What Is It All But Luminous Read online

  I BOUGHT A PIN AT TIFFANY AND GAVE IT TO KIM AT CHRISTMAS.

  Aloft in space amid fire and ice,

  on a ball in orbit with a clockwise spin,

  In the land of the loon and of succulent rice

  is the city known as St. Paul’s twin.

  There beside Excelsior

  my lover sits amongst her kin:

  While under the family Christmas tree

  my love resides within a pin.

  That sunny crimson, those lips, her tousled hair, the attitude. I’m a sucker when the sun shines out….No amethyst could tempt her secret soul forsworn to love…worthy of Aquitaine and rainy days that she could tell of…

  I took her dancing to the Sweethearts’ Ball on Friday night. I looked her over: the cut of her dress, the way she teased her hair—she was beautiful.

  And so we danced to unchained melody…just for the thrill of holding her on the floor. (I sang for you when I let them pull me onstage.) We were all the rage in our own reviews that night—lost in limelight…luminous…divine. The moon was bright, you were mine, that sunny Valentine.

  FRANCE. FIFTH LEG OF EUROWALK

  These are the fields I’ve driven across so many times before. The nineteenth of August. The northern view. Miraculous sun. Finally alone, I write to you: Love rules my life.

  A thousand feet above the English Channel coast—Cherbourg. Host to the haunting memory of indigo and dusty rose and times I rode on the Continent…burning autumn leaves in late September…aroma in a biker’s wind. Then late for school, I would tear myself from France.

  And now I reenter the spell—on foot, hushedly, and with reverence for the trance: Stendhal, Balzac, Debussy, and Ravel, Voltaire, Molière, Robespierre and Racine, Rodin, Renoir, Proust and Monet, Camille Corot and the road ahead D87, a two-lane blacktop south and east to Byzantium.

  To be with Jean Rhys in Paris, or to drink with Joyce when he came through that town. To tour with Montaigne and Bridget Bardot, Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp, Azay-le-Rideau. O I could tell of days of intoxication with France: an orchard in Aurillac, curve of the river Yonne, the grass we danced on at Rambouillet behind the king’s château…“Here, There and Everywhere” had just been released…I sang at the old Olympia before they tore it down. I rode in the rain on a BMW by the Porte de Clignancourt. We sang at night on the Boulevard St. Michel and at a racetrack where Degas painted and a hundred thousand French came for each of two nights. I know antique simplicity in the Ardèche mountains, peace in the Midi, brandy and moonlight at Les Deux Alpes skiing with les étudiants…we sang on the boardwalk with Kathy in Nice under the stars in ’65 and used the francs we made to eat. The Frenchman I most got to know was Rousseau—I see him as an orphan boy in the high Savoy.

  I have seen my own life pass in France since ’62 in old Cambray my own Swann’s Way, blasé to the Norman land today I muse: How like Odette was Laurie Bird—naughty and gorgeous.

  My wife and I and our eight-year-old attended a Buddhist meeting with our guards up, down, and in-between. He was rebellious, she was courageous, and I was wondering what it would mean.

  The Junior Pioneers met in Room 306. The group leader offered the image of leaves that fall but return; our son begged to differ—what’s gone is gone—but I was a skeptic in my turn.

  Then I had to leave (to record in Orlando) while the group went to garden in Union Square: I called from the airport to hear him triumphant—he had planted fourteen tulips there!

  Kathryn and Arthur Jr.

  From February 1989 to January 1999 I read 312 books. These 26 books stand out:

  Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy (1925)

  Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963)

  Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (1927)

  Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962)

  Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (AD 177)

  H. G. Wells, A Short History of the World (1922)

  Swami Prabhavananda, The Sermon on the Mount According to Vedanta (1963)

  Hermann Hesse, Demian (1919)

  Stanley Coren, The Left-Hander Syndrome (1992)

  The Random House Dictionary of the English Language (1966)

  Franz Kafka, The Trial (1920)

  Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (1724)

  Jean Rhys, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931)

  Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (1994)

  Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts (1993)

  Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert in Egypt (1850)

  Charles and Mary Lamb, Tales from Shakespeare (1807)

  Keith B. Richburg, Out of America (1997)

  Patrick Süskind, Perfume (1986)

  Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)

  Jimmy Webb, Tunesmith (1998)

  Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Devils (1871)

  Émile Zola, Germinal (1885)

  Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: The Science of Freedom (1969)

  John Updike, Rabbit, Run (1960)

  Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (1851)

  I HAVE PSORIASIS. PERIODICALLY I GO TO THE MAYO CLINIC AND LIVE IN PAJAMAS.

  Then, in 1996, my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. For the second time, life stopped.

  To Sanford, dearer than dear.

  I am your long-lost love, your grandmother, your Yiddish-kite, the light in the old green house, the soul of your early days. I am the tallis you wear since then. You can be the rabbi, Moses Haddas. Dear God, let me be the cantor in prayer again.

  No, you can’t blame the elm disease on us as such

  —it’s Dutch. But the ravage hasn’t reached

  this original hippie sixty miles west of the Mississippi.

  Here under the magnificent spread of a hundred-foot vase,

  I am thinking of the fork in the trunk, an early divorce.

  Trunks packed like trees, they grew divergent,

  poised between the reach of the leaves for open air

  and the pull of the partner*—a perpetual “V,”

  a devoted duality, balm of balance, rapturous realm,

  a remaining American Elm.

  * * *

  *  THIS IS PAUL SIMON

  To my Kathryn

  The beauty of a tree is its integrity.

  Like humanfolk, it’s whole when it’s in balance.

  Anchored underground, the roots are daily drinking

  where nectar of the earth is sunk.

  Up above, avenues of branches are dancing in the air—

  not anywhere but massed in equal weight

  around a center pole, the trunk.

  There in the distance, a spreading oak is on display for me.

  I see it two-dimensionally—

  a plane of woods on a stick, a counterpoise.

  And I delight to see, among my joys,

  how the rotating plane holds the picture as I draw near.

  The picture of an Eastern Dancer—

  a hundred arms in balance on her toe—

  my bodhisattva!

  But now I lie with my lover beneath a maple tree.

  She and I look up to see a six-foot hole in the trunk—

  a gash filled in with tarry pitch some years ago.

  We recognize, we three, the flaws of vulnerability—

  fault lines of experience.

  The maple carries our eye above the wound to the sky.

  (What does it matter that weather harms?)

  Before it, spreads the perfect canopy of green.

  Branches dancing in the brilliant balanced scene—

  integrity intact.

  The tree has absorbed its history. Leaves shine.

  Its wholeness, our epiphany, my love’s and mine.

  Sisters in arms, we lie before the bodhisattva’s

  perfect ninety-nine!

  Christmas 1997. In this holy time of year, I bow before you, Kathryn dear, transcendent o’er your trial of fear. For unto few the task is given—like the Ascension’s risen Christ—to know the Valley and pay the pric
e, to pass through the Shadow and be born twice!

  TO SANFORD

  To slip from the shore and swim in the widening stream

  of our history once more starlit in the mystery

  of the mutual love we store against the night—

  It’s the end of the day, the evening is near, the first of December, the end of the year. It’s the end of the decade, an era of mystery; even the twentieth century’s history. A new thousand years starts in thirty-one days, and I can feel ten thousand years ago—vertigo—accessible today. But my love for James Arthur (expressed here in rhyme) goes way beyond this span of time.

  More than your teammates, it’s who guards you that carries the bond. Who was appointed or self-appointed to watch your every move.

  I GRIPPED THE PIANO AS I SANG ONSTAGE. IT WAS A ROCKY TRIP FROM THE SOUTHERN TIP OF CHILE ACROSS THE DRAKE PASSAGE TO THE ANTARCTIC PENINSULA ON THE OCEAN EXPLORER. IT WAS THE LAST WEEK OF DECEMBER 1999. THE GARFUNKELS WERE LITTLE EARTH ANGELS AS WE WALKED AMONG THE PENGUINS AT THE CLOSE OF THE MILLENNIUM.

  MAY 2001. WALKING THROUGH NORMANDY TO PARIS.

  My son is here to remind me of my original nature.

  Singing is the same. Being fine, holding to goodness

  so much as to be divinely touched, adored at the door

  where we came in.

  Four-thirty at Chavenay, I resume my way,

  my seventh stay on the road to the east.

  I walk for simplicity, to empty out, to come about

  with my sails, to reflect, as a boy, the original joy

  of spring.

  Moral tone, moral fiber, word of honor, pitch ring true.

  Here I walk. Free. In authenticity. Alive to the ages

  of man, to the moon on the tide, the original spin—

  France’s rolling waves of what has been….

  I will go back to junior high, to innocence,

  to see my son come in.

  Like fingerprints that are unique, no two faces on earth are the same. But you? Surely I’ve seen a few of you before, six at least this year. Uncanny doubles surround me. Familiar physiognomy.

  Like a knight, an itinerant warrior, I will lay me down sometimes on a massage table. Out come the words aromatherapy bodywork drink more water and one hundred twenty-five dollars please. I let them have me and go to pleasure, to relaxation, and it feels so good.

  Last Sunday in Asheville, a hippie masseuse came to my hotel room before the show to do me. I never see hippies around anymore, but there was the incense, the talent, the attitude. There, the language: “When Jerry died” means Deadhead, and her mantra was “It’s all good.”

  “It’s all good…It’s all good…Is it all good?” I knew what she meant—spine and idealism thrive on a push. (Have I given my heart, my hips to a slightly older wiser Jenna Bush?) It’s turn-of-the-century transcendence for her; a tentative stance of dependence for me.

  But is it all love when push comes to shove?

  Now she packs up while I must get on to the sound check. “If you would, could you please?”…Suddenly she’s lost her car keys. (I’d rather feel late than loss if I could.) In silence, she burns. I turn to wood (is it all good?), to stone, the adjective, Appalachian, alone at the end of spring, to full-grown antipathy, moral tone turned mush—a slightly older colder Mr. Bush.

  IN SEPTEMBER 2001, AMERICA IS HIT. THE WORLD TRADE CENTER’S TWIN TOWERS FALL. WE ARE SHOCKED BY OUR VIOLABILITY. NATIONALISM BE DAMNED AND ALL THOUGHTS ABOUT IT. MY LOVE FOR AMERICA IS REAL.

  Perhaps if I steal from Thomas Wolfe

  and give him his proper due—

  not the “man in full” but the “homeward angel”

  —he might reappear for you.

  Then see him up there where the Rockies rise, his legs dangling over the ledge above Denver, eight thousand feet in the air. Before him, the plains, behind, the Pacific, stars coming out on a summer’s night, and everywhere the twilight falls on America.

  To the right is Amarillo, beyond it the Astros at play, over my shoulder, Seattle, over the other beyond the Great Canyon, gas fumes and fast food mix with the smell of L.A. Hear the blues parade across the stage. Up from New Orleans into Chicago, see all the clusters of light beyond. Follow the fashion of rock ’n’ roll—St. Louie to Cleveland to Philly to bond the nation’s soul with music in its cars.

  And in our hearts love of the physical entity. America. Identity in doubt. We can’t go home again, so we’re runaway vagabonds, lost in twilight, wondering what we’re about.

  —9/11/2001

  SOON AFTER, I CO-WROTE “PERFECT MOMENT” FOR MY 11TH SOLO ALBUM, EVERYTHING WAITS TO BE NOTICED.

  When Simon and Garfunkel received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award (2002), this was my speech to industry colleagues:

  “I am enormously proud of our body of work, Paul’s and mine. My whole life has been deeply enriched by the musical gifts of this neighbor of mine from Kew Gardens Hills. I never would have had this career if Paul Simon wasn’t such a magnificent rhythm guitar player. His grooves underlie all our music. Think of ‘Mrs. Robinson,’ of ‘Scarborough Fair’—it was always Paul on acoustic guitar. Then think of ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’—yes I am proud of my vocal performance, but the song is Paul’s. Is there any writer in our time with such beauty and poignancy of heart and mind? I doubt that anyone has received gifts to rival the songs he put through my singing voice.

  “I miss that earlier, sweeter America—it was almost a lifetime ago when you imagined us today, lost in our overcoats, sharing a park bench quietly…and now we share in this Lifetime Achievement Award for work we fussed over endlessly in the recording studio. To me it comes down to this: one and one can coexist, or add up to two, or in our case, they can affect each other like electric energy, resulting in this Grammy honor tonight. In the words of Nat King Cole—sort of the door I came in on—Love is the thing!”

  Now the moment I awaited has arrived: I leave my Paris hotel to go southeast across Europe. If it’s one part east for each one part south—then I go to Lausanne; if it’s three parts east to two parts south—Lucerne; I choose two parts east to three parts south—Lyon.

  Dear Jack,

  You are the last great intellectual—lover of ideas. You crave connection but like Moby Dick in a shallow pond, you withdraw to the sea. I, your friend (without harpoon) see your winking eye on the long cruise. I have tracked you for half our lives—from frolic through fashion to father. Like Gleason, you are the Great One, a truly fine Artist.

  Enough of the virtual world—

  I walk for tangibility, to see

  the newest green and the space

  between. I know the life of a town

  is in the interpersonal dramas

  of its people, and that all I see is the set.

  But at Combs-la-Ville, forty

  kilometers south-southeast of Paris,

  I have passed through all the

  furniture. Now an arcade of actual

  trees, a hundred tall sycamores,

  makes a canopy for the groom in love.

  And I delight to sense them sense

  each other, almost touching,

  leaving room above.

  With Mort Lewis, our manager, c. 1983

  My son is my conscience. Mired in business, shredded in rage, lost in a sea of inane flattery….He makes me be a better man.

  A town is temptation. I shall not stop.

  I’ll follow the crops in the field across France,

  entranced by the shape of the land.

  I go with the sweeping broad line

  of the landscape, a man enhanced,

  increased, south and east.

  The zephyr, the zebra, the zodiac and I

  glide on the two-lane blacktop.

  Two twenty-two in the afternoon,

  April seven, two thousand two,

  Montereau centre ahead.

  Forty-five miles below Paris.

  Call the prince’s carriage,
my feet,

  elite among all modes of transport.

  DO NOT STREAM THE EARTH. LIFE IS NOT

  A SCAN. Dwell on the dell and

  the worth of man as best you can.

  Let the shoulders give up.

  Let the floor of the belly fall down.

  Breathe in and out three steps apiece,

  then four, then five and up to twelve.

  Do one hundred steps (or fifty paces)

  a minute till the end of facts:

  to transcend—relax.

  And behold: the beautiful confluence

  of the Yonne and the Seine.

  (He travels farthest who knowest not where or when.)

  The sky is like mercury.

  The heavens mercurial.

  The earth is bathed in mercurochrome

  and mercy is the cure.

  I walk alone in Burgundian wonder:

  to Byzantium still, with the world

  so insecure?

  When books were new in Gutenberg time up the river Rhine in Mainz, in a printer’s shop on the press it read, “Let the Word go forth; a new consensus is born.” Then they spread it around the Continent from Germany to Paris, from Venice to Lyon—serving Italy and Spain for the reading-prone—it was in Lyon where you caught the early train to Cicero, St. Augustine, and all that praise of God that’s in between the page and man, if you were a book fan.

  Maybe it’s like recorded sound a hundred years from the start—Gutenberg is Edison, and I am a man of middle age in 1552. The Renaissance is in decline but these old eyes of mine have seen my own devotions of the heart, like an early master, play a part in the history of the art.

  Now the printer comes to town, unknown. Typeset faces trademark serifs characters italic and apprentice to no man. O Sacré Coeur, as it were, O Font of every blessing plead my lower case above: though I am prone to wander and to leave the God I love, say that I walked to Lyon in January just for the thrill, at the groin of Europe, if you will.