The Unicorn

I was thinking about it today.  And I notice there’s a new Rhino two-disc collection coming out:

Forever Changes

I first wrote about this album eight years ago and I wanted to do so again today. Love review… It’s remarkable, and deserves to be heard by a new generation of listeners. It was one of the first albums that truly made the Los Angeles region great as a place for rock - along with the Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds” and the first Mamas and the Papas album (and there was, of course, KHJ’s status as one of the premier radio stations in the country, with DJ’s like The Real Don Steele and Robert W. Morgan) -and I had the privilege of being present when the band played its last concert at San Francisco’s Cafe Du Nord two years ago. They performed the album in its entirety, and they did it well. When we left at 4 a.m., we felt satiated and that we’d had the full Love experience. And we watched Johnny Echols, the guitarist, and Arthur Lee, who died a bit later, be driven off in somewhat rundown limousines.

This is an essential album. And I can’t recommend it enough.

Kenneth Rexroth lived in Northampton with his future wife for some time.  This poem, from “The Phoenix and the Unicorn,” was a result of that experience.

“. . . about the cool water
the wind sounds through sprays
of apple, and from the quivering leaves
slumber pours down . . .”

We lie here in the bee filled, ruinous
Orchard of a decayed New England farm,
Summer in our hair, and the smell
Of summer in our twined bodies,
Summer in our mouths, and summer
In the luminous, fragmentary words
Of this dead Greek woman.
Stop reading. Lean back. Give me your mouth.
Your grace is as beautiful as sleep.
You move against me like a wave
That moves in sleep.
Your body spreads across my brain
Like a bird filled summer;
Not like a body, not like a separate thing,
But like a nimbus that hovers
Over every other thing in all the world.
Lean back. You are beautiful,
As beautiful as the folding
Of your hands in sleep.

We have grown old in the afternoon.
Here in our orchard we are as old
As she is now, wherever dissipate
In that distant sea her gleaming dust
Flashes in the wave crest
Or stains the murex shell.
All about us the old farm subsides
Into the honey bearing chaos of high summer.
In those far islands the temples
Have fallen away, and the marble
Is the color of wild honey.
There is nothing left of the gardens
That were once about them, of the fat
Turf marked with cloven hooves.
Only the sea grass struggles
Over the crumbled stone,
Over the splintered steps,
Only the blue and yellow
Of the sea, and the cliffs
Red in the distance across the bay.
Lean back.
Her memory has passed to our lips now.
Our kisses fall through summer’s chaos
In our own breasts and thighs.

Gold colossal domes of cumulus cloud
Lift over the undulant, sibilant forest.
The air presses against the earth.
Thunder breaks over the mountains.
Far off, over the Adirondacks,
Lightning quivers, almost invisible
In the bright sky, violet against
The grey, deep shadows of the bellied clouds.
The sweet virile hair of thunder storms
Brushes over the swelling horizon.
Take off your shoes and stockings.
I will kiss your sweet legs and feet
As they lie half buried in the tangle
Of rank scented midsummer flowers.
Take off your clothes. I will press
Your summer honeyed flesh into the hot
Soil, into the crushed, acrid herbage
Of midsummer. Let your body sink
Like honey through the hot
Granular fingers of summer.

Rest. Wait. We have enough for a while.
Kiss me with your mouth
Wet and ragged, your mouth that tastes
Of my own flesh. Read to me again
The twisting music of that language
That is of all others, itself a work of art.
Read again those isolate, poignant words
Saved by ancient grammarians
To illustrate the conjugations
And declensions of the more ancient dead.
Lean back in the curve of my body,
Press your bruised shoulders against
The damp hair of my body.
Kiss me again. Think, sweet linguist,
In this world the ablative is impossible.
No other one will help us here.
We must help ourselves to each other.
The wind walks slowly away from the storm;
Veers on the wooded crests; sounds
In the valleys. Here we are isolate,
One with the other; and beyond
This orchard lies isolation,
The isolation of all the world.
Never let anything intrude
On the isolation of this day,
These words, isolate on dead tongues,
This orchard, hidden from fact and history,
These shadows, blended in the summer light,
Together isolate beyond the world’s reciprocity.

Do not talk any more. Do not speak.
Do not break silence until
We are weary of each other.
Let our fingers run like steel
Carving the contours of our bodies’ gold.
Do not speak. My face sinks
In the clotted summer of your hair.
The sound of the bees stops.
Stillness falls like a cloud.
Be still. Let your body fall away
Into the awe filled silence
Of the fulfilled summer —
Back, back, infinitely away —
Our lips weak, faint with stillness.

See. The sun has fallen away.
Now there are amber
Long lights on the shattered
Boles of the ancient apple trees.
Our bodies move to each other
As bodies move in sleep;
At once filled and exhausted,
As the summer moves to autumn,
As we, with Sappho, move towards death.
My eyelids sink toward sleep in the hot
Autumn of your uncoiled hair.
Your body moves in my arms
On the verge of sleep;
And it is as though I held
In my arms the bird filled
Evening sky of summer.”

The first four lines are Rexroth’s translation of a famous Sappho fragment.  The rest is wholly his own.

Lovely, and it speaks of everything we love about this region, I think.  And it’s one of the most romantic poems that I’ve ever read.

Darren

I was speaking with a Physical Plant employee here the other night, and he told me that in 21 years of employment he’d only made it up to $14 an hour.  He’s had a pay increase of exactly $2 in five years.  The guy comes in at 4 in the morning, works his heart out sweeping floors and cleaning bathrooms, and we can’t do any better for him than that?

I remember that when the Columbia strike took place some years ago one of the major issues was compensation for staff.   Are we so indifferent to those who clean up our parties, sweep up our bathrooms, and pump our toilets that we can’t give them better rates of pay?  At most other campuses, this would lead to a general strike, and at least unionization would occur.

The same employee told me that he helped out a professor at one point who needed to move from one location to another.  After that, he happened across her in the Freshman Quad, and she refused to look him in the eye.  She completely ignored him.  I’m not taking his story as an unbiased account of animus, but I do ask whether we treat those who clean up our messes and open up our doors in the morning differently than we do others on this campus.  And is this part of the reason, as well, that Amherst students are regarded as elitist assholes when you go into town and venture into the Legion or the Spoke and try to chat with someone?

First:  College employees need a union.  They need negotiations on a collective basis.  No more of this idiocy in which they simply get hired and accept whatever conditions the College wishes to impose.  This is not pre-NLRB 1947, and we are not in the sweatshop era any longer.

Second:  They need respect.  The next time you run into a janitor or a Valentine worker, say hi at least.  I worked in Valentine doing dishes for my work-study for three years.  I still run into my old boss from there at the Legion now and then.  They appreciate your consideration, and they appreciate your friendship.  It’s not much of a hardship for you simply to say hello, and for you to show your thanks.

Gown/town relations require compromises and understanding on both sides.  We might begin with some compassion for those who earn meager wages doing the work that keeps this College functioning, and keeps us fed and somewhat healthy.

I used to write music reviews for websites and newspapers, and I’m thinking about renewing my activity in that vein.  Cheers!

Fairport Convention was one of the first bands in a British folk revival sparked by the resurgence of American interest in traditional music. As artists in the United States such as Bob Dylan, Odessa, and Phil Ochs, and later the Byrds and their offspring the Flying Burrito Brothers were revisiting the folk songs and traditions that they loved and altering them to reflect their own sensibilities and those of their generation, bands in Britain were doing the same with their own musical heritage. Some of the results of this interest in preserving while transmuting the past are forgettable today; the third Fairport Convention LP, Unhalfbricking, is timeless.

Unhalfbricking was released in Britain in July 1969, only half a year after What We Did on our Holidays, which introduced a new, revamped Fairport lineup. The most important change was the addition of vocalist Sandy Denny, who brought a loving, caressing sensibility to material that combined cover versions of traditional Midlands folk tunes and more recent songs by musicians such as Dylan. But the vibrant heart of Fairport’s music was provided by guitarist Richard Thompson, who continues to tour frequently and is one of the most individual presences on the club scene.

Probably the most well-known composition on this album is “Si Tu Dois Partir,” a French-language version of Dylan’s “If You Gotta Go, Go Now” which retains the rollicking spirit and mild irony of the original. A top-30 hit in France, it features an accordion sound worthy of a 1950’s Ed Sullivan broadcast and a happy but ragged choral sound that’ll remind you of a camp sing-along. The song propelled Fairport to a prominence that gave the traditional music they loved a renewed status in the ears of pop music lovers, and paved the way for the commercial acceptance of bands such as Jethro Tull, who were similarly interested in sharing the music they loved with their fans, albeit in a more theatrical and commercial fashion.

But this album has many more riches than “Si Tu Doir Partir.” It begins with “Genesis Hall,” which gives us the smoky, haunting vocals of Denny in front of a soundtrack that cascades and retreats and in doing so tells you that you’d better sit up and pay attention to what the band has to say. The lyrics, penned by Thompson, tell you right off the bat that you’re in for a remarkable musical experience:

Now one man, he drinks up his whiskey
And another, he drinks up his wine
And they’ll drink till their eyes are red with hate
For those of a different kind…

These lyrics reflect painful experience, but they evince hope. We’re told in the lovely “Autopsy” that “crying the hours into years” may be an indulgence we think we can afford, but that we’ve got to get up at some point and act rather than merely philosophize. The choice of the cover selections tells us this as much as the originals do: if Dylan’s “Percy’s Song” has always been the story of a man unjustly sentenced, it’s a call to action in just the same way that “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” or “Who Killed Davey Moore?” enrage us and motivate us to take our blinders off.

The most powerful of the selections on “Unhalfbricking” for me are “A Sailor’s Life” and “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?”. The former chronicles the odyssey of a sailor who’s far away from his family, and it’s about the loneliness of that life and the choices we’re sometimes forced to make in service to an occupation that reflects the call of the spirit. It’s distinguished most of all, though, by the crescendo it builds to, a jam that showcases the considerable abilities of the musicians involved: there’s the rumbling bass of Ashley Hutchings, the steady drums of Martin Lamble, but most of all the guitar of Thompson, which sings like Maria Callas as Violeta in La Traviata when she’s dying; even if it’s too late when you find love, you can rejoice that you’ve found it, and this music possesses the intensity and direction that only those whose love for their craft is unlimited can ever produce.

“Who Knows Where the Time Goes?” is for me the most beautiful song on this album. It’s a paean to the moments that slip away from us, to the life that passes even as I write and you read, to the things we fail to notice as that passing takes place. The metaphorical conceit is the change of seasons: just as birds flee our trees as our winter comes on, and they know when it’s “time for them to go,” they inevitably return. Sandy Denny’s voice rises and falls and reminds you a bit of a Gregorian choir: it becomes a lamentation that turns into a triumph. It asks us how we can let our time and our opportunities slip away, and it shows us how we can grippingly reel them in by celebrating our lives just as she does hers in this stunning production. I’m never unmoved when I hear this song by the realization that she lost her life in a fall down a flight of stairs only nine years later; the time indeed does go, and those of us who remain to benefit from her legacy and the music that Fairport Convention has left us are the greater for the gift that this work represents.

I have never failed to be entranced and inspired by listening to this album. It’s a little like Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks: it breaks your heart, but it puts it back together again through the carpentry of its truth and loving spirit. When I listened to Unhalfbricking most recently in preparation for this review, I got up from the recliner facing the stereo only twice: once to turn it over, and again to listen to it once more. It’s that kind of experience.

As we have a certain emphasis on poetry these days…

Carolyn Forche’s The Country Between Us has lived with me for a long time. Good poetry does that; it’s a well-worn knapsack full of tools that you use far more often than you’d anticipated. This volume rewards me every time I dip into it with its steely commitment, principled rage and compassion expressive of its author’s need to bear witness to the experiences that shaped it.

Forche’s subject is man’s inhumanity to man; she’s smart enough to know that a few poems aren’t going to stop the next Guernica. But she’s found the courage to raise her voice in a compilation of verse that unites her passion to right the injustices she’s seen with her unceasing motivation to search her own soul and discover what animates her lifelong struggle to convince us that there’s indeed something we can do, and that others are doing, about the far-off tragedies chronicled on the front page that lands on our porch every morning.

The poems in The Country Between Us are grouped into three sections. The first consists of pieces that treat the bloody Salvadorean conflict that was at its height when the collection appeared in 1981. The second incorporates verse written in a variety of places and periods that’s informed by the same interest in locating and characterizing the intersection between the political and the personal that makes the first part so compelling. The third section stands on its own: it distills the lessons of the entire volume into heady liquor, and it’s a deeply felt and gorgeously expressed tribute to the empathy the best of us feel for others, and the diligence which some employ working to ensure that we never forget the pain that we’re capable of causing each other. In so doing, this single poem reminds us that while it’s easy to hate and injure, the ultimate test of how we’ve lived is taken every day, and we pass or fail based solely upon whether we’ve treated each other with care.

Anger and beauty join in the first things we encounter in The Country Between Us. There are military men resigned to the inevitability of bloodshed and its source, the hate which engenders violent action which in turn breeds more hate; they lose the ability to empathize, as in “The Colonel,” a prose poem:

The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table… I am tired of fooling around he said. … Some of the ears on the ground caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.

There are also heroes, people like Pedro, Margarita and Leonel, to whom “Message” is addressed:

You will fight
and fighting, you will die. I will live
and living cry out until my voice is gone
to its hollow of earth, where with our
hands and by the lives we have chosen
we will dig deep into our deaths.
I have done all that I could do.

It’s clear that they’re just a few of many people for whom these poems will serve as their only fitting memorial. There are many roles to play in the revolutionary struggle Forche chronicles: hers is to immortalize those who served and died and to tell us of their legacy.

Forche is well-traveled; she passes on some of what she’s learned in Belgrade, Prague, Mallorca and elsewhere in the second section of this collection. It’s evident here, as well, that her commitment to the causes she fights for stems from her identification with anyone who’s been beaten down, neglected, and marginalized. The poems here recall some of these people, and a life spent translating her caring about them into both direct action and the beautiful but pissed-off writing we find here. There’s Anna in “Endurance,” who tells us that many Americans lack the strength of soul that’s earned by direct observation of just how far we can go to abuse each other and ourselves - her eyes are the “hard pits” of a past that’s given her a mystical authority. There are indictments of those who, in Eliot’s well-known phrase, “had the experience but missed the meaning”; it’s one thing to

…marry the veiled face
and jewelled belly of a girl who could
cook Turkish meat, baste your body
with a wet and worshipful tongue…;

it’s another to

…spray… your politics
into the flesh of an enemy become real.

You can become an expatriate, trying to acquire the perspective of the land you’ve adopted, she tells us, but it’s easy to merely skim the surface and fail to understand the deeper passions of those you’ve cast your lot with.

There are reminiscences of the Detroit Forche grew up in,

chipped beef and white beans,
relief checks and winter trips
that always ended in deer
tied stiff to the car rack…,”

and these glimpses of her childhood begin to fill out the mental picture we’ve formed of her: the poetry survives on its own, but the photo-booth look at her past Forche gives us humanizes it a bit and makes it clear that we’re dealing with someone that’s like us; she’s just seen a little bit more and is gifted with the ability to beautifully convey her passions and convictions.

“Ourselves or Nothing” is a long poem which is the concluding piece in The Country Between Us. It gives us a portrait of an historian concerned with the Holocaust in particular and, once again, the harm we’re capable of inflicting on each other in general; it’s the themes of this volume boiled down to a strong sauce. We can recite, as Forche does here, the list of places where we’ve slaughtered each other:

Belsen, Dachau, Saigon, Phnom Penh
and the one meaning Bridge of Ravens,
Sao Paulo, Armagh, Calcutta, Salvador,
although these are not the same.

The historian writes for the same reason that others have before him: to show that we’ve fought and killed in fits of passion, destroyed in the name of a hollow ideal, broken each other’s hearts in service to the messages of opportunistic manipulators that we adopt all too easily and invest with the wishful interpretations that we hope will fill our seemingly unique empty spaces. He tells us that

… all things human take time,
time which the damned will never have, time for life
to repair at least the worst of its wounds;
it took time to wake, time for horror
to incite revolt, time for the recovery
of lucidity and will.

This poem sticks out in front of us the central concern of the poetry gathered here - the obligations of an individual in a world in which violence and corruption seem to be forces we’ll never beat. It challenges us to respond, to commit to a principled life of involvement in the wider world. This writing holds out hope - it’s proof in itself that we still have the ability to make the right decisions and do so when it matters most. The final word is best left to Forche, and it’s what she’s chosen to conclude this exquisite collection:

There is a cyclone fence between
ourselves and the slaughter and behind it
we hover in a calm protected world like
netted fish, exactly like netted fish.
It is either the beginning or the end
of the world, and the choice is ourselves
or nothing.

You might have seen this article in the NYT a couple of days ago:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/fashion/04edline.html?em&ex=1210219200&en=2a724fd748d9e702&ei=5087%0A

Apparently parents are tracking their kids through software these days.  I’m not a big fan of “self-esteem” movements, but am I the only one who thinks this is absolutely a horrible idea, and one that robs college students of their independence and humanity?  At one time, you shipped your kids off to college, and hoped they came back to you unscathed and a little wiser.  Now parents micromanage:  some students I know talk with them every day, and others feel obliged to update them with e-mail accounts on a daily basis.  None of that seems like a good idea to me.

There was a time when if you truly wanted to make your own way you set out for a place like Alaska on a ship and worked slapping salmon or trout onto the deck of a rusting schooner.  You remember how Saul Bellow had it in “The Adventures of Augie March,” one of our finest novels:

“I am an American, Chicago born – Chicago, that somber city – and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man’s character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn’t any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.^“

A man’s character is indeed his fate, and he should be free to pursue that fate without interruption by officious parents or school administrators.  Monitoring devices such as those described in the NYT piece above turn a person into an instrument rather than a moral agent, and rob him of dignity.  We need, generally, fewer police, and a little more understanding of each other.

After all, once you get into the “real world,” no one is going to set up “diversity workshops,” give you donuts and bagels while you chat about how to incorporate a Buddhist notion of the world into the workplace, and allow you the leisure to spend three weeks on a paper about Beaumont and Fletcher.  “Knocks” are indeed your fate, and that’s simply the way it is.  Parents who choose to  “monitor” their kids on such a level that they actually look at their keystrokes rob their children of the most valuable experience there is:  making one’s own way, and learning on one’s own.

Since reading Rachel’s rather lovely posts I’ve been reflecting on poetry and how it’s influenced my life.  You might remember this Wallace Stevens passage from “Harmonium”:

She says, “I am content when wakened birds,
Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;
But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields
Return no more, where, then, is paradise?”
There is not any haunt of prophecy,
Nor any old chimera of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote on heaven’s hill, that has endured
As April’s green endures; or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow’s wings.

April’s green does endure; as we watch the rain fall on the Common we see spring awakening, as do the birds.   “Where, then is paradise?” Stevens’s imaginary interlocutor asks?  It lies within ourselves and our own ability to survive.  But we have the potential for grace, as Kenneth Rexroth had it:

The Earth will be going on a long time
Before it finally freezes;
Men will be on it; they will take names,
Give their deeds reasons.
We will be here only
As chemical constituents—
A small franchise indeed.
Right now we have lives,
Corpuscles, Ambitions, Caresses,
Like everybody had once—

Here at the year’s end, at the feast
Of birth, let us bring to each other
The gifts brought once west through deserts—
The precious metal of our mingled hair,
The frankincense of enraptured arms and legs,
The myrrh of desperate, invincible kisses—
Let us celebrate the daily
Recurrent nativity of love,
The endless epiphany of our fluent selves,
While the earth rolls away under us
Into unknown snows and summers,
Into untraveled spaces of the stars.

We can indeed celebrate this “endless epiphany” by being good to one another, by not marking off artificial distinctions, and by treating each other with care.  These things matter, and we should take them seriously as we progress towards graduation.

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