Love and Mercy

Every spring, there is a day when the clouds seem to lift; a single day, a specific moment, when the gray has given way to spring.

In Texas, this usually happens late-February, early-March. Here, in the God-forsaken yankee tundra of Michigan, it happened this past weekend—on Sunday, to be exact. Paula Jane and I cruised round Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti most of the day, reveling in the warmth of the sun. Listening to Brian Wilson, as we always do in the spring, especially on this day, when the world begins again.

As some of you know from other posts, I wasn't always a Brian Wilson fan (beholden as I was to the dumbass Idea Worm, til my friend John set me straight). It would be difficult to entirely express how much I love him now; his music symbolizes so much of what is positive about living, and what is best about human beings, a thing I am apt to lose sight of. And beyond that, Brian's music makes me happy. His simple, child-like optimism is entirely unaffected, and affecting.

Examples of this are represented by the two selections I have chosen, the first being the incredible ballad—the first ballad Brian ever wrote—Surfer Girl. The lyrics are remarkable enough—I'm giving you credit here, reader, for being sophisticated enough to realize that while a song about a surfer who is a girl can be beautiful—as this one is, even at that level—this song is larger than that, and more encompassing. It is written in the language of the person expressing it—perfectly so—and represents to me as perfect an artifact of longing, and for the desire for human intimacy, as I've ever heard.

These are the first lyrics:

Little surfer little one
Made my heart come all undone
Do you love me, do you surfer girl
Surfer girl my little surfer girl

I have watched you on the shore
Standing by the ocean's roar
Do you love me do you surfer girl
Surfer girl surfer girl

The language is simple, the idea sentimental—unapologetic, and straight-forward. The idea of one's heart coming "undone" is stirring, the recognition of feeling as being comprised by one's history, sort of an amalgam of unfiltered sensory perceptions surrounded—girded—by the pain of experience. A mechanism permitting us to feel and function simultaneously, protecting us from hurt—undone, on the instant, by longing.

If you feel this song is maudlin, or hokey, or crude, I pity you. Brian's great gift is to give poetry to the feelings of millions of awkward people, and their deepest, truest, most tender moments; and to do so without irony, or cynicism, or any negating conceits. It is deeply beautiful, I think, as is the crucial bridge:

We could ride the surf together
While our love would grow
In my Woody I would take you
everywhere I go

Brian delivers those first two verses in the breath-taking falsetto he made famous (at the end of the song, the refrain little one, little one is entirely Brian); the bridge, however, he switches to his "regular voice" (as in Wouldn't It Be Nice? or Help Me Rhonda); after the first 3 lines of the bridge, though—on the lyric everywhere I go—he changes back to falsetto, and the effect is glorious. It sounds like nothing less than desire, pent-up and segregated from possibility. Too sublime for anything better than approximation.

True story about this song: Paula Jane and I saw Brian in Seattle about 10 years ago, on one of his first tours after his comeback. If you know anything about him, you know of his battles with drugs and depression. I believe he suffered some kind of a stroke some time in the eighties; part of the result is that his falsetto is nearly gone. His regular voice is good as ever—maybe better—but one of the Wondermints (his touring band) handles the falsettos. Which is okay—the guy is very good—and Brian does most of the singing.

I knew this, and was resigned to it, when we saw him. It was a great show, and when Surfer Girl came up, I was prepared to hear the other guy sing it, so I was shocked when Brian appeared to sing the lead. Of course, with the harmonies, it was difficult to know exactly whose voices we were hearing. Then came the bridge, which he sang perfectly. I was sure he wouldn't sing the transition—everywhere I go—alone, in falsetto. How could he? Although I admit that as the lyric came near, I gripped the edge of my seat with anticipation. And when it happened, and when Brian did indeed sing it, alone, and fucking nailed it, it was probably the most beautiful moment I've ever experienced at any show, by any artist.



The next song is Love and Mercy, from his self-titled LP in 1988. Context is necessary to fully appreciate this song, I think. By that year, Brian had been departed from the national stage for a long time, lost in a maze of addiction and mental illness. Everyone thought he was gone for good. I'd been reading for months and months that he was back in the studio, working. There were lots of rumors, some true and some not, and a helluva lot of buzz. When the record finally came out, and Brian had our ear again, the first thing he chose to say to us is expressed in this lyrics of this extraordinarily beautiful, odd, frightened, humane, and deeply hopeful song. I listened to it over and over, weeping, and glad to be alive in any world with Brian in it.

Two versions. First, of my favorite recording of Brian singing the song, before his voice had really recovered. He sounds just a little wobbly, and damaged, and it breaks my heart.

Next, from the Kennedy Center honors a few years ago, the British group Libera's salute to Brian, which must be seen, and heard, to be believed.

If you can watch these, and still feel no love for Brian, you perplex me.

Who? (an existential parenthesis)

Who lives under the rock
(inside the hackberry bush)?

Who creeps about the wash-house walls
(hiding in the crevices)?

Who clings to the underside of the porcelain
(dreaming of juice)?

Liberalism

Sometimes, it seems a little hopeless (see right), like the relentlessness of the fascist is too much to overcome. But I have to believe that a tide is turning; and that history is on our side.

In a time when progressive ideas and values are being assailed like no time since the 1930's, it is good to read John Donne—even if you've read it 1000 times, it helps you remember the essense of what we believe—it is a cornerstone of our thought, I think—and it always makes me feel better about the future:

"No man is an iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee...."

Another poem, for yet another cold night

The poem is Auden's The More Loving One, and it is a thing to aspire to.

Though the idea of loving the starless night is dubious, at best. Seem to remember reading somewhere that we are buffered by stars. It is an idea I will hold to, to the last.


Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total darkness sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

—W.H. Auden

Si, se puede!

In my home, growing up, Cesar Chavez was a hero. We didn't eat lettuce or grapes for two years, in support of the United Farm Workers.

This was, of course, before the Christ-in-Concrete crowd took hold of my Mom, and turned her into a Republican automaton, along with most other white people.

A testimony to Cesar's significance is the effect his name has upon the monied classes; what little pigment they possess is drained instantly from their faces, and spit-flecked apoplexy inevitably follows. They fucking hate him. Where I come from, there are streets and schools named for him, and it's like a little stab in the heart every time they see it. Which is great.

Cesar Chavez oughta be 84 today. The labor movement needs his kind of leadership—and determined optimism—now, more than ever.

Finale: Ted Hughes explains Crow

This is the final portion of Ted Hughes reading at Adelaide, explaining his take on the Crow myth.

I will write more about it later, but from my perspective, having read it again after setting it aside for awhile, I can tell you that it makes me very sad, indeed. Very sad.

Perhaps I'm too invested in the characters involved, or perhaps my interpretation is skewed by other factors, but right here, right now, the brilliance of this poetry, and the imaginitive narrative sewing it all together, is rather overwhelmed by the human implications; in this telling, no one gets out alive, and that's fucking too bad.

Isn't it?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"This is another of (Crow's) little plays. This is just notes for a play, since apart from when he just writes a song about what happens, he just writes notes for a possible director or producer. Just the notes that you might base a play on - no dialogue, no anything else, but the same two characters that he's stuck with:"

(Notes for a Little Play)

First — the sun coming closer, growing by the minute.
Next — clothes torn off.
Without a goodbye
Faces and eyes evaporate.
Brains evaporate.
Hands arms legs feet head and neck
Chest and belly vanish
With all the rubbish of the earth.

And the flame fills all space.
The demolition is total
Except for two strange items remaining in the flames —
Two survivors, moving in the flames blindly.

Mutations — at home in the nuclear glare.

Horrors — hairy and slobbery, glossy and raw.

They sniff towards each other in the emptiness.

They fasten together. They seem to be eating each other.

But they are not eating each other.

They do not know what else to do.

They have begun to dance a strange dance.

And this is the marriage of these simple creatures —
Celebrated here, in the darkness of the sun,

Without guest or God.


"He goes through all his trials and eventually he comes to a great river. Beyond this river is the Happy Land but sitting beside this river, on his bank, is a horrendous woman, an enormous, grotesque and gigantic woman, who forces him to carry her across the river. By one means or another, she gets up on his shoulders and he enters the river. And he wades out over the gravel and the current deepens, and as he gets deeper into the water her weight begins to increase until he finally has to stop. But her weight goes on increasing and drives his feet down into the gravel of the bed of the river, and the water rises to his mouth, runs past his mouth, and at that point she asks him a question. He has to sing the answer and he has to have the right answer. He begins, and he sings and, as he sings - as he gets a little bit of rightness here and a little bit of rightness there - her weight lightens. He keeps on trying to chip a bit of her weight off with little rightnesses until, finally, she's back to the weight she was and he's able to climb out of the holes and go on across the river. But as he goes on across the river, her weight begins to increase again and the whole thing happens again. She asks him another question.

"All the questions relate back to his encounters and his experiences with this being that he's been looking for. So they are all questions about the relationship between man and women - or Man and Woman. So they're all really love questions. And they're all dilemma questions, because they don't have an answer. So, this is one of his answers. And the question is "who paid most?". So he begins with the river running past his mouth. And he's only a half creature, so he's completely unmusical. He begins to try and chip little bits of her weight off him:"

(Lovesong)

He loved her and she loved him.
His kisses sucked out her whole past and future or tried to
He had no other appetite
She bit him she gnawed him she sucked
She wanted him complete inside her
Safe and sure forever and ever
Their little cries fluttered into the curtains

Her eyes wanted nothing to get away
Her looks nailed down his hands his wrists his elbows
He gripped her hard so that life
Should not drag her from that moment
He wanted all future to cease
He wanted to topple with his arms round her
Off that moment's brink and into nothing
Or everlasting or whatever there was

Her embrace was an immense press
To print him into her bones
His smiles were the garrets of a fairy palace
Where the real world would never come
Her smiles were spider bites
So he would lie still till she felt hungry
His words were occupying armies
Her laughs were an assassin's attempts
His looks were bullets daggers of revenge
His glances were ghosts in the corner with horrible secrets
His whispers were whips and jackboots
Her kisses were lawyers steadily writing
His caresses were the last hooks of a castaway
Her love-tricks were the grinding of locks
And their deep cries crawled over the floors
Like an animal dragging a great trap
His promises were the surgeon's gag
Her promises took the top off his skull
She would get a brooch made of it
His vows pulled out all her sinews
He showed her how to make a love-knot
Her vows put his eyes in formalin
At the back of her secret drawer
Their screams stuck in the wall

Their heads fell apart into sleep like the two halves
Of a lopped melon, but love is hard to stop

In their entwined sleep they exchanged arms and legs
In their dreams their brains took each other hostage

In the morning they wore each other's face

"Finally, this is a song taught to him by an eskimo guide that he meets, who teaches him a lot of little stories and songs which become his defence. This eskimo shows him how to adjust himself to the circumstances - in a series of little childish stories. This is one of them. 'How Water Began to Play':"

(How Water Began to Play)

Water wanted to live
It went to the sun it came weeping back
Water wanted to live
It went to the trees they burned it came weeping back
They rotted they came weeping back
Water wanted to live
It went to the flowers they crumpled it came weeping back
It wanted to live
It went to the womb it met blood
It came weeping back
It went to the womb it met maggot and rottenness
It came weeping back it wanted to die

It went to time it came through the stone door
It came weeping back
It went searching through all time and space for nothingness
It came weeping back it wanted to die

Till it had no weeping left
It lay at the bottom of things
Utterly worn out
utterly clear

Slowhand

It's Eric Clapton's birthday. Reckon he and Jimi are my favorite guitarists.

I strongly believe in the healing powers of rock and roll. It restoreth the soul.

Doesn't get better than Cream, does it?

The Tyler Rose

I've always been a Cowboy's fan, which often as not the past decade has been like hitting myself in the head with a two-by-four once a week, come autumn. Never gave a damn about the Oilers (and give less than a damn about the Texans).

And as much as I loved Tony Dorsett and Emmett Smith, and respected Walter Payton and Barry Sanders, the greatest runner I ever saw was the Tyler Rose, Earl Campbell (who is 56 years old today).

And though I never saw Jimmy Brown or Gale Sayers play, I don't think it possible that they were better than Earl; though his career was brief—perhaps it's just not possible to play with that kind of intensity over a long career—for five seasons or so he was as good as anyone who ever played the game.

He was pretty damn good at the University of Texas, too, of course, winning the Heisman Trophy during a time when it still meant a little something. Barry Switzer (a total fucking wanker, who knows a little about football) said Earl was the only 18year-old he ever saw who could've gone straight to the NFL, and been a star.

I never saw a guy who punished opposing players like Earl did. Though he was just under six feet tall, he weighed nearly 250, and ran a 4.5 forty. He had 34 inch thighs—fuck—think about that!—34 fucking inches, man. That's just scary. And saying he ran a 4.5—which is fast—is still deceiving. He had another gear, that only great players have. When he needed to be, he was the fastest guy on the field.

The first video is a highlight reel. At around 2:50, watch him headbutt Isiah Robertson—an all-pro linebacker—and knock him on his ass. Earl did that kinda stuff all the time. Next is video of the culmination of his famous Monday Night Football performance against the Dolphins, an 81 yard sweep, that caused Howard Cosell to vibrate. No one did bombast quite like old Howard; what Earl was to grace and power, Howard was to hot air.

More Crow, more explication

This is part three of Ted Hughes' 1976 reading at Adelaide, in which he interspersed a number of his Crow poems with a pretty detailed account of Crow's origin.

These poems were begun a few years after Plath's death, and from what I understand the last was completed during the week prior to Assia's suicide (and Shura's murder).

Make of that what you will.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"As (Crow) goes along and has many adventures, everything that he meets tells a different story about what he does or what happens to him. So these are just various little episodes from it. This one is about the Black Beast:"

(THE BLACK BEAST)

Where is the Black Beast?
Crow, like an owl, swivelled his head.
Where is the Black Beast?
Crow hid in its bed to ambush it.
Where is the Black Beast?
Crow sat in its chair, telling loud lies against the Black Beast.

Where is it?
Crow shouted after midnight, pounding the wall with a last,
Where is the Black Beast?
Crow split his enemy’s skull to the pineal gland.
Where is the Black Beast?

Crow crucified a frog under a microscope, he peered into the
brain of a dogfish.
Where is the Black Beast?

Crow roasted the earth to a clinker, he charged into space -
Where is the Black Beast?

The silences of space decamped, space flitted in every direction - Where is the Black Beast?

Crow flailed immensely through the vacuum, he screeched after the disappearing stars -Where is it?
Where is the Black Beast?


"A certain question begins to trouble him more and more and more - a fundamental, simple little question, "Who made me?". This turns into a quest for whoever it was that made him and he's quite successful in this quest. He keeps getting very close to whoever or whatever it is that made him, and whatever it is that made him always appears, or nearly appears, in some female form. So his journeys are a continual adventure or recurrent adventures with the Female in various forms. He has a series of encounters, and his misfortune is that he always bungles the encounter. He never understands that this is what he is actually looking for. This is just an account of one of his bungles:"

(A Horrible Religious Error)

When the serpent emerged, earth-bowel brown,
From the hatched atom
With its alibi twisted around it

Lifting a long neck
And balancing that deaf and mineral stare
The sphynx of the final fact

And flexing on that double flameflicker tongue
A syllable like the rusting of the spheres

God's grimace writhed, a leaf in the furnace

And man's and woman's knees melted, they collapsed
Their neck-muscles melted, their brows bumped the ground
Their tears evacuated visibly
They whispered 'Your will is our peace.'

But Crow only peered.
They took a step or two forward.
Grabbed this creature by the slackskin nape.

Beat the hell out of it, and ate it.


"God, who was first of all indulgent to him, becomes worried, because he sees that this is an alert little beast. So he begins to try and frustrate him. And the more he frustrates him the more able this creature becomes - the more obstacles infront of him the stronger he gets. So he becomes wiser, cleverer, stronger, and he becomes involved in all the cultures, intrigued by all the possibilities and the interesting tales. And early on, he encounters the literature of Oedipus, since he's so involved with his own search, and he reads Sophocles, and he reads Seneca, and he reads Freud. He sees, obviously, that this is open to everyone and he makes his own version. And by now he's begun to produce his own literature but his own literature is very crude. He produces plays and stories but he can never get more than two characters into the plays and stories - always the same two characters. So when he comes to deal with the Oedipus theme, he's stuck again with these two characters. This is a song from one of his plays - presumably the play is mimed while somebody sings the song - and, as a matter of fact, he steals the entire thing from Seneca:"

(Song for a Phallus)

There was a boy was Oedipus
Stuck in his Mammy's belly
His Daddy'd walled the exit up
He was a horrible fella

Mamma Mamma

You stay in there his Daddy cried
Because a dickeybird
Has told the world when you get born
You'll treat me like a turd

Mamma Mamma

His Mammy swelled and wept and swelled
With a bang he busted out
His Daddy stropped his hacker
When he heard that baby shout

Mamma Mamma

O do not chop his winkle off
His Mammy cried with horror
Think of the joy will come of it
Tomorrer and tomorrer

Mamma Mamma

But Daddy had the word from God
He took that howling brat
He tied its legs in crooked knots
And threw it to the cat

Mamma Mamma

But Oedipus he had the luck
For when he hit the ground
He bounced up like a jackinthebox
And knocked his Daddy down

Mamma Mamma

He hit his Daddy such a whack
Stone dead his Daddy fell
His cry went straight to God above
His ghost it went to hell

Mamma Mamma

The dickeybird came to Oedipus
You murderous little sod
The Sphynx will bite your bollocks off
This order comes from God.

Mamma Mamma

The Sphynx she waved her legs at him
And opened wide her maw
Oedipus stood stiff and wept
At the dreadful thing he saw

Mamma Mamma

He stood there on his crooked leg
The Sphynx began to bawl
Four legs three legs two legs one leg
Who goes on them all

Mamma Mamma

Oedipus took out an axe and split
The Sphynx from top to bottom
The answers aren't in me, he cried
Maybe your guts have got em

Mamma Mamma

And out there came ten thousand ghosts
All in their rotten bodies
Crying, You will never know
What a cruel bastard God is

Mamma Mamma

Next came out his Daddy dead
And shrieked about the place
He stabs his Mammy in the guts
And smiles into her face

Mamma Mamma

Then out his Mammy came herself
The blood poured from her bucket
What you can't understand, she cried
You sleep on it, or sing to it

Mamma Mamma

Oedipus raised his axe again
The World is dark, he cried
The world is dark one inch ahead
What's on the other side?

Mamma Mamma

He split his Mammy like a melon
He was drenched with gore
He found himself curled up inside
As if he had never been bore

Mamma Mamma

Crow explicated, part 2

Ted Hughes, at Adelaide, continued:

"But this world he appears into is a world where everything is happening simultaneously, so the beginning and end are present, and all the episodes of all history are present, as in all the different rooms of a gigantic hotel. And God, having come down into the world to see how this creature is going to size up - he, first of all, seeing what a wretched, black, horrible little nothing it is - he's rather indulgent toward it and tends to show it the beauties of the creation, and let it look on whilst he shows the marvels of the beginning.

"So this is an episode from the beginning, where God has created Man's and Woman's bodies and he's trying to get souls into them. The Talmudic legend is that, when God created Adam and Eve, he took soil from the four corners of the Earth, so that Man shouldn't feel lost whenever he wandered on the Earth. He moulded these two beautiful people but then he couldn't get the souls into them, because the souls out in the gulf - being just souls - were completely clairvoyant and knew everything that was going to happen to them. They didn't want to go into the bodies. So the great problem, before anything can happen at all in Talmudic literature, is how is the soul to be got into the body? God has this problem - a permanent problem - and Crow sees a short-cut (a very obvious short-cut) which has great consequences in the story later on. So this is what happened:"


(A Childish Prank)

Man's and woman's bodies lay without souls,
Dully gaping, foolishly staring, inert
On the flowers of Eden.
God pondered.

The problem was so great, it dragged him asleep.

Crow laughed.
He bit the Worm, God's only son,
Into two writhing halves.

He stuffed into man the tail half
With the wounded end hanging out.

He stuffed the head half headfirst into woman
And it crept in deeper and up
To peer out through her eyes
Calling it's tail-half to join up quickly, quickly
Because O it was painful.

Man awoke being dragged across the grass.
Woman awoke to see him coming.
Neither knew what had happened.

God went on sleeping.

Crow went on laughing.