• • •
THE IDEA OF BREAKING THE SILENCE is important in Quakerism. You don’t want to break it. You want to wait for it to stop being brittle. You want to ease into it, merge with it, and find that you are speaking. I think I’m becoming a Quaker, even though I don’t believe in God. “God” is an embarrassing word. I can’t say it without getting a strange, hollow, do-gooderish feeling in my throat. Gourd. Gawd. Gaudí. Mentally I substitute the word “good” for “God,” and that helps. Good is God.
I started going to Kittery Friends Meeting a few years ago. My friend Tim had a very nice, very smart girlfriend, Hannah, who was a Quaker, and she’d gotten him going to meeting with her, and one day he was explaining to me how great it was and how there were some quite nice seemingly unattached women there who went almost every Sunday and I remembered that John Greenleaf Whittier was a Quaker and I thought, Why not go and see? I thought I wasn’t going to speak, but gradually the silence got to me. A half hour passed, and then forty minutes, and someone said something about two stones side by side in a river and my blood started pounding in my ears and with five minutes to go until meeting ended I stood and said something cryptic about the incredible uncertainty of joy. I sat down shaking, trembling, quaking.
I went back two weeks later. Hannah broke up with Tim and moved away, and Tim got a better job at Tufts University, but I’ve been an attender at Kittery Friends Meeting on and off since. That’s what you are: you’re an attender. After you’re an attender for a while, you can become a member, but I’m happy just being an attender.
• • •
I HAVEN’T MOWED the lawn recently because I don’t want to buzz through all the dandelions. My new plan is to smoke one enormous ugly cigar per week. Just one—or two, or three, or twelve if it’s necessary. A huge nasty grotesque cigar, not from Cuba, because fifty years ago Kennedy imposed a trade embargo on cigars—first securing twelve hundred H. Upmann Petit Coronas for himself and his friends—and since then we have tortured and isolated that impoverished country, all because its inhabitants “embraced” Communism. What they embraced is a hope that things could be better. That’s all they embraced. These tags that people use: freedom fighter, terrorist, Communist, fellow traveler, dupe, stooge. I want to forgive everyone. I want to do better with my life. Maybe doing better is somehow finding a way to make people’s imaginations work better.
Imagine a drone. Can you imagine a drone? An unmanned aerial killing machine? I will try. I read that they sound like lawnmowers. Here I am in my driveway, listening, and—yes—I can hear a distant lawnmower. What if I knew that that aerial lawnmower could at any moment blow up my house? What if in trying to blow up my house it blew up Nan’s house, killing the chickens, killing both her and Raymond?
Tim told me he’s going to write a book about drones. A few years ago he went to the Hannah Arendt conference at Bard College, where a man from Atlanta gave a talk on robot warfare and how it was inevitable, and how very soon drones would have software that incorporated the rules of warfare so that onboard drone computers could decide, using either-or algorithms, whether a target was legitimate and whether a missile attack would result in an acceptably low number of civilian casualties. Then the drones would not need any human operators living in Syracuse or Nevada. No human person would ever have to push a button to fire a drone missile. Everything would be preprogrammed and hands-free and guilt-free. Tim came back from the Bard conference very upset, and he began making notes for his drone meditation. Will Tim’s book do anything at all to stop targeted killing? Possibly. Probably not. I have no faith in books to stop anything. You need something more than a book. If I wrote a poem against drones, would that help? Not a chance. You need more than words. You need shouting. You need crowds of people sitting down in the road. You need audible outrage.
I have just reread parts of the article in The New York Times that upset me so much. It’s about President Obama’s kill list. Why is a kill list a bad thing?
It’s a bad thing because—oh gosh, where to begin.
• • •
I BOUGHT SOME BUNNY-LUV CARROTS and a bottle of Pellegrino and I aired out the picnic basket in the sun so that it would smell fresh. Then I remembered my car. It was a horrendous mess—papers were in there, and paperbacks, bags of old things, empty pouches of Planter’s trail mix (“Join Mr. Peanut on a taste adventure”), sand, and now cigar ash. The ashtray was positively Pompeiian. It wasn’t up to birthday snuff. I drove to the convenience store and I threw out all the trash and put quarters in the jukebox of emptiness and vacuumed the sand out of the passenger side—and the old ends of antacid, and the very dirty pennies that were stuck together from coffee spills. I heard the coins clack up the hose and I liked the sound, and I heard the sand granulate up the hose and I liked that sound, too. But still the car wasn’t clean.
I went to the gas pump and got some paper towels and I dipped them into the squeegee water and cleaned the mud and dirt off the edges of the passenger door. That’s the first thing you see when you open the door. I got the car looking reasonably kempt, as if I wasn’t some homeless guy with a decrepit car. While I was cleaning, the smell of the windshield water got to me and I started to think, You sad fool, you’re preparing for this picnic as if it’s a date, but it’s not. You’re seeing your dear friend Roz. You’re not winning her back.
• • •
I WANT TO KNOW more about songwriters. I went to Antiquarian Books on Lafayette Road to look through the music shelves. John, the owner, who is an enthusiastic member of Mensa, says he has a quarter of a million books, plus a Babylonian tablet in storage that he wants to sell for one point five million dollars. His aisles are ten feet high and double-stacked on each side with book piles—some of the aisles are so completely booked in and narrow that you have to walk sideways. John has gotten a bit portly, and some aisles he hasn’t been able to fit into for years. He has an adults-only collection in the back—I’ve bought some racy things there to read with Roz.
This time I bought Chuck Berry’s memoirs, a biography of Kurt Cobain, and a scarce collection called Outstanding Song-Poems and Lyricists, edited by a theatrical agent, which has many hundreds of songs written by obscure men and women who, in 1941, were eagerly hoping for their words to be set to music. There were love poems and antiwar poems and pro-war poems, all waiting for singers to sing them. On page 206, I read the beginning of a song by Mrs. Percy Halbach:
The nights were new; what did you do?
You ruined my life completely; we were making love so sweetly
You big bad moon.
Not too shabby, Mrs. Halbach. John said, “My best customers are the submarine men, because they never get claustrophobia when they’re halfway down an aisle.” When I left, John was negotiating with a cheerful couple who wanted cash for their trunkful of nineties VHS porno tapes.
I parked in the Starbucks parking lot and lit a Murciélago cigar with a black bat on the label—murciélago means “bat” in Spanish—and began reading about heroin overdosages in Kurt Cobain’s biography. Suddenly there was a crunch and the car lurched forward. My head was thrown back and my new Craftsman’s Bench cigar cutter flew into my coffee. I said, “What the fuck?” and got out, expecting to see damaged metal. A young woman with hoop earrings emerged from a big white sedan, her hand on her clavicle. She’d backed right into me. “I am so, so, so sorry,” she said. We studied our bumpers—no harm done. She apologized again. I said, “I’ve done it myself, it’s all good, no worries, bye.” She got in her car and drove off. A lot of life is like that.
• • •
IT’S AMAZING TO SEE the little kids in Quaker meeting, how they learn to sit quietly. They only have to sit for fifteen minutes, and then they go downstairs to paint peace signs on stones, but at first they can’t do it and they poke each other and laugh and twist in the pews and climb on their parents’ laps and whisper and tap their feet. Or they pa
ge through picture books. You can hear the long, slow turning of their wider-than-it-is-tall books. It’s like the pages are being cut with a paper cutter, schwoooof. Then eventually the silence begins to work on them. There’s a Swiss writer who wrote a book called God Is Silence.
The dumbest thing I ever did was not having children. Absolute dumbest thing. Even worse than selling my bassoon. I see the error now. My sister’s kids are turning out great. They were shockingly spoiled when they were little, but now their true personalities have taken over and they’re just nice calm tall young people with personalities. One is at Kenyon College studying something with lasers and the other is an intern at a dollhouse museum.
Nan’s son Raymond is another great kid. He has gotten deeply into music in the last few years. Nan seems to think that I might serve as a role model for him, which is completely wrong but flattering. He refused to do homework and he didn’t want to go to college, and instead he’s in his room making beats on a beat-making machine with square rubber pads. In the summer he works at Seacoast Nursery hauling around baby trees, and he spends his money on music equipment. A few years ago I heard him banging away on a drum set. Gradually he got better. He had a good rhythmic ear. Then I heard him playing the electric guitar—that was last year. Now I don’t hear him because he works with headphones on.
He reminds me a little of me in his single-mindedness, except that he’s doing pop music and I was doing classical music in high school. I barely passed Algebra II and I refused to write papers on King Lear, which I thought was an unbearable, false, vile jelly of a play with no beauty in it anywhere, and instead I read Aaron Copland’s book on music and Rimsky-Korsakov on orchestration. Rimsky-Korsakov really understood the bassoon—that’s why he gave it Scheherazade’s D minor solo. In minor keys, Rimsky-Korsakov wrote, the bassoon has a “sad, ailing quality,” while in major keys it creates an “atmosphere of senile mockery.”
I read some of Stravinsky’s books, too, all written with the help of the overly allusive Robert Craft, including the one where he says, “I am the vessel through which Le Sacre passed.” And I read one of Paul Hindemith’s books. Hindemith, a composer, outraged me when he wrote that the bassoon, “with its clattering long levers and other obsolete features left in a somewhat fossil condition,” was due for a major overhaul. I had to admit, though, that the keys did make a lot of noise. There’s no way to play a fast passage without some extraneous clacking. Listen to Scheherazade—you’ll hear all kinds of precise metallic noises coming from the bassoonist.
I secretly wanted to be a composer, and when I wasn’t practicing bassoon I was at our old Chickering piano, plinking away, writing scraps of piano sonatas in a little stave-lined notebook that I still have. And then I read Keats’s sonnet and realized I wasn’t going to have any success as a composer. I went to Berkeley for a while, and then to France, where I discovered Rimbaud’s Illuminations—Rimbaud is a great sea poet—and while I was in Paris some Smith College students gave a party and I danced with two smiley girls, one in a skirt and one in sexy plaid pants, and I discovered that I enjoyed dancing with smiley Smith girls. When I got home to America, Saturday Night Fever was playing in movie theaters, and Elvis Costello was watching the detectives, and the Talking Heads were doing “Take Me to the River,” and I suddenly thought, I’ve missed the boat, I want to hear music I can dance to.
Eight
I’M IN THE PARKING LOT of Margarita’s, which is one strip mall over from Planet Fitness. I’ve been listening to a good songwriting podcast from England called Sodajerker while watching the latest developments in the Kardashian family saga on one of the Planet Fitness TVs. Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, the married couple who wrote “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” for the Animals, and many other hits, told the Sodajerker podcasters about how they sometimes wrote “slump songs” together—songs written just so they were writing something. And some of the slump songs became hits.
“You’re going to have to face it,” says Robert Palmer, “you’re addicted to love.” I’m debating whether I should go into Margarita’s and have dinner at the bar. You can order what’s called a Mexican Flag, which is three different enchiladas. I think I won’t, because when you eat at the bar you can’t read.
Here’s what happened at Quaker meeting. I listened to the clock, as I always do. Very few people spoke. A man I didn’t know stood almost at the end of meeting and said his wife had died. He was quite an old man, with strong cheekbones, thin, and he held his hands out for a moment before he spoke. He said, “My wife died in my arms last week. I was lucky enough to know her for almost ten years. We met in a drawing class and I remember being impressed by how intensely she concentrated while she was drawing. She drew a pear. We were all drawing pears, but her pear made sense. It sat on the plate. I told her how much I liked her drawing, and we became friends and it turned out we were both ready to love and we got married very soon after that. One of the last things she said to me before she stopped talking was—” And then he stopped. He said nothing for a long time. Then he said, “She said, ‘I’ll miss you.’”
This is the kind of thing that happens at meeting sometimes. In the silence that followed I thought of the man’s wife dying in his arms, and suddenly the long, complicated poem I’ve been struggling with, about how in 1951 Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who was a great Francophile, and his friend General de Lattre of France persuaded the American legislature to supply napalm and other arms to the French forces in Vietnam, seemed not worth doing. I don’t want to know about evil via poetry. I don’t want to spread the knowledge of evil. I just want to know about love. At the end of meeting, the clerk, Donna, said, “Do we have any visitors?” Someone from North Carolina said he was visiting from North Carolina. And then Donna said, “Okay, are there any almost messages?”
This is often my favorite part of meeting. An almost message is something somebody was on the verge of saying during silent meeting but for one reason or another didn’t say, but the pressure to say it is still there.
This time a young woman in a brown short-sleeved dress said, “I sat down here an hour ago and there was nothing in my mind. I’d rushed to get here and there was just a jumble of stuff in my head that I’m supposed to be doing, a little to-do list for Sunday. And then in the silence a word came to me, and the word was ‘unprepared.’ I turned it over in my mind. I wasn’t prepared for meeting. I had nothing to say. And then I thought, But isn’t this the essence of Quakerism? We’re not supposed be prepared. We’re supposed to sit here and wait for what’s true to come.”
She said some more things I don’t remember, and then she sat down, and I thought, She’s right, the key sometimes is not to be prepared. Wait and see. Don’t prepare for wars by having huge military bases all over the world, four hundred bases. Don’t prepare for terrorists by creating a homeland bureaucracy. Don’t expect people to hate one another. Wait and see what happens.
Then there were announcements. A film about sustainable agriculture was scheduled for Wednesday, and the knitting committee was going to be knitting blankets for sale, the proceeds to go for the furnace fund. They’re thinking ahead to winter. Then everyone went into the other room to eat and have coffee.
Afterward I drove to Planet Fitness listening to the song about Darfur, by Mattafix. It’s sung by a British man, Marlon Roudette, who has an extraordinary maple-sugar voice. At first I thought he was a woman. “Where others turn and sigh, you shall rise,” he says.
Chevron discovered oil in the Darfur region of Sudan in 1978. In 1979, the CIA installed a friendly governor in Darfur, and the Carter administration began sending weapons and money to Jaafar Nimeiry, Sudan’s president, who allowed the United States to build military bases in the country. Reagan sent more weapons and proclaimed that President Nimeiry, a murderous dictator, was a great friend to America—the CIA loved him because he was anti-Qaddafi. The result of our years of military assistance and meddling was a brutal ci
vil war and a catastrophe of refugees and starvation. If you corrupt a government with money, weapons, and covert advisors, people are going to die. That’s why the CIA has to be abolished immediately. It takes no great insight to see this. “You don’t have to be extraordinary, just forgiving,” sings Marlon Roudette.
• • •
YOU CAN’T INCLUDE IT ALL. You might think, I’ll write a poem and it will have every good thing in it, and every bad thing, and every middling thing—it’ll have Henry Cabot Lodge and clouds and eggplant and Chuck Berry and the new flavor of Tom’s of Maine toothpaste and bantam roosters and gas stations and seafoam-green Vespa scooters and the oversalting of rural roads—but it doesn’t work. I’ve tried. As soon as the poem becomes longer than two pages, it stops being a poem and becomes something else. The longest poem I ever wrote came out in 1980 in a journal, now forgotten, not well known even then, called Bird Effort, which is the name of a Jackson Pollock painting. In the same issue was a poem by John Hall Wheelock, who had recently died—a friend and confidant of Sara Teasdale’s who produced a glorious posthumous oral autobiography. Really, if you want to know about kindness and poetry in the twentieth century you should immediately read John Hall Wheelock’s memoir. It was published a while ago by the University of South Carolina Press.
My long poem was called “Clouding Up” and it went on for two and a half pages. It was mostly about clouds. There was something in it about the Cloudboys and the Nimbians, I wince to remember. It was a poem I’d written in college. My creative writing teacher, a taciturn but fair-minded man, wrote, “I’m a bit baffled by this. To be frank, it’s boring.”
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