The Heart Is A Lonely … Juggler

I integrated something new into my affairs recently.

I found a new kind of wood to use in my furniture. Of course, it’s kinda silly to say it’s a “new” kind of wood. I just have never used it before. Western Curly Maple.

Now acer macrophyllum isn’t all that different from acer rubrum or sacharum –red or sugar maple– that I use all the time. But it is different. It’s called quilted maple by most, not tiger maple. Its wild grain is wild in a different way.

A long series of things has to happen before I use such an item. It has to exist, in useful quantities, where I can get it. There’s a reason everybody doesn’t still make blockfront dressers out of Cuban mahogany anymore.

Part of the dynamic of availability is the cost. The price dynamic tells me if there’s any around. Western Maple is plentiful enough to be sold here in the east for less than some local wood.

Will it wear out my tools? Dust give me nose or lung cancer? Is it dimensionally stable? Can I get it in wide widths? Can I get contact dermatitis from handling it? Too heavy to lift? Does machining it close the grain too much, called mill glaze, to accept glue properly? Does it split when you fasten it? Does the grain tear out when you run it through a planer? Accept dyes and stains and finishes? Warp when you slice it and release pent up stresses in the wood? Hell, will it release pent-up stresses in me? Of course, before any of this started, the granddaddy of all considerations: Is it beautiful?

I’m only half way through determining if all that and more checks out. And I had to take a thousand dollar flyer just to give it a shot. I can only guess wrong about such things once or twice, and I’d be out of business. Oh yes; or sick or injured or dead.

There is a kind of reverie that comes while you are pushing a lot of wood through machinery. It can be hypnotizing and lulling. You are wearing muffs on your ears, and sometimes a mask over your lower face, and a glasses. Darth Vader got nothing on you. For a cheap laugh, I used to go and see my toddler with it all on. The mock fear and giggling was worth it. At any rate, you have to be careful when you’re doing repetitive things over and over with danger very close at hand. You can’t get bored and cut your hand off.

There is a kind of inspirational thinking that can happen when you are like this. The front of your mind is preoccupied with the task at hand. In a way, putting the repetitive but dangerous activity in the front of the mind puts other parts of the mind to sleep. Many people distract this “rest of their mind” with music while working. But there is a kind of thinking you can do there, like peripheral vision. Or just plain visions. It is the stuff of shamans and Nietzsche and Jung and the monk’s cell. You can see around the corner a little. Many foolish people simply pay the most attention to the bad rock music they’re listening to, and little attention to anything else, least of all what they’re supposed to be doing, and maim themselves or ruin their work. I think the narcotic effect of smoking, along with the mundane, repetitive kabuki process of having a cigarette, explains its appeal in much the same way. It is contemplative. You’re thinking about smoking in the front of your mind. In the back, well, I don’t know; I don’t smoke.

When you juggle, if you look at any of the balls, all the others drop to the floor. You can’t pay attention to what you are doing the same way you do with everything else. You look off into the ether, and your eye takes it all in, and mind tells your limbs to faithfully execute the dull, disparate throws you learned by wrote before you could think about integrating them into juggling.

I’ll try juggling new balls from time to time. But I never look right at anything any more.

What’s Opera, Doc?

The joke in Seinfeld that everything you know about opera you learned from Looney Toons is both funny and accurate for a lot of us. But what’s wrong with having your interest in something profound being piqued by something frivolous or mundane? A map doesn’t come full size, because it sure would be hard to fold. And I’ve noticed that all of Rhode Island isn’t really flat and light blue. We accept approximations all the time to give us the general idea.

I like me some opera. I like it as much straight up as when Elmer Fudd does it. And You Tube is good for opera.

YouTube strikes me as a sort of abandoned library. There’s all sorts of great stuff in among the debris, but I fear the whole thing will get torn down for condos soon. I pick around in the dusty piles while it lasts.

I found Caruso.

Someone’s restored it fairly well. You can hear the compression that comes with being recorded on machinery that greatly restricts the tonal range. But even though it doesn’t have all the oomph that you would have heard in the original, you can discern it in there, like a beautiful woman draped in satin.

Opera was for everybody then. Caruso was Sinatra and Elvis and the Beatles first. I think of my own grandfather, Caruso’s fellow Neapolitan, hearing these familiar notes in his Cambridge Massachusetts walk-up flat. Life is in those notes. It must have seemed like seeing Jackie Robinson rounding second base to an African-American for my grandparents to hear Caruso sing in the United States. Like a hero; a champion; a god. San Francisco shook itself to the ground with its earthquake, then burned. The paper only wondered: Is Caruso OK?

It is considered trite, a little, that aria from La Boheme; but that’s just a measure of its universality and accessibility. Why, Bugs Bunny might even sing that one.

The sentiment is lovely. Que Gelida Manina -How cold your little hand is.

Rodolfo meets Mimi for the first time, and falls in love.

How cold your little hand is!
Will you let me warm it for you?
Why bother looking?
It’s dark, and we won’t find it.
It’s our good luck though,
this night’s filled with moonlight,
up here the moonlight could rest on our shoulders.
Please wait, my dear young lady,
and I will quickly tell you who stands before you, and
what I do, how I make my living.
May I?

Who am I? What am I? I am a poet.
What keeps me busy? Writing!
And what do I live on? Nothing!
In poverty I’m cheerful,
I am a prince who squanders
arias and couplets of longing.
And as for hopes and dreams of love
and castles-in-the-air, Miss-
I am a millionaire!
My fortress could be broken in,
robbed clean of the fine jewels I store-
if the thieves were eyes like yours.
And now that I have seen you,
all of my lovely dreaming,
all of the sweetest dreams I’ve dreamt,
quickly have slipped away.
This theft does not upset me,
because such treasures mean nothing
now that I’m rich with sweet hope!
And now that you have met me,
I ask you please,
Tell me, lady, who you are, I ask you please!

YouTube tempted me with another version: Giuseppe DiStefano.

It’s newer,as Giuseppe is my father’s, not my greatgrandfather’s, contemporary. But the recording is at least as old as I am. I think it might be the best version of it I ever heard.

And I’ve heard Caruso.

Romance. Novel.

[Editor’s Note: Yeah, that’s them. I don’t know why he calls her “Something Awful.” She looks alright to me.]
{Author’s Note: I love you something awful. There is no editor}

The world is full of orphans: firstly, those

Who are so in the strict sense of the phrase;

But many a lonely tree the loftier grows

Than others crowded in the Forest’s maze. —

The next are such as are not doomed to lose

Their tender parents in their budding days,

But, merely, their parental tenderness,

Which leaves them orphans of the heart no less.

I searched the whole world for you, imperfectly. I got tired, and stood still, and you found me. I’ll stand still now, until it’s all over.

I don’t know you yet. I don’t want to know you. I want to meet you every day, over and over again. Divine Providence made me talk all the time, while you keep still, so you can stay mysterious for as long as you like. I’ll never shut up, I promise.

I watch our little one sleep. He has the dreams I want. He dreams of nothing but fun. He dreams of nothing but you.

(Update: I’m silly. I didn’t attribute the poem. I realize now that they don’t always teach in wealthy people’s colleges what they used to teach in poor people’s elementary schools. Anybody recognize that?)

(In the comments: Patsy gets it right off. It’s old Georgie Gordon)

So What

I wouldn’t put my finger in that change return slot if there was fifty bucks in it. The greasy handset, battered by a numberless army of salesmen and lovers, hangs like a murderer on a gibbet over the thing. Let the bums get it. She said she’d come. I’m not calling her any more.

I loved the feeling of the neon glowing on the side of my face in there. Don’t tell me it’s just light. I feel it like the sun. It’s the only sun I’ll ever acknowledge. The one in the morning rises alone. Mine rises when the manager flips the switch. It never sets on me, that sun.

Man, that scirocco of sweat and booze and cigs and breath like a welder’s tank. I feel like I’m born again, from a mummy’s womb. Straight on in, just like the music.

The stage is exactly three inches and a galaxy away from the dance floor. Dance? Please. Stumble around with a woman that ain’t your wife floor, I think. I like the old dude that looks like Batman’s butler or a fruity sort of baron or something that conducts or sways or whatever it is he’s doing. He’s possessed with it, same as me. He’s usually possessed of plenty of cake, a desire to buy a man a drink, and an aversion to arithmetic, too. The waitresses adore that.

The curtain is dirty from wiping your hands on it. Me included. It’s dirty like life is. Up high, it’s dirty with cobwebs and dust and corruption because you can’t reach up there. Down low it’s dirty with the grubby hands of all of us trying to wipe off the sweat and grease of what you’re doing.

I listen for the cornshucks of the brushes on the snare. He hits it, but I don’t care about that. In between — the faint circular sketching he does without thinking — that’s what I’m after. He’s lathering the dry face of the song so I can shave it with the sharp edge of the brass. The bass rumbles like thunder in the distance.

I can taste metal and blood and booze in my mouth. Tastes like life.

“I’m Like A Woodie Guthrie Jukebox”

Nobody much understands Bob Dylan.

He’s just a singer that can’t sing to some, a writer that doesn’t know how to edit to others. He plays the guitar like he just bought it, and plays the harmonica like he just rented it. You’re missing the point.

Bob Dylan is a scholar. He’s a scholar of the American song. That makes him a scholar of the the American condition. And like real scholars, he’s lost himself among the things he studied until he’s gone into them. He’s a self-invented person. Bobby Zimmerman don’t live here no more.

I can’t think of anybody’s opinion about Woody Guthrie I’d rather hear. Woody was the scholar of the American condition before Bob Zimmerman, and Bob Dylan in due time, was born. God bless ’em both:

Woody Guthrie was a pacifist. Ain’t we all? World War Two came, and he wrote: “This machine kills fascists” on his guitar, and joined the merchant marine.

Sometimes pacifists got a gun. Sometimes, singers can’t sing much.