Rumours of Glory

by Bruce Cockburn

  “Well, don’t do me any favours!” she said. “Love comes and love goes.”

  It certainly does. It took me more than a year after that to put the going into motion. It was a crisp January night, and while the year that ensued had seen some laughter and affection between us, clearly nothing had gotten any better.

  “Well, what’s going on?” Sue asked.

  “I don’t think I love you anymore.”

  Pain shot across her face, immediately replaced by a blaze of bitter anger.

  “Well, you better get out then,” she said.

  The next day I was gone. I called a moving company and put all my belongings, except for clothes and instruments, into storage. I called my friend Linda Manzer and asked if I could stay in her extra room for a while. Between Sue and me there was almost no dialogue: no explanation, no conversation, nothing. Later we talked, but more about the technicalities of the breakup, how to settle the business end of a failed relationship. Issues of the heart went unplumbed. She had horses to feed. I gave her all the money I had. I moved out virtually penniless but wide open to a beckoning future. I raised my sights from the psychic forge and locked onto a new day.

  I didn’t care much about the money, though I had gotten used to a certain level of the sort of security we think it brings. I gave it up with some trepidation, but I had God and I had me—and though I’d experienced many doubts about myself, I trusted that I would end up where I was meant to be. If I were destined for a downward spiral into obscurity and penury, so be it. I had always been homeless in my heart. The streets were not alien territory.

  The farm, the horses, and the pets were memories now, each painted with a spatter of pain. My heart and thoughts remained true to Madame X, my grail. She had been a gateway leading out of a lifetime of imprisoned emotions, and I loved her, but I would never have a life together with her. Someone said to me, “The swiftest bird flies alone.” I took flight.

  Linda had recently purchased the old rooming house in Cabbagetown, the partly gentrified neighbourhood of Toronto, where she’d been living and was gradually converting it back to a single-family dwelling. She and I had been acquainted since the seventies, when she was apprenticing with guitar maker Jean Larrivée. Eventually she established herself as a luthier in her own right. We got to know each other better in the late eighties, when I commissioned a couple of instruments from her. The three acoustic guitars with which most people will picture me were built by Linda Manzer.

  Linda still had a ground-floor room with its own shower. She had built in a loft bed, constructed with predictable precision. This she said I could have, so I ended up living there for a year. Bernie, bless him, artfully kept the business going for me, but for a while I was very careful about how I spent my money. I discovered that I had unknowingly accumulated quite a few bonus points on one of my credit cards, and with those I bought a pressure cooker and a few other useful items. Later, in some Montreal bar with Jenny, listening to an all-girl punk band, I realized, in an epiphanous moment, that I could cut my own hair and stop having to put out hairdresser’s fees. I’ve been cutting my own hair ever since.

  I took on an attitude of waiting. Somewhere I ran into Martha Ross, another refugee from the horse world and a broken marriage. We went out a few times, which helped stave off loneliness somewhat for both of us. Linda and her partner, Sarah, proved themselves to be true friends, as did the little posse of people I had hung with through the eighties: the Cade sisters, Jonathan Goldsmith, and Hugh Marsh. And John and Matt, my sources of absinthe. A lot of people were there for me. After a while, they all knew the broad outline of the Madame X story, though not her identity, which I had sworn not to reveal. I kept up regular visits to the gun club. I toured. I appreciated my friends and family.

  It was three years from the millennium, but I noted parallels to when I had dropped out of Berklee, despite the wide gulf in years and circumstance. Both were major life transitions, running leaps into the unknown, and in both cases I knew they were exactly what I needed to do.

  The differences were pronounced as well. This time I was deep into career, about to turn fifty-three. My daughter was twenty and starting to thrive, as I’d always wanted her to, as I’d prayed she would. I had a bunch of decent records circulating among my fellow earthlings, though I wasn’t even sure I would continue to write songs. Parting company with Sue seemed like the end of a particular road, the end of choices made for reasons I could not clearly articulate or understand. There was nowhere left to go in that direction. I welcomed the transition and determined to no longer live in a state of alienation from my own feelings or the feelings of others. I would dissolve the psychic restrictions that held me back.

  I was conscious of embracing renunciation. Renunciation means different things to different cultures, but the basic idea is that you free yourself from the attachments to all the material junk in your life, which is almost everything, in order to be open to, and aware of, the workings of the Divine. Renunciation allows the cosmos and one’s uncrowded mind to decide the next move. I was staring into a welcoming but also frightening dark current, which I insisted on fording alone.

  On tour in Europe in early 1997, it occurred to me that perhaps loneliness was the proper state of the artist, or at least this artist—that loneliness is the penalty for the selfishness inherent in the job and its accompanying public position. Travelling across the Old World, the pages of writing I put into my notebooks bled out of that solitude—lyrical but not lyrics, poem fragments, fears, fleeting love. . . . I clutched at a cathartic countdown toward whatever might be next.

  * * *

  The train is full of lovers as I go back to my room under the eave,

  on the eve of the millennium, now almost two thousand years

  from when the Christ was probably not born, son of Adam son of Eve,

  dark Madonna of the earth —

  and to the earth we shall return, flames of Eden lighting our way.

  Rain crashes in the street like bullets.

  In a doorway lovers press together, everything glistens. The sewers roar.

  Thawed ground squishes underfoot.

  I gaze at the rune thinking hard of you. The stone shouts joy.

  Out of heaven’s wet matrix rushes beautiful rain beautiful rain beautiful rain. You’re a knife in the heart of my life, gushing crimson spring.

  The flower of passion, of longing, blooms against my heart, carved from ancient bone, passed from hand to hand, finally yours to mine.

  Cascading images from Neruda, read and reread (the yellow heart!), drench me, merge with the red rush to feed a sea where I float.

  I can’t find anyone.

  I’ve torn apart cities looking and I can’t find anyone like you.

  When I find what prison you’re in I’ll breach it, kill the jailers, or maybe they’ll be powerless and I won’t have to.

  When I’m gone and the silence remains, me not even a shadow flash-burned on nuclear-blasted wall, will I still have some meaning for you?

  Distracted from thought or intent by some quick flicker of passing light or unexpected spike of pain, will you see me, if only faintly?

  Picture me smiling—I know you’ve seen it.

  Picture what my tongue said to you before the brain and life got in the way. Evidence keeps appearing of the great web of love with which God has surrounded us.

  Love at arm’s length—the kind I can reciprocate without hurting anyone.

  Where are you?

  No contact.

  How are you?

  No contact.

  How do you feel about me? Now?

  No contact.

  When does it become too much and I just shut down?

  I waited as on Circe’s isle, refused to turn into something I couldn’t recognize, waiting for the right wave. When it came I rode it to the open sea. I didn’t know where it would take me. I stood and waited for the sign, never strayed back from the edge, now it’s time and I leap into the a
rms of the whirling sea —

  on the bottom or the other shore I’m going to find you.

  Nothing is pure, nothing is sure.

  I try to picture you. You’re clouded by distance, by my fear for your welfare. I see you as I last did, eyes filled with sadness, enigma.

  I want to see you laughing in the light, each golden candle flame a rainbow nimbus gleaming off shiny miracles.

  For defense: A bullet of pure turquoise to pierce the spirit of whoever would hold you back.

  Tiny flower of bone or ivory, silver setting, pressed to my breastbone, instead of you.

  * * *

  In “Fascist Architecture,” I had written that Kitty “tore me out of myself alive.” The same thing happened with the Madame X experience. It was cycles later and at a different level, but both left me raw and in a kind of spiritual growth spurt. It was as if God were overseeing my basic training. The military tears you down to nothing and then rebuilds you in the mold they want. The fires of crisis often afford an opportunity to rebuild ourselves, to move forward from the embers into the arms of God.

  You knelt on the carpet, crimson and stained

  Light trickled over your black dress like rain

  Your lips were hot and my shocked heart screamed

  And I can’t scrape my eyes free of this dream

  We each occupy the same space/time

  Matter, anti-matter, tangled like vines

  And the awful tolling, and the cold rain outside

  And I cannot scrape this dream off my eyes

  And the embers of Eden burn

  You can even see it from space

  And the great and winding wall between us

  Seems to copy the lines of your face

  “EMBERS OF EDEN,” 1997

  To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/86.

  One hopes it doesn’t take too many more of these cycles. “Embers of Eden” is on Breakfast in New Orleans Dinner in Timbuktu, my twentieth studio album (and twenty-eighth album overall) in twenty-nine years. It emerged as something of a sequel to The Charity of Night. Charity reflected a clinging to fugitive bits of light in the dark. The new album was about healing, and the record is infused throughout with elements from my past. There was a scouring of old drawers for things to mix with the present. As with all the music I make, Breakfast in New Orleans reflects an organic, almost biological urge to produce art from the life around me—an urge that, so far, I have been able to satisfy.

  The Charity of Night and Breakfast in New Orleans are really band records in a way that owes much to the T Bone influence. The band albums from the eighties, maybe with the exception of Inner City Front, aren’t like that. They’re slicker, more arranged, more pieced together, which was fine for the sound we were after. But for these last two nineties albums it felt right to loosen the reins, just letting the musicians play into their muse. We’d all go over things a couple of times to figure out what we wanted, then I’d turn them loose in the studio. The sound is dynamic, the energy high.

  Breakfast was fresh, an enjoyable album to make. As the title suggests, in early 1998 I travelled from the Mississippi delta metropolis of pre-Katrina New Orleans to the southern Saharan nation of Mali—not in the same day, of course, but close enough. New Orleans is a delightful hodgepodge of culture, politics, history, music, and nature. It’s where the vast Mississippi River takes its final turns before nurturing, and simultaneously poisoning, the Gulf of Mexico. There is vast juju in New Orleans, dark magic, blessed voodoo, all kinds of occult elements mixed with tourism, corruption, violence, and eccentric grace. New Orleans music throbs with an ancient groove, mixing church and brothel, African and no-longer-staid European, tribal and cosmopolitan, lamentation, celebration, incantation, jazz, funk, and blues in a modern and sometimes very weird-tasting stew. The magic of the place got under my skin while we were mixing The Charity of Night there at Daniel Lanois’s Kingsway Studios.

  For months I’d been trying to drag Ani DiFranco into the goings-on, having met her at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival in June 1995. Hearing her perform hit me the same way that hearing Bob Dylan had long before. I wanted to put some of her inspiring energy on the album, in any capacity, but she was never available. I suspected she had a certain reluctance to get involved. During a break in the mixing routine, Colin, John Whynot, and I strolled down to Kaldi’s, a nearby café. We had barely settled with our coffees when a couple walked in. The woman seemed familiar, but I had not gotten a good look at her. I thought, “Man, that sure looks like Ani, but no, the hair’s different.” Then she turned around and we both laughed. Turns out she was driving back to New York after finishing a record of her own in Austin.

  “Well,” she said, “I guess I’m supposed to be singing on your album!” We returned posthaste to the studio, and Ani added distinctive and luscious harmonies to what Jonatha Brooke had done on “Get Up Jonah.” It was a gift. It would have been a perfect meeting of spirits, except I had to play the more or less finished version of “Birmingham Shadows” for her. She was not aware of the song until that moment. I got all shy and tongue-tied at the end of it. I said, “There it is—it’s yours.” Then I thought that sounded like there was some obligation attached to it, which there was not, so I added, “Well, not yours exactly, it’s mine, but . . .” and I trailed off. It felt inappropriately intimate to be standing there while she listened to this declaration of admiration. I felt embarrassed, exposed. I immediately regretted having inflicted the awkwardness of the moment on her. She went on her way. The song remained, as did “Get Up Jonah,” significantly stronger for her presence in it.

  I woke up thinking about Turkish drummers

  It didn’t take long—I don’t know much about Turkish drummers —

  But it made me think of Germany and the guy who sold me cigarettes

  Who’d been in the Afghan secret police

  Who made the observation

  That it’s hard

  To live

  Then I was reminded of the proprietor of a Vietnamese

  restaurant in Quebec who used to be head of the secret police

  in Da Nang—and it occurred to me I was thinking about

  all this stuff to keep from thinking about something else. . . .

  Isn’t that just what secret police are all about???

  Somebody stands in a window

  Watches the river roll

  Trains rumble in the foreground

  With the weight of approaching dawn

  Flames from the refinery

  Rise broken, red and riveting

  And the high vault of heaven

  Looks far away and cold

  There’s howling in the factory yard

  There’s pounding in my head

  I’m swollen up with unshed tears

  Bloated like the dead. . . .

  Blood and ashes—time burning

  On the skyline dark against the stars

  A solitary horseman—waiting

  Lashed to the wheel

  Whipping into the storm

  Get up, Jonah

  It’s your time to be born

  “GET UP JONAH,” 1995

  To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/87.

  My social skills served me better in the greener and cooler wilds of the northeastern United States. In June 1996 I played Ben & Jerry’s One World, One Heart Festival near Warren, Vermont. A woman had written to me in advance of the event, introducing herself and inquiring whether I might have a chance to meet up. In a rare instance of postal responsiveness, I wrote back saying, “Why not?” There was no sense in those letters that either of us was looking for a date. After my set, word came backstage that Sally Sweetland was asking for me. I walked over to the gate and met the painter, a fit blonde of about forty, and her five-year-old son, Carson. There was a spark between Sally and me, for certain, and though we both chose to ignore it, neither of us forgot it.

  I remembered it well enough that in
the summer of the following year—after the relationships I had been in, both the actual and the unrequited, were as behind me as they would get—I wrote to her again. Why had I kept her address? Some unexamined impulse, some hunch. This time, when we met in Burlington, it was a date, the first of many. In a few months I was in a relationship again. Getting to know, and letting myself be known by, Carson was a new challenge. I made an effort to be kid-friendly. The gap between me and my inner child was such that the effort felt somewhat artificial, but soon enough a comfort zone presented itself and there we resided. In the process the gap may have shortened by a tiny increment, just as my psychic doorway to the outside world was cracking open wider.

  Slid out of my dreams like a baby out of the nurse’s hands

  Onto the hard floor of day

  I’d been wearing OJ’s gloves and I couldn’t get them off

  It was too early but I couldn’t sleep

  Showered and dressed, stepped out into the heat

  The parrot things on the porch next door

  Announced my arrival on Chartres Street

  With their finest rendition of squealing brakes

  Down in Kaldi’s café the newspaper headlines promised new revelations

  About Prince Charles’s Amex account

  A morose youth in old-time Austrian drag

  Stared past his mustache at the floor

  And last night’s punks and fetish kids

  All tattoos and metal bits

  And in the other corner (wearing the white trunks)

  Today’s tourists already sweating

  Deep in the city of the saints and fools

  Pearls before pigs and dung become jewels

  I sit down with tigers, I sit down with lambs

  None of them know who exactly I am

  I’ve got this thing in my heart

  I must give you today

  It only lives when you

  Give it away

  Languid mandala of the ceiling fan

  Teases the air like a slow stroking hand

  Study the faces, study the cards

  Study the shadow creeping over the yard

  I’ve got this thing in my heart