In August 1941, Donovan and MacLeish met on a cool porch and sketched an organizational chart for a secret agency, and afterward MacLeish sent out telegrams to academicians of war planning, including William Langer at Harvard and James Phinney Baxter at Williams: “Colonel Donovan as coordinator of information is setting up a central intelligence service with which the Library of Congress is cooperating,” MacLeish said in the telegrams. The war planners met, and one of MacLeish’s librarians produced a long document titled “Proposal for a CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE SERVICE for the Federal Government Together with the Relationship of THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS Thereto.” It ended up being called the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, and it did many counterproductive secret things during the war, some of which are still classified, and in 1945 Harry Truman formally abolished it and fired Donovan. But Archibald MacLeish carefully watched over the shreds of OSS intelligence that were left, in his new job as assistant secretary of state, and then a few years later Truman realized he needed a spy service after all, in order to do battle with the evil Communist conspiracy as it was manifesting itself in Greece and Italy and Southeast Asia and everywhere else. Truman wanted to overthrow Communist leaders by spreading around bribe money and napalm and ammunition, so he reconstituted the OSS. But now it was called the Central Intelligence Agency, echoing MacLeish’s original name. And some of MacLeish’s young Yale protégés from Skull and Bones, including Cord Meyer and James Jesus Angleton, eventually became the CIA’s senior paranoid poltergeists. So now you know. Archibald MacLeish was one of the original instigators and organizers of this bloated monstrosity of assassination and violent regime change and unaccountable underhanded ugliness and skullduggery. And drone warfare. Which is why Plato was right: poets should never get involved in politics.
Is there a song in that? Probably not. I don’t want to know about evil, I just want to know about love. Stephen Fearing sang this song in 2007 in a hotel lobby in Paris. Listen to it on YouTube and you will be happy: www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiJjLdcFF6Y.
• • •
I SO ADMIRE people who can sing. They tell their voice to go somewhere and it just goes there. Or they say, Don’t go there, go almost there and swerve up into position at the last second. There’s an unspeakable intelligence in what they’re doing. No words can describe it.
I went out and spent twenty dollars on sushi at Fresh Market, and then I went to the chocolate factory on Hanover Street and bought dessert: some special pistachio bark sprinkled with chili powder and cayenne pepper and cinnamon. It has magical mood-altering properties, I think, and even if it doesn’t it tastes good. On the ride home I got lucky when I was listening to my songs on shuffle: I came to something by Anna Nalick called “Breathe.” I was sitting at a stoplight and suddenly there was an amazing woman singing in my ears about how life’s like an hourglass glued to the table and what you have to do is breathe, just breathe. Something papery in me crumpled and I crunched my eyes closed and sang tunelessly along with Anna Nalick, and I listened to every word. The last time I’d thought about that song was back in 2009, when I was in a hotel room in Cincinnati after a reading.
It was so good that I tapped the genius icon, the little atom, to make a genius playlist from songs that iTunes in its wisdom thought were like “Breathe.” The Weepies came on, another group I haven’t thought about in a while, singing that the world spins madly on, and then came another good song that I’d forgotten, by Kate Earl, called “Melody.” “Melody” is about how Kate Earl listens to songs all day long and she has nobody beside her to go ooh ooh ooh, but her skin is warm and her heart is full and the music is loud so her hips can swing. I bet they do — those woman’s hips, those hourglass hips, they don’t lie. I think “Melody” was a free single on iTunes one week, that’s how I got it. And here Kate Earl was just singing it for me. I started to dance in the car, taking a right turn into my driveway. She says something very profound and simple: “Every missing piece of me, I can find in a melody.”
This song is a wonder. There are sleighbells in the background for some reason, who can explain it?
Thirteen
NAN CAME SMILINGLY OVER with Raymond and I said, “Hi, folks,” and sat them down at the kitchen table. I decanted the sushi onto plates and brought out the little soy sauce saucers so that we could each of us mix our own personal octane mix of wasabi. The best thing about sushi is the wasabi mustard — it clears your head like nothing else. We talked about the chickens for a while, and whether a fresh egg tastes different from an egg you get from the supermarket. Nan said that before she got the bantam rooster a hawk had killed two chickens, but the flyweight bantam is fierce and fearless and he protects them. Then I asked Raymond how his music was going. He said it was going okay. I asked him if he could show me how he made beats and he pulled his MPC beat-making machine from his backpack and we hooked it up to my computer speakers and he cycled through some of the presets and got a chesty kick drum going and made a quick eight-bar loop. It sounded excellent. Nan and I were rocking our heads, looking at each other with our eyebrows slightly raised while Raymond tapped on the rubber pads with his fingers and fiddled with dials.
“So Raymond,” I said, after a while, “what would you suggest I get if I wanted to make music? Should I get one of these MPC things? I can’t spend a huge amount of money.”
“What kind of music do you see yourself making?” said Raymond, in a grown-up sort of way.
“Well, I bought a cheap guitar and I really like it”—I pointed at my Gibson Maestro, carelessly propped in a corner of the kitchen—“but really I’d kind of like to make a superfunky dance song that people would have to get up and dance to.”
“There are basically two ways to go,” said Raymond, “real analog hardware or software. I use both. Hardware’s nice because you’ve got actual dials and faders and pads, but it’s pricey. Do you have vocals?”
“Yes, I’ve got some vocals. Vocal fragments.”
“Then you’re going to need a good microphone and a USB audio interface. The Saffire 6 is good.”
“His grandparents gave him some money for his education,” Nan explained.
“Thank heaven for grandparents,” I said. “My grandparents bought me a bassoon.”
“A bassoon,” said Raymond. “Do you still play?”
I said I’d sold it a long time ago. “And I have very limited means at the moment.”
“Then you should just go with software. Get Logic. It’ll cost you two hundred dollars and it’s got tons of instruments.”
“Okay.” I began taking notes. “Logic.”
“Yeah, you can pretty much do any bizarro thing you want with it. It’s got a synth called Sculpture that makes glass and wood sounds, and sounds like bouncing marbles.”