Trains, Bells, and Lullabies

I now have a robe, but I still wake up in the middle of the night listening for trains. Tonight they sounded as if on cue. Like they'd been waiting for me to wake. I listened. A long wail wafted across the neighborhood into my room, followed by a short staccato horn, like a cough after a moan. The same sequence repeated three times. Was this the sound of warning? Was some lone unicyclist hogging the tracks? Some errant black bear? Or was the conductor just bored?

In the mornings, at midday, in the afternoons and evenings, I hear bells. The other evening I heard a bell song that was the same melody as a lullaby my father sang to me. I always thought this lullaby was made up - I never knew that he appropriated the tune from an old protestant hymn. I wonder if he even knows that he has done this, or if it is just serendipity.

On good days in the neighborhood the bells compete with the trains. Plangent wails verses plangent bells. It's enough to plug your ears with your fingers lest you rip your own heart out and eat it.

The bells never ring in the middle of the night. I'm not complaining, for in the villages of old you know for whom the bells tolled....

But for tonight there are trains and lullabies.

Close your eyes and goodnight for tomorrow will come. Close your eyes and goodnight for tomorrow will come.

Nick Drake

My friend and I are trying to write novels. I woke up at 7am this morning with an idea. I went for a walk. When I got home I sifted through some old CDs and found a Nick Drake album a friend of mine gave me years ago. I played him as I wrote my new idea down.

I want my novel to begin like the "Cello Song," the first song on Way to Blue. I want it to build with the same urgency, octave by octave, and then have the same sonorous effect as the cello that echoes the beginning, repeating the main melody, but making it new all the same. Music can do that. Can words? How do I make it continously repeat, and at the same time always be new?

I think Faulkner does that in The Sound and the Fury.

I hope someone hums at the end.

My Two Favorite Streets

My two favorite streets in Jackson are Riverside (especially the portion that runs parallel to LeFlour's Bluff park and I-55), and Jefferson, (especially the portion that jogs left off of the Pearl Street exit, winding down among the oak trees under the bridge). I try to drive these boulevards whenever possible. Riverside is especially dreamy at Sunset when everyone else is stuck in traffic on the interstate. You can whiz right on by, because for some odd reason barely anyone drives on Riverside. They don't know what they're missing! You have the road to yourself, garnished in orange sunsetty light, boulevarded by Oak trees. Rolling the window down and turning the radio up enhance this experience. (I often choose Roy Orbison or P.J. Harvey to accompany me down Riverside).

My favorite time to drive down Jefferson under the bridge is midday on Saturday, after brunch, taking a friend back to his car that he was too drunk to drive home the night before. It's a lonesome, urban stretch: to the left, the widespread branches shake their rustling leaves and shadow the acorned ground; to the right, the white concrete pillars trestle the Jackson skyline. The added benefit to this drive at this time of day is that you can see who else left their cars on Commerce street and wonder - why? - and to whose late night homes did they scuttle? (Nick Cave provides an appropriate soundtrack to driving on Jefferson under the Pearl Street Bridge, trimmed with Oak trees.)

Perhaps I just like these two streets because they are boulevards: a little Paris right here in Jackson.

La Traviata

I woke up tonight at 2:30 am and couldn't fall back asleep. I lay there listening to the silence for an hour: waiting for the plangent wail of the train whistling down Mill Street, which never came. And so I listened to the silence, wondering who else might be surged from their sleep this time of night to listen to that thick quiet. So empty that it rings for lack of boundary. If you meditated long enough you could tumble into it, learn all the nuances of its timbre, pitch, and tone. I wonder on the nights when this happens, if someone I love is troubled. That perhaps this trouble has awakened me, so that the troubled doesn't have to feel alone. But, it might just be my own restless trouble.

And so I rousted myself out of bed, wishing, now that it's cold, that I had a robe. I haven't had one since childhood. Now the desire to be swaddled in terrycloth is beguiling, which brings me to the opera. La Traviata is a classic love story in which two people of different social classes fall in love. Because of the strict social code this love is taboo. The lower class soprano gives up her love for his upper class' sake. Later she lays dying (and singing those trilling octaves in bed!). He comes to proclaim his love for her. Alas! It is too late. But on her deathbed she, generous of spirit, tells him to find a new love (Just as Maude tells Harold on her death gurney : Go out and love some more!) There is no bitterness in her love. Although her story is bitter, she does not want to eat her own heart. Facing death, she wants her love to embrace life.

The soprano sang for three hours at heights and depths analogous to San Francisco or Cape Town: cities where dreamy and calloused-handed people carved out lives on cliffs at the edge of the sea, and clung there until the gentry garrisoned what could have been something marvelous.....What is it about mountains next to the sea which is so thrilling? What is is about the flat Mississippi Delta that engenders almost the same sensation? At once lonesome, troubled, yet infused with heart, spirit, and the plangent wail of trains, guitars, sunsets.

How does one hone such a craft as singing opera? When does one start? How many hours does one practice in order not only to reach those heights, but also to sustain them through an entire performance? The craft of this specific, spectacular art mystifies me. In comparison, my piddling at the typewriter seems like pale liquid trickling through Opera's dark rocks.

To sing opera, you must be able to breathe, deeply. I bet when you are done you feel as if you're skimming the wide, shining sea. If singing in the shower or the car can pick me up (which it does at a breakneck rate), how much higher quality of emotive life does an opera singer live?

Leontyne Price, Mississippi's own famous opera singer, was once stranded with my father in the Birmingham, Alabama airport. It was 1963, a few days before Christmas. My father was a 22-year-old first year law student at NYU. They were on the same flight home to Mississippi. Weather stranded them in Birmingham, which was burning with racial tension and violence. Ms. Price got on the payphone next to my father. She called her manager and demanded he get her out of there. She did not want to spend the night alone in Birmingham. My father, who had just lost 2 of his heroes (his mother and JFK) in November and was contemplating entering the priesthood, reached out to Ms. Price. He introduced himself and asked if he could sit with her. They had a Manhattan at the bar. Ms. Price called her manager again. Arrangements were made - she was to leave that night on the train to Laurel, MS. She relaxed. They shared some stories, a few trilling laughs. My father spent the night on the cold tile floor, but he didn't care. In his ears he heard the vigor and grace of a soprano: a poor, black Mississippi girl who made it big time in New York, and the world. A slap in the face to the ideology of white supremacy. In his sorrowful, questioning heart, he felt hope.

What can we know of opera singers and fathers? What quiet have they known? What cacophony? What key can unlock their mysteries?

Only the stories they tell, the songs they sing.

Fairy's Bottom

Last night I went to see a high school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, because of the fairies of course. For without the giggling, mischeivous, winged creatures, how could we stomach the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet? Just as penguins are birds who cannot fly through air, they are quite capable of flying through water. Therefore, finding one's medium is key to finding one's flight. If only words were more exact and precise. I like how Shakespeare, himself, seems to be poking fun at his own craft through Peter Quince and the Nick Bottom troope. Juxtaposing the plays both critiques and augments each's foibles and assests, which is a mark of creative intelligenge.

Tonight I shall attend La Traviata.

There will be a lot more later!

I promise!