Royal Ruminations

      Oh, it's been a peculiar several weeks, with aspects of the Not-So-Good Doctor's life flying about like furniture in a Leonard Cohen video.   (That's probably appropriate since I've been lifting my glass quite a bit lately to the awful truth that you can't reveal to the ears of youth.)   But here I am, at long last, returning to update this blog after being awake for a day and more, thinking I really ought to though I can't honestly say I feel much like bothering.   This blog, however, has been left to gather weeds, and I should tend to it, so here I am, treating myself to the rare indulgence of drinking Crown Royal in the morning (out of the exact same glass as pictured at right) and smoking enough cigarettes to qualify me for inclusion in a John Lee Hooker song, ironically enough not "Serves You Right To Suffer." The songs of Curtis Mayfield are pumping through the speakers, unfortunately covered by a mixed bag of artists from Bruce Springsteen to Lenny Kravitz, of which the highlights are Steve Winwood's breezy "It's All Right," B.B. King's punchy "The Woman's Got Soul," and -- if only for the song and not the version-- (gulp, shudder, gasp) Rod Stewart's hackneyed, and "unplugged," version of the mercifully untarrable "People Get Ready."  

People get ready there's a train comin'
You don't need no baggage, just get on board
All you need is faith to hear the diesels hummin'
You don't need no ticket, just thank the Lord.

There's something so rich and haunting about the song that even Rod's sulphurous stink doesn't attach itself permanently to it, which unfortunately one can't say of his vile versions of Van Morrison's "Have I Told You Lately" or Robbie Robertson's "Broken Arrow" or Tom Waits' "Downtown Train," fine songs all.   And, yes, for those of you thinking it: the Doc is very much of an older generation of music. Blessèd be for that.   Somehow I can't imagine myself savouring a Crown Royal to 50 Cent or the extreme gynotechnics of our current crop of vocally-challenged lolitas.

      But here I am, finally beginning to take stock of Things, so much of which seemed a flurry of late.   Flurry? More like a bombardment, and I fear I'm beginning to look like Dresden (but thankfully not Nagasaki). I've done most of my marking through their three passes, and I no longer have to make any silly trips to campus which always seem to last three times as long as I initally project them to take.   My private library is finally finding its form again after two months and change of disshevelment (read in: chaos), which means I've actually been able to find floor space again.   And I can honestly say that I've attended to as many of the personal obligations in the past while that I possibly could, including meeting up with some people that I had not seen in several years.   As if making up for lost time weren't enough of my task with my adopted workload, it was a huge part of my personal life of late, making the rounds in compensation for my recent absence.   See, he returns, and we come with him might be an accurate way of describing matters of late, though whether the Doc has been a chimera of life or death I refuse to hazard. Sometimes I wish Wallace Stevens had written a study of gypsies. It might help me make sense of things.   I don't suppose there are any gypsy sayings about Wallace Stevens? At this point I'd settle for Thomas Hardy.

      I've jumped now from Mayfield to Morrison, to the latter's A Night In San Francisco from 1994, a stunning live double-album of which James Brown would surely approve, not least of which for Candy Dulfer guest-leading the sax lines. Besides some nifty takes on some old classics-- Morrison's and not-- there's a striking version of "Vanlose Stairway," a song which supposedly takes its title and inspiration from a Dutch subway station, which bridges, in riveting fashion, with a declamation from Ray Charles' "Fool For You." It's one of the few examples of magisterial gospel dissolving into vicarious, reflective heartbreak, before emerging on the other side as a kind of breaking, scattershot-mystic's travelogue with "Trans-Euro Train." And it works.   It works beautifully, Crown Royal or no. It reminds me why I've always contended that Van Morrison is the closest we'll probably ever come to a combination of John Donne with Ray Charles-- with a dash of William Blake for good measure.

      It probably seems I'm writing so much about music because I'm getting drunk and just writing to the moment, but that wouldn't be entirely true. Fact is, I've had some stirrings of quasi-pseudo-would-be poetic thought in the past month, and I've been thinking a lot about sounds and rhythms, my own writing in the past too many years too prosaic by half, or (in fact) three-quarters. I've been caught for years in dealing with Morrisonian sentiment with the parsimonious niggling of Henry James, and-- alas-- my mind, not given to fineness, ends up chopping the garlic so fine it ceases to exist. It's like trying to return to one's elements long past the stage when one thinks one knows what they are: one keeps answering the questions before one truly knows the answers, like a teenager assuming an understanding of sexuality just because of a cognition of a few basic dimensions. No, no, no, what a certain way to make sure one's over before one's even begun, and rueing the fact. No: discipline, patience, control: these are the lessons those of us without genius must obey. And so too learning to listen all over again-- or listening to learn from the beginning, as if to discover the unknown, half-remembered gate, as one must eventually come to relearn Aristotle.

      But elsewhile, one comes to chagrin the things one does know. How Blakean. There's too much intolerable wrestling always having to happen, especially for those of us that are seldom entirely pinned but have a bugger of a time getting the better of things. Damn and damn and damn and blast. If only it were as easy as hearing diesels humming.