The following day at the computer bank at his school on the default browser I saw that Levon Helm had died. I didn’t even know he had been sick.
***
What had been in my head before the song played was the concept that one could have many souls and that there was a difference between finding the one you wanted and the one that is your destiny. Helm’s voice on the recording to me was like the call out over water to the lost soul that had rushed back to the spirit of earth. The sense of holding on to it so long in that moment to the coincidence that also happened to be so close to his passing did not strike me as it might have in the past. We are blinded to what we are connected, how were are put together, and the love that binds. What you hear at any moment in the human world of sorrows is the music of the soul’s farewell, especially now as the rains come harder and the waters rise faster than in our darkest dreams.
On this song there are no drums. On this song America is a fiddle and the play is the wave of her people rising and falling on the crests, coming in and going out on the tide, each identity glistening for a moment beneath the moonlight until it returns with all memory and flesh to the deep. The voice of survival is a keening for being in a universe where beauty flickers in the shadow of mountains about to roll over us, chance about to take us through deadly shadows, and liars lead us to countless wells of poison. For the spirit of the dead is always rising and the song of the dying never ends and sometimes we hear it beyond the brain’s battered scaffold of words.
If we do not need to sleep to dream, if we do not need our eyes to see, then if many souls spill out when I die will the one that has names be me?
Thanks, Lavon.
***
I was reading my copy of Fury on Earth years ago on a bus rolling through Ballard. I was distracted by this very attractive dark haired lady. I had seen her probably four or five times in different places throughout the city. She wore a beret and had this moustache and a goatee. Totally far out. Right about then the guy in front of me turns around and starts jiggling. Having grown up with a pal with gran mal seizures I knew what was happening. Still, I hesitated waiting for someone else to act as he fell to the aisle of the bus where he convulsed like someone getting flack treatment. I looked around, nobody moved, bust comes to halt as someone yells "driver this dude is like tweaking out". Shit. I get down on the floor and kneel above his shoulders. He is maybe 28, thin, sun glasses on his head which I take off andput in his jean coat pocket. Lift him up on my lap since he was bouncing his head a bit, hold arms under his bicepts trying to keep him from thrashing too hard against the seats. I'm like man, you pick the shittyest places to convulse! Soon as the bus pulls over everybody gets out. I stay with the guy till the EMT arrives. They come in and get him and while transferring to mobile gurney as he starts to watt out his wallet falls to the street and this fellow who'd been in the back of the bus reaches for it. I step on the wallet with my foot. Hey man that's my brother I'm goin' to take care of it for him. Yeah right. I take it from under my foot and put it in ampty jean pocket of seizure man and button it. Seizure guy starts to realize he is going to ER sits up and starts protesting. Cops arrive. Well, I guess, I did my do. Where's my book? I have to pound on buss door cause driver all happy no doubt is going out of service. A quick look inside and I see my Fury On Earth was gone. Got it for 3 bucks at Foozels. Finally get another bus. On way see goatee lady walking down the street. She's got Fury on Earth and she's reading it as she walks. I thought of getting off the bus and talking to her. But I started having a gall bladder attack. It was like a spear penetrating frong the right side of my neck all the way to my right hip. I didn't know what it was at the time. Blinding pain. I remember trying to imagine if there really were any scientific way of accessing metaphysical powers. I thought of William S. Burroughs in his orgone box and tried to picture him there. His image morphed into a naked version of goatee lady. Some wild electronic pulse of pain was shooting through the air. It was my punishment for not getting off the bus and approaching goatee lady. I never saw her or my book again.
***
How clear are your eyes that do not see? How strong is your voice that cannot speak? How pure is your heart that cannot feel? We have ten thousand pictures for each of the ten thousand things and can place the most beautiful image of your mother in every falling snow flake. When your phone rings the tone can be Nick Cave’s The Weeping Song. You never have to feel bad or even nervous and best of all you not only never have to tell the truth you never even have to face it. Tomorrow I am going to the river as one time I went there and met the murdermen sacrificing small animals in stone circles and sticks on Jacob’s Island, brother, they had painted their faces and said they were of the zodiac. Can you capture and distill the chanting women on that hill who held their hands across the road in your headlights and your cousin reached over with her foot and floored the accelerator? Remember how they follow you back into your cage of logic. Soon the hand held device will be the person held division and all the cracked magma and fallen wax will be ought but lint for designs and blood selling. She puts down the sleek and shinny electronic everything. She looks up and for a moment can’t remember if it is Austin or Dylan, can’t remember which mall she is in. Something lifts the fog for only an instant and she says, to no Austin or Dylan in particular, “last night I had a dream. Everyone was sick. All the women looked like Tilda Swinton. Sad, intelligent, beauty. I got to the hilltop and there was a vast crowd there. Everyone, really. Slowly an old man made his way among them and washed their feet. Ultimately he came to me, had me sit on a rock. He took off my shoes with this odd balance of power and grace. He held a rag in his hand. It was filthy from all the other feet and as I looked at it I could see all manner of lower life forms teeming about in it; and yet, I was not disgusted. I felt like I was accepted accepting. He looked deep into my eyes and asked me if I were ready. I wanted to say yes; I mean I think I said yes, and then I woke up.” The no one in particular she was talking to did not hear much in particular of what she said. Her device vibrated. Some one just facebooked her a picture at Kafka’s grave.
***
There 's this smoothy called Maker's 46 up in the cabinet there, went back to hide she did after being chased by a pint of guinness, she's laughin be careful now boy you'll wake up with the purple nose. I'm not one to think the politics of self deception an act of mercy, she says, warnin me off. Still, I respond, taking her by the neck, the real gold's not in guilt, it's buried elsewhere, in grit of this grief. Ah, sometimes you just have to reach for the pity....
And out she pours. All promise and dreams, a quiet fall to earth by this dimension's smallest stars, coming in from everywhere and the sweet singing darkness of the universe..
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