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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780393322620 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 12/17/2001 |
| Series: | National Poetry Series Books (Paperback) |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 120 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
The Prodigal Son and the two Sinatras
The first time he becomes aware of the voice, some are saying that popular music is at its nadir. Transition tends to have this effect on people. Nelson Riddle is no longer writing the arrangements. If there's a new audience, it can't sort through the complexities of a big band, the lush trombones, the way a soloist can play his way out of the chart without ever leaving it. The early voice, crooning with the Dorsey outfit, comes to his attention much later. This voice is the trombone, the solo that comes face to face with the night and comes out unscathed. Like Monk's hands on the keyboard, it stops in places where one would expect it to become a victim of its own inventions. But it wanders back nonchalantly and you forget the pauses that make it possible. He doesn't know how to reconcile the two voices before they run into each other, both of them losing their timing on the way, both of them trying to catch up with the present. They can't conceive of irretrievable losses, of hearts so still that they're no longer susceptible to music. One voice doesn't hear the other struggling like a cloud on a clear day. Neither one suspects that they will meet here, and these are not compassionate times.
The Prodigal Son on Green Dolphin Street
or, more precisely, on a distant variation of it. Some things you can never apply to a life at the window, not even at one of the windows where Eliot, in his proper voice, places men in shirtsleeves, tells them to lean out, to shout something at the reader.Arudeness so mannered you know it isn't theirs but Eliot's—or Eliot's idea of rudeness in the common man—and it's Eliot's insults they shout, and Eliot's lips where they place their cigarettes and light them. Let's say it's 1958. Sounds like Miles Davis nearby—a trumpet that knows its limitations and doesn't give a damn. Jazz crosses a line at one point. On this side is the musician, his lips, his lungs. Across the line is the song, the horn, no trace of the man. Say Eliot lives down the street, or is visiting someone down the street, and hears enough to make him stay longer, to make him walk out alone. Sometimes, rereading Eliot, these men are present. Sometimes they're nowhere in the vicinity—it's all empty streets and empty windows, it's as if he meant for the men to peer from the windows only occasionally. Follow this shattered logic for a moment: Miles and Eliot run into each other on one of these streets. Maybe it's an alley, but this is not important. They brush against each other. One of them mutters something, the other looks away. This is very important. Eliot has everything by which he'll be remembered behind him and seven years ahead of him. Miles has just played the Plaza Hotel. One of the two men—hard to say which one—is doomed and the street will get the better of him.
The Prodigal Son: The treadmill effect
is not limited to walking uphill during a landslide. A man can scat. A man can believe the simple story of Satchmo dropping his lyrics in midsong. The story can strike back like a snake, biting the man on the neck. A man can scat until the sounds make sense again, until the words come back to the page he sets under the one small leak. It rains and the words talk to each other in a peculiarly intimate language. A man can listen even if he doesn't understand. A man can go on listening even as he declares war on what he hears. He can scat successfully only if he doesn't know it is the art of coming undone. Crumbs of sound snap off until the air is empty. A man can scat for help when the journey is longer than the road. A man who believes in Satchmo watches him drop his horn and his lyrics as though this were also the art of falling. Not falling apart or falling out but simply falling. A man can believe that from an accident an industry rises. Scat acquires properties one would expect to find in the synthetic counterpart of speech. A man learning to scat is not unlike a fire learning to burn. The man picks up the lyric sheet and the horn. Satchmo walks away like a landslide. The man improvises a story.
The Prodigal Son: German postcards
I. Ella at Deutschlandhalle, West Berlin, 13 February 1960
This is how you wing it when identical souvenirs are exchanged. His hands and the object in his hands immediately turn a single color and texture while her hands refuse to be transformed (though solid, the object conforms to the cupping of her palms, to the fingers following the curve that begins at the center of each palm; a childish instinct records every gesture, leaving out the implicit dangers, so the thought that a corner of the world is safe is more convincing tonight; the object proposes a compromise, the hands decline or dismiss the proposition; she watches the whole affair as if the hands were not hers, as if the hands were empty, as if, as though, as opposed to; she brings her hands together, interlocking fingers falling into place like some military formation, and the object becomes the gap we assume exists between any two things that are joined, no matter how close the union) or the transformation is too slow to be relevant. You be the judge. You in your wing chair. You in your slippers. You reading in your sleep.
2. Brandenburg a cappella, 9 November 1989
Sometimes a great architect works undercover in the wrecking crew. He chisels for the enemy. Wall to rubble, rubble to dust. His sweat is genuine, almost biblical. Mercenaries who've joined the project fall until there's no one left up there, nothing to fall from, only fallen men covered with a film as taut as a good alibi. They rise and join the night like coal miners who accidentally save themselves and stumble into their own parade. Even when they grow comfortable with the floats and streamers and the band marching silently behind them, the miners are still surprised to see the wives and children of the victims waving from the sidewalk as if these dazed survivors carried in their dust the essence of the dead.
The Prodigal Son: Kierkegaard at face value
The child with absolute pitch forgets Mozart, and music stops seeping out of that room where the fire escape skips a few rungs. The silent child wants to panic but can't find the appropriate expression. The crowd appears to grow sensible in the confusion though nothing actually grows; no visible sign of sensibility—say, a third eyebrow—makes a spontaneous appearance in the crowd to assure us that it's finally tame. This brings us to the body, the single unanimous body wearing itself inside out. One wonders what pulls it all together, how this and this compensate for a lack of that; why no single part is a threat—to the whole or to the other parts; why there is no sign of a system or hierarchy. The one he follows home stops to ask for directions, consequently turning into a public spectacle. A crowd installs itself to watch or to be seen.
The Prodigal Son reassesses Kierkegaard
El odio como factor de lucha ...
I.
Jimi Hendrix is playing "Little Wing" and it isn't raining yet. The house shifts a bit every season, the earth below it settling like someone old enough to refer to the town of his adult life as home. The towns of childhood are warmer and vague, and the aunt who smells like soup comes to visit every summer and stays too long. This is the bird that flies into his cupped hands when he stands on the green balcony, his aunt leaning on the piano, watching him and watching the bird fly off and back again. Little wing split in two. Clouds building. One loud dream always tugging at his plaid shirt.
... el odio intransigente al enemigo que impulsa más allá de las limitaciones naturals del ser humano ...
2.
Let's get one thing straight. The wall keeps coming back. His father takes him to the harbor to see the famous ship that keeps its eye on the island, but he sees only sea and sky. His father points, but still he sees no ship. When they come home, the wall he has crushed like paper in so many dreams is back. Though he tries, he cannot see the famous ship, and it becomes a symbol—like God and the enemy. The wall, which few notice, becomes for him what the ship has become for nearly everyone else. He hears of other walls with some evil purpose, but he can only see this one as it turns to paper in his dreams and back to brick in this life.
... y lo convierte en una efectiva, selective y fría máquina de matar. Nuestros soldados tienen que ser así, un pueblo sin odio no puede triunfar sobre un enemigo brutal. —Che Guevara
3.
More about the bird though not everything. He has vowed never to tell us all he remembers. He says only one town is approachable enough. The bird, he says. The green balcony overlooking the abandoned gas pump and, beyond that, the furniture store with a single wicker sofa (not for sale) in the showroom. One day, from the balcony, he watches the parade. It features an enemy plane shot down by the rebels. He notices that it has only one wing. By now he knows not to trust the rebels. This makes him the enemy. The bird flies down to the gas pump and its eyes meet the eyes of ordinary humans slowly becoming a crowd.
The Prodigal Son edits a newsreel
for consistency and the result is enough to make a revisionist weep. It is always difficult to pin down the source of tears, the raw and moist emotion that manifests itself in the eyes. Maybe it starts outside the body and seeps in surreptitiously, swings like a pendulum in the throat. There is a wealth of possibilities on the cutting room floor—buildings to be demolished, voices to obstruct, faces to rearrange in a crowd, faces to pull out of a crowd, fields to be filled with faces, faces to fill with bewilderment. The living know instinctively how to strike a pose; everyone else has to scramble for the items needed to come up with the blueprint and a rudimentary knowledge of the language it speaks. Before the beginning, one has a scene in mind—a brook, a mote, the impression of a body on the tender surface of a recently plowed field. Some revisionists cry because they see the future and it is self-explanatory.
The Prodigal Son watches a documentary
on euphoria and feels his body—muscle by muscle, limb by limb—fall asleep during the screening. There is an insurrection, there are lynchings, there is a highly combustible gathering of names followed by more lynchings. The time is most likely the present though the place doesn't appear to be particularly attached—in the sense place is sometimes emotionally attached (one wishes there were a more reliable term)—to anything historically or geographically measurable. Now and then, one feels on the scene the grip of something not quite scripted. Someone comes by to light the lamps along one street and then another. It is not unlike watching an automobile being pulled by a team of horses. But the glow from the street lamps is consistent with the mood of the mob: violence needs back lighting, like the face of Greta Garbo. (That contrived halo, one suspects, is a compromise hammered out from a clause of unreasonable demands in her contract.) Whether it's Garbo or a mob, the desired effect is always a glimpse of the text one expects to read in the Great Unwritten Contract. Collect enough glimpses and you have a partial image, which is the source of illusion, disillusion, the stop-action sequence of a mythological animal sprouting horns in a fraction of the time it takes you to look up its name.
The Prodigal Son, Mr. DeMille, Norma Desmond Billy Wilder, Claude Monet, et al.
He runs into Billy Wilder, the director, at the Paramount lot, and they start to chat about the state of American cinema and how life on the big screen has grown dangerously accustomed to itself. It's like putting on weight over the years, one says, and not noticing what a burden the body has become. Both men are intrigued by the notion of coming back from the dead to recount one's ordinary life. They assume that there are captive ears for this out there, anonymous listeners with equally ordinary lives. The relevance of any one thing is relative. Only relativity is always relevant. Both men have an ear to the ground, as they say even now that the expression has lost its luster. The ground will do although other surfaces are safer and more reliable. What they need is a hook, another expression that now and again finds its way to the surface of our vocabulary. Billy suggests a shot from the bottom of the pool, looking up. On the surface, like one of these dormant expressions of our vernacular, a body floats. Beyond it, the usual characters one would expect at the scene of any suspicious death. They appear a bit more distorted than the floating body, and the mansion in the background is as hazy as those Houses of Parliament Monet painted over and over. In some variations, fog dominates the composition. This should not be an impediment. The key to understanding the paintings is to know that they are all about buildings, that the presence of buildings is not particularly crucial.
The Prodigal Son paraphrases a plagiarist
hoping to produce an echo in a vacuum, a rendering versus a carbon of the original. Salvador Dalí has a theory about the Angelus of Millet—he is not obsessed with the painting we know but with what he believes Millet paints and eventually paints over. When the Louvre finally X-rays the Angelus, revealing something like a child's coffin beneath what is now a basket on the ground between a man and a woman, Dalí says this confirms his premonition and explains why the expressions on the couple's faces bear no relation to the exhaustion of field work. These peasants are not bowing their heads to examine the workmanship of the basket or the ripeness of the fruits it contains; they stand in a room beyond grief, the door locked, grief thrashing about in the hall. Because there are too many keys and most of them are mislabeled, one tends to spend too much time in the dark hall, fighting grief for the right key. There is no mention of the original shape or purpose of the wheelbarrow behind the woman (although one would think this is an elementary problem: every coffin needs a carriage); there are no questions about the pitchfork planted near the man, how it may be a shovel in disguise. Dalí finds the key and makes his way into the room a bit too soon, casually greeting the peasants who are stunned by his appearance. While the unlikely trio denounces surrealism, one could conceivably X-ray every painting in the Louvre and become self-appointed curator of the results; one could create or attract a subculture of those who believe that the only possible art is the discovery of the thing effaced—a voice quivering beneath a still life, a nude killed by a cubist, the Millet child spending the better part of eternity upstaged by uncounted bodies in a mass grave.
The Prodigal Son gives blood
What could be more intimate? Battlefield, altar, bodas de sangre, marriage bed. If it pleases the gods, there's bound to be a con man with a shortcut nearby. The ghost of Hamlet's father is more convincing than the Prince of Denmark in the flesh. Antimatter is more theatrically inclined than matter, just as radio—despite all the arguments for the intimacy of the page or the screen's objectivity—is the medium best equipped to handle suspense. The con man keeps falling between stations, the shortwave set always on the blink, countries fading out, countries fading in, a multitude of unrelated monologues forced to share a single mouth, the listener—this means you, Mr. Con Man—never knowing where any station will turn up. (Never twice on the same spot.) "This is Radio Luxembourg." "No, this ..." And the second voice flaunts its anonymity like an echo that returns at will. If this were television and the shadow-voice an image, they would call it a ghost. A clot of massacres jams radio signals. Radio Free Europe, Radio Martí, the pirate voices from offshore—all jammed. A bloodless death is like a downtown flasher who sends his raincoat to the cleaners, waits, goes back to ask why the holdup, is told the raincoat is in someone else's hands, an honest mistake. A bloodless coup at the palace and the new leader emerges with a clean raincoat too big at the shoulders. When he waves to his sympathizers (one sees only the man but assumes he isn't waving to an empty street), his own bony shoulders wriggle inside the padded shoulders of the raincoat, they go limp like mice halfway down the length of a snake. A meal as bloody and as bloodless as a ghost. The little man, shoulders like foreign hearts pumping the cold blood of a reptile, has come to hear from a ghost what the radio will not (cannot?) tell him; stops halfway down the steps that lead to the palace gate; takes off his raincoat to beat the air, creating an illusion of wind no ghost can resist.
Table of Contents
| Preface | 17 | |
| Intro: The Prodigal Son jumps bail | 23 | |
| 1 | ||
| The Prodigal Son and the two Sinatras | 27 | |
| The Prodigal Son on Green Dolphin Street | 28 | |
| The Prodigal Son: The treadmill effect | 29 | |
| The Prodigal Son: German postcards | 30 | |
| The Prodigal Son: Kierkegaard at face value | 32 | |
| The Prodigal Son reassesses Kierkegaard | 33 | |
| The Prodigal Son edits a newsreel | 36 | |
| The Prodigal Son watches a documentary | 37 | |
| The Prodigal Son, Mr. DeMille, Norma Desmond, Billy Wilder, Claude Monet, et al. | 38 | |
| The Prodigal Son paraphrases a plagiarist | 39 | |
| The Prodigal Son gives blood | 40 | |
| The Prodigal Son in a frenzy of scarves | 42 | |
| The Prodigal Son confronting Zeno's paradoxes | 43 | |
| The Prodigal Son introduces George W. G. Ferris | 44 | |
| The Prodigal Son: Still life in slow motion | 45 | |
| The Prodigal Son deconstructs the origami language | 46 | |
| The Prodigal Son, for whom summer is a verb | 47 | |
| The Prodigal Son pulls an all-nighter | 48 | |
| 2 | ||
| The Prodigal Son is caught off guard by planned obsolescence | 51 | |
| The Prodigal Son, accompanied by the ideogram | 52 | |
| The Prodigal Son as understudy | 53 | |
| The Prodigal Son locates the epicenter | 54 | |
| The Prodigal Son: Notes from the epicenter | 55 | |
| The Prodigal Son paces the other half of a semicircle | 56 | |
| The Prodigal Son: Temporary trains | 57 | |
| The Prodigal Son bribes the fortune teller | 58 | |
| The Prodigal Son: Standard deviations | 59 | |
| The Prodigal Son marks his calendar | 60 | |
| The Prodigal Son swims to a barrier island | 61 | |
| The Prodigal Son learns to drown | 62 | |
| The Prodigal Son envisions nothing | 63 | |
| The Prodigal Son succumbs to secular miracles | 64 | |
| The Prodigal Son investigates the Hemingway suicides | 65 | |
| The Prodigal Son in absentia | 66 | |
| 3 | The Prodigal Son in his own words: | |
| Credo (1) | 69 | |
| Bees | 70 | |
| Tipping over the actuarial tables | 71 | |
| Homage to Li Po | 75 | |
| Rhetorical answers | 76 | |
| Credo (2) | 77 | |
| Independence | 78 | |
| Captivity | 79 | |
| Free will | 80 | |
| Fate | 81 | |
| Faith | 82 | |
| Credo (3) | 83 | |
| Benedictus | 84 | |
| Prayer against Ecclesiastes | 85 | |
| Letter to the anarchists | 86 | |
| Debussy | 87 | |
| Credo (4) | 88 | |
| 4 | ||
| The Prodigal Son's education | 91 | |
| The Prodigal Son forgives his brother | 92 | |
| The Prodigal Son on a bus in New Delhi | 93 | |
| The Prodigal Son buries a dog named Pavlov | 94 | |
| The Prodigal Son takes up a hobby | 95 | |
| The Prodigal Son: Studies for a portrait of John Merrick | 96 | |
| The Prodigal Son is spotted on the grassy knoll | 97 | |
| The Prodigal Son, briefly suspected in the shooting of Andy Warhol, is cleared of all charges | 98 | |
| The Prodigal Son stands outside the Dakota | 99 | |
| The Prodigal Son as decoy | 100 | |
| The Prodigal Son: Science fiction | 101 | |
| The Prodigal Son in spite of himself | 102 | |
| The Prodigal Son loses his wife | 103 | |
| The Prodigal Son buys a new car | 104 | |
| The Prodigal Son: Vegas, after hours | 105 | |
| The Prodigal Son and the epistemology of chance | 106 | |
| The Prodigal Son in Pompeii | 107 | |
| The Prodigal Son: Amnesty | 108 | |
| The Prodigal Son accidentally kneels while learning to crawl | 109 | |
| The Prodigal Son considers a diplomatic career | 110 | |
| The Prodigal Son learns the word "antebellum" | 111 | |
| The Prodigal Son overhears his interrogators | 112 | |
| Coda: The Prodigal Son catches up with the bounty hunters | 115 | |
| Notes & dedications | 117 | |
| About the author | 119 |