Late Arcade

by Nathaniel Mackey

  We’re wondering what approach an audience would take. Blow the balloons up and rub them? Blow them up and let the air out? Blow them up and pop them with pins? Blow them up, put them on the floor and stomp them? Leave them uninflated, stretch them tight and pluck or strum them? Leave them uninflated and snap them? Blow them up and thump them? All of these? All of these and more? We wonder but we also worry that were we to do this we’d be acknowledging the comic-strip balloons too explicitly, identifying with them, no matter how playfully, making them a trademark, inviting the audience to think of us in relation to the balloons first and foremost, making them a calling card of sorts. Is irony lever enough to fend off what could look like endorsement? And what if the comic-strip balloons themselves got the wrong idea?

  We wonder if it’s a risk worth taking. What do you think?

  As ever,

  N.

  22.I.84

  Dear Angel of Dust,

  Thanks for writing back so quickly. I shared your letter with the rest of the band. We agree that a balloon is nothing if not captured breath. That it contains or seeks to contain something too inchoate to be contained we also agree. That the comic-strip balloon and the literal balloon, the rubber balloon, have that much in common we see as well. We agree that using containment (would-be containment) to open things up is a kind of coup. That putting the audience’s will or wish to containment literally in their hands carries an element of poetic justice has also occurred to us. That it carries an element of poetic license as well has occurred to us too. The tradition of balloons as a sign of ceremony does recruit color, as you say, to the binding of breath, much as music does. We couldn’t have said it better, except we’d maybe keep going and say balloons are in a sense already music, a ritual disbursement of caught or constricted breath meant to consecrate, even where it borders on asthma (if not especially where it borders on asthma), the blessing breath is. If asthma can be thought of as a wildfire, we’d say, balloons are a controlled burn. They marshall caught or constricted breath intimating breath’s possible extinction, festive recruit’s cautionary aspect or address. Balloons are also, we’d go on to say, chromatic festivity’s dark tone, dark temper, so much depending on sacks of air. We’d want festive lightness given a gravity of sorts, each audience member holding a balloon as though it were his or her own lung.

  We’ll see what happens. We’re more inclined to give it a try after getting your letter, more of a mind it’s a risk worth taking. It’s a moot question at the moment, however, as we don’t have any gigs in the offing. As I’ve said, we’ll see what happens.

  As ever,

  N.

  [Dateless]

  Dear Angel of Dust,

  I woke up remembering these words: I plucked a plywood harp strung with fishing line, a crude instrument with rattly strings, a blunt instrument. No angel, I struck out at the world with it, disbursed its screw-loose harmonics (if they could be called harmonics) with a heavy hand, pure payback. I awoke with them on my mind and tongue, mouthing them as I came out of sleep, under my breath as it were, muttering them close to my lips, tongue and teeth, a recitation by heart were there ever one. I remembered them from the dream I’d had, a legible, indelible burst within the dream, not unlike the balloons that on occasion visit our music. A balloon’s balloon I’m tempted to call it, a cyst inside the balloon my dream was.

  It was a dream in which I was back in school, junior high school. I had put off doing the project for my “Music Appreciation” class until the last minute, not getting going on it until the day before it was due. The project was to build a small musical instrument of some sort, either modeled on an existing instrument or invented. I’m not sure why I procrastinated, which was unusual for me, but my guess would be that my prior experiences with school assignments that involved building something, a science project on electromagnetism, a historical shadowbox, a terrarium and so on, did it. Such were among the times growing up without a father got to me most, as the best projects were always those done by kids whose fathers, with their well-appointed workshops and garages, all but did the projects for them. A girl in “Music Appreciation” the previous year had turned in a harpsichord that was much talked about and that went on to win a prize at the county fair.

  So it must have been a kind of dread, a kind of trepidation, that kept me from getting to the project until the very last day, dread, trepidation and, the balloon within the balloon was telling me, anger, resentment. When I did get around to getting started on the project I rummaged around our garage, not with much idea of what I was looking for or of what I intended to make. I found an old sheet of plywood and I saw that we had a hacksaw, with which I proceeded to cut out a piece in the shape of a bass clef. It turned out we had some fishing line, a few spools of various grades, a can of silver spray paint and a packet of small nails. I spray-painted the piece of plywood I’d cut and once it was dry I cut several lengths of fishing line and used the small nails to secure them to the inner curve of the piece of wood, tapping the nails all but all the way in and tying the ends of the lengths of line around them. I’d made a harp.

  It was a harp mainly to the eye if not in name only. I didn’t pay much attention to how it sounded, just making sure the strings, the lengths of line, were pulled tight enough to make a sound when plucked. I made no effort to tune them. The thought never occurred to me. It was a perfunctory effort but, if I’m reading the balloon within the balloon right, subliminally more than that. I wanted it to visually signify harp but otherwise flaunt the meagerness of the resources available to me to make it, my absent father at the fore. Its rattly, measly, make-do sound was pathetic, an orphan sound I meant at some level to rub the teacher’s nose in, the school’s nose in, the world’s nose in. The would-be elegance of the silver paint job only made it worse, more flagrant, an obvious compensatory move that highlighted how shoddy the harp was.

  All this went on in the dream as it had when I was a kid in junior high. I turned the harp in the next day. It was one of the least impressive projects turned in, but when my teacher, Mrs. Keene, who was typically very stern and severe, took it up and examined it, as she did right there in front of the class for each and every project turned in, she plucked the strings and generously commented that several of them did indeed emit some of the notes of the scale. I was only more embarrassed and set emotionally awry by this though. She was also saying, without saying it, that most of the strings did not, which was true. No matter the harp had accomplished its subliminal mission, I was upset as she stood there plucking it.

  It was at this point that the dream deviated from what had actually occurred that day when I was a kid. No, it’s not that a balloon bearing the words I woke up reciting emerged from the harp as Mrs. Keene plucked. It was a little more subtle than that. What happened in the dream was that as Mrs. Keene continued to pluck I felt pressure against my forehead, exactly in the area where the cowrie shell attacks and the bottle cap attacks have occurred in the past. The pressure was intense and, reaching to touch the area, I felt it was made by extrusions of what had the feeling of type, as though the typebars or the typeball of a typewriter banged outward from inside my head, causing reverse-image letters to rise on my forehead. My fingertips were oddly fluent in the reverse reading the imprints on my skin required. It was as though I were a blind person reading braille and I did so preternaturally fast. I ran my fingertips across the text and there it was: I plucked a plywood harp strung with fishing line, a crude instrument with rattly strings, a blunt instrument. No angel, I struck out at the world with it, disbursed its screw-loose harmonics (if they could be called harmonics) with a heavy hand, pure payback.

  When Mrs. Keene stopped plucking the strings the text went away and my forehead went back to being smooth, at which point I awoke with the words of the text on my mind and my tongue.

  Sincerely,

  Dredj

  6.II.84

  Dear Angel of Dust,
<
br />   Thank you for writing back. I appreciate your response to Dredj’s letter, which, as you guessed, was written during a cowrie shell attack, though maybe I should call it a reverse-image text attack. All the other hallmarks of a cowrie shell attack were there, but the protrusions on my forehead felt, as in the dream, like raised reverse-image letters rather than cowrie shells. You also noticed, I was happy to see, the conversation the letter seems to be having with the balloons that emerge from Aunt Nancy’s “Dream Thief ” solo on Orphic Bend, all that business about the cigar-box guitar. Yes, there seems to be some dialogue going on about absent fathers, makeshift amenity and string, as though the first were the third attached to the second, obligatory dues, anacrustic obbligato, something gone before saying but not without saying. You’re also on point asking what dialectical residue accrues to fishing line’s advance over straw, not to mention the other stuff you bring up.

  The implied or potential chat between Dredj’s fishing-line harp and Aunt Nancy’s cigar-box guitar wasn’t lost on the other members of the band. “It’s as though the two played a duet,” Penguin said at one point as we were discussing the dream at rehearsal. I’d brought up the cowrie shell attack, the reverse-image text attack, at the very beginning of rehearsal, still caught up in its resonances and its resistances even though it had been a light, shortlived attack as these things go. “Why would an embarrassing incident from junior high school come back with so much force?” I asked early on, a little bit rhetorically but not entirely so. I really did want the band’s input into the process of decipherment and decoding, even recoding, I’d begun. We ended up talking for a long while, everyone pitching in, putting his or her two cents in, and it was Penguin who first brought up the relevance and apparent relatedness of the cigar-box guitar. “They might as well be cousins,” he remarked of it and the fishing-line harp before noting their implied or potential duet or dialogue. Everyone immediately chimed in, saying the same had occurred to them, Aunt Nancy’s not the least among the ratifying voices, “Yes, that’s the first thing that struck me about it.”

  When I said recoding I meant exactly that. Drennette, after we’d been talking a long while, suggested we leave off talking by translating our talk, letting our talk extend into and take the form of a piece of music, “Dredj’s Dream,” which we would collectively compose, partly writing it out and partly, having done that, adding to what we’d written as we played. We all thought it was a good idea and Drennette went on to stipulate that we at no point allude to or in any way sound like either of the pieces the title brought to mind, “Monk’s Dream” or “Sonny’s Dream.” She admitted, as she put it, that it would be especially hard to stay clear of Sonny Criss’s piece, given its bottom-heavy propulsion’s affinities with Mingus’s The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, thus providing an opportunity to say or to suggest something about an L.A. sound, but she insisted it was a temptation we would have to resist. I’m not all that sure we’d have found echoing or alluding to Monk or to Sonny so tempting or that we’d have otherwise gone that way, but we agreed to the proviso and got to work.

  We decided that if we alluded to any other piece it would be our own “Dream Thief ” and we did end up doing so. It was as if Dredj were the thief in question, the dream of the fishing-line harp siphoning aspects of the dream of the cigar-box guitar, just as we now channeled or alluded to certain melodic and harmonic elements in “Dream Thief ” with an intermittent, subsidiary line running thru “Dredj’s Dream” that bore roughly the same relationship to “Dream Thief ” as Abdullah Ibrahim’s “Sotho Blue” does to Oliver Nelson’s “Stolen Moments,” Abdullah upping the ante on “stolen” paralleled and upped further by the act of “theft” we made “Dredj’s Dream” guilty of.

  Yes, the line says or insinuates, we fish our premises, extend our precinct, our province, advance what sonorous catch we can. Still, we wondered if a more literal fishing line might not have a place in the piece, short lengths of it cut and tied around the strings of Aunt Nancy’s bass à la Cageian “preparation.” We agreed it did but the “line” Aunt Nancy ended up using was less literal than gestural, a symbolic substitute or simply a substitute, as there was no fishing line handy. We were rehearsing at Lambert’s apartment and there was none there. Lambert, however, scrounged around and found some twistie bag ties in the kitchen. He offered them to Aunt Nancy and she tied some of them around her bass strings, a substitute for fishing line that could be seen or said to signify fishing line. Symbolic or not, the twistie bag ties, at the literal level, the aural and the tactile level, intrude and obtrude in a rattly, screw-loose way, in a manner not inconsistent with Dredj’s fishing-line harp.

  These are only a couple of the elements that went into it. After a spate of brainstorming, trial and error, disagreement, agreement, happenstance and what have you, we worked it out. It’s funny that a few times, going thru it, one or another of us couldn’t help referencing “Monk’s Dream” or “Sonny’s Dream” in the course of soloing, something, as I’ve already said, I’m not sure would’ve occurred had Drennette not brought it up. Prohibition carried the power of suggestion it seems. In any case, we ran thru it several times after pulling it together.

  None of the takes were as good as we’ll eventually make it. For one, we’re wondering what it would sound like with actual fishing line and we intend to get some. I’ll hold off sending you a tape, but “Dredj’s Dream,” collectively composed, definitely goes into our book.

  Yours,

  N.

  16.II.84

  Dear Angel of Dust,

  I dreamt I wandered in a maze, some sort of shopping mall it seemed, obliquely reminiscent of South Coast Plaza, the mall built on lima bean fields in Costa Mesa, the town right next to the town I grew up in. It was my birthday and I was there to meet someone, “a certain someone” as I put it, a special someone. I knew the sadness I’d see her struggling with would stir me, the struggle, to be more exact, more than the sadness, a struggle she and I would share. I knew her pouty, dry, slightly chapped lips would cry out to be wet by a kiss, the long, wet kiss my mouth was nothing if not made for. I knew it was that that my lips and tongue were there for, my teeth as well. I knew the bordering on bite our teeth would bring to the kiss was as much what we were there for as the press of lips and the meeting of tongues. I knew she was there somewhere in the maze, in the mall, though we’d forgotten to say exactly where in the maze or in the mall we’d meet when we arranged a few days earlier we’d meet.

  As I walked about looking to see her, peeking into this or that store I could recall her liking, stopping at this or that bench we’d sat on before, this or that fountain we’d stood in front of, looking to find her but not finding her, her presence, a diffuse albeit palpable air, a presiding sense, suffused and pervaded everything, as though, there but not yet found, she was all the more there. At the same time, there was the sense of her as ultimate find, ultimate fit, the “one and only” of love lore, of course, but not only that. There was a sense of some long-sought attunement having been come to, a nestling sense of ordainment, rest, no matter not having found each other yet. It wasn’t some hackneyed business of her being with me though not actually so or not yet so, but it was. She was there as I looked, everywhere I looked, not in the way of thirst proving water’s existence, not patly in the looking itself. She was there not so simply as that, though it can, in another way, be put simply: she was the dream.

  Every so often during my waking life I’d glimpsed or gotten an inkling of agency and occasion run as one. In the dream it rayed out, sustained as never before. Her palpable air was nothing less than aura, a guiding sense that all was well, all would be alright, our not having decided exactly where we’d meet notwithstanding. She was there with me already and I was there with her already. An inner glow, an inner warmth, welled up in me at the thought. It was a thought I knew the dream dictated, the dream an expansive medium I knew now as at no time before. All this was true
and of her it was true. She was as close as my breath, more near than my skin.

  I came upon her in an odd room I couldn’t recall ever having been in or ever having seen in the maze or the mall we were in. It was an open room, a pizza parlor or maybe a beer joint, with a wide entrance that wasn’t a mere door but a whole wall pulled away. She sat around a table with a small group of people, engrossed in the conversation going on among them but my “certain someone” nonetheless, thru and thru. I knew this more viscerally than ever before and she knew it, though she didn’t so much as look up from the conversation. She knew while not appearing to notice I was there, my “certain someone” to the bone, her not appearing to notice I was there notwithstanding.

  She finally did look up and acknowledge me standing there at the entrance. She excused herself from the table and got up and walked over to me. She took my right hand into her left hand and she kissed me on the cheek, turning me away from the pizza parlor or whatever it was and beginning to walk out into the maze or the mall. She looked into my eyes and smiled. A jolt of sorrow shot thru me.

  We had gotten our wires crossed it seemed. She was surprised to see me there she said and when I mentioned our arrangement to meet, my birthday and so on, she said we had left it hanging, with no follow-up, and she’d gone ahead and made other plans. I asked, “What now?” She explained that she couldn’t simply up and leave her friends, the people at the table in the open room, and that she needed to get back to them. She hugged me and said happy birthday and turned around and walked away. I awoke with a sense of malaise that bordered on devastation, an extremely heavy sense of malaise, and with an even heavier sense that something was awry, that things didn’t exactly add up or didn’t exactly fit.