Rumours of Glory

by Bruce Cockburn

  The next morning, heading west out of Turin on the autostrada, we passed a long line of upended and burned-out cars and trucks, some still smoldering. In murk of the night, as we played, a collision had triggered a 150-car pileup.

  The tour ran up and down the Po Valley in the northern part of the country. A damp November cold clung to us like lichen. Compared to a Canadian winter it was nothing, but there was no respite, as there was no central heating. It got warm only when the stage lights came on. The fog we encountered in Turin was endemic.

  Showtime was usually nine o’clock, but we never started on time. Those were the days when I would eat before shows, and we were always told not to hurry, as it was customary for concertgoers to leave home about the time a show was scheduled to begin. This was the case on the wet night we played in Vicenza, near the northeastern town of Padua, famous for its eight-hundred-year-old university where Galileo taught, and for being a hotbed of student protest.

  As usual, our hosts were very casual, not at all worried about time. We did a sound check and went to dinner, stayed until nine, then ambled back to the small indoor arena that was the venue. But something had changed. We stepped out of the yellow van onto a crunching layer of broken glass that frosted the entire back parking lot, glinting in the glow of the overhead lights. There was mayhem in front of the building. We heard shouting and popping sounds. An acrid odor filled the air. We found Massimo, the beefy biker type who was assisting with the lights, guarding the stage door with a microphone stand clutched, clublike, in his fist. He hustled us in and quickly slammed and barred the door behind us. A lot of angry people were trying to get into the show. Some of them had guns. The windows had been shot out on the street side of the hall. Uniformed security guards were defending the front doors. One of them had been badly beaten. No one had been shot—yet. Our Massimo, who thought little of clambering one-handed like King Kong up the lighting towers with a spotlight dangling from his free hand, was quaking with fear. A couple of years earlier he had suffered a broken back in just this kind of situation.

  My first thought was “Geez, we’re not that late!” But that wasn’t the problem. A mob of university students from Padua had begun the evening by shooting up the home of a local judge, then ambled on over to the show. In Italy security guards were accustomed to large contingents of confrontational young people demanding unpaid entry to concerts, as the music “should be free.” Promoters were faced with a choice of resisting the crowd and thereby almost certainly risking violence, or waiting until ticket holders had gone in before opening the doors to anyone. Our situation was somewhat different. By the time we took the stage, the real cops had arrived. A number of them were visible in the hall, in plainclothes (turtlenecks and blazers), recognizable by the compact Beretta submachine guns slung at the ready on their shoulders.

  The lights came up and we went on. People packed the floor, and more snaked up the sloping tiers of seats. The area closer to the main doors was a continuous swirl of motion, as some people came in and others ran out to check on events outside. From all around us came the pssht sound of breaking glass as paving stones sailed through the high windows. Every now and then a whiff of that acrid smell would blow our way, tear gas from the battle scene. At one point Stuart passed by the foot of the stage, his dark shoulder-length hair bejeweled with glittering bits of windowpane. In between songs, I caught the eye of Sue, at the lighting desk, below stage left. She flashed a broad grin, shot both thumbs aloft, and shouted “Rock ’n’ roll!” Action at last! This was probably the best night of the tour for her. I think overall she found my shows somewhat sedate.

  We were getting ready to end the set with “Lord of the Starfields” when Glen’s voice came back through the monitors: “The head cop says if you don’t stop playing, he’s going to order his men to start shooting.” Pause. “Don’t believe him. I went out and checked. It’s almost over out there. I’d keep playing.” Good enough for me! I launched into the guitar intro, which elicited a scowl on the jowls of the man in charge, but no gunfire. The response from the crowd was immediate and enthusiastic. That song was showing up on radio around the country. It was, and still is, the track of mine that has garnered the most attention in Italy.

  The tour ended in a circus tent in Rome, and I was sick. Something I had eaten was wrecking my guts. At the end of the sound check, I shit myself running for the backstage portable toilet. I was weak and shaky, and told Ivano and Claudio I’d have to cancel the show. They grew visibly panicked, which I understood, having tasted the volatility of Italian audiences. If we didn’t play, they would probably riot. But I didn’t see how I could go on in the condition I was in. If you think diarrhea sucks, try having it onstage while pumping your abdominal muscles to force air past your vocal cords. Someone showed up with pills, which were supposed to help but did not. Our two promoters begged me to go on “even for a half an hour,” which seemed ludicrous to me. A short show would enrage the audience as much as no show, maybe more. As the appointed hour neared, I said, “Okay, I’ll try and do something, but be prepared for a sudden stop.” We went on. Somehow I managed to survive ninety minutes onstage. Every time I strained for a high vocal note I felt like my innards would erupt, but my system was so drained by then that we were all spared that. I thought the performance had to have been, well, crap, but everyone seemed pleased.

  After the show, as was the custom, we were hauled off to a restaurant with the local promoter and his friends, then said our good nights. Our little group—me, Claudio and Ivano, Stuart, Dennis, Bob, Glen and Sue—set out over the cobblestones. The full moon seemed to overpower the yellow streetlight glow, casting sharp shadows in the faintly misted air. We turned a corner and proceeded across a small plaza, Glen and I at the head of the pack. Under a street lamp on the opposite corner was the caped figure of a lone Carabinieri officer. “Do not go near to him,” Ivano admonished in a low voice, but he was standing pretty much where we had to go. Giving him as wide a berth as possible, Glen and I approached. The cop cradled his little Beretta machine pistol. His eyes followed our hands while the muzzle followed our progress. He made only one other move.

  “He took the safety off,” observed Glen. “I saw that,” I said. The guy looked like a teenager. His hands shook visibly. I felt sorry for him. What if we’d been the Red Brigades? We looked the part, the right age group, Glen with his David Crosby hair and mustache, and me looking faintly punky with a motorcycle jacket and a tie, black jeans, and sneakers. We all survived the encounter, and I found myself wishing long life for that young lad.

  Sun went down looking like the eye of God

  Behind icy mist and stark bare trees

  Inside the dim empty cinema two guys in leather jackets

  Glance at each other and shiver

  “They never built these places with winter in mind”

  Out the window down the grey road

  You can see old walled monastery

  Now become a barracks for the paramilitary police

  I saw an old lady’s face once on a Japanese train

  Half-lit, rich with soft luminosity

  She was dozing straight upright, head bobbing almost imperceptibly

  The wheels were playing fast in 9/8 time

  Her husband’s friendly face suddenly folded up in a sneeze

  Across the strait a volcano flew a white smoke flag of surrender

  In a Roman street on a full moon night

  I was sick and there was a young cop in a circle of yellow light

  As we drew near he snapped the safety off his machine pistol

  And slid a trembling finger to the trigger

  I wanted to say something calming but couldn’t catch his eye

  He didn’t want contact—he was trained to see movement

  “Well don’t shoot me, man, I’m a graceful slow dancer

  I’m just a dream to you not real at all”

  I wonder if I’ll end up like Bernie in his dream

  A displ
aced person in some foreign border town

  Waiting for a train part hope part myth

  While the station changes hands

  Or just sitting at home growing tenser with the times

  Or like that guy in “The Seventh Seal”

  Watching the newly dead dance across the hills

  Or wearing this leather jacket shivering with a friend

  While the eye of God blazes at us like the sun

  “HOW I SPENT MY FALL VACATION,” 1979

  To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/36.

  As Dragon’s Jaws went gold, my marriage took an inversely proportional nosedive. Kitty and I found ourselves adrift in an interpersonal wormhole. The reasons were many, but a long history of failing to communicate our deepest fears, resentments, and longings was at the core of our unraveling. We couldn’t sew things back up, and we couldn’t figure out how to move forward. Kitty was a pretty good communicator, but like most of us at that age she didn’t have a complete grasp of her own inner workings. I was like a chain-saw rendering of Rodin’s The Thinker done in ice, a frozen simulacrum of anger, avoidance, and angst in the posture of a man taking a dump. Neither of us would entertain for a moment the notion of going for counseling. To share our deepest thoughts and feelings with a total stranger called for more trust than either of us was capable of at the time. Something would come up and we couldn’t talk about it, then something else would surface that also couldn’t be discussed. Together we were a mess. Then I’d leave on tour. My wife would be left in a stew of frustration and loneliness.

  Kitty made the move, announcing she was leaving the marriage, catching me by surprise. To my mind we had made a promise before God, and that promise had to be kept at any price. There was no way out of it. How much heavier can it be than making a promise before God? I can’t be sure, with hindsight, that I would never have made the call, but I hadn’t reached the point of imagining us splitting up. I’m not sure what my threshold would have been, but Kitty was smarter than I was and recognized that the marriage was going nowhere. I think I was in the bathroom, shaving, when she informed me that she wanted a divorce. Suddenly, on the inside at least, I was a hurricane blowing through a keyhole.

  “Okay,” I snapped, “take the money and the kid and just go.”

  “No way,” said Kitty. “You’re Jenny’s father. You’re going to be in her life no matter what you think about it.”

  She was right, of course, and in the end being a father, even every second weekend, was a blessing. Yet at that moment all I wanted was to amputate the broken limb and move on. When you get spun off the tracks like I was, anger can take over and attempt to crush the cause. This isn’t how things are supposed to go! We’re supposed to be a couple! God doesn’t want us to split up!

  Deep beneath the surface, though, I was relieved. We had all this biogas built up from suppressing our issues and emotions, our endless well of stuff, and when it finally blew I could feel, far below the pain, a welcome sense of freedom, of floating into a sea of new possibilities.

  During the thirteen years Kitty and I were together, our quest for a relationship with the Divine, with Christ, was fruitful, often beautiful and mysterious. In all senses of the word, we travelled. I encountered places within myself, and within the cosmos, across a spirit world occupied and offered to us by God, that I would not have reached without her. Kitty is one of several women who have helped guide me into and through critical realms of self-exploration, who helped blaze paths toward understanding the Divine and the human condition. In large part our marriage broke down because I could not open up. I remained mired in my childhood psyche, unable to adequately express feeling, to demonstrate or even appreciate the love that simmered in my soul, both for Kitty and, eventually, for our daughter Jenny.

  Disharmony gives way

  To mute helplessness

  Not enough communication

  Too much not expressed

  It’s all too easy

  To let go of hope

  To think there’s nothing worth saving

  And let it all go up in smoke

  What about the bond?

  What about the mystical unity?

  What about the bond

  Sealed in the loving presence of the Father?

  Dysfunction

  Of the institutions

  That should give a frame to work in

  Got to find our own solutions

  Confusion

  Pressure from all sides

  Got to head right down the centre

  In the love that will abide

  What about the bond?

  What about the mystical unity?

  What about the bond

  Sealed in the loving presence of the Father?

  Man and woman

  Made to be one flesh

  Nobody said it would be easy

  But can we let go now and fail the test?

  Now you could say

  Life is full of moving on

  But do you want the pain that’s

  Already been spent

  To all be wasted—c’mon

  What about the bond?

  What about the mystical unity?

  What about the bond

  Sealed in the loving presence of the Father?

  “WHAT ABOUT THE BOND?,” 1980

  To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/37.

  How droll now to look back at my assumption that I knew what God did or did not want. I have a T-shirt I picked up in Buenos Aires that says, “Si quieres hacer reir a Dios, cuentale tus planes” (“If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans”). The breakup brought me an inch or two closer to an understanding of what it means to live in relationship with the Divine. God makes the plans. In the day to day we carry on, intending this and that, hoping for whatever, but it’s best to maintain a very light attachment to those intentions and hopes. You will be given what you need, but you might not appreciate that at the time.

  After Kitty’s announcement I recalled an experience I’d had in Italy. Part of the legacy Il Duce left behind is a style of construction he championed, commonly known as “fascist architecture.” The buildings are larger than life, the stated intention being to celebrate the glories of human achievement. In fact, they dwarf the human spirit, rendering people tiny and helpless and the state omnipotent. It’s a reflection of the state as god, propped up by a cadre of corporate devotees. Fascist architecture became a suitable metaphor for the structures I had created in myself—defensive constructs whose function was to shore up a psyche stuck in an insecure and frightened child’s view of the world, but that impeded forward motion into the larger expanse of human existence. Kitty’s action had cracked the foundations more deeply than her love had been able to.

  I remembered the Stadio dei Marmi, its giant sculptures of naked athletes whispering an echo of Mussolini, who forty years before had stood outside the stadium praising “the new fascist man.” The stadium is still there; its walls have not fallen.

  Fascist architecture of my own design

  Too long been keeping my love confined

  You tore me out of myself alive

  Those fingers drawing out blood like sweat

  While the magnificent facades crumble and burn

  The billion facets of brilliant love

  The billion facets of freedom turning in the light

  Bloody nose and burning eyes

  Raised in laughter to the skies

  I’ve been in trouble but I’m ok

  Been through the wringer but I’m ok

  Walls are falling and I’m ok

  Under the mercy and I’m ok

  Gonna tell my old lady

  Gonna tell my little girl

  There isn’t anything in the world

  That can lock up my love again

  “FASCIST ARCHITECTURE,” 1980

  To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/38.

  10

  Though
I never could quote chapter and verse, over time I familiarized myself with the Bible. I read it cover to cover. For a while I used it the way some people use the I Ching: just open it up on a given day and apply whatever jumps out. I paid a lot of attention to the letters of Paul. He was the authority on what it means to be Christian. Various TV evangelists claim to be that also, but they are, at best, interpreters of Paul, who is interpreting Jesus, whom he never met. Not in the flesh, at any rate. I found Paul quite hard to like. I was struck, though, by how much personality vibrated in those pages. In reading his letters I felt touched by his presence, not in a mystical way, but in the way of one human being reaching out to another. The fact that I was annoyed by much of what he had to say did not diminish my understanding that he was trying to communicate truth to me, as he knew it. It remains difficult to see why Jesus needed that guy to translate for him. It seemed to me that Paul was struggling with how to apply his faith in the risen Christ to the day-to-day world of men and women. He talks to them about love, but he also lays down rules, imposing his experience on theirs. Maybe they wanted that. Subsequent apologists cite differences in customs between that time and our own, but the attempts to reconcile the codes of behaviour ring somewhat hollow for me. God is not a social phenomenon. When a group of humans try to make him that, their faith slides into superstition, often pathological.

  When I got married I did not yet think of myself as a Christian. I was very interested in God, though I had outgrown the imagery presented to me as a child: the bearded Caucasian in the white robe . . . who was that? Some druid perhaps, lured in from the sidelines of history. Then there were the rays of sunlight passing through clouds. That at least had a celestial aspect. But overall I had abandoned the idea that the Christian imagery represented the Divine in any meaningful way, except for the meaning each of us might, in our hearts, invest in it. I found the myriad visions of God interesting. The Father was a bit too familiar, and too loaded a concept. Odin was cooler: the “all-father” who, with his ravens and his one eye, curiously, had returned home from having been hung on a tree and stabbed with a spear. Then there was Zeus, with his fondness for forcing himself on earthly women, and his fellow Olympians, with their petty jealousies and intrigues. The many Trickster figures made for great storytelling, though none of it was to be taken literally. All of it represented our species’ hunger for relationship with, and understanding of, the Divine, as well as our deep psychological processes.