we know, via hindsight via dogma, that God DID speak to them. So they are Saints or Patriarchs or something. Real or invented, these people were fuckin’ nuts, and YOU would number among the nameless scoffers in their tales. Of course you would. Or maybe you and I would not figure in at all… we’d ignore them. We would be like the characters inhabiting unseen parts of films. Who dat?
The crowd hanging out at Martini’s bar the night BEFORE George Bailey stumbles in and begins his ordeal. Ordinary people living in Sweden during the events Cervantes covers in Don Quixote. Another deer in another wood far from Bambi. We have selected the particular story in that book/movie - or it has been selected for us – from an infinite number of possible others, and an infinite number of permutations of that choice of cast and setting. (This all gets very stoned-sophomore, and is not especially original or profound, I know. So eat shit: this is my blog, not fucking Spinoza. The pursuit of some mathematically precise ideology is the exact opposite of my… uh… belief) Joan of Arc and those who love her (as literal patron saint, as poetic metaphor, as sex fetish, as illustration of religious principles, as political figurehead) are choosing their story, its meaning, and all that. The more dogmatic one is, the further from that differentiation and the possibility of “god.” I personally view the “gift of faith” as a corral that comforts because it contains… swaddles. For that, it’s perfectly acceptable. But if your Mohammed or Jesus says “go tell it on the mountain” so others “know” the “truth” I’m not interested in listening (naturally, if you want me to die because I reject it, I want you dead first; zealotry is another whole story). People who are into this are OK, as are those who have no faith or need for any. But when they announce their specific convictions about God or Nothing they bore me as truly as all those insufferable political partisans who yell at one another on cable TV. I don’t believe in God and I don’t believe in Nothing.
That stuff is a roaring ocean I don’t belong in. I have a swimmin’ hole that suits me. I read old TV guides. I listen to airchecks of long-ago radio broadcasts. I live in a past of my own choice, to create a present of my own preference. I may be accused of retreat, avoidance, solipsism, etc. However, I make my music and art as a gesture of connection to the world and faith in the future; it’s how I impose meaning on this life. As badly as I’ve wanted to commune with my dead brother Bob or my dead nephew Pete, I could not contrive any self-persuasion that such contact ever happened. My Dad is another story, and I think that has something to do with the parental bond and the nature of our relationship in life. My Dad is literally with me. In and around me. And for all the “I, me” filling these entries, it is YOU I’m speaking to. These are travel snapshots… yours are just as interesting, I’m sure. I can only talk about the view from here. It changes all the time, and it never does, but with the seismic intensity of life and death around here these recent years, it’s (I hope) understandable that talk turns to this stuff. Such ponderations may or may not have any interest or value, but these matters matter to me. And answers, thank heaven, are few. I tell you all this because I love you in sickness and in health. Of course I'm full of shit. You're not? I only know I’m healthy when I can laugh, and alive when I can sing. So la-de-da-de-har-har-har.
Thursday, August 18, 2005
“Macushla, Macushla your sweet voice is calling
calling me softly again and again
Macushla Macushla I hear its dear pleading
my blue eyed Macushla I hear it in vain”
That’s an old lyric, not one of mine.
A lyric you may never hear, one of many in progress from a song I’ve been working on:
Floated off alone along the slow green hours
Searching through a song to find my fathers’ face
Idle while I traced a fingertip
Along a long ellipse of tiny stitches
holding his stars in place
This “eh” lyric concerns frequent nights in the recent, distant past when I’d sip glasses of absinthe alone at the junction of solitude and isolation. On the wall of that room where I’d partake, the flag from my Father’s coffin holds pride of place. It is folded, as per military custom, into a tidy triangle. The dark blue field and the stars… a wedge of blank infinity. It suggests to me the dignity of such formal traditions – so deeply appreciated by Dad - as well as an implication of continuity. I’d hold it and weep, listening to “Farewell! But Whenever You Welcome The Hour” by Thomas Moore. The song reduces me to sobs when I’m sober; on absinthe it would physically possess me, wrenching my soul with a power so absolute that there was a kind of convulsive satisfaction to it. This is not hyperbole, though it might sound nonsensical to anyone who’s never come up through black depths of sorrow toward the light of a song: light, ocean, velocity, the bends. And you want it all, it’s intolerable, and you want it never to end. The dull ache of ordinary grief, the banality of daily routine, the numbness resulting from tamping down a life’s yearnings and losses all replaced by an ecstasy of sorrow. It is very, very close to the holy abandon of hysterical laughter.
This is why I don’t dismiss the sentimental, but I abhor every version and variation of “cool.” And I don’t give a flying fuck if it all makes me sound insane or dorky.
“Farewell, but whenever you welcome the hour
That awakens the night-song of mirth in your bower,
Then think of the friend who once welcom'd it too,
And forgot his own griefs to be happy with you.”
That was my Dad.
“Let Fate do her worst, there are relics of joy,
Bright dreams of the past, which she cannot destroy,
Which come in the night-time of sorrow and care,
And bring back the features that joy used to wear.
Long, long be my heart with such memories fill'd,
Like the vase in which roses have once been distill'd.
You may break, you may shatter the vase if you will,
But the scent of the roses will hang 'round it still.”
The scent of the roses briefly filled the air those nights, but this little ceremony was also an act of selfish brinksmanship; it DID make me insane. And I can’t be insane. I have two tiny children. I see Dad in them, and they show me the part of Dad that’s in me. They deserve better than Syd Barrett for a Pappy. Their Mom deserves a healthy, full partner. In attempting to get past the losses I’ve so long been mired in (wallowing in the tar pit is SO Pleistocene Epoch… I mean, really…) and become for them something like the Dad I was so blessed to have, I’ve corked the bottle and petitioned Seamus to help me.
So I’m watching this mediocre movie “Million Dollar Baby” with Mom and Brother Brian one night a while ago, at the beginning of a period of genuine healing, which continues. I used to think that “healing” was a joke doctors told each other over piles of money, but I believe it more now. A few days prior, after many entreaties to Dad, I found, happenstance, an old picture of us at Greenwood Lake, a place the folks took me for a lovely little getaway when I was a kid. There we were on a diving board, me looking just like my boy Miles will look in a few years, Dad smiling with his arm around me then, waving to ME. Now.
Hi, Dad. I’m good… me and Shelley and the babies are good.
So I am feeling Dad’s presence all over the place lately, and not in that depths-of-sorrow way the absinthe and Moore engendered, but in a “the sun is shining and the fence is fixed” way. There's a story for that reference, but not tonight. But dig...
Miles used to stare at the space above Mom’s chair, which was where Dad would sit and watch the tube in his final years here with us. Miles’d act happy and excited, staring at that same spot in mid-air above Mom’s head. Hi, Grandpa. He stopped doing it some months back, when he shed much of his otherworldly baby aloofness and became the laughing, kissing, chattering little boy he is. But one day recently he looked back up there and pointed. “Poppop!” Fucking amazing. The kid was one month old when the old man died (and there is an incredible moment, starring Lily, from that awful day, but that's a whole 'nother glory trance for a whole 'nother time). I don’t care how it sounds… I reject hoodoo of all sorts and aim to explain nothing, nor look for explanations, but there are things you know, and I knew what Miles was seeing.
So anyway, we’re watching “Million Dollar Baby,” a film about which I knew nothing except that Morgan Freeman is always worth watching. The pic was a well-made, pat tale of no consequence, but I thought to myself at one point “Dad would like this. Well, Dad probably does like it.” It concerns boxing, and Dad did some of that – Golden Gloves – and used to take me to some local bouts when I was the squirt in that photo. Just as I thought the thought, Clint Eastwood’s character whispers to the female boxer he’s managing: “Mo Cuisle.” Whoah! I said out loud: “Dad!” My Mom said “What do you mean?” in an eerie, aware voice. This heartbroken woman felt it too, but held her thought, unsure that I had that same ZOT. The light in the middle room suddenly went out. The light Dad would always get up out of bed to turn off in the middle of the night. This wasn’t a “chills” moment, this was all-pervasive warmth. I fucking knew and I still know. Mo Cuisle! The song (title anglicized… which means you phonetically announce the pronunciation of an Irish Gaelic word to facilitate contemporary understanding, since the goddamn brits pretty much did in the language except for the efforts of cultural preservationists like my Dad… “Macushla”) that John MacCormack recorded when Dad was a little boy, a record I’d heard all my life, and love for the tear it brought to Dad’s eye:
Macushla, Macushla your white arms are reaching
I feel them enfolding, caressing me still
fling them out from the darkness my lost love Macushla
let them find me, and bind me again if they will
Macushla, Macushla your red lips are saying
that death is a dream and love is for aye
then awaken Macushla, awake from your dreaming
my blue eyed Macushla awaken to stay.
Dad sang in a poorboy choir that accompanied MacCormack on stage, years and years ago (“Fado, fado” as Dad used to say)when he was a Dublin kid who looked like me in that photo where I looked like little blue-eyed Miles is gonna look. His voice remained strong and beautiful, and he sang Macushla all through his life. He sang it that night as the light went out and Clint Eastwood became the vehicle for Dad telling us all he was here, and I heard you Dad. This is how he says he heard me and all my pleading. When we wish to tell those we love that we hear them, we let them hear us. We move through an impossibly complex universe, and we adopt a cheap cynicism to cover the ignorance and hurt that often defines our experience of the “tangible” portion thereof. Some of us, Griced beyond all redemption, hear only the dull buzz of our own idiot obsessions and desires, and make only the screech of feedback as our call. Some of us hear something of the infinite, and that’s a lucky thing worth bleeding to keep hold of.
Let us view the duality in terms of my own religion:
Some of us glimpse the sublime, and know it when we do. This is the Brian Wilson beatification.
Some fall to the side of all things small, cheap and ugly… arrogance and stupidity… allowing the Mike Love leviathan to overtake all.
Are we destiny-bound to go either way? Do the little beGriced children ever see Grandpa hovering in mid-air or only those enMurphyed chosen?
Must little Wilsons suffer and strive while little Loves reap and laugh? Grim questions with no answers, but anyhoo, which life is worth living? Your answer will reveal whether your soul’s song spirals heavenward in sweet clear falsetto, or plods farting through the swamp, like that smirking lord of darkness who, for all his meditation, couldn’t transcend his odiosity for even the one second stop-time that kept “The Little Girl I once Knew” off the charts.
What the fuck is Mike "Sport" Murphy talking about?
Ah, whatever. Shelley and I took Lily and Miles to a play center today, and at some point “I Get Around” sounded forth from a hitherto silent jukebox. Still my favorite record of all time, hands-down. Still futuristic, fresh, thrilling and PERFECT. So Brian is on my mind. So is Van Dyke Parks, and SMILE and SONG CYCLE and all of it again.
Music, boyoboy.
My portal to Great All-Unknown, and my direct line to everything that means something more than the loud fuck-it-all that otherwise surrounds. The type-A void, pounding like the wretched, hateful, stupid hip hop that blasts from the automobiles of a billion little American twats with goatees and baseball hats. Today, while Shelley and I... in love... watched our little children gamboling, that Brian Wilson song thrilled me the same way it did when my Mom and Dad... in love... gamboled with me at Greenwood Lake. Fado, fado.
I felt obliged to mention these high things and low things, if only in a confusing little sketch like this entry. Absinthe and agony, for all the trouble they caused, opened a door. Now the absinthe’s gone, the doorway may be entered. I’m in. I see Dad smiling in mid-air, above that chair where he read the French reviews of Uncle, beaming with pride as I stood amazed, never even knowing the old man could read French, let alone ever suspecting my work would give him cause for pride. Well, Dad, thanks. I’m making music again. Mo Cuisle! My heart!
We will attempt to reflect some sense of all the above and more at Knitting Factory. If you’re there, you can tell me afterwards if we succeeded.
calling me softly again and again
Macushla Macushla I hear its dear pleading
my blue eyed Macushla I hear it in vain”
That’s an old lyric, not one of mine.
A lyric you may never hear, one of many in progress from a song I’ve been working on:
Floated off alone along the slow green hours
Searching through a song to find my fathers’ face
Idle while I traced a fingertip
Along a long ellipse of tiny stitches
holding his stars in place
This “eh” lyric concerns frequent nights in the recent, distant past when I’d sip glasses of absinthe alone at the junction of solitude and isolation. On the wall of that room where I’d partake, the flag from my Father’s coffin holds pride of place. It is folded, as per military custom, into a tidy triangle. The dark blue field and the stars… a wedge of blank infinity. It suggests to me the dignity of such formal traditions – so deeply appreciated by Dad - as well as an implication of continuity. I’d hold it and weep, listening to “Farewell! But Whenever You Welcome The Hour” by Thomas Moore. The song reduces me to sobs when I’m sober; on absinthe it would physically possess me, wrenching my soul with a power so absolute that there was a kind of convulsive satisfaction to it. This is not hyperbole, though it might sound nonsensical to anyone who’s never come up through black depths of sorrow toward the light of a song: light, ocean, velocity, the bends. And you want it all, it’s intolerable, and you want it never to end. The dull ache of ordinary grief, the banality of daily routine, the numbness resulting from tamping down a life’s yearnings and losses all replaced by an ecstasy of sorrow. It is very, very close to the holy abandon of hysterical laughter.
This is why I don’t dismiss the sentimental, but I abhor every version and variation of “cool.” And I don’t give a flying fuck if it all makes me sound insane or dorky.
“Farewell, but whenever you welcome the hour
That awakens the night-song of mirth in your bower,
Then think of the friend who once welcom'd it too,
And forgot his own griefs to be happy with you.”
That was my Dad.
“Let Fate do her worst, there are relics of joy,
Bright dreams of the past, which she cannot destroy,
Which come in the night-time of sorrow and care,
And bring back the features that joy used to wear.
Long, long be my heart with such memories fill'd,
Like the vase in which roses have once been distill'd.
You may break, you may shatter the vase if you will,
But the scent of the roses will hang 'round it still.”
The scent of the roses briefly filled the air those nights, but this little ceremony was also an act of selfish brinksmanship; it DID make me insane. And I can’t be insane. I have two tiny children. I see Dad in them, and they show me the part of Dad that’s in me. They deserve better than Syd Barrett for a Pappy. Their Mom deserves a healthy, full partner. In attempting to get past the losses I’ve so long been mired in (wallowing in the tar pit is SO Pleistocene Epoch… I mean, really…) and become for them something like the Dad I was so blessed to have, I’ve corked the bottle and petitioned Seamus to help me.
So I’m watching this mediocre movie “Million Dollar Baby” with Mom and Brother Brian one night a while ago, at the beginning of a period of genuine healing, which continues. I used to think that “healing” was a joke doctors told each other over piles of money, but I believe it more now. A few days prior, after many entreaties to Dad, I found, happenstance, an old picture of us at Greenwood Lake, a place the folks took me for a lovely little getaway when I was a kid. There we were on a diving board, me looking just like my boy Miles will look in a few years, Dad smiling with his arm around me then, waving to ME. Now.
Hi, Dad. I’m good… me and Shelley and the babies are good.
So I am feeling Dad’s presence all over the place lately, and not in that depths-of-sorrow way the absinthe and Moore engendered, but in a “the sun is shining and the fence is fixed” way. There's a story for that reference, but not tonight. But dig...
Miles used to stare at the space above Mom’s chair, which was where Dad would sit and watch the tube in his final years here with us. Miles’d act happy and excited, staring at that same spot in mid-air above Mom’s head. Hi, Grandpa. He stopped doing it some months back, when he shed much of his otherworldly baby aloofness and became the laughing, kissing, chattering little boy he is. But one day recently he looked back up there and pointed. “Poppop!” Fucking amazing. The kid was one month old when the old man died (and there is an incredible moment, starring Lily, from that awful day, but that's a whole 'nother glory trance for a whole 'nother time). I don’t care how it sounds… I reject hoodoo of all sorts and aim to explain nothing, nor look for explanations, but there are things you know, and I knew what Miles was seeing.
So anyway, we’re watching “Million Dollar Baby,” a film about which I knew nothing except that Morgan Freeman is always worth watching. The pic was a well-made, pat tale of no consequence, but I thought to myself at one point “Dad would like this. Well, Dad probably does like it.” It concerns boxing, and Dad did some of that – Golden Gloves – and used to take me to some local bouts when I was the squirt in that photo. Just as I thought the thought, Clint Eastwood’s character whispers to the female boxer he’s managing: “Mo Cuisle.” Whoah! I said out loud: “Dad!” My Mom said “What do you mean?” in an eerie, aware voice. This heartbroken woman felt it too, but held her thought, unsure that I had that same ZOT. The light in the middle room suddenly went out. The light Dad would always get up out of bed to turn off in the middle of the night. This wasn’t a “chills” moment, this was all-pervasive warmth. I fucking knew and I still know. Mo Cuisle! The song (title anglicized… which means you phonetically announce the pronunciation of an Irish Gaelic word to facilitate contemporary understanding, since the goddamn brits pretty much did in the language except for the efforts of cultural preservationists like my Dad… “Macushla”) that John MacCormack recorded when Dad was a little boy, a record I’d heard all my life, and love for the tear it brought to Dad’s eye:
Macushla, Macushla your white arms are reaching
I feel them enfolding, caressing me still
fling them out from the darkness my lost love Macushla
let them find me, and bind me again if they will
Macushla, Macushla your red lips are saying
that death is a dream and love is for aye
then awaken Macushla, awake from your dreaming
my blue eyed Macushla awaken to stay.
Dad sang in a poorboy choir that accompanied MacCormack on stage, years and years ago (“Fado, fado” as Dad used to say)when he was a Dublin kid who looked like me in that photo where I looked like little blue-eyed Miles is gonna look. His voice remained strong and beautiful, and he sang Macushla all through his life. He sang it that night as the light went out and Clint Eastwood became the vehicle for Dad telling us all he was here, and I heard you Dad. This is how he says he heard me and all my pleading. When we wish to tell those we love that we hear them, we let them hear us. We move through an impossibly complex universe, and we adopt a cheap cynicism to cover the ignorance and hurt that often defines our experience of the “tangible” portion thereof. Some of us, Griced beyond all redemption, hear only the dull buzz of our own idiot obsessions and desires, and make only the screech of feedback as our call. Some of us hear something of the infinite, and that’s a lucky thing worth bleeding to keep hold of.
Let us view the duality in terms of my own religion:
Some of us glimpse the sublime, and know it when we do. This is the Brian Wilson beatification.
Some fall to the side of all things small, cheap and ugly… arrogance and stupidity… allowing the Mike Love leviathan to overtake all.
Are we destiny-bound to go either way? Do the little beGriced children ever see Grandpa hovering in mid-air or only those enMurphyed chosen?
Must little Wilsons suffer and strive while little Loves reap and laugh? Grim questions with no answers, but anyhoo, which life is worth living? Your answer will reveal whether your soul’s song spirals heavenward in sweet clear falsetto, or plods farting through the swamp, like that smirking lord of darkness who, for all his meditation, couldn’t transcend his odiosity for even the one second stop-time that kept “The Little Girl I once Knew” off the charts.
What the fuck is Mike "Sport" Murphy talking about?
Ah, whatever. Shelley and I took Lily and Miles to a play center today, and at some point “I Get Around” sounded forth from a hitherto silent jukebox. Still my favorite record of all time, hands-down. Still futuristic, fresh, thrilling and PERFECT. So Brian is on my mind. So is Van Dyke Parks, and SMILE and SONG CYCLE and all of it again.
Music, boyoboy.
My portal to Great All-Unknown, and my direct line to everything that means something more than the loud fuck-it-all that otherwise surrounds. The type-A void, pounding like the wretched, hateful, stupid hip hop that blasts from the automobiles of a billion little American twats with goatees and baseball hats. Today, while Shelley and I... in love... watched our little children gamboling, that Brian Wilson song thrilled me the same way it did when my Mom and Dad... in love... gamboled with me at Greenwood Lake. Fado, fado.
I felt obliged to mention these high things and low things, if only in a confusing little sketch like this entry. Absinthe and agony, for all the trouble they caused, opened a door. Now the absinthe’s gone, the doorway may be entered. I’m in. I see Dad smiling in mid-air, above that chair where he read the French reviews of Uncle, beaming with pride as I stood amazed, never even knowing the old man could read French, let alone ever suspecting my work would give him cause for pride. Well, Dad, thanks. I’m making music again. Mo Cuisle! My heart!
We will attempt to reflect some sense of all the above and more at Knitting Factory. If you’re there, you can tell me afterwards if we succeeded.
Monday, August 15, 2005
KNITTING FACTORY SHOW TICKET UPDATE
Our man in the Great Midwest, Michael Castelle, kindly informs me that tix can be gotten right now, right here.
There are several very popular KRS acts on the bill, so this WILL sell out. Knitting Factory is not allowing "guest lists," so schnorrers take heed!
Get your tix now and come see us. Make me feel all tingly inside.
Buy tix for a poor kid who's never seen been to a real farm.
Do it for the soldiers.
Do it in the name of all that's right and decent.
Think different.
Just do it.
I'm lovin' it.
Don't tread on me.
In space, no one can hear you scream.
Chock Full O' Nuts is the heavenly coffee; better coffee a millionaire's money can't buy.
Ol' Man River... he just keeps rollin' along.
Our man in the Great Midwest, Michael Castelle, kindly informs me that tix can be gotten right now, right here.
There are several very popular KRS acts on the bill, so this WILL sell out. Knitting Factory is not allowing "guest lists," so schnorrers take heed!
Get your tix now and come see us. Make me feel all tingly inside.
Buy tix for a poor kid who's never seen been to a real farm.
Do it for the soldiers.
Do it in the name of all that's right and decent.
Think different.
Just do it.
I'm lovin' it.
Don't tread on me.
In space, no one can hear you scream.
Chock Full O' Nuts is the heavenly coffee; better coffee a millionaire's money can't buy.
Ol' Man River... he just keeps rollin' along.
Saturday, August 13, 2005
Further poop on my show:
KNITTING FACTORY
74 LEONARD ST. NYC
FRIDAY SEPT 16
11 PM
It is Kill Rock Stars Night for the CMJ marathon, and consequently most of the audience will be collegiate ciphers / lower-echelon- music-biz dicks with badges. I could use some familiar faces in the house. It will be an all-new band with an all-new sound. We will play in the “Old Office” space.
NOTE:
Last time I did this event, the venue sold out (rather, was overwhelmed by badge-toting schnorrers) and several friends were unable to enter. I advise getting tix beforehand. Check the club's site for particulars:
http://www.knitmedia.com/kfny/index.cfm
KNITTING FACTORY
74 LEONARD ST. NYC
FRIDAY SEPT 16
11 PM
It is Kill Rock Stars Night for the CMJ marathon, and consequently most of the audience will be collegiate ciphers / lower-echelon- music-biz dicks with badges. I could use some familiar faces in the house. It will be an all-new band with an all-new sound. We will play in the “Old Office” space.
NOTE:
Last time I did this event, the venue sold out (rather, was overwhelmed by badge-toting schnorrers) and several friends were unable to enter. I advise getting tix beforehand. Check the club's site for particulars:
http://www.knitmedia.com/kfny/index.cfm
Tuesday, August 09, 2005
Sunday, August 07, 2005
Saturday, August 06, 2005
SPORT MURPHY-RELATED INTERNET SHIT ROUNDUP!
ITEM: It's said that "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned," and here's one li'l hellion who also "hath" no shortage of sound musical taste! On a "revenge site" concerning her allegedly errant hubby, this gal saw fit to post my tune "You Lousy Stinking Scumbag!" Nope, I don't know her, but she's MY KIND O' GREEN-EYED MONSTER! You go, girl!
ITEM: Now, far be it from me to say the folks at ROLLING STONE DOT COM are a bunch of complete douchesacks in the glorious tradition of Jann "thar she blows" Wenner itself, but WHOAH NELLY was I surprised to discover that I had made 2 ALBUMS I've never heard of! Boy am I looking forward to checkin' out my recording of "Tap That!" Hope Warner's sends the royalty checks here by mistake too! Whoo-ee!
ITEM: After all my snide remarks about CMJ some entries back, IMAGINE MY SURPRISE to indeed be playing the big big event after all! And I'm even on the official "Scheduled to appear" list! HOT DAWG! Look under "S" for "Sport!" I was hoping JETHRO TULL would play a reunion date, but I don't see him under "T" !!!
ITEM: Somehow it turns out that an increasing number of HOT YOUNG CHICKS... complete strangers... from far and near... with vaginas... are mentioning my name on their blogs and MYSPACE pages! No, I won't give URLS, since that would be sort of rude and then they might find out and not like my music anymore! Sort of like if they ever saw what I fucking LOOK LIKE in person! And how INCREDIBLY FUCKING OLD I am! YEEEEEE-fucking-HAAWWWW!
Everything's coming up SPORT MURPHY, that's for sure! So make sure you come to KNITTING FACTORY on September 16 and SEE FOR YOURSELF!
ITEM: It's said that "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned," and here's one li'l hellion who also "hath" no shortage of sound musical taste! On a "revenge site" concerning her allegedly errant hubby, this gal saw fit to post my tune "You Lousy Stinking Scumbag!" Nope, I don't know her, but she's MY KIND O' GREEN-EYED MONSTER! You go, girl!
ITEM: Now, far be it from me to say the folks at ROLLING STONE DOT COM are a bunch of complete douchesacks in the glorious tradition of Jann "thar she blows" Wenner itself, but WHOAH NELLY was I surprised to discover that I had made 2 ALBUMS I've never heard of! Boy am I looking forward to checkin' out my recording of "Tap That!" Hope Warner's sends the royalty checks here by mistake too! Whoo-ee!
ITEM: After all my snide remarks about CMJ some entries back, IMAGINE MY SURPRISE to indeed be playing the big big event after all! And I'm even on the official "Scheduled to appear" list! HOT DAWG! Look under "S" for "Sport!" I was hoping JETHRO TULL would play a reunion date, but I don't see him under "T" !!!
ITEM: Somehow it turns out that an increasing number of HOT YOUNG CHICKS... complete strangers... from far and near... with vaginas... are mentioning my name on their blogs and MYSPACE pages! No, I won't give URLS, since that would be sort of rude and then they might find out and not like my music anymore! Sort of like if they ever saw what I fucking LOOK LIKE in person! And how INCREDIBLY FUCKING OLD I am! YEEEEEE-fucking-HAAWWWW!
Everything's coming up SPORT MURPHY, that's for sure! So make sure you come to KNITTING FACTORY on September 16 and SEE FOR YOURSELF!
Friday, August 05, 2005
