by James Greer
“Show was good, I thought,” Trinket says, thoughtfully, sipping from a glass of maybe whiskey and soda. This is what we talk about late at night after playing.
Henry slumps over the bar rail, grunts. He looks at his shot glass, now empty, and at his full pint of pilsner, but doesn’t seem to have the energy to pick up his head and drink.
“Did you see Tub cockblocking on that German chick, the one with the silver miniskirt?” asks Henry. “Did you see that?” He laughs, full-throated, his body still slumped but his mind now alert.
“Thought he was gonna get his ass kicked by her boyfriend,” we offer.
“He will someday. He’s begging for trouble. What’s he thinking?” The question is obviously rhetorical, less obviously pointed. One of the things our band does on tour most often is talk behind each other’s backs. It’s not serious, most of the time, and then eventually it is, when Henry reaches a certain ambiguous fed up point. He goes through band members with astonishing frequency, which is how we got the job in the first place. In Whiskey Ships, the songs are the stars. And Henry, too, by extension, because he writes the songs and sings them. Everyone else is expendable, even interchangeable, to a certain extent. So Henry’s nitpicking serves a purpose, clarifying his attitude toward this or that member. His attitude right now toward Tub’s relentless womanizing is mixed: admiration and disgust. But because he’s more amused than anything by Tub’s incorrigibility, Tub’s in no immediate danger. You’re pretty safe on tour, anyway. Henry’s not likely to work up the bad mood to fire someone until he gets back home and faces a lengthy stretch of domesticity.
Before long we are as drunk as we are capable of getting without actually passing out. We’ve seen Henry in this condition many times; it’s one of the miraculous things about his alcohol consumption—that he never gets sick or (usually) rowdy or blacks out in any conventional way. He usually just falls asleep, often in a sitting position, his head drooping closer and closer to his chest until you can hear him softly snoring. Even then, though, he’s not always done. We’ve made the mistake once or twice of talking about Henry in the third person when he was in the room in an apparently unconscious state, only to have him rouse himself and gruffly mutter a response or rebuttal to whatever observation we had made.
We say goodnight and head to our room. Trinket’s already gone up. We’re rooming with him for this tour because, to be honest, we can’t take the constant strain of serving as audience to Henry’s nonstop performance. Trinket hardly ever says anything; at age thirty-one he’s the oldest of us and the least-invested in the rock myths we all, to a certain extent, treasure. He’s got a wife and two kids and paints, very well, could maybe even make a living off selling portraits of rich Daytonians, but he’s also a fine guitarist and songwriter with a distinctive high tenor, and if he weren’t in a band with Henry he might be famous on his own. But the very qualities that prevent the limelight from settling on his thinning hair make Trinket an ideal roommate on tour.
As we lie in our safe European bed and wait to pass out, we start obsessing about our creeping anxiety, and the unbanishable depression that has seized us upon arriving in Germany. We have an unsettled feeling in our stomach that has nothing to do with the quantity of alcohol we’ve sluiced through our kidneys tonight. We worry that the unease we feel is purely selfish: in other words, that our slow-growing dissatisfaction with the practice of playing in Whiskey Ships versus the theory of playing in Whiskey Ships betrays an unbecoming ungratefulness, and our willingness to let minor annoyances grow into major justifications which are, at the far end of the longest day, a den of chimera hiding the fact that we are lazy, and proud, and greedy, and envious.
Our bed is right below a window cut at an angle in the angled roof that looms low above our head. Through the window, we can see the moon and stars in a clear night sky and a branch of a plane tree waving in the summer wind. The patterns of light caused by the moon shining weakly through the tree’s leaves cast moving shadows on the wall. Objects in the room—dresser, suitcase, clock—acquire a hollowness in the dark we fill with bright worry, until the hollows glow, until they blaze with moonlight. The window is loose in its frame and rattles with every gust of wind. We feel the frayed edges of our personality unraveling. Outside the angle of another person’s perception, we’re afraid we have no real being. We’re an accretion of foreign fluids—the sweat and saliva we’ve sucked out of everyone else. That equals us. That’s our sum.
In the morning we’ll remember what we’re doing here. Sea-sperm and driftwoody, heaped up on the sand and sore. Whoreshoe crabs. Our flat life in the ebb, erasing.
The distant air arrives in waves. A mingled junk of stars and winking trawlers warps before us, controlled in its slow fall and rise by God’s easy breath.
We sit on a bench, looking out at the whole empty thing. Imitation of cerebral effort: one cumbrous claw scratched at thinning, greasy hair. It’s true a liar can be an artist, but only to the extent that he can distinguish his creations from those of nature. But the line between illusion and deception is often imperceptible. Why is it a lie can be the most exalted of things (when it is called a fiction) and the most debased? A metaphor is a ladder to the truth, and yet is not of itself true.
Red wine has been no friend to us. Swinging in the porches of our ears, insipid vocabulary of the sweet tipple-o. Head’s unhooked. Heart stuck, caught between rush of love and stooped and seething fear. A great shadow passed suddenly behind, like the impenetrable evil of the whole world. Nothing in the night sky could have produced such a shadow.
Falling into the ether/or, no life clung to no thick bones. Draw the curtains on the artificial starlight outside and light a cigarette by feel in the close and inky blackness. Smoke spirals and gathers on the ceiling, up in the pitch.
We sleep the sleep of the just. The just sleeping.
Rock will not kill you or make you stronger, it will simply drain every life-affirming instinct from your soul and spew from its ulcerous mouth the resulting brew of misplaced ideals and ideologies all over the future. You are the future. We can’t stand the mere thought of you.
Here now began the combat which Adam should have undergone in paradise; for on one side God’s love-desire, which had manifested itself in the soul, did eagerly attempt the soulish and bodily property, and introduced its desire into the soul’s property; and on the other side the devil in God’s wrathful property did assault on the soul’s property, and brought his imagination into the property of the first principle, viz. Into the center of the dark world, which is the soul’s fire-life.
Journal entry from around the same period: We just grow older with very little to show. Need to take more pictures.
Rock is not meant to be part of pop culture; in its purest form it is a reaction against that culture, not a happy participant. You don’t use rock music as a soundtrack to peppy teen comedies or dramadies or maladies. You use rock music to sandblast that dreck from your mind, at least for a moment. (Moments are the building blocks of community, and rock is community, however limited.) Rock is a rhythmically religious experience. It is a motion of the spirit toward its essential nature. It does not sell anything except itself, which does not mean you can’t sell it to someone else. Paying money for rock in a consumable form (record, concert) has nothing to do with the purity of the thing being conveyed or experienced. Commerce dilutes nothing on its own—it’s simply a method of transmission. Rock is not supposed to be a mass medium, it was never designed to carry the weight pop culture would like to impose upon it. If you want rock bad enough, you will find a way to get it.
On the other hand, looking at this in the subjective aspect: Just as music alone awakens in man the sense of music, and just as the most beautiful music has no sense for the unmusical ear—is no object for it, because an object can only be the confirmation of one of the essential powers and therefore can only exist insofar as the essential power is present as a subjective capacity, because the sense of an object go
es only so far as a particular person’s senses go (has only a sense for a sense corresponding to that object)—for this reason, the senses of the social man are other senses than those for the nonsocial man. The forming of the five senses, he goes on to say, is the labor of the entire history of the world down to the present.
We will not be upbeat to soothe you. Remember that.
Don’t be misled by Great Minds who mutter that ability “to rock” is as important as ability “to tie your shoelaces.” These talentless mediocrities are descended from the same Great Minds who once insisted that “Pushpins [thumbtacks] are more important than Pushkin [poet].” In other words, don’t listen to anyone: especially us, because we’re up against deadline and have to fill a certain number of pages with a certain number of words, so who knows what we’ll say next, and how devoid of meaning, although as we should have pointed out several times before, but never got around to doing, meaning is in the end meaningless.
What we like about Whiskey Ships’ music, for instance (picking our band as an example because we consider ourselves pretty much an expert on that and only that subject), is that despite its absolute denial of meaning (resolute refusal to make sense), we get more “meaning” out of a song like “Hinterlanding” than out of any N—or [insert favorite band name here] song ever written. But the lyrics make no sense, you say. Now, we’d have a hard time proving it to you, but Henry never wrote a syllabilly of nonsense. Where there is no obvious meaning, the mind sifts through the rubble of sense to create an entirely new edifice, and one that resounds all the more for the effort put into its construction. Talk about audience participation!
Let it be told, and related, and sung, that we know our interpretation of any particular Whiskey Ships song is most often completely different from Henry’s, because we talk about his lyrics a lot, but the great thing is he allows for both ours and his interpretation, and a host, if you will (you won’t), of others as well. This freewheelin’ Henry Radio is made possible mainly because the lyrics, while crucial to the sound and sense of the song, are not the main argument—only a part. The argument of a Whiskey Ships song is the melody/rock mix crossed with those sense fragments that evoke a response in the listener. The way these three elements work together in the context of a song like “Infra Dig,” for instance, is to produce a reaction (dependent, as always, on the individual listener) of pure melancholic joy capable of restoring everything Kurt took away with his suicide. The song’s lyrics “mean” nothing in any conventional sense, but when paired with the chord structure, the melody, the singer’s emotional delivery, and the band’s performance, your heart cannot help but leap from its constraining cage. There’s an infinity of probabilities, and the gracelessness with which we clodhope through the murk of the possible and impossible cannot help disincline even the bold, even the beautiful. Things have meaning or thingness only in relation to other things, and sometimes a rock song is at the center of that web.
We will not be upbeat to soothe you.
We will not be upbeat to soothe you. Most of rock is drudgery and tedium, relieved at rare intervals by very short-lived sparks of actual Quiddity. Most of rock is Not Rock. Most of Not Rock is Not Good. Consider the possibilities.
(Skepticism alone is a cheap and barren affair. Skepticism in a man who has come nearer the truth than any man before, and yet clearly recognizes the limits of his own mental construction, is great and fruitful.)
Notebook Twelve
The boys, under Kurt’s direction, had hauled a giant spruce into Albion’s ballroom late one night in mid-December and decorated it with things Mary stole from her job at The Magic Hat, a novelty store on Brown Street near Stewart. So there were twists of crepe ribbon in black and orange, left over from Halloween, and trick rings with paste rubies and emeralds that opened when pressed in the back to reveal a secret compartment, strung together on fishing line from the hardware store where Co-Daryl Hawes worked. We stood the tree just behind the chairs and the piebald rug facing the fireplace. At night, with the fire stoked, the reflected light in the fake jewels, threaded through the sweet-smelling branches of our tree, gleamed religiously. We drank our sacred wine from holy cups and toasted the blaspheming town.
Kurt suggested we get together on Christmas Eve after midnight. Not many of us had places we had to be, so most everyone showed. Kurt insisted that we not exchange presents, but since we knew that he was planning on getting us all things we pooled our resources and bought him an ugly mustard-colored sweater, chosen by Amanda, which Kurt dutifully tried on and wore almost every day thereafter. He seemed embarrassed by our gift, and overcompensated by plying us with more than the usual complement of bottles from his kitchen stash. Then he handed out his presents.
He had clearly put some thought into his choices. For Mary he got a cashmere scarf of delicate robin’segg blue, which she would not remove from around her neck for weeks afterwards (even during sex, it was rumored). For Joe Smallman, Kurt got an antique silver cigarette case. For Amanda, he found a rare recording of her favorite jazz singer, a Harlem woman from the ’40s called Gilda Lily who had made only three albums before dying of a heroin overdose. The others were similarly gifted (the Rose Scholar, for instance, received a book called The Rose Encyclopedia by T. Geoffrey W. Henslow, M.A., F.R.H.S., Arthur Pearson, Ltd., London, 1912), with the exception of me. Poor Fiat. I said nothing, but my disappointment must have been obvious, because Kurt came over on the pretext of filling my cup of wine and whispered, “Yours will come later.” If any of the boys from the Southern Belle had said that I would have thought something vulgar, but Kurt was never vulgar, except for effect, and I detected no such effect here.
Later came, and later went, and then people started to leave, and then everyone left except me, and of course Kurt. Through the tall windows on the north side of the ballroom shone pale Christmas light, making irreligious shadows of our high-backed chairs. We said nothing but watched the fire die. I think I may have pretended to read a book by dying firelight, but Kurt seemed content to stare into the embers, his unnaturally long fingers tented together, his elbows propped on the chair’s worn arms.
Eventually Kurt stirred and walked or swam out of the room at the far end that led to the front door. I assumed he had gone to bed, because by habit he never said goodnight, just disappeared. I had slipped into a cozy dream, peopled by characters from the book I’d been pretending to read, when Kurt returned carrying a package wrapped in plain brown paper with a ribbon of twine. I sat up, rubbing my eyes, and reached for my cup of wine. Kurt handed me the package and sat down in his chair.
“I was dreaming,” I said irrelevantly.
“I never remember my dreams,” replied Kurt.
I swished the wine around my gums and swallowed. “Is this my Christmas present?”
“You talk sometimes about an Irish writer, O’Hanlon.”
“Only when I’m drunk. I know you don’t like to talk about books, and he’s someone I try to keep to myself, anyway.”
“I would have no pleasure giving you something only I liked.”
I attempted to untie the knotted twine but soon gave up and tugged until it snapped. My expectations at this point were deliberately low. I expected at best a cheap hardcover edition of Miserogeny, or even one of O’Hanlon’s earlier books, like Hunting Accidents. The bulk of the wrapped package suggested more than one volume. I tore the wrapping and threw it on the floor next to my chair. The heat from the fire cause the discarded paper to skid across the floor toward Kurt’s chair. He bent over and crumpled the paper into a ball, then tossed the ball into the fire, where it ignited instantly. Black flakes of burnt paper floated lazily up the flue.
“It’s a book!” I said with affected irony. I found Kurt’s intense interest in my reaction unsettling. It was three books, in fact, or rather three volumes of the same book. As I examined the volumes closer, real excitement took hold of me.
“This can’t be what I think it is,” I said, looking at Kurt, who re
turned my look warmly, almost impishly.
I examined the first volume carefully. The title page bore the name of the original publisher, Odeon Press, and the original date of publication, 1948. At the bottom of the title page was stamped the number “73.” I knew then that I was in the presence of a very precious thing, and my hands began to tremble.
I could hardly stand to hold the book in my hands—it felt warm to the touch, vibrating with the force of the words held captive in ink impressed on yellowing, brittle paper. I closed the first volume and put it down, in my lap, dizzy from the intensity of feeling. The set I was holding was the very first edition of Miserogeny, one of only 250 printed in large format, and bound in midnight-blue with gold lettering. It was not out of the question that it had been handled by O’Hanlon himself. There was no ex libris stamp or dedication or other sign of ownership—the lack of which increases a book’s value among collectors but for me only increased the mystery, and the admittedly remote but still-real possibility that the volumes came from O’Hanlon’s own library, in other words that it was a set he’d reserved for himself. Kurt would give no explanation of how he’d come by such a treasure. I had only seen pictures in rare book catalogues, and the prices attached to these pictures were usually a multiple of my yearly salary. I said as much to Kurt, who only shrugged and said that I should not consider such things.
My first impulse was to refuse the gift, but here again Kurt warned that such a refusal would not only be rude but pointless—he had no use for the books himself and the circumstances were such that he could not return them. I argued halfheartedly, but was hamstrung by the realization that here, for the first time in my life, was a book I actually wanted to own. So I shut up and began flipping through the pages, while Kurt watched, and smiled.