So Much Soul

My grandmother, Louise Reiberg, died a year ago, this past weekend. It doesn’t seem like it has been that long, but the calendar and my crow’s feet don’t lie. We all still miss her dearly, the last of my grandparents to pass. Perhaps it was serendipitous that one of my favorite bands, Glossary, from Murfreesboro, TN, began offering free downloads of their new album, “The Better Angels of Our Nature” in the same week that we were celebrating this somber anniversary. The serendipity to be found not in the surprise of their offer, I knew that it was being released in this manner. (And I am not so callow that free music does my grief relieve.) Nor is it in some misreading of the album title, I know from whence this quote comes, and it has nothing to do with our relatives ascending to heaven on cherubic wings. No, the happy coincidence comes from being able to listen to the album’s single, “Little Caney” and have it color the circumstances of the week. To summarize the song: It is about a family matriarch or patriarch taking a young child out to an old cemetery to visit the overgrown, but still hallowed, familial burial ground.

Joey Kneiser, the songwriter and lead vocalist for Glossary, is always deft at keeping his lyrics engaging but austere, and the conflict and resolution of the song satisfying. In this particular composition, he knocks the cover off the ball. It also helps that the melody and orchestration of the song are a pitch-perfect rock and roll, kitchen-sink epic. I will reprint the lyrics and link to the song below, but I’d like to conclude my thought first.

The death of our relatives and loved ones is arguably the most psychologically affecting experience in our lives. Whether it makes us finally and fully appreciate the indelible impact of the newly dead on our own lives, or gives us pause to reassess how we will choose to live the rest of our time on Earth, no other single event can change our psychology more drastically. I know that births are profound experiences, having recently experienced one. Where there was nothing there is now something, and nearly all of one’s attention is now focused on protecting this new life. Births, however, are not inevitable. They happen because we make them happen, something we (usually) hope to happen. The new child, while joyous, dramatic and life-altering, is a being that is integrated into that which came before and that which must follow. Every watershed event in our life, birth, marriage, divorce, career success or failure, is a culmination, a coalescence of a succession of events that have been somewhat predictable and lead to a new iteration of our life. Every one except death. Of course death, too, is predictable. It is inescapable, our whole lives lead us down the path to its door. But all of the other formative elements in our lives are additive. Even divorce is a change that, though we may not desire it, adds greater depth to our lives and creates a broader base of experience upon which we subsequently live. Death, on the other hand, is an excision, a knife-quick dissolution of a being and a life whose presence had been a constant and whose sudden absence colors by subtraction everyone and everything that they ever touched. Even if the process of a person’s death is especially protracted, the exit itself is still stunning, perhaps even more so. The moment when their living breath is extinguished is not simply a coda to a longer movement. No, it is a single-note orchestra. Perhaps a soft minor tutti, perhaps a blast of brass and sharp strings, but there is no dynamic to that moment; it is both crisis and resolution all in a flash.

This morose proclamation does not mean that a person’s memory, past acts and influence cease to exist. On the contrary, since these relics and psychological artifacts are all that remain, they become even more important and cherished by those who loved the departed. It is why we bury our dead, in a prehistoric kind of suspended animation, making very secular shrines to people who, though the pious may never speak it, were far more important to us than any God. Why we cremate and condense them to their carbon essence and keep them in urns tucked neatly into our living room décor, so they may continue to be a part of our quotidian lives. Why we spread the ashes into oceans and through vegetable gardens and under looming oaks, so that the remnants of their physical being might be incorporated into the water we drink and the food we eat and the trees that give us shelter.

And so here is where I found myself while listening to this humble American song, played by humble American musicians, the kind that so often in the last century have stumbled upon some of the most profound truths and authentic artistic moments in Western Civilization. You may shout hyperbole and you may not like the song. But I’ve found myself singing it at moments when I was sure not a sound was passing through my lips. In the last week, I have longed for a field with simple limestone slabs that state plainly, my people were once here. And moments later, I’ve cringed at the notion of ‘rotten clothes in boxes of bones’ being kept like junk-drawer detritus for some funhouse notion of tribute. And it’s all because of this song. Mainly, I just love listening to this song and thinking about my grandmother and my son and the fragile human bridge I form between them. And if that is all I am, I am wholly satisfied.

Little Caney

Hold my hand and walk the ground softly
We don’t want to wake the dead
Just want a little corn in our bread and settle down
Come on Little Caney you know the sun is sinking now
And we got to make it on out to where your branches lay

Marked by stones and covered by wildflowers
Is family you’ve never known
Rotten old clothes lying in boxes of bones
I wish you could’ve been there when they all had souls
So much soul

Don’t get lost in the tall tall grass
It’s grown as high as you
I can see the graveyard peeking through the trees
And the scattered monuments of your kin
Reunited in the dirt
Only absent the hurt that living brings

Marked by stones and covered by wildflowers
Is family you’ve never known
Rotten old clothes lying in boxes of bones
I wish you could’ve been there when they all had souls
So much soul

An’ looky here Little Caney honey don’t you cry
‘Cause you know we’re all going to die someday
And the hand of another you’ll be holding tight
When you walk out to the site where I lay

Marked by stones and covered by wildflowers
Is family you’ve never known
Rotten old clothes lying in boxes of bones
I wish you could’ve been there when they all had souls
So much soul
Where did it go

http://glossary.us/the-better-angels-of-our-nature-free-download/320-kbps-aac

St. Mark's Place

In my fiction class we did an exercise about describing a setting or environment in writing. It seems to fit thematically, at least in terms of the setting, of the previous post.

St. Mark's Place

For three blocks in the heart of the East Village, 8th Street is called St. Mark’s Place. Where I live above Avenue A, I can look down and see where it ends on the east side of Tompkins Square Park. It turns back into plain old 8th St. on the other side of the park. I only ever walk in one direction on St. Mark’s. West. Away from the impending morning, and later, towards the setting sun.
I fall out of my building’s aging terrazzo-floored vestibule, thermal coffee mug reluctantly purchased at Starbucks, briefcase that my great uncle gave me for Christmas, or was it graduation? Hard right at Narducci’s on the corner. The green, white and red door in my periphery and the smell of warm pepperoni too early in the day tell my legs to turn even before my mind does. Step by step, I know what I will see for the next three blocks like a useless psychic who can only see one second into the future. A Pakistani fellow, who may or may not be the Maitre’d at one of the restaurants on 6th St. sweeping his stoop with a broom that is worn down almost to the threads that bind the straw. Across the street, the Eileen Fisher boutique with loosely clothed mannequins, comfortable in their muted earth-tones and raw silk ankle-length skirts. Every seven paces, trees are planted in the sidewalk, the base of the small trunk covered in mulch and topsoil, and that small square of dirt is surrounded by wrought-iron borders. I pass slower pedestrians on the street side of the arborial impediments, and weave back onto the sidewalk once clear of the foot traffic. Lazza Café is at the corner of 1st Avenue. Like every morning, I ponder what the Eggs Benedict they are famous for taste like and make a note in my mind that I should stop in sometime. Five years in the city and I can still convince myself that just maybe this will happen. I cross 1st Ave. against the light, stepping past the tourists in baseball hats and jean shorts who patiently await the green figure. Stride past The Gap and know that in minutes I will be on the Lexington Avenue Express headed north/northeast to the Mobil building, where there is now not a single shred of actual Mobil Corporation. Only Pfizer pharmaceutical and its 42 floors of offices and my small closet of a space where I design the perfectly compliant drug packages that house the blood pressure, cholesterol, and erection medicines that Pfizer sells.
As I move past the A-1 Fast Grocery awning, “A Dozen Roses, ALWAYS $7.99!!” I notice something different. A woman. People are always there, around me as I walk to the train. It’s Manhattan. Characters. Types. The Homeless Guy, The Artist, The Power Suit, The Drunk, The Punk. You want these? St. Mark’s has them like a Field Guide for NYC. But today I see a woman so absurdly beautiful that I stop. Altogether cease movement, right in front of the copy store that never has any customers. And not like “implausibly super-model hot” absurd. (In fact add that stereotype to the list of people St. Mark’s has in spades.) No, absurd because her features are so huge, out of scale and incongruent to themselves that I probably shouldn’t find her attractive at all, much less be contemplating the idea that she might be the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Her eyes are larger than children on greeting cards. Between her almost swollen cheeks is a nose that defies ethnicity, sharp and large, a bump in the bridge, nostrils narrow but obvious. Perhaps it is the supple black leather blazer that seems to have been cut within a millimeter of every corner and curve on her torso. Perhaps it is the subtle angle of her hips as she searches through her purse for the searing red lipstick that she is now applying to her astounding, tumescent lips. Perhaps I better move faster since she is walking away from me. I follow the Demoiselle down the sidewalk, oblivious to everything but her gait. We careen past the piercing and tattoo shop at 2nd Avenue. Past the austere 19th Century beauty of the Cooper Union and onto the cement sidewalk island that is home to the giant sculpture of a cube set on its vertex, a sort of colossus guarding the entrance to the train. It is here that St. Mark’s Place ends, evaporates into a notion and the paved asphalt around us once again assumes its numerical appellation. I continue to follow her billowing mass of chestnut hair, her slim black pants, her gunmetal silver heels into the green glass portico covering the entry staircase that leads to the 4 5 6 lines of the Subway. Through the yellow turnstiles, and I begin sweating. What would I possibly say to her, what words could I form that wouldn’t be preposterous? “You are so gloriously out of proportion that I think I may be in love with you?” As the train chatters into the station, she turns around glancing towards the white and black sign reading Uptown. Was she on the wrong track? Was she going to leave to find the correct route? Did she have a boyfriend, a girlfriend she was waiting for? Could she not read? Did she vote for Hilary? Or worse, Giuliani? Does she go to church? Does she hate the Yankees? Was she contemplating doing any one of the thousands of things that would ruin everything? Everything that she is to me right now? The picture, the wonderfully imperfect picture. The two blocks that I followed her that doesn’t exist now. So as she lifts her leg, calf muscle flexed above her feet and fluorescent orange toenail polish, to board the 6 train, my train, I inhale. Exhaust fumes fill my nose and I step back. Away from the platform. Search for and find a bench. Watch the stainless steel train doors close in front of her as I dab the sweat from my sideburns. Listen to the hydraulic hiss of the cars beginning to move up the track. And I wait with my coffee and briefcase for the next train.