Her name was Eva, inexplicably. And she existed, for our purposes, entirely within her immediate consciousness, which was bordered on two sides by the horizon, and she had her back, when we find her, to the other two. One horizon was the ocean, and one horizon was land.
It was true, now, she could see the vanishing point, and if she concentrated she could catch things in the act of vanishing; not moving but simply being less clear the farther they were from her.
And the sky seemed like a big blue dome, like a huge bowl flipped upside down, blocking out the real sky. And under that bowl Eva stood, facing west, the sea to her left, watching things vanish.
On the right horizon, far in front of her, she perceived something different, maybe mountains, but they were too far to see; she did not pause to consider them but if she had, she might have registered the vague feeling that they were accessible to her, if she chose to go that way. But it did not register so in effect she did not have the choice at all.
Stuck, then, as she was, on the beach, she found her feet planted solidly in the sand, until she decided to move them, in which case she found she was perfectly free to do so.
Thus Eva is isolated in her unexplained state on a beach, and no one else is near.
Then she was seated on a piano bench, positioned squarely in front of a grand piano, on the same beach and presumably in the same spot. Now she was facing the ocean, on which wave after wave rolled forward. While inspecting the keys, she was interrupted by the sound, first she thought of sea gulls crying, and then of a man calling. Immediately she began to play; her fingers swept over the keys effortlessly and almost soundlessly; the music was there, but only in the context of the waves and the man's cries for help. As she listened to her playing, she listened to his calls; while transfixed by her hands she could see his passive body being curled around, over and under the waves, far out to sea. She heard a gull's sorry shriek and froze; the sound of the waves continued to roar, urging her to play, but her thoughts broke free and she desperately searched for the drowning man. The waves instilled in her the desire (without a desire, really the command) to accompany this man's death, to make his last moments music. And when he was gone hers would become the performance, and she would learn that no one was watching or listening, but that one much become accustomed to a singular performance.
But he was not gone yet, and Eva struggled with herself to decide whether to go to him with the marginal chance of saving him, or to stay and improvise the soundtrack of his death, to relinquish, on his behalf, any hope of rescue, but to ensure that his last moments were filled with beauty, to decide for him the melody that would embody his passing.
The choice was made for her, by whom it is unsaid. She fought against the anxiety that he did not choose his own song. The thought plagued her and pushed all music out of her mind, so that the piano fell silent, as did his cries. Desperately she played the first thing she thought of, a melody that was already written, and she could not remember how it ended. Still ravaged by the tragedy that it was her song imposed on his death with no agency of his, the sound, the piano and the cries, faded into the ocean roar, which is contained in a sea shell.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Album Review: The Shape of "Feel Good Ghosts"
It has been said that Cloud Cult’s album Feel Good Ghosts (Tea Partying Through Tornados) does not build—that is, does not reach a climax—overall, but if one considers it a concept album and listens to the lyrics as a complement to the music from start to finish, there is a noticeable progression, complete with crests and troughs. Through this lens, one may find that the fourth track, “When Water Comes to Life,” is the primary climax, for several reasons.
First and foremost, this song builds. It builds the way a dancer acquires energy, in breadth of movement, in meaning, in intensity. From the violin’s first minor intervals, positively soaked in emotion, through their delicate plucking sounds, the song demands your focus; it drives forward with undeniable momentum. The minute mark bursts forth with a glorious melody that delivers a feeling of arrival, but the song keeps building. It seems that in just this first minute and a half—technically and blasphemously called an intro—a whole story has been told, a whole life has been lived. When the vocals finally come in, Craig Minowa’s tender voice mirrors the pattern the instruments just established: he starts softly and passionately, which the strings and percussion imitate underneath.
At the top of this song’s peak, it is clear that it is the center of the album. “No One Said It Would Be Easy” opens with the claim that you are the vastly complex conglomerate of countless unfathomable worlds; “I Love You All” closes, simply, with the way lives end, maybe, with an “I love you.” “Water” sits right in the middle of the thirteen tracks, conceptually if not literally. “All you need to know,” Minowa (et al) sings, “is you were made of water. You were made of water.” Now, one may speculate, that is clearly not all you should know. With a brilliant touch of irony, Cloud Cult is demanding that their listeners assume the fairy cake (cf. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)—they are depending on you, their faithful and astute listener, to understand that if you know this one very important and central thing, you can extrapolate everything else you will ever need to know. Based on that aspect of human life, you have it in your power to determine the rest of creation.
What an epic statement to make! And with characteristic Cloud Cult-ian understatement, too. Also, what a sharp contrast from track one’s “You were sewn together with a tapestry of molecules, a billion baby galaxies and wide open spaces.” From that starting point, it would almost seem the “Water” is the nadir; having begun as the most complex creature imaginable, now we have been simplified to being the combination of two elements, with the inculcated insistence that that is all we need to know. But understanding the irony of such a statement—understanding that any comment on the nature of things from the human perspective is necessarily an understatement—inverts the trough, and thus “Water” is the summit of Feel Good Ghosts.
That is not to say, by any means, that the album declines after track four. Suffice it to say, though, as a parting thought from this brief overview, that taking the last song as the end of a progression implies that Cloud Cult has shifted their focus from the constitution of the human body to the essence of human life: love of family. It seems that Feel Good Ghosts has not “built” in the linear fashion we are used to. Instead, it has traced a speculation of our own existence, and at the end of it all, has decided that the rub is not what we are made of, but what we do.
First and foremost, this song builds. It builds the way a dancer acquires energy, in breadth of movement, in meaning, in intensity. From the violin’s first minor intervals, positively soaked in emotion, through their delicate plucking sounds, the song demands your focus; it drives forward with undeniable momentum. The minute mark bursts forth with a glorious melody that delivers a feeling of arrival, but the song keeps building. It seems that in just this first minute and a half—technically and blasphemously called an intro—a whole story has been told, a whole life has been lived. When the vocals finally come in, Craig Minowa’s tender voice mirrors the pattern the instruments just established: he starts softly and passionately, which the strings and percussion imitate underneath.
At the top of this song’s peak, it is clear that it is the center of the album. “No One Said It Would Be Easy” opens with the claim that you are the vastly complex conglomerate of countless unfathomable worlds; “I Love You All” closes, simply, with the way lives end, maybe, with an “I love you.” “Water” sits right in the middle of the thirteen tracks, conceptually if not literally. “All you need to know,” Minowa (et al) sings, “is you were made of water. You were made of water.” Now, one may speculate, that is clearly not all you should know. With a brilliant touch of irony, Cloud Cult is demanding that their listeners assume the fairy cake (cf. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)—they are depending on you, their faithful and astute listener, to understand that if you know this one very important and central thing, you can extrapolate everything else you will ever need to know. Based on that aspect of human life, you have it in your power to determine the rest of creation.
What an epic statement to make! And with characteristic Cloud Cult-ian understatement, too. Also, what a sharp contrast from track one’s “You were sewn together with a tapestry of molecules, a billion baby galaxies and wide open spaces.” From that starting point, it would almost seem the “Water” is the nadir; having begun as the most complex creature imaginable, now we have been simplified to being the combination of two elements, with the inculcated insistence that that is all we need to know. But understanding the irony of such a statement—understanding that any comment on the nature of things from the human perspective is necessarily an understatement—inverts the trough, and thus “Water” is the summit of Feel Good Ghosts.
That is not to say, by any means, that the album declines after track four. Suffice it to say, though, as a parting thought from this brief overview, that taking the last song as the end of a progression implies that Cloud Cult has shifted their focus from the constitution of the human body to the essence of human life: love of family. It seems that Feel Good Ghosts has not “built” in the linear fashion we are used to. Instead, it has traced a speculation of our own existence, and at the end of it all, has decided that the rub is not what we are made of, but what we do.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Magnifying Glass
Heather was skinny when she had her baby, irreconcilably skinny for the fact that she was pregnant and reasonably healthy. The nine months leading up to the birthday were a time of very little growth, physically or emotionally--for her anyway. Obviously Jack did more growing in that time than he ever would again, except the year he turned 14 and had to pretend he was 18 in order to prove--well, his name wasn't really Jack, either, it was Stanley, a name as skinny as his mother, but no one knew it because she gave him away when he was 5 minutes old, after holding him once and bursting into tears because he was deformed.
In fact, he was not deformed, but no one would ever tell him that. Somehow Heather, in her post-labor hysteria, managed to hallucinate that her baby had no eyes. What a nightmare! She passed him off as quickly as she could without throwing him to the nurse, who cleaned him up and lay him to rest in an incubator, doctor's orders.
Maybe Heather's faux pas was a result of some kind of drug (although Jack seemed fine). Or maybe she was just not cut out to be a mother. She could easily have passed for his ten-year-old sister.
In later years she would increasingly wonder what happened to her little eyeless baby, and sometimes even wonder if hers was the right reaction. As reactions go, it was arguably not the most caring, or well-grounded. Sometimes it's best to go with your first impulse.
And so baby Jack was left as soon as he got here, which perhaps brought his expectations down to a reasonable level as soon as possible.
In fact, he had very large eyes, very large blue eyes indeed, how Heather missed them--
Jack's eyes were a beautiful baby blue, the color only a baby's could be, and they were wide and solemn. Soon they changed to brown but their large wideness remained, as if he could see and comprehend exceptionally well for a 2-week-old. At that age the brown eyed boy had reached his projected birthday and the nurses celebrated by sending him home with a family whose son had passed before meeting his brother, born two minutes earlier. The stillborn's name was Aidan.
Given Jack's (and Heather's) shaky medical records, it is unclear how Jack ended up in Aidan's place at the Simons' house, suddenly endowed with a twin brother and parents who loved him simply because he was alive.
Before he had time to acclimate to his new home, where he spent the first night under a black and white mobile with the letters AIDAN hanging from it, waiting to be batted and learned, Jack was whisked away again. This time it was because, as he might learn later, his poor father had shown up at the hospital not two hours after the Simons had left. Really! Exhausted, sweaty, caked with dust, Joel Samson collapsed upon hearing the news, in a dramatic exclamation point to his impromptu journey across several continents. Because after hearing, much too late, that his seed had indeed brought forth a tiny life from a slip named Heather, he had immediately bought a plane ticket and then alternately sat and stood up on a second-by-second basis, legs shaking, hand massaging face, for the several days until his flight left from Accra, capital city of Ghana, West Africa. Joel had decided in a previous life (not Jack's) that the jubilee-celebrating country of Ghana, having been liberated in 1958, was a good place to sort out all his problems. Ironically, it was another woman who had sent him there in the first place, several months earlier, when she told him she was pregnant with his twins. (Not pregnant--Jessi was a compulsive liar. Even more ironically, her compulsiveness meant she had not even completed the thought when the beginning and middle were in Joel's ear. Incidentally, the beginning of his thought of Africa formed at the same time as the end of hers.) It was not until he was in Heathrow airport that she called and told him the truth, but when she found out his itinerary she screamed bloody murder and dumped him. So he decided he might as well go to Ghana, at least until she was out of the apartment.
On a whim one day in Accra, he had turned into an Internet cafe, having about an hour before he had agreed to meet his friend Kwame for a beer. In his inbox he was mildly surprised to find a note from Heather's roommate Delia, a florist with scary round eyes who had always been nice to Joel, the few times he'd met her--even helping him arrange his bedroom so that the pigeon droppings would not blow onto his pillow and his karmic energy would not clog the bathroom--saying that Heather had just gone into labor, and had just as recently divulged a) the pregnancy and b) its cause. Delia just thought Joel should know.
And so Joel found himself pacing the cement outside Kwame's rich uncle's house until he lost count of the nights. The airplane was no less frenzied but at least British Airways served free alcohol. Headachey and incredulous, Joel passed a nine hour layover in Heathrow scavenging the stores for a suitable baby gift (whether for Heather or the baby it was not determined), before he realized he had 100 cedis and 2 dollars but no f-ing pounds. He finally slept on the plane to JFK but woke to find they'd been delayed 5 hours and hadn't left England yet.
Eddie Fontaine picked him up from the airport and tried to get him to clean and shave and eat and sleep before meeting his new family, but Joel insisted. Heather was nowhere to be seen and the baby, he was duly informed, was safe with a foster family. Having not eaten or changed clothes for almost four days when he collapsed, he was a right mess and the same nurses obligingly made up a bed for him, where he spent the night. Eddie came through again the following morning (luckily a Saturday), and by doing so convinced Joel that had to go home, clean up, and approach this the right way.
"Oh, sorry," mumbled Joel, head down, as he went to step around her.
"Oh--it's okay--I mean, hi Joel," said Lisa, who knew who Joel was, partly because he ran into her all the time.
They lived in the same apartment building, and had for a couple years now, a fact of which Joel was completely unaware. Lisa didn't mind. She was shy anyway, and could do with one less person trying to engage her in small talk in the hallway everyday. But she liked Joel.
Joel was an imperfect person and he knew it. It seemed to him that he really could not be any other way, given his genetic makeup and chancy upbringing; of course, those didn't affect his future, so conceivably he could be any way he wanted, but they determined his actions of the past, which he knew one should not cry over anyway. And the future was constantly slipping into the past, like sand through the thin part of an hourglass, or the land rushing beneath you on a plane, so fast and irretrievable it was hard to tell which moment was where. As soon as you see the Nile, he reasoned, you are over it and there's nothing to be done about it. He hadn't flown over the Nile on his way to Ghana but he knew this to be true because rivers are thin, not unlike the neck of an hourglass, and planes are fast, not unlike life. For Joel, there was no present, only the future whizzing by him into the cesspool of history. Or, the present was the whizzing sound it made.
Ever since he had pulled Jack, who he loved so passionately, into his life, he had been wishing desperately to have a present.
Lisa, on the other hand, had no Jack to speak of and possessed a very different view of time. For instance, she was constantly amazed at how much faster time passes when you are a grown-up than when you are a child, for whom one day stretches out like a summer vacation. To her, the present is all there is; she imagined time like an inscrutable map laid out on an enormous table, over which one pores with a magnifying glass, and because the map is so staggeringly large, made larger by the magnifying glass, and because we can only look through the magnifying glass, bent low over the table, we never see what the map is of--but if we could step back, we would. The present is the circle of the magnifying glass.
In fact, he was not deformed, but no one would ever tell him that. Somehow Heather, in her post-labor hysteria, managed to hallucinate that her baby had no eyes. What a nightmare! She passed him off as quickly as she could without throwing him to the nurse, who cleaned him up and lay him to rest in an incubator, doctor's orders.
Maybe Heather's faux pas was a result of some kind of drug (although Jack seemed fine). Or maybe she was just not cut out to be a mother. She could easily have passed for his ten-year-old sister.
In later years she would increasingly wonder what happened to her little eyeless baby, and sometimes even wonder if hers was the right reaction. As reactions go, it was arguably not the most caring, or well-grounded. Sometimes it's best to go with your first impulse.
And so baby Jack was left as soon as he got here, which perhaps brought his expectations down to a reasonable level as soon as possible.
In fact, he had very large eyes, very large blue eyes indeed, how Heather missed them--
Jack's eyes were a beautiful baby blue, the color only a baby's could be, and they were wide and solemn. Soon they changed to brown but their large wideness remained, as if he could see and comprehend exceptionally well for a 2-week-old. At that age the brown eyed boy had reached his projected birthday and the nurses celebrated by sending him home with a family whose son had passed before meeting his brother, born two minutes earlier. The stillborn's name was Aidan.
Given Jack's (and Heather's) shaky medical records, it is unclear how Jack ended up in Aidan's place at the Simons' house, suddenly endowed with a twin brother and parents who loved him simply because he was alive.
Before he had time to acclimate to his new home, where he spent the first night under a black and white mobile with the letters AIDAN hanging from it, waiting to be batted and learned, Jack was whisked away again. This time it was because, as he might learn later, his poor father had shown up at the hospital not two hours after the Simons had left. Really! Exhausted, sweaty, caked with dust, Joel Samson collapsed upon hearing the news, in a dramatic exclamation point to his impromptu journey across several continents. Because after hearing, much too late, that his seed had indeed brought forth a tiny life from a slip named Heather, he had immediately bought a plane ticket and then alternately sat and stood up on a second-by-second basis, legs shaking, hand massaging face, for the several days until his flight left from Accra, capital city of Ghana, West Africa. Joel had decided in a previous life (not Jack's) that the jubilee-celebrating country of Ghana, having been liberated in 1958, was a good place to sort out all his problems. Ironically, it was another woman who had sent him there in the first place, several months earlier, when she told him she was pregnant with his twins. (Not pregnant--Jessi was a compulsive liar. Even more ironically, her compulsiveness meant she had not even completed the thought when the beginning and middle were in Joel's ear. Incidentally, the beginning of his thought of Africa formed at the same time as the end of hers.) It was not until he was in Heathrow airport that she called and told him the truth, but when she found out his itinerary she screamed bloody murder and dumped him. So he decided he might as well go to Ghana, at least until she was out of the apartment.
On a whim one day in Accra, he had turned into an Internet cafe, having about an hour before he had agreed to meet his friend Kwame for a beer. In his inbox he was mildly surprised to find a note from Heather's roommate Delia, a florist with scary round eyes who had always been nice to Joel, the few times he'd met her--even helping him arrange his bedroom so that the pigeon droppings would not blow onto his pillow and his karmic energy would not clog the bathroom--saying that Heather had just gone into labor, and had just as recently divulged a) the pregnancy and b) its cause. Delia just thought Joel should know.
And so Joel found himself pacing the cement outside Kwame's rich uncle's house until he lost count of the nights. The airplane was no less frenzied but at least British Airways served free alcohol. Headachey and incredulous, Joel passed a nine hour layover in Heathrow scavenging the stores for a suitable baby gift (whether for Heather or the baby it was not determined), before he realized he had 100 cedis and 2 dollars but no f-ing pounds. He finally slept on the plane to JFK but woke to find they'd been delayed 5 hours and hadn't left England yet.
Eddie Fontaine picked him up from the airport and tried to get him to clean and shave and eat and sleep before meeting his new family, but Joel insisted. Heather was nowhere to be seen and the baby, he was duly informed, was safe with a foster family. Having not eaten or changed clothes for almost four days when he collapsed, he was a right mess and the same nurses obligingly made up a bed for him, where he spent the night. Eddie came through again the following morning (luckily a Saturday), and by doing so convinced Joel that had to go home, clean up, and approach this the right way.
"Oh, sorry," mumbled Joel, head down, as he went to step around her.
"Oh--it's okay--I mean, hi Joel," said Lisa, who knew who Joel was, partly because he ran into her all the time.
They lived in the same apartment building, and had for a couple years now, a fact of which Joel was completely unaware. Lisa didn't mind. She was shy anyway, and could do with one less person trying to engage her in small talk in the hallway everyday. But she liked Joel.
Joel was an imperfect person and he knew it. It seemed to him that he really could not be any other way, given his genetic makeup and chancy upbringing; of course, those didn't affect his future, so conceivably he could be any way he wanted, but they determined his actions of the past, which he knew one should not cry over anyway. And the future was constantly slipping into the past, like sand through the thin part of an hourglass, or the land rushing beneath you on a plane, so fast and irretrievable it was hard to tell which moment was where. As soon as you see the Nile, he reasoned, you are over it and there's nothing to be done about it. He hadn't flown over the Nile on his way to Ghana but he knew this to be true because rivers are thin, not unlike the neck of an hourglass, and planes are fast, not unlike life. For Joel, there was no present, only the future whizzing by him into the cesspool of history. Or, the present was the whizzing sound it made.
Ever since he had pulled Jack, who he loved so passionately, into his life, he had been wishing desperately to have a present.
Lisa, on the other hand, had no Jack to speak of and possessed a very different view of time. For instance, she was constantly amazed at how much faster time passes when you are a grown-up than when you are a child, for whom one day stretches out like a summer vacation. To her, the present is all there is; she imagined time like an inscrutable map laid out on an enormous table, over which one pores with a magnifying glass, and because the map is so staggeringly large, made larger by the magnifying glass, and because we can only look through the magnifying glass, bent low over the table, we never see what the map is of--but if we could step back, we would. The present is the circle of the magnifying glass.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
1.
Words that form a sentence are not
(or even a fragment) to be separated for
without one another they have
no meaning
in speech there are gaps between
words (one would hope) but
they must not be filled with silence or
uncertainty for that would turn a
word-ship in tindersticks, and
a sentence into words; no,
there is meaning in the gaps
2.
Some people know how to convey the sounds
between words that give them their proper meaning.
Perhaps they think more fluidly too and
understand the molecules that link the
particles of a thought
if that's true perhaps they are the ones who
inherently understand language
3.
If you do not already know what I mean then
what I say will have no weight to you
(no root in the shared consciousness)
unless, of course, you find it phonetically pleasing
in which case you could not possibly really not
understand
(form follows function)
And words are merely messengers between two friends who
know what the other thinks anyway
words are the empty symbols that only call forth
knowledge you must already possess, or be capable of
possessing.
words do not create
4.
Or, if that fell on shallow ground:
words do not carry thought, but they awaken latent thought
(thinking in terms of poetry allows you to see things from a
micro or telescope and orbit your thought)
when two or maybe 3 people
find the same meaning within themselves (to which words call
attention) then
they have a bond less arbitrary than language because
they have found a direct path into each other's minds, so to
speak
5. And sometimes I think people can only share an idea if
it's a true one because
with all the false ones floating around what are the chances
they'll both pick the same one
(or maybe that' s not really why but sometimes I think it
anyway)
so words have the power to inspire recognition (like symbols)
(I've thought that before) of
Truth
and they work best between like-minded people, or
Friends
If words' ultimate goal is not Truth then
we are merely making guttural mellifluous sound
but truth may have to be a side effect of words
and poetry the goal
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