What Is It All But Luminous Page 10

The Big Bang? A whimper? A tribute?

  A summation? Tears? Reckoning?

  Anyone noticing? Reassessment? Rest?

  A fallen leaf blown through the grass?

  So much for matter. But there at the

  teeniest molecular level, science can’t

  decide if the building block of all

  matter is matter, or is it a wave?

  A disturbance. A cause to move.

  Didn’t I do that? Didn’t I make my

  contribution to the collective vibe?

  On the plane of spirit/energy (the

  invisible no-stuff stuff) I worked

  in sound and moved the waves my way.

  People received me warmly. The heat

  sustains me. The earth may take me.

  I will write in smoke from my slow-burning

  leaf.

  The hidden “g” in benign

  My partner is Sancho Panza.

  He picks me up when the sun goes down.

  We sleep in towns with two-star inns,

  And travel to Macedonia.

  My cousin conquered the fields of Spain

  Four hundred years ago.

  His mind in a majesty

  Vision as clear as Vincent van Gogh’s.

  Kathryn is my Dulcinea

  Thessaloniki the prize

  Eyes that see archaeology

  Are wet with windmill pictures.

  I slay them all with song in my throat

  I am Don Quixote.

  GREECE, WEST OF METSOVO

  Yesterday I went to see The Social Network. There was the star, a heartless Harvard wallflower cashiering the privacy of everyone’s face he could get his computer around. Bypassing the moral issue, he and his “friends” feasted on the roasting of individuals (feeling human beings, a half a million wieners on a grill for worldwide consumption…as if privacy, civility, taste, and discretion had given way to speedy, cerebral cleverness). Power to the People taken from the individual. He learned the game from music downloaders—the taking of individual achievements (special things) and making it people-owned stuff.

  One of my vocal cords has gone dysfunctional since February 2010. I can’t find the desire to go into the recording studio and try for another special thing. It has become water from a faucet—a thingless stream. My heart is in protest. I cannot render to these new people that which is God’s.

  I played the Tokyo Dome last year with Paul. We sold out the 48,000-seat baseball stadium twice so quickly we added a third—the Budokan, 9,000 seats. If Simon had played the dome alone, would he make a million yen? He is a big name, but is the duo eight times bigger or ten? How to conceive of a ten-to-one ratio: turn the pages from the start of the start of the dictionary, stop at 90 percent in—you get toothpick. You can Twist Unjust Verbosity With Xenon Yielding Zoon; but everything from a to t allows a greater tune.

  The fog has lifted for me. I see my true self-worth. My Simon and Garfunkel body of work is an achievement of great beauty. It needs nothing with it to stand tall. Not Paul Revere, Paul McCartney, or Paul Gauguin. The Beatles stand alone. As does S&G. An imaginary painter, Johan van Jeers, would love to combine his work with Rembrandt’s, and sell the Dutch couple. How does Rembrandt feel about this?

  WHEN I LEARNED THAT A CONTRACT HAS BEEN PREPARED FOR ME TO SIGN WITH SONY, AUTHORIZING THEM TO RELEASE AN ALBUM COUPLING SIMON AND GARFUNKEL WITH PAUL SIMON, I WENT TO SWITZERLAND.

  OCTOBER 2010

  The Brienzersee is next to me where litigants have died.

  Songs are sung on the Thunersee, west on the other side.

  Between, I am in Interlaken rock ’n’ roll has done me wrong.

  Split my soul, stopped my song.

  From February 2011 to January 2015 I read 89 books. These 24 books stand out:

  John Muir, A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (1867)

  Michael Soussan, Backstabbing for Beginners (2008)

  Elie Wiesel, Night (1958)

  Luigi Pirandello, One, No One & One Hundred Thousand (1909–26)

  Niobe Way, Deep Secrets (2011)

  Albert Goldman and Lawrence Schiller, Ladies and Gentlemen—LENNY BRUCE!! (1971)

  Henry Kissinger, On China (2011)

  J. W. von Goethe, The Man of Fifty (1818)

  Sanford D. Greenberg, Even This We Will Be Pleased to Remember (2011)

  Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels (1974)

  Mario Puzo, The Fortunate Pilgrim (1964)

  E. L. James, Fifty Shades of Grey (2011)

  Nancy Mitford, Voltaire in Love (1957)

  Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (2013)

  James Fenimore Cooper, The Deerslayer (1841)

  Victoria Wilson, A Life of Barbara Stanwyck (2013)

  Hugh Trevor-Roper, History and the Enlightenment (2010)

  Erik Larson, In the Garden of Beasts (2011)

  Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis (2003)

  Sinclair Lewis, Main Street (1920)

  William Manchester, Winston Spencer Churchill: The Last Lion, Part 2: Alone 1932–1940 (1988)

  Robert D. Kaplan, The Revenge of Geography (2012)

  George Eliot, Felix Holt: The Radical (1866)

  Alice Munro, Dear Life (2012)

  O Jungfrau out my window,

  Eiger round the way,

  The falcon cannot hear me,

  Witness my dismay:

  Out on the balcony,

  here at the peak of the continent,

  War and Peace are tearing at my core—

  The glory of my music life

  is up for grabs and bargained for.

  Was I just a pawn in someone else’s game?

  Midwife or The Man? Someone’s song?

  or Singer, with an insight of his own?

  Set to soar, but made to play along?

  Poet or prosaic,

  Prometheus bound or in flight?

  Mercury ascending or bloody Mars in a fight?

  INTERLAKEN, SWITZERLAND

  OCTOBER 28, 2010

  Autumn in the Alps…eleven-o-seven, a radiant morning. I walk toward the Jungfrau, to the town of Allmend. Breathe out.

  Going on sixty-nine next week, but first—Halloween. Let the deepest sigh of the mind, of the spleen, and the heart between say “Aahhhh…” My natural day goes this way: Herald Tribune and coffee still, toward but never reaching Understanding…the pen finds the paper, it is noon when I begin. Here on earth there is never Understanding, only the specific—two men are carrying a load of broken branches in an olive-brown six-by-eight hammock-thing. The lungs inflate. The heart can’t help but love. (We never chose our nose or to live.)

  Look up from here—

  Itinerant minstrel, mute with awe—offer the rare and the raw. Render unto God what is His….How do you do it, lordalmighty! How did you put those rocks up there? I must give praise for every inch, for sunlit days like these when perception of your magnificent construction is a cinch…ignore the fan letter, Lord, you’re busy, I’ll just lay it at your feet. It’s all I can do to add depth to my life. It’s Bach’s and my conceit. My woman, my children, and You who dropped the snow. Glistening tracks are in it….My faith is my lifelong construction…the cedars, the straw bales, the strawman, the cowbells, the melting, the melting—all that is, allmending. I turn to go.

  Rhythm and rock are fixed. It’s my perception of the cliff that shifts. There, the spilling crevice of my early college years, I was Rousseau, le savoyard. There they spill still. Forty-eight years have passed since those Vespa-riding days. (“J’entends siffler le train.”) There was gunmetal gray in the mountain face. World War II was over.

  Wood burns after the summer’s end. A ten-year-old looks up at me at the cable-car window, thrilled by the Alps and the spill. He wants to know if I enthuse. The Grand Chiseler still speaks to me now, the grays have purples and blues.

  —You dig? I hear. Or not, I muse.

  10 years old is a whip—one skater pulls another along. You’re t
en.

  20 was in the tunnel of inner ferment, mostly unnoticed.

  30 was a cricket on your shoulder, from the swampland, marking time.

  40 was a goad. Do it now. Swim hard.

  50s not so nice. Like a scotch ’n’ soda—a face-off with The Big Man.

  60 starts denial for real—mind control—poetic surrealism.

  70 is the worst of the seven. It’s got badness all seeped into it—no more trees, no breeze, no this.

  80 you don’t wanna know. And yet you do. Take me there, O Lord.

  At 90 it all makes sense. You’re out of your own way. In love.

  Circumcision—where’s the rub? Pleasure-robbing hospital habit. It’s not that the thrill is gone, just somewhat taken away. Come men, be indignant. We need orgasm accounts from those without and those guys with, all over the world. (Hold the mohel with the paring knife there—we must compare levels of ecstasy.) And what about the trauma to the child? Don’t we know, in the 21st century: All is imprinted from birth somewhere—

  O tender infant, infinitely divine, must we feel that post-womb life can sting like lightning between the legs, just out of the blue?

  Health is purpose.

  Acting toward the goal is a verb.

  All, to me, is metaphor.

  Here logs sit in a self-conscious pit,

  all aglow like nouns.

  I place new wood atop. The blaze leaps up.

  The bed alit is food for the action,

  now consumed in turn.

  The verb in the hearth is to burn.

  WHERE IS MY SINGING VOICE?

  I am an old boatman.

  I cast my net of pretense before me.

  Then I sail into it.

  I dreamed I was packing for David Crosby

  for a flight in two hours. When the clothes were in,

  I started on the music, all in my kitchen in a box.

  He said, “Pack the vinyl, tapes, and CDs thoroughly.

  Send it all after me.” Many dozens, the bottom of my drawer

  —it was a major cleaning out.

  I awoke to the notion that the clearing wasn’t for Crosby.

  It was me. A foreshadow of my demise. I have cast

  my imagination before me. The people at my funeral—

  diverse associates of mine—they knew an Arthur

  who hardly knew himself. They grapple with identity,

  like the blind feeling a gondolier:

  The old camp counselor, the drummer, the woman I married.

  “How could we know the same man?” My son implores

  my partner, “Who was he?” Crosby measures Sanford

  speaking to the tunesmith. They all assess the deceased.

  There at the intersection of all their points of view,

  I lie in their hearts.

  Sweet Arthur, son of Jack and Rose, brother of Jules

  and Jerome, sailing home in my little poem.

  “Car!” we called in Queens. So we stopped the game and stepped aside. Now I walk in northern Greece, from Igoumenitsa to Istanbul. A week to Thessaloniki. The Greek economy falling down. Sixty-two years have now gone by. Mount Olympus up ahead. Apollo may have played in this very lake where lately Plato had his country estate. I walk with traffic on the right of the road. Now the game is to listen behind me for the sound of tires, then move to the right and think “Car.”

  Today I lost Duke Snider, my handsome centerfielder. Tonight Jane Russell died. He was eighty-four. She was a screen star in ’54, with Marilyn. I was the horny adolescent, sitting in the back row watching them. Main Street movie theater. Winter coat upon my lap. Scared stiff but getting sticky. That’s how good the acting was.

  Snider and Russell, him and her prototypes. But bigger than the Duke, better than Mantle and Mays, stands the Cardinal, muse of mysterious ways, romance in a newsreel, hunched in a question mark, the great Stan Musial.

  My lover wants to meet me in the afterlife.

  What in the world could this possibly mean?

  Is it “I will follow you” gone wild?

  (My heart jumps to 100 on the treadmill screen.)

  Or is it love gone long and I’m just beguiled?

  Wrap me up in endlessness, sign me on for dateless death.

  Honey hold me in your infinite kiss.

  Be my wife outside of time,

  In a free fall that feels like this,

  Outlasting all known rhythm in our rhyme.

  HAUNTED BY THE LOSS OF SINGING, FEBRUARY 3, 2011

  THIS IS AN ERA OF NEEDLESS FEAR. I SING TO SOOTHE. LYING ON THE MASSAGE TABLE, I THINK ABOUT THIS:

  It’s curious to me, I tell the masseur, that baseball bats have gone

  from ash to maple, in the pros.

  So an infielder not on his toes

  is now up for the pierce and slash of flying wooden torpedoes.

  Why does the talk-show host sit on a chair that’s higher than

  the guest? Am I the only one who notices this?

  The majestic Craig Ferguson and the imperial egos of all the rest

  Seem rude to the person they’re talking to…curious.

  —Anytime you can smash your opponent in the face it motivates

  your team, I heard a sportscaster say.

  Is it a kinder, gentler generation or what?…I’m just curious.

  When I see television medicine ads, the dire warnings of

  fifteen possible side effects scare me away from the product.

  Is it just me? Am I being tough? Why would anyone take this stuff?

  …just curious.

  And how, exactly, do you abuse a drug?

  I don’t think I ever heard Longoria till Eva, the desperate

  housewife made it a household name.

  Along comes Evan Longoria of the Tampa Bay Rays.

  What’s the game?

  Across America concert at Ellis Island, 1997

  Picnic in Central Park, New York City. Beau is two years old.

  I’d rather be in Breughel’s world,

  four more centuries wise;

  Heaven knows why Flemish tableaux

  of the earth are filled with skies.

  Here I walk on the road to Aix-en-Provence,

  where the cube was born;

  Reality worn away for the man

  who chopped it up, Paul Cézanne.

  England had Tudors,

  but the continent’s faith was higher;

  Ask the Medicis about Palestrina

  or the reach of a Gothic spire.

  Give me the dead white old boys’ club,

  Johann Bach and the young Jean-Jacques;

  Picasso can paint their shoes

  and Salvador Dalí can bend a clock.

  David Bowie’s a personal pal,

  but Warhol and him? Guess what I say—

  Peter the Elder paints landscape art

  to steal the heart away.

  Let them all go to email. I prefer the page.

  I remember when it evoked an earlier age.

  Now the madeleine is all the rage.

  Poor Proust—an epiphany in his shoe.

  Soon Tiffany will sell his silver spoon,

  And tea with Swann and me in the afternoon.

  I don’t need a quill to still be heard.

  Imagine a thoughtful word could still get through

  to the textless conversation of the few.

  Not the guy with the sightless eye on his cell phone,

  Nor the girl in a BlackBerry world with a tone-

  deaf ear…am I the only one that’s here?

  I walk in light rain through a square

  in Aix-en-Provence.

  My love is like the lime umbrellas of Cherbourg

  and like morning dreams sprung to day,

  blown in the secret “h” of a whim,

  the way a nylon dome succumbs to Him,

  it lifts, inverted in a breeze

  —it’s Kim!

  I try to be a wor
dsmith and send it in the mail.

  After the salutation, words fail.

  I stumble on in frailty. You are the very heart of me.

  Now I see it was love at first sight.

  There in the kitchen, your wide eyes took me in.

  My soul was akin to yours and to all

  that might be within us.

  Twenty-five years have passed.

  You stopped time still.

  I never pull back from the circle we’re in

  to observe with perspective all that has been.

  In your vast ocean, my will is a ship.

  Even in my dreams I can’t get a grip.

  You have become my everything—frightening

  for love to be so strong.

  With Arthur and Beau as embodiments,

  I can still sing—This is my song.

  TO PRECIOUS KATHRYN

  I found my wife in a crevice in the globe,

  a corner of the Roman Colosseum.

  She taught me a new way to fight

  and how to write the Book of Job:

  display your pain in an open wound museum,

  make it personal—bleed with all your might.

  LIFE ACHIEVEMENTS

  #25 Singing the sound track to The Graduate, 1967 film

  #24 Acting in Catch-22, 1970 film

  #23 Producing, singing Songs from a Parent to a Child, 1997 album

  #22 Singing four hours of repertoire as cantor at my Bar Mitzvah (1954)

  #21 Reading the Random House Dictionary, 1,664 pages, all 275,000 words (1998)

  #20 Making Across America, a TV special of my concert at Ellis Island (1996)

  #19 Producing, singing Watermark, 1977 album

  #18 Finding, designing our New York City apartment, 1975

  #17 Reading 1,219 books (1969–2015)

  #16 Songwriting, singing Everything Waits to Be Noticed, 2002 trio album

  #15 Producing, singing Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, 1966 album

  #14 Singing Old Friends show, S&G concert tours I and II, in USA, Europe, and Far East, 2003, 2004, and 2009