Rumours of Glory
Page 40
We staged a celebratory concert during the proceedings, featuring Jann Arden, Jackson Browne, Chude Mondlane, and me. It was in the Ottawa Convention Centre, a couple of hundred metres from Parliament Hill, and was well attended. Bobby Muller, head of VVAF, spoke, as did Lloyd Axworthy, then minister of foreign affairs under Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. One hundred twenty-two nations ratified the treaty right away, and since then another thirty-nine have signed on. Several have not, however, including the obvious suspects: Russia, China, North Korea, South Korea, Cuba, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel, and also, glaringly, the United States.
In 2010, when the Obama administration was making noises about possibly signing the Ottawa Treaty (which, by the end of 2013, it had not), the right-wing Heritage Foundation objected, saying, “Such a ban applied to the U.S. would seriously degrade the ability of the U.S. to defend itself and its allies, particularly in Korea. Furthermore, the very process by which the convention was created is objectionable because it undermines responsible diplomacy and the sovereignty of the United States and other nation-states. The U.S. should shun the Ottawa Convention and the associated process, and instead pursue reasonable arms control through serious diplomacy.”
“Reasonable”? The U.S. has more munitions at its fingertips than all other nations combined, yet a lack of land mines would somehow “seriously degrade” its ability to defend itself? Any minute now, one of those Heritage guys is going to propose mining the U.S.-Mexico border.
Fortunately, not everyone in the States is as off-kilter as the Heritage Foundation and its brethren. Whereas the United States has failed to ratify the treaty, land-mine production in the States ended in 1997, and since then the American government has pumped $2 billion into land-mine removal in several countries, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The Ottawa Treaty led to rapid demining in some small nations. According to the Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor, by 2011 fourteen nations had been completely demined, including Nepal, Rwanda, and the Central American countries of Nicaragua, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. In addition, casualties from land-mine explosions dropped from 11,700 in 2002 to 4,286 in 2011. (The imperative now is to reduce that number to zero.) The land-mine treaty serves as an excellent example of how humans can reduce military and other threats to their well-being and to our planetary ecosystems.
The 1996 Ottawa summit occurred one year after my land-mine caper in Parliament, which I like to think helped push the process forward. A gentleman from one of the demining NGOs had lent me sample mines for our speaking tour. They were an effective aid in getting the message across to an audience for whom the whole issue is pretty abstract. I was accompanied on the tour by Chude Mondlane and Michael O’Connor, executive director of COCAMO. Each of them spoke passionately on the issue from their own perspective. I’d haul the five land mines around in a satchel and pull them out at a strategic point in my presentation—“here’s the Canadian one, here’s the Chinese one, these are Russian, that one’s American”—a serviceable graphic.
The tour culminated in a visit to Parliament to meet with interested members, in particular those supporting Reform Party MP Keith Martin’s private member’s bill calling for a land-mine ban, at that time before the House. We also carried a petition, on which we had gathered some sixteen thousand signatures, demanding a landmine ban. We secured a room in the basement of the Centre Block of the Parliament buildings to hold a press conference and present the petition. I figured my samples would make an effective display for the cameras.
It was easy—a little too easy, really—to stroll into Parliament with my sack of latent devastation. This is Canada. Nobody carries a gun. There were Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers in the building as well as commissionaires who are partly tour guides and partly security—generally ex-military types who know what they’re doing, but overall a very light security presence. I arrived a few minutes ahead of our 9 A.M. press conference, and the “guard” waved me through, bulging bag and all. Today, post-9/11, I’d probably have been handed over to the CIA and rendered to some cattle-prod dictatorship, but everything was more innocent back then.
A dozen journalists drowsed in folding chairs, some behind TV cameras. They were bored, expecting little, licking doughnut frosting from their fingers. We took up our position on the podium, and I pulled mines from the bag and plunked them onto the heavily varnished plywood table surface. Thunk! Thunk! Cameras closed in. The reporters, suddenly awake, craned their necks to see. The two security men at the back of the room, discreetly outfitted in grey flannels and blue blazers, looked at each other in a charming caricature of apprehension. We made our statements, answered some questions, and then left.
Around noon I returned to Parliament for a planned lunch with some MPs. Carrying the same shoulder bag, I arrived punctually. This time they saw me coming. A security agent in a different uniform approached and said, “Mr. Cockburn, can we see you for a minute?” Instantly I was encircled by six more like him. It had been a long time since I’d felt this much at home in Ottawa.
“Can we look in your bag, please?”
“By all means,” I said, “but before we do that, I think we should move down the corridor. Passersby might be nervous about the contents.” Tense, scattered glances all around—isn’t this the guy who wished he had a rocket launcher? “I’ve got inert land mines in my bag,” I said, “but you know that—that’s why you’re here, right?” We moved, them shuffling as a unit to keep me surrounded, ten feet down the hall. One of the officers said, “Are you sure these things are inert?” I couldn’t help myself. “Oh yes! I’m pretty sure they are, really,” I said, then pulled them out and held them up. No one relaxed. Five little pretend bombs. I was earnestly admonished not to bring them with me again.
I’ve mentioned that I don’t go to war zones looking for song material. That said, I try not to block ideas if they come. I wrote “The Mines of Mozambique” on September 11, 1995, in a sparsely furnished hotel room in Quelimane. For a complex song, it came rather quickly. The issue was compelling and the images strong. That song, and parts of “The Coming Rains,” poured out over the course of an all-night vigil by my wide-open window.
I enjoyed traversing the countryside and meeting the inhabitants, even though they were to a great degree demoralized and self-contained. A vestigial sense of humour had survived. At one point I found myself amid a tiny cluster of houses where the old folks poked me and said, “Hey, I’m really glad you’re here because the little kids have never seen a white person.” Then, to the kids, “See, that’s what they look like”—poke—“that’s one there.” As the newly arrived exotic, I got to sit in the only chair they had in the village. First they had to go and fetch the thing, which took about half an hour, while I stood around and wondered what they were doing. Eventually someone showed up with a little wooden school chair. They plopped it down under a big shade tree. An elder smiled and gestured and said, “Sit down,” so I did. Soon they began preparing lunch, which was preceded by a little boy chasing a chicken around the yard. He speedily captured the bird and deftly decapitated it with his bare hands.
These folks were canny. They understood that if you can afford a plane ticket to get to this little village in the middle of the bush, you must be good for more than just teaching the kids what a white person looks like. They asked me for a bunch of stuff that I couldn’t possibly deliver, but it was in these moments that I rededicated myself to committing time and media capital to ridding their homes of the land-mine scourge. They had paid many times over for that and more.
No matter how lightly you travel, your baggage always comes with you. I spent three weeks on the east coast of Africa living out of a small backpack and a guitar case, but the loneliness I’ve borne from birth, and the bruises and stretch marks the experience with Madame X left on my heart, remained present. We can’t deny our own stories, no matter where we are. So even in Mozambique, I found myself haunted.
All day the mountains rose behind a veil of smoke from burning fields
And road dust dyeing black skin bronze and the road rolling
like a rough sea
It’s quiet now, just crickets and a dogfight somewhere in the far away
In my heart I hold your photograph
And the thought of you comes on like the feel of the coming rains
Hot breeze ran its fingers through the long grass of a thatched roof eave
They stuck me in the only chair they had while they cooked cassava
And a luckless hen
They asked for one well three lanterns and 200 litres of fuel and
I said, “Who, me?”
And the time for planting’s coming soon
And the thought of you comes on like the feel of the coming rains
In the town neon flickers in the ruins
Seven crows swoop past the luscious moon
If I had wings like those there’d be no waiting
I’d come panting to your door and slide like smoke into your room
All day the mountains rose behind a veil of smoke from burning fields
And road dust dyeing black skin bronze and the road rolling
like a rough sea
It’s quiet now, just crickets and a dogfight somewhere in the far away
In my heart I hold your photograph
And the thought of you comes on like the feel of the coming rains
And the time for planting’s coming soon
And the thought of you comes on like the feel of the coming rains
“THE COMING RAINS,” 1995
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/81.
From the wreck of a nation, I returned home to one of the world’s wealthiest countries (today Canada generates more landfill trash per person than anywhere else on earth) and the wreck of my romantic life. Back at the horse farm, I became increasingly withdrawn. Before leaving for Mozambique, I had written a song called “Pacing the Cage,” which more or less expressed my ever-darkening mood. Sue heard me practice the piece. Later she said, “I knew we were finished when I heard that song. A happy person is not going to write something like that.”
Sunset is an angel weeping
Holding out a bloody sword
No matter how I squint I cannot
Make out what it’s pointing toward
Sometimes you feel like you’ve lived too long
Days drip slowly on the page
You catch yourself
Pacing the cage
I’ve proven who I am so many times
The magnetic strip’s worn thin
And each time I was someone else
And everyone was taken in
Powers chatter in high places
Stir up eddies in the dust of rage
Set me to pacing the cage
I never knew what you all wanted
So I gave you everything
All that I could pillage
All the spells that I could sing
It’s as if the thing were written
In the constitution of the age
Sooner or later you’ll wind up
Pacing the cage
Sometimes the best map will not guide you
You can’t see what’s round the bend
Sometimes the road leads through dark places
Sometimes the darkness is your friend
Today these eyes scan bleached-out land
For the coming of the outbound stage
Pacing the cage
“PACING THE CAGE,” 1995
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/82.
Of course “Pacing the Cage” wasn’t just about me and Sue, or the horse farm, or even my impossible longing. When you compose a song, it’s likely to be very personal, very specific. Once you throw it out into the world, everyone who hears it perceives it through the filter of his or her own feelings and experiences. It becomes universal, touching some common wound we all bear. As always, I took what was in front of me and put it on the page, then spun it: I really did look at the sunset and see the suggestion of an angel weeping, holding a bloody sword; I really did tire of showing or swiping my ID at every airport or checkout stand, as if I didn’t exist without such proof; I really had come to understand that the dark of night is as likely to hold protection as threat.
In 2008 singer-songwriter Jonatha Brooke, who contributes so soulfully to the album where these songs appear, kindly described “Pacing the Cage” as “one of the all-time best-written songs.” I do think it’s one of my better songs. An upset fan, by a lamp-lit stage door after a show somewhere, said, “It sounds like a suicide note.” Sue had had a similar reaction. In a metaphorical way, I suppose it was. I wasn’t contemplating suicide, but the song is about waiting to get out of here. Is “out of here” out of your skin, out of a situation, out of town? You choose.
It’s not an accident that “Pacing the Cage” and the opening cut, “Night Train,” are on the same album. They might be thought of as companion pieces. “Night Train” was something of a personal manifesto summing up my worldview at the time. Not much has really changed, at least with respect to the external images the song employs.
Despite its complexity and length, “Night Train” came to me quickly. It revealed itself over the course of one long night. It was one of the few times I have sat down with the deliberate intention of writing a song from scratch, rather than just snagging a passing idea and running with it.
There was a madness to my method: friends in Toronto were making absinthe using wormwood grown in their backyard, various herbs in accordance with old recipes they had dug up, and high test grain alcohol, which you could buy by the gallon in liquor stores in Quebec. As soon as I tried it, I asked if they would give me as much as they could spare.
Absinthe is a peculiar drink—one with a reputation, however unfounded, for inducing insanity, which resulted in a century-long ban in many countries until recently. From wormwood comes thujone, a ketone that is responsible for the drink’s supposedly psychotropic effect. But because absinthe typically comes with alcohol concentrations somewhere between 50 and 75 percent, the drinker is likely to be completely shit-faced before the thujone kicks in, meaning it might not be felt at all.
That said, I had read up on absinthe, about Rimbaud and van Gogh, Satie and Toulouse-Lautrec, all major artists who were heavily into the “green fairy” and who believed it affected their art. So I thought, “What the hell, I’m going to see what all the fuss is about.” I set myself up at my desk with my bottle of absinthe, a beaker of water, and a bucket of ice, told Sue not to wait up for me, and commenced to consume the bitter beverage. I didn’t bother with the extra ritual of pouring ice water over sugar. I found that when watered down to the proper degree, it was palatable enough. The thujone first announced its presence in the sudden, sweet musicality of ice cubes tinkling against the side of my glass. I sat sipping, pondering, refilling the vessel. For a while it seemed like my experiment would come to naught. I happened to glance up at the shelves of poetry above the desk. My eye fell on Juan Felipe Herrera’s Night Train to Tuxtla. Suddenly everything was there. The song unfolded like a dream: a verse or two, then a pause, another verse. It came with a visual, a mental scenario for a video, which I also wrote down and hoped to use, but which was killed by the powers that control videos. (The video that eventually did come out of the song worked out well, and of course it included a train.)
In the treatment I wrote, a uniformed policeman walks into a seedy bar alongside the railway tracks, takes off his hat, sits down at a table, and has a drink. Around him is a motley collection of rough-looking people, mostly men. It’s shot film-noir dark, shadows clinging to the edges of every person and object. He’s there to collect his protection money, which is delivered to him in a paper bag, as if takeout food. In due course he leaves, but he is slugged on the head as he crosses the shadowed railway track. He falls to the ground, unable to sto
p his assailant from grabbing the bag of money and running off. In the last shot, his head is on the track, his eye in line with it, and we see the steel rail from his perspective, disappearing into the out-of-focus distance. I would have cast myself as the cop.
Not a knife throw from here you can hear the night train passing
That’s the sound somebody makes when they’re getting away
Leaving next week’s hanging jury far behind them
Prisoner only of the choices they’ve made
Night train
Ice cube in a dark drink shines like starlight
The moon is floating somewhere out at sea
I’m an island in the blur of noise and colour
Alcatraz, St. Helena, Patmos, and the Château d’If
Night train
And everyone’s an island edged with sand
A temporary refuge where somebody else can stand
Till the sea that binds us like the forced tide of a blood oath
Will wear it down—dissolve it—recombine it
Anyone can die here they do it every day
It doesn’t take much effort though it goes against the grain
And the ultimate forgetfulness of violence
Sweeps the landscape like a headlight of a train
Night train
Ice cube in a dark drink shines like starlight
Starlight shines like glass shards in dark hair
And the mind’s eye tumbles out along the steel track
Fixing every shadow with its stare
Night train
And in the absence of a vision there are nightmares