What Is It All But Luminous Page 3
I light the Ducal cigarettes
that pass between our silhouettes.
Paris 5e Hotel le Colbert, room 22. January 10. The buttresses of Notre Dame are flying out my window. [J] has been ill. His father is cutting him off. We went to dinner at Sophie’s house (Avenue de Wagram) for eight Parisiens in their early twenties. At 1 am they went to Le Bus Palladium in Pigalle to dance through the night. Next day he goes to class, Sorbonne 17e, economics post-university level. He is being bounced. I get caught for shoplifting underwear at Prix Unique. We had a car accident in Luxembourg. Last night he had a 40° fever (speck of dust). I bought him medicine. I brought him dinner. He glistened with sweat through the night—his bed all junked up and cokey.
A flock of birds was passing in the sky.
They flew in two societies.
I marked the leader’s wings in no one’s wake.
Behind them, two cavorting stragglers fly.
I am with them wond’ring—why don’t these
two lovers take the route the others take?
Two lovers—or two wand’ring innocents?
In voluntary nonparticipance,
For joie de vol, for each the other’s sake.
Aspen, Jack: “G, I’m your new partner. I talk. You write it down. You can take all the credit and the money this time.” (laughing, then pointing to the corner of his mouth, confidingly) “Just watch this.”…Alan’s Woody Creek house Lou Adler L.A. Lakers Jim Harrison send my stuff to him…Eric and Tania’s burned-out forest in the Var turned 50 percent new green in the first spring…“G (as he pushes off to ski), on the day you die, think to yourself, ‘This is where Jack was in the third grade.’”…All my life I have imagined that my life is being viewed by a theater full of researchers. A long watch, I hope. The experts buzz at the poignant intermissions. The chapter endings so slyly apt.
Captain Nately in Rome, Catch-22, 1970
From February 1979 to January 1984 I read 133 books. These 26 books stand out:
Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky (1949)
Yukio Mishima, Spring Snow (1968)
Richard Price, Ladies’ Man (1978)
Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark (1934)
A. Alvarez, The Savage God (1971)
Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, Book 2 (1925)
Jean Dorst, The Life of Birds, Vol. 1 (1971)
Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1787)
J. D. Salinger, “The Inverted Forest,” Uncollected Short Stories (1947)
Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters (1979)
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)
J. P. Donleavy, The Destinies of Darcy Dancer, Gentleman (1977)
Gompert, Mandelbaum, Garwin, Barton, Nuclear Weapons and World Politics (1977)
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929)
Saint Augustine, Confessions (AD 398)
Martin Buber, On Judaism (1909–51)
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927)
Emil Ludwig, Napoleon (1926)
Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature (1980)
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1604)
W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge (1944)
Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism (1966)
Michel de Montaigne, Travel Journal (1580)
Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (1919)
James Joyce, Ulysses (1921)
When I was fourteen I lay down with you
our eyes misty with urge,
our mouths in open moan
The sun was big in those late afternoons
swollen and red-ripe,
it filtered in stripes on wallpaper
and wet linen.
—Do you know what we are?
you said
(Left to right) Mike Nichols, Candice Bergen, Art Garfunkel, Jack Nicholson
Baby come back. Any kind of fool could see there was something in everything about you. February 8, 1984. I live alone in the bee-loud glade. My heart breaks daily for Laurie Bird….Necromancing. I have begun to read the dictionary. Z to A. Why not? Collected pretty shells, shaded meanings—vernier, vermilion, venal, veery…How much is too much turning around to look at the people you pass? My brothers and Penny. Cortina d’Ampezzo, we weave our tracks in a snowy braid….It is not given to man to know his needs.
Jack and I in Bloomingdale’s. We buy four pairs of moving gloves. He says they’re for when you’re on the move. Adding my name to the hotel’s book of famous people, I scan through the forms of politeness on the pages preceding mine: wordy Spielberg, formal Streisand, gracious Michael Jagger.
Rolling Stone cover, October 11, 1973
THEN ONE DAY I LACED UP MY NEW BALANCE SNEAKERS, LEFT MY KITCHEN, AND WALKED ACROSS CENTRAL PARK, TO MY OLD ALMA MATER, TO THE GEORGE WASHINGTON BRIDGE. I CARRIED NEXT TO NOTHING, JUST A PAPERBACK, MAPS, AND SOME UNDERWEAR. FORT LEE FOR LUNCH, DOWN TO SECAUCUS, RISING THROUGH WEST ORANGE. I CROSSED NEW JERSEY IN SEVEN DAYS, SINGING WITH MY EARPHONES, WRITING IN MY NOTEBOOK. I WAS JOHNNY APPLESEED, WALT WHITMAN, AFTER THE PINNACLE, FIFTY-THREE PACES A MINUTE, SEVENTEEN MILES A DAY, FORTY EXCURSIONS, I REACHED THE PACIFIC.
Do or deign. Marvin Gaye was shot today. I follow the Mason-Dixon line to Gettysburg. March 31, 1984. Wrightsville, Pa. Thirty-five miles along the Susquehanna….I’d like to know the age of a tree, and in its species’ expected duration of life, compute where it stands in its maturity. I might be walking among my peers.
In size places, a windbreak of schoolgirls
play sway in a Maryland meadow.
Largent, West Virginia. JUNE 15. Walking America, night setting in, no cars, no phone, in pain. Necessity invents. We knock on the door of the house up the hill, and we’re kindly taken in. Three twentyish girls playing cards. Rock ’n’ roll came from their window. The girls were hippies on welfare. We had two pairs of legs in jeans. It was Friday night, and they were in mid-trip on acid. They taught me about the under-the-radar population in America—no registering for anything, no taxes. They recognized me but found their disbelief wrestling with a miracle. What are you doing here? Go explain that truth is stranger.
Can I look through whatever is today
and see what once was Proust’s Cambrai?
“Wherever you go, you’re always there.”
This is said to spoil the spell
of being “taken” by a place.
When I was a boy of seven or so
daytime radio would take me to
pictures of Western America.
Before there was Paul Harvey,
there was Arthur Godfrey
and Our Gal Sunday.
Listening to the national radio,
I felt connected to Montana.
Americana got a hold on me.
I am watching the beautiful light-
fall here at the end of the day
in southern Minnesota. Iowa’s only
a few miles south.
Have I not entered the mental tableau
that radio created for me
sixty years ago? Am I not within
the pixels of the picture here today?
And am I, at last a noble and titled
Englishman, taken by the sky
or by my own blue eye?
Captain Conti shoots the shit with me on the pilot’s deck, the bridge. It’s Friday the 13th of July, ten at night. The tugboats have taken us into the reflection of the full moon on the Mississippi. My inner life is set again in motion.
—Shippers are crying the blues, he says, exports are way down. America’s heyday is over.
We sail under the Greater New Orleans Bridge. He has promised the World’s Fair a blast of the horn and he leaves me, reborn by the rail, as we glide past the fair—darkly, sage. Fireworks cover and christen the eye for the soon-to-be-visible stars in the sky.
So much brilliant daylight is a challenge to the eye. So I start off with coffee up in the wheelhouse. The captain tells me he’s looking for A. A. Brill’s translation of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. It gives him the giggles to read stuff like “Misers tend to be constipated.” His quarters are below mine, so now I must watch my ass.
We are sailing to Galveston, threading through oil rigs.
—They have just invented a directional drill that can reach, at an angle, for miles undersea. So now they can steal oil from the neighboring wells.
I walk the ship from end to end, watching it part the waves. A part of loving is knowing…water excited, diaphanous folds….I have come to know, somewhat, the sight of the beautiful foam below. Now the Courtship continues to sail amid marble. I look for my love to grow.
Looking sternward, rotating counterclockwise in Galveston harbor, a pilot’s boat shoots clockwise into view. Container-loaded and spring-loaded I am at last ready to take a ship. Gulls in a vortex take the eye above the pilot’s boat…to the west, to a bay, and to mainland USA—Oil City, Texas, seven miles away. Now aimed at the Atlantic, valediction complete, we climb onto a sheet of iridescence…beautiful, limitlessness…and we’re gone.
We sailed for a while at six degrees
almost north up the Florida coast.
At ten after midnight, I turned in my bed
and felt our direction shift.
“This must be the start of the crossing,”
I mused, with my ear to the mattress,
engrossed in the rocky motion
of solid time getting longer
the deeper we drift.
ALMOST ACROSS THE ATLANTIC, THE FREIGHTER CARRIES THE MOURNER.
I catch myself in close-up looking into
three concentric rings.
If they combed the world to find me,
covered all my stomping grounds on land
and raked the sea—
only at longitude seventeen west
and latitude forty-eight north,
four hundred miles from the Brittany coast
in the hull of a night-riding voyager,
loitering in the pantry.
Spooning pear juice from a tin,
remembering her love for pears,
and staring at rings in a tin sea,
would they find me.
MOTORCYCLING IN EUROPE
Not unlike Rimbaud, I tend to go my own invented way, beyond fame. I live in soliloquy, and I don’t mind the wolf in me nor all the rugged barren beauty round my shoulders as I ride alone.
It is the eve of September 1984, August 31, that clearest cusp of the calendar. Autumn has begun in the Hebrides. The day has come to the end.
Nineteen hundred and eighty-four kilometers of two-lane blacktop have passed from the Faubourg du St. Honoré, through the Bois de Boulogne, La Porte de St. Cloud, Argenteuil, up the Seine, Vétheuil. Rouen ’n’ onward west—across Normandie, always in sunshine—Repentigny—kick into fourth to the ferry at St. Malo then the Anglo-Saxon section commences: Southampton to Soho Square—I interrupt to go to London on a train, to the art department at CBS, to Intourist (London to Leningrad)—to the bike and the south and the centerline, past Stonehenge, through the Cotswolds, to Leeds, we weave around the spine of England’s Midlands to Northumberland in summer wind and over the border to Scotland…there’s no one in this country, pathetic little road, purple mountains, heather and brown, follow me down the motorway to Glasgow, town of Scrooge and Marley buildings built around the ’80s, empty since the ’60s, downtown Stonehenge, train station space that great place I sit in the sunlit morning among men who don’t work, with the Firth beside…birds gossip in the gleaming of the Clyde…and I am reading Edmund Wilson, listing north-northwest, and dreaming beyond Lochs Lomond and Ness, over glenned loveliness to the serious beauty of the Highlands. The clouds and I are attracted and held in thrall. It rains. Fall weather emerges at Invergarry, and in reply we ride to the Atlantic on a ferry from the mainland to the Isle of Skye. Keen the air, I clean in the rain in a Portree laundromat. Today, herring gulls, ferry to the Hebrides, land in the minority. Uig to Tarbert, across the little Minch. As Skye fades into water, its final fields in silhouette climb north-northwest to cliffy falls.
And I have come to Stornoway, 1984, away from Paris. Across the Isle of Lewis, and from its leeward side, I ride alone to the sea at last. Under a shelf of risen rain, the northwest sun emerges and slips slowly on its way to set. Chastened and enchanted and forgiven again, a silhouette is slowly rising into it.
Laurie Bird, 1953–1979
We both had cotton T-shirts from
Redfish Lake in Idaho,
mine green, hers white.
We had had them from before we met.
At night in our bliss, she slept in only this,
the captured sailfish nestled across
her perfect chest.
In the morning at the dawn of consciousness,
I would nuzzle under her armpit
where the blond hair was.
There, in her smell, was my elemental
resting place, straddler of dreams
and the day,
I see that cotton short sleeve
cut her beautiful biceps at the top.
Under it within that crumpled skinny harbor,
safe again in love’s conviction,
I long to return.
THIS IS LAURIE BIRD
Overdubbing.
Into the heart of Nashville this morning I brought Tolstoy—Confession (1879). Under speckled autumn light, before the capitol steps, I retraced with Leo his search for faith—how urbanity, rationality, and the life of wealth were obstacles in the pursuit.
Yesterday, Amy Grant sang on our album. From out of church music she arrives at the date addressing the singer’s challenge at the microphone—to offer the inner self.
And where is my faith? Has there not been for me a loss in the meaning of everything since the day she died?
Tolstoy toiled with the common man, an attempt to be God’s instrument. Amy came with a student’s air. And I employ these people to come and put their feeling in the tape.
It has become a Gothic cathedral to me, this Animals’ Christmas—an anachronism. Jimmy and I are stonecutters, building a structure in praise of God.
Let toin be toinbee
and let all toins be.
The span of an octave,
a handful of books,
the stretch from pinky to thumb,
I grab five books
with an eight-note grip—
six inches of literature,
two to three months,
the size of a hen,
a season of reasoning,
cut lit for feed,
I read for greed.
syrinx (sir/ ingks) n.
The song organ in birds; a panpipe Syrinx. In Greek mythology, a nymph pursued by Pan and changed into a reed, from which Pan made his pipes.
syntony (sin/ tə-nē) n.
The harmonizing or tuning of transmitters and receivers each to the other; resonance.
syncline (sing/ klīn) n.
The axis of a fold from which rock strata incline (Is it the pinnacle?)
supertonic (sü-pur ton/ ik) n.
The second tone of a scale (Is it the 9?)
supernal (sü-pur/ nəl) adj.
Heavenly
stover (stō/ vər) n.
A coarse roughage used as feed for livestock
stager (stā/ jər) n.
A person of experience in some profession, way of life, etc.
specular (spek/ yə-lɵr) adj.
Pertaining to a mirror
specious (spē/ shɵs) adj.
Apparently good or right though lacking real merit; superficially pleasing
solipsism (sol/ ip-siz-əm) n.
The theory that only the self exists, or can be proven to exist
simony (sī/ mɵ-nē, sim/ ə ) n
.
The making of profit out of sacred things
sidereal (sī-dēr/ ē-ɵl) adj.
Determined by or from the stars
servitor (sûr/ vi-tɵr) n.
One who is in the service of another; attendant
senescent (sɵ-nes/ ənt) adj.
Growing old; aging
sempre (sem/ prā) adv.
[musical directions] Throughout
sciamachy (sī-am/ ə-kē) n.
Act or instance of fighting a shadow or an imaginary enemy
sawyer (sô/ yər) n.
One who saws, esp. as an occupation
satyriasis (sā/ tɵ-rī/ ə-sis) n.
Abnormal, uncontrollable sexual desire in men
When I was twenty, I was crazy inside. It was 1961—a year of extremism, of personal greatness. In the depth of my being I was bound for glory. On the surface, I didn’t know what to do. I went for becoming an architect. I liked their gum-bottom shoes. I had little success in bedding the girls—they mostly represented failure. My family, my home was a source of comfort. Sanford Greenberg was my gold standard. Each morning I communed with God. I was small, but I was chosen.
I HAVE A FRIENDSHIP MADE OF GOLD WITH SANFORD G. HE IS MY DEAREST. WE ROOMED TOGETHER IN THE EARLY ’60S, AT COLUMBIA COLLEGE. WE REMAINED SOLIDLY BOUND IN OUR MUTUAL LOVE OF LIFE, OF CHARACTER, AND OF EACH OTHER.
This is our town, this friendship of ours.
We are the ones who can’t look at everything hard enough.
Let us go back to the day
of the fiftieth year you were my mate.
It was early December, two thousand eight,
fifty years since fifty-eight.