Rumours of Glory

by Bruce Cockburn

  It’s worth noting that Ibissa, unlike most villages in the region, is home to a spring, which fountains out of the ground near the bottom of the cliff, becomes a stream, winds through a lush, cultivated area, and flows past the sloping, rubbled sides of the little canyon and the clustered houses before running on downhill to disappear into the beige blotter of the desert. We asked the chief if we could film the spring itself, a sacred place. He thought about it for a while and consulted with his peers. In the end they approved, and we were led to the spot. As I sat beside the clear pool I felt the spirit of the place, an energy that was soft and benign. Later I remarked on the presence of this spirit to Chief Coulibaly. He said there was once a time when they would perform an annual sacrifice of a lamb to the spirit of the spring.

  “But that was in the old days,” he said, “before we had the Faith. We don’t do that anymore. Now we only sacrifice a chicken.”

  A couple of hundred yards from the town’s very public latrine (rarely used by the people of Ibissa; it was most likely built to please some foreign NGO) is a large livestock trough, fed by a deep well punched hundreds of feet down to the water table. The pump is powered by a jewel-like array of photoelectric cells that shines sapphire behind a chain-link fence high enough to keep the goats from destroying it. Years earlier, on the orders of some past president, area villages had each received one of these solar water systems. All but Ibissa’s had ceased to function, as the development scheme that put the things in did not include instruction in their use and maintenance. Our hosts, however, sent a villager to the city to receive the training necessary to maintain the pump. That man had died, but he passed his knowledge on to a successor, who now lived in a little shack close by, as Keeper of the Well. The villagers collected a modest rent from their traditional foes, the Peul, whose passing herds of cattle and sheep depended on the precious water.

  I was constantly dazzled by images of daily life: women grinding millet, three to a big mortar, pounding in sequence with huge pestles and singing to the rhythm; gardeners, both men and women, hoeing in the heat behind living fences of dense thornbushes; the goatherd guiding his flock down from the heights by means of coded whistles; deer hunters gathered in the main pathway, mixing gunpowder to load into homemade flintlock rifles behind stone bullets; the complete absence of modern dress. All of it, especially juxtaposed with the crystalline solar array, played into an end-of-the-world feeling I couldn’t shake the whole time we were in Mali. In the ever-expanding desert sands surrounding Ibissa, I envisioned a planetary future bleak but inevitable. Some would be lucky, like these Dogon villagers, who were doing all right. But overall, water and food for the swelling legions of the world’s poor continue to run out, which paints a grim picture for everyone.

  Working with USC Canada and USC Mali, the villagers—reluctantly at first—started growing new crops suited to the increasingly harsh conditions of the region. The old chief told us that when he was a boy, dense forests had thrived in and around his village, and lions, antelopes, and elephants had roamed nearby. Everything had been green, trees all up and down the cliffs, but the villagers had cut it all for firewood and building material. Now the trees are gone, along with much of the wildlife.

  For the past two decades, however, the people have been planting trees and rotating crops to retain soils and nutrients, as well as maintaining gene banks of locally adapted seeds. The Dogon of Ibissa and people in a few other regions of Mali have successfully begun to reverse the desertification that threatens their existence. It’s a lesson for all of us, as vast expanses of once arable land are lost across the planet to industrial agriculture, soil erosion, and excessive pesticide use. Time is running out and we are, whether we like it or not, in this together. Taking care of this one small corner of the earth matters in Mali, just as it matters everywhere.

  The dry heat continued unabated, so we didn’t suffer from mosquitoes, but by night, enormous tropical cockroaches came up from inside the latrines at the USC house, where they found shade and humidity during the day’s heat. We happened to arrive at the beginning of the season of the Harmattan, a strong trade wind that fills the air with fine sand from a thousand miles away and carries it on for a thousand more. The Harmattan is associated with seasonal epidemics of meningococcal meningitis, which have impacted the Sahel region—the “meningitis belt”—of Africa for more than a century. None of us contracted the disease, but while we were in the region the air was constantly hazy. Vestiges of trees, dried up and dead, alongside thick-trunked baobabs that looked as if they were dead even when they weren’t, and an enormous space framing a throbbing orange sun—all added to a surreal landscape and stirred the seeking soul. It was the vista of a dying planet, and we used it, fittingly, as a backdrop to film a video on the side for my song “Last Night of the World.”

  Thoughts of the coming millennium, and the media saturation of doom-laden speculations about what it might bring, had conjured the song. It had little directly to do with the Sahara, but the atmosphere of Mali offered a perfect frame in which to hang it. The song’s refrain was inadvertently suggested by Sam Phillips while we were on tour together. One night after a show we took a walk around some town. I was lugging the shoulder bag that I generally carted around, loaded with notebook, pens, flashlight, knife, energy bars, gaffer tape, water, all sorts of stuff.

  “What are you carrying in that thing anyway?” Sam asked me.

  “Everything I need for the apocalypse,” I told her.

  She looked at me and stopped, hands on hips, eyebrow raised quizzically. “What do you need for the apocalypse,” she asked, “besides champagne and a couple of glasses?”

  I’m sipping Flor de Caña and lime juice, it’s 3 A.M.

  Blow a fruit fly off the rim of my glass

  The radio’s playing Superchunk and the Friends of Dean Martinez

  Midnight it was bike tires whacking the potholes

  Milling humans’ shivering energy glow

  Fusing the spaces between them with bar-throb bass and laughter

  If this were the last night of the world

  What would I do?

  What would I do that was different

  Unless it was champagne with you?

  I learned as a child not to trust in my body

  I’ve carried that burden through my life

  But there’s a day when we all got to be pried loose

  If this were the last night of the world

  What would I do?

  What would I do that was different

  Unless it was champagne with you?

  I’ve seen the flame of hope among the hopeless

  And that was truly the biggest heartbreak of all

  That was the straw that broke me open

  If this were the last night of the world

  What would I do?

  What would I do that was different

  Unless it was champagne with you?

  “LAST NIGHT OF THE WORLD,” 1998

  To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/90.

  What I brought home from Mali, among other things, was a sense that, for all the historical continuity that was evident, I was looking at the future. Small, desertified villages were emptying as young people abandoned increasingly harsh lives in response to the seductive call of the city. They were looking for gadgets and money and the easier life that a new mythology told them were out there, but they were leaving behind the ancient knowledge required to live in community on the edge of the desert. With some notable exceptions, most of the people in the villages we visited were children or middle-aged and older. Teens and twentysomethings had migrated elsewhere. At the other end of the exodus (which is exactly what the villagers call it) are the shantytowns that surround Bamako, where the young people wash up like so much flotsam. Insecurity is rife. Maybe you’ll get a job, maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll get money, maybe you won’t, most likely you won’t. Poverty becomes endemic, struggle the norm. Desertification in Mali pro
vided a clear window into one possible global future.

  I get a similar feeling when thinking about the tar sands in northern Alberta, an energy boondoggle that’s carving the wastes of Mordor out of what once was beautiful woodland. The mining and processing of tar sands are an attack on ecosystems not only in Canada, but also wherever the thousands of miles of oil pipeline go. The pipes will inevitably fail and leak (if they’re not sabotaged) as the project grinds on. The massive tanker vessels to which the pipelines lead will sooner or later spill their contents. Then there’s the burning of fossil fuels. The tar sands are but one link in a chain of interconnected crises, a hundredth monkey of planetary destruction.

  Activist and author Bill McKibben calls the Alberta tar sands the world’s biggest “carbon bomb” that is still left in the ground. There are many other carbon bombs, including deforestation in the Amazon basin, the world’s largest carbon sink. The Amazon is essential to balance the overflow of carbon we’re pumping into the atmosphere, yet Amazon rain forests are falling and burning (another carbon contributor) faster than ever in history. Wealthy nations and people, those contributing the most to this mess, don’t seem to be as alarmed as the situation might merit, maybe because we don’t live where the impacts are directly felt . . . yet. Everybody in Canada, for instance, in a sense lives in Bamako—the moist, subtropical capital, reasonably well equipped, in a landscape that is mostly desert. But the desert is catching up, and there’s no way to outrun it. We have to turn and stand and defend our land, our atmosphere, our children, from the elemental demon our hubris has loosed. We have to live like the Dogon, who are humbly planting the future.

  At the time of our trip, Mali was one of the rare countries in Africa from which war was virtually absent. It’s true that there was an ongoing Tuareg rebellion against the central government, whose attempt at modernization was forcing them to abandon their traditional ways, but it was small and localized in a remote part of the country, and seemed then to be almost over. It had to have been of greater import than it seemed, as it became the excuse for a military coup in 2012, which created a wave of instability that gave the rebellious groups an edge. They were joined by hard-core Islamists, who quickly seized control of the movement’s direction. Timbuktu and Douentza became scenes of wanton destruction of historical artifacts, and of violent and repressive attempts to impose the fundamentalists’ interpretation of Sharia law. A year later the French military intervened and sent most of the militants scurrying, but a difficult life in the Sahel had been made harder, and it seemed there would be no turning back from that.

  Not unexpectedly, I brought home from Mali the makings of a song, a poem of the moment. The sands that surround us, metaphoric and literal, will not wait around. It’s a law. The hourglass trickles; deserts grow. Everything is temporal. When the Harmattan blows, we really do choke on the dust of fallen empires. Peoples have come and gone throughout human history, yet in Mali, marginal as life might be, there is a promise of hope, as the herders I saw were roaming the Sahel as their ancestors did seven thousand years ago, when it was grassland. Like most people of the earth, they have always lived in the present, and I will honour that in this way: if there’s something you need from me, get it now.

  There’s a black and white crow

  on the back of a two-toned sheep

  in a field of broken yellow stalks

  below looming cliffs.

  High above the plains

  little grey houses blend

  with giant jagged boulders

  and pale weathered stumps.

  Life in the ghost of the bush.

  Wind whips the acacias and strange forked palms

  That cluster around the water hole

  Suddenly, out of the blowing sand

  A milk-white camel appears.

  Turbaned rider, blue robe billowing,

  bounces with the shambling trot;

  wears a sword and a rifle on his back,

  and hanging from his neck, a transistor radio. . . .

  You blink and like ghosts, they’re gone

  Under the wan disc of sand-masked sun

  A woman grins—spits expertly

  Into the path of a struggling black beetle

  Six feet away

  Hoists her water bucket onto her head

  And strides off up the trail. . . .

  Sun a steel ball glowing

  Behind endless blowing sand

  Sun a steel ball glowing

  Dust of fallen empires slowly flowing through my hands

  Use me while you can

  Pearl held in black fingers

  Is the moon behind dry trees

  Pearl held in black fingers

  Bird inside the rib cage is beating to be free

  Use me while you can

  I’ve had breakfast in New Orleans

  Dinner in Timbuktu

  I’ve lived as a stranger in my own house, too

  Dark hand waves in lamplight

  Cowrie shell patterns change

  And nothing will be the same again

  Bullet in a sandstorm

  Looking for a place to land

  Bullet in a sandstorm

  Full heart beats an empty one

  In the deck they dealt to man

  Use me while you can

  “USE ME WHILE YOU CAN,” 1998

  To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/91.

  21

  By now billions of people have seen the images, in videos and photos, of the second plane, a passenger jet banking hard at 466 miles an hour, appearing diminutive against the massive Manhattan skyscraper into which it disappears, spilling fountains of flame out the opposite side and spitting debris all the way to Brooklyn. The building’s adjacent twin was already belching fire and slate-grey smoke from its upper floors, where the first plane went in. The second plane dissolved the theory, which lasted all of seventeen minutes, that on a beautiful September 11, 2001, at 8:46 A.M., the North Tower of the World Trade Center was hit accidentally.

  From the street a thousand feet below, or from perches in nearby office towers, but mostly on television, people gazed in horror at the grim spectacle of flames engulfing the upper sections of two of the world’s tallest and most iconic buildings. Closer inspection—and many cameras were pointed at the Manhattan skyline that day, making it a tragedy that unfolded in real time across the globe—divulged human beings clinging to the sills of broken windows, fruitlessly waving garments to summon rescue, desperate on manmade cliffs as fire and smoke pumped heat into and sucked oxygen out of the upper floors that had not already been vaporized by the fully fueled passenger jets. More than two hundred of these souls would eventually jump, not choosing to die but choosing how to die. As almost everyone in the world knows, after being skewered by jets, both of the 110-story World Trade Center skyscrapers imploded and disappeared into the air and onto the streets of lower Manhattan. The nearly 3,000 people who died on September 11—including 227 passengers and 19 hijackers on four airplanes (one of which was piloted into the Pentagon, killing 125 people in that building, and another of which crashed in a Pennsylvania field, killing all 44 on board)—constitute the highest death count of any foreign attack on U.S. soil.

  On the morning of 9/11 I was at the house I rented on Rue de Bullion in Montreal, loading my van for a visit with Sally Sweetland in Vermont. The phone rang just before 9 A.M., as I was about to lock my front door. It was Sally.

  “You’d better turn on CNN,” she said.

  I switched on the tube just in time to see the second plane hit. I thought, “They’re going to close the border. I’d better get down there right now.” If I was going to be stuck on one side or the other, I wanted to be on the U.S. side, with my girlfriend and her son.

  I jumped in the van and headed south on Autoroute 15 as fast as I could go. The American border guards seemed to be in a state of shock, dazed and reeling. Men in body armour with straining dogs inspected commercial vehicles, b
ut disconsolately, as if they were heartbroken. The anger that would surely come had not yet materialized. I approached the guard at a booth. He looked tired, worried.

  “Man, I’m so sorry.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “Where are you going?” I told him, and he waved me on.

  My instinct about the border was correct: they closed it the next day. It remained closed for a few days, and for a long time afterward it remained difficult to cross. Even leaving the States, you had to go through an inspection by U.S. Border Patrol officers before they’d let you out of the country. You’d be required to pull over into a special lane, at which point they’d grill you about where you had been and why. Once in a while they’d do a cursory search of my van. I didn’t fit any sort of profile, so they never really went to town on me, though I saw other vehicles rifled with an earnest rigour.

  By the time I got to Sally’s place in Waitsfield, the towers had fallen and the TV coverage had acquired a glossy sheen, with stirring theme music and dramatic graphics, as if the video footage didn’t offer drama enough. During the ensuing days Sally and I kept tuning in, along with everyone else, watching the planes and the flames, again and again, morbidly fascinated by the literal height of human ingenuity, and hubris, crashing to the ground in free-falling pyres. In slow motion, each tower left in its wake a column of smoke, as if a burnt offering to the demon lords of empire.

  It seemed clear that the long-running assumption of safety that most Americans carried around with them had been forever shattered. The further erosion of this security—made manifest in the subsequent adoption of a permanent war footing and a metastasizing police-state mentality—represents one of the greatest ongoing losses suffered by U.S. society that day.

  I wrote “Put It in Your Heart” more than two months after 9/11, and it was presented to the world in 2003 on the album You’ve Never Seen Everything. The song is a response to that awful day. My initial reaction was that it would be pathetic to address such an event in a song. I felt impotent having no quick response to offer, and the form didn’t seem as though it would be up to the task—an assumption confirmed by the various offerings showing up in the weeks following the attack. One day, back in Montreal, I was attempting to meditate, following instruction from my yoga teacher. As I sat and let thoughts and images rise to the surface of consciousness, the phrase “put it in your heart” floated past. It was something another teacher, Marc Bregman, with whom I do dream analysis work, had said a short time before. He was offering a means of facing the buried sources of pain that we were unearthing through the work. I realized that the concept could apply just as well to emotional pain from outside sources. Without thinking only of 9/11, I began to put images and feelings together, and the song took shape. I rethought my original reaction to the tragedy. Maybe, to put such an atrocity into perspective, only art would do. Music is my art. I would sing.