She’s Not There
Poe says the death of a beautiful woman is the most poetical topic
in the world, but I’m not buying it. There are a lot of topics
more poetical than the death of a beautiful woman—actually,
there’s just one, which is the unattainability of a beautiful woman
or man or even a man or woman who is not exactly an oil painting,
as they used to say back in the day, and if this is true for poems,
how much truer is it for songs, starting with today’s and going back
to the old ones and then the really old ones, the songs that don’t
seem to have an author, that just seem to flow up out of our need
for sadness, for the pain that, if handled right, in the end
becomes pleasure. My question is, are these songs outside of us
and do they arise only when our hearts are broken, or are they inside
us already and require little more than a mild shock to lurch into life
like a distraught monster, howling with pain as it throws the furniture
through the window, burns the house down, and heads out to trample
civilization as we know it under its hobnailed boots? When you
think of heartbreak, your first thought might be of a girl sobbing
in her bedroom as her mother calls from downstairs and begs her
to eat something, but “monster” is an apt synonym for “heartbreak”
given the thin line between love and not just hate but the kind
of rage that just makes you want to obliterate the person you adored
five minutes earlier, the one you idolized, loved to distraction,
doted on, were charmed and fascinated and bewildered by.
Once two fans who loved NASCAR driver Jeff Gordon so much
that they dressed themselves in outfits that duplicated his—
boots, gloves, helmet, fire suit festooned with his sponsors’
logos—and leaned from the rail of a crosswalk over the track
and tried to get Jeff’s attention as a reporter was interviewing him,
but the sound of the engines was so loud that Jeff never heard
them, never even looked up, and in a heartbeat the young men
turned on him and began to curse and shake their fists and spit
at Jeff Gordon, who didn’t even know they were there. You say
well, that’s NASCAR for you, but it’s as bad or worse when
the subject is Irish politics, as in “Pretty Peggy-O,” an anonymously-
authored ballad in which troopers arrive in a town
called Fennario, and their captain falls in love with a lady like a dove
and calls her by her name, Pretty Peggy-O, but she won’t
marry him even though he says he’ll set her cities free if she does
and then, when she jilts him, says if ever I return / your cities
I will burn and destroy all the people in the area-o, but the next
thing you know, he’s the one who dies, who falls right over when
Pretty Peggy-O tells him to get lost, hit the bricks, beat it,
amscray. I guess he wasn’t so hard-hearted, after all. So you’re
looking at a captain who’s as mad as a frustrated Jeff Gordon fan
and announces that he’s going to burn down an entire country
and everyone in it if a maid doesn’t yield to him as well as a maid
faced with a classic dilemma: should she remain chaste
at the expense of everyone else or spend the night with the captain
and save thousands from a fiery death? Happily, she doesn’t have
to decide, since the jilted captain dies of disappointment before
he can find his box of matches. And that, you’d think, would be that
except for one thing, which is that the song doesn’t really end,
it just starts over: instead of a concluding stanza that ties everything
up as neatly a festive ribbon in a bonnie lass’s hair, the song’s last
stanza is the same as the first, meaning that the captain falls
in love with a lady like a dove all over again, and off they go
for a second round of failed love and heartbreak or as many rounds
of failed love and heartbreak as you and your Irish pub buddies want,
the captain cajoling and threatening and dying
as Pretty Peggy-O flirts and rejects and mourns anew, the scene
rolling out again and again over the years, over the beers, over
the centuries, the epochs and eras and eons, the geologic periods
of time from the Cambrian through whatever they call the one
we’re living in today. There’s a reason why some of the songs
that get under our skin the most aren’t so much written
as assembled: one songwriter’s ideas and images and feelings
might be his or hers alone, whereas when a song’s authors
are as many as the entire population of Fennario (or actually several
multiples thereof), that means thousands of us are pouring
our hopes and fears into a seven-stanza (or eight-, if you count
the repeated stanza twice) song. Journalist Ted Anthony
writes of what he calls “handmade music” or “mongrel music,” which isn’t
a negative description at all, because our mix of “heritages
and experiences and outlooks and travails makes us stronger
and healthier both in our culture and in the music,”
he says, for “we come from what we believe is a single world,
but it is so many, all existing at once.” What rough beast
sleeps within you, reader, its one eye about to open?
No single person wrote “Pretty Peggy-O” and a million songs like it.
Another way to say it is, you did, and you there, and you, and you.
Cause of Death Unknown
Guy I know was visiting his mom
when she died suddenly, and when
I asked him how he was doing,
he said he was grieving, sure,
but was also pissed at the cops
because they said his mom’s bedroom
was a crime scene, making him
a criminal. Which is not how it works:
another friend who is a police officer
said no, what we say is cause of death
unknown, because even when
you find yourself looking at a bloody corpse,
you don’t know how it got that way.
Everyone thinks “Something in the Way
She Moves” is about Patti Boyd,
but George Harrison says I wasn’t thinking
about Patti when I wrote that song—
I was thinking about Ray Charles.
Guy’s mom had had a stroke, of course;
the coroner could tell that just by looking
at her. She’d dressed, had breakfast,
read her Bible, decided to lie down
for a minute before driving to work,
and that’s how her son found her:
hair done, hose and shoes on, hands
resting on her stomach, purse
by her side, eyes open like she was
trying to figure it all out, he said.
Later
That’s what they say in novels:
a couple meet, they have a drink,
one thing leads to another,
you turn the page, and there’s that
word. Later, it says, exactly as it should:
any attempt to describe what just happened
will come across as mechanical
or embarrassing or both. You’d feel
silly: you might as well be looking
at a clipboard, saying first they kissed
ten or eleven times, and then
he got on his back, and she put
her left leg under his right, and so on.
It’s different in the movies, but there
you feel as though you’re looking
at something you shouldn’t,
as though you’re sitting across the room
as the lovers writhe and change
positions. And do what, really?
Something they won’t even remember,
just as you can’t recount what you
and your beloved did just the other morning.
What you do remember is how you felt later
as you lay side by side with the sheets
twisted around the two of you, stunned animals
staring at the ceiling and catching your breath,
and then one of you said how’d that happen
or what just happened, and the other
said what your mother used to say
when you were a little kid and you asked her
how wars started and why some people
are mean and others nice or, later,
when you were a teenager,
how you could tell if someone really
loved you or simply wanted to use you
and also how you could tell if you, too,
were in love or just wanted to be,
and your mother said I have no earthly idea.
