Really?

      "Was he only 73?," asks Richard Corliss at the beginning of his obituary on Ray Charles for TIME. It's an appropriate question, all considered. He seemed, after all, to have been around forever. He was so long a fixture of the modern music industry, so long a pop-culture icon, that he seemed to have been always already part of the scene. It's not that Ray Charles ever seemed "old" per se; in fact, even in his later years, he was perpetually energetic, though admittedly not in the James Brown sense of the word. But Mr. Brown is now 76, still remarkably athletic, still, in many ways, a kinetic marvel. Ray Charles, however, always seemed older, as if here of a previous generation, perhaps in part because Brown's career hit its apex after Charles' hit its, and perhaps because so much of Brown's performing style is a logical continuation, an intensification even, of the sexualized gospel that Charles effectively pioneered. It may be that Charles' association with "big bands" and his fondness for performing "old-standards" suggested that he was part of another era; after all, one can hardly imagine James Brown launching in concert into a cover of "That Lucky Old Sun" or "I Can't Stop Lovin' You." Charles seemed to have more in common with the music of Count Basie and Artie Shaw than he did with James Brown-- or, rather, that performers like Brown and Aretha Franklin, now 62, seemed more like inheritors of Charles' music rather than contemporaries in fact. It also has to do with the fact that Charles became an influencing figure in his early youth (he started as a professional musician at 15), a kind of wunderkind to whom others very much, and very eagerly, paid attention, including Elvis Presley, who was only five years Charles' junior. He was, in many ways, a mentor even to his seniors, a prodigy in youth, a titan in age. As much as he was a product and a symbol of a very particular time, he also seemed to be outside of time, constantly popping back up when one least expected, always seeming the same figure he always had been, perhaps a little greyer and a little less motile, but always there and always unmistakably Ray. Even most teenagers in 2004 have a fixed image of the man, despite more than likely never having listened to a single one of the man's albums: he was part of the North American cultural furniture, forgotten more often than not, but significantly there whether one realized it or not. Think "We Are The World." Think The Blues Brothers. Think of those Pepsi commercials and think of all those film cameos, so many of them featuring the world's most famous blind man driving a vehicle of some sort. He always seemed to be there. To think in terms of a number, like 73, is to quantify an intangible, to account for a presence we'd generally come to take for granted, and to note the limits of a man's being. And with Ray Charles, whether one thought of it consciously or not, noting the limits of his being is something of a cognitive dissonance: it's hard to think of him as having a beginning and ending as we tend to think of most people; it's hard to think of him as being subject to the same temporal conditions as the rest of us because he seems he's just always been there, the familiar object in one's house that no one can exactly remember how long it's been there. Actually begin to put a number to it, and the inevitable response is a slightly surprised rhetorical question: Really?

      Really. Most of us tend to not to think of-- or imagine, as the case may be-- of Ray Charles as a specifically "young" man (or as an "old" one, either). Most of us tend not to imagine how he came to be blind, or how he came to be the figure that he became; we tend not to think of his career as a progression or as a linear narrative, at least not in the past twenty or thirty years. For reasons I can't quite explain, it's easier to think in terms of beginnings and endings, up periods of ups and downs and befores and afters, with people like Ronald Reagan or Johnny Cash, giant figures in their own ways but somehow still obviously contained by time, than it is to do so with Brother Ray. It's tempting to remember Van Morrison's observation that Charles knew how "to play with time" in this regard, though it's also probably reaching for a conclusion more serendipitous in coincidence than purpose. A less-than-brilliant young "critic" once described him as

the singer whose existence resists the trends of history; he is the servant and the slave, singing songs of worship and desire; he is the saint and the sinner whose devotions are hybridizations of formal styles. He is, literally, the voice of soul, especially if, as Arnold Shaw defines it, 'soul is extremely uninhibited self-expression.... It is not just feeling but conviction. Not just intensity but involvement.'

There's some truth in this, I think. More than most, Charles seems astonishingly counter-historical, a remarkably relevant relic by one turn, an impossibly archaic contemporary by another. Indeed, to appreciate Charles' peculiar position in popular culture, one has to appreciate his paradoxicality-- to accept the counterlogical, as, effectively, we've done for decades without being entirely aware of it. Ray was the mess of contradictions that most us simply knew to accept-- and knew how to accept, that is, on a strange plane (to quote from Leon Russell's "A Song For You," which Ray covered so eloquently in the early 1990s) "where there's no space or time."

      Or so it seemed. I guess that's what yesterday refuted. He's now subject to history, as he always in fact was but so seldom seemed: subject, that is, to limits and numbers and such. Somehow, though, that just doesn't seem right, especially for someone who seemed so defiant of tables of probability and rules of convention. He was a professional musician for 58 years, and a hitmaker for 55? Somehow, that just doesn't seem right-- it just doesn't jibe. But it's true, hard as it is to believe. But, alas, what's true so very often is. It's too bad we can't stay in the world of involvement and conviction, in the more viscerally sure world in which facts are merely incident to what we feel and what we believe. Another titan is gone. No, that just doesn't jibe at all.