Then I thought of a stanza in a Charles Causley poem. I hit the space bar to begin my egg slicer loop and I sang
O war is a casual mistress
And the world is her double bed.
She has a few charms in her mechanised arms
But you wake up and find yourself dead.
That was much better than any lyric I could write. Causley’s father died of injuries suffered in World War I. Could I make a hot bumping antiwar dance song out of Causley’s stanza? Probably not, but even if I could, they wouldn’t be my words. I’d have to get permission from his executor, and it would be a whole wrangle. I had to supply my own lyrics.
• • •
I WAS OUT by the half-dead apple tree dancing to Phatso Brown’s remix of “Apes from Space” when the man from Allstate arrived with his clipboard. I showed him the scene of the accident. He made some measurements and took a lot of photographs. He was an enthusiast of post-and-beam construction with a beard, and he seemed to know what he was looking at. He asked about the heap of boxes. “They’re mostly just old papers and books and probably they’re fine,” I said. “As long as it doesn’t rain.” The underbarn has a sand floor and it floods when there’s a heavy rain. There was a canoe down there, too, I added — only a bit of it was visible. He asked about its value.
“What can I say?” I said. “Green fiberglass canoe, Old Town, some happy hours on the river. It probably cost a thousand dollars. Maybe more. It was a birthday present from my ex-girlfriend.” He nodded and made a note. I left him to perform further calculations and sat in the white plastic chair making an intensive auditory study of the dance songs in my iTunes library. There are so many great dance songs — and yet there’s room for more. Or so I thought. I wanted to start a dance song with a woman saying, “And I’ll see you later.” Maybe I could convince Roz to say it. I listened to “Safe from Harm” by Andrew Bennett, and “Save the Last Trance for Me” by Paul Oakenfold, and “Healing of the Nation” by Sherman, and “La Luna” by Blank & Jones, and “Striptease in Istanbul” by Nublu Sound, and parts of four songs by Underworld.
Underworld is good. I discovered them by chance on a long plane flight. I was poking at the touch screen, looking for something to listen to after watching a very good documentary on Picasso and Matisse — Matisse comes off well, and after his operation he uses a pair of large shears to cut colored pieces of paper — and I saw a song on a list called “Bigmouth.” It was a dance number with an insanely honking harmonica and no words, and it was by Underworld, a band who had also created something called “Mmm… Skyscraper I Love You.” Back in the eighties they were doing things I would like to have done — chopping up found voice clips ahead of the game — although they were too tolerant perhaps in their early days of zappy saw-toothed sounds, as everyone was. The song I liked best by them was a more recent one called “Bird 1.” “Bird 1” is about something — I don’t know what — something about a white stick and a shaft of sunlight and a fly and a chainsaw of tiny firecrackers. I’m always a sucker for a shaft of sunlight. It’s stoned, I guess. It’s “poetry.” The chorus is splendid. “There is one bird in my house,” sings the main Underworld man, Karl Hyde. Not “a bird,” but “one bird.” There’s basically only one chord for most of the song, as well as one bird. There are a great many words in the song, however. Most of them don’t rhyme, and as in many great songs, the words aren’t terribly important. I would like to write something like this.
Where is my lighter? I’m simply unable to light a cigar stub outdoors with just a match. I haven’t mastered the technique.
The Allstate man said he had everything he needed. He said it looked like about five thousand dollars’ worth of structural damage, plus eighteen hundred for the books and the canoe — assuming the canoe was a total loss — and he’d be able to get me a check this week. We shook hands and he drove away. He had a sticker on his window that read “Proud Parent of an Honor Student.” I liked him.
• • •
IT’S EVENING NOW. Some fine fleshy clouds. I’ve squandered an hour setting Lewis Carroll’s “Soup of the Evening” to music. My mother used to read that poem to me and laugh and say how good it was, and it is awfully good. My tune may be marginally better than the one that Willy Wonka sings in one of the movie versions of Alice in Wonderland, and then again it may not. And the question is, Do we need another musical version of “Soup of the Evening”? I’m soaked with sweat.
All songs are protest songs, as somebody once observed — was it Bob Dylan? Every song presupposes enough peace and quiet that the song itself can be sung, the guitar strummed, the words heard. There’s no way people can be dancing if there are explosions and cries of anguish outside. In fact, most people are peaceable most of the time, regardless of what they say. Yeats says, “Our master Caesar’s in the tent, the maps are all outspread. His eyes are fixed upon nothing, his hands under his head.” Something like that. In other words, Caesar is lying very still. He may be planning mayhem and flank attacks and organized massacre, but he needs quiet while he strategizes. The poem is called “Long-Legged Fly.” If you’re a stop-lossed land warrior getting drunk in your Humvee listening to “Beer for My Horses” to get hepped up for a retributive foray into some tiny dirt-poor village in Afghanistan, you’re just a person sitting in a Humvee while that song is playing. Even if you’re the biggest, meanest, tattooedest thug of a bar-brawling jackalope who beats up defenseless people every other night, even if you hate music and never listen to it, you need to eat and sleep and recover from the cuts and bruises on your knuckles and regain your pointless rage. You are nonviolent except for the brief periods when you’re violent. For what that’s worth. I called Tim and tried this line of reasoning out on him and he wasn’t terribly impressed. He’s gone hyperpolitical because it’s an election year.
He said, “Why don’t you write a book about trying to write a protest song?”
“I guess I sort of am,” I said.
I’m having problems writing lyrics. They’re either too simple, or too clever-clever, or too sexual. It’s reassuring to go back to listening to dance songs, because usually there are very few words. In one of Paul Oakenfold’s songs there are five words at the beginning, shouted by a television preacher: “I said praise the Lord!” After a while there’s a recorded outgoing message from a woman from 976-4PRAYER. That’s it. And it’s a good song. A good protest song.
Twenty-one
I DON’T WANT TO GO TO BED YET. My piano technique is getting a little better, I think. I learned to play piano on our beat-up, difficult-to-tune Chickering, with carved floral decoration. Some of the keys had cigarette burns or missing ivories or both. I took lessons with Mrs. Trebert, who explained to me that her name was unusual because it was the same backward and forward. Bach would have liked her name: it was a backward canon at the unison. It was her husband’s name, actually. He was very sick and pale and quiet. He sat in a warm, dark room while Mrs. Trebert listened to me play Bach and Béla Bartók. My favorite piece was by Bartók, in A minor. The left hand went back and forth between two notes, an A and an E, and the right hand played something equally uncomplicated. Béla Bartók was a Hungarian composer who was hired by Koussevitzky to write a piece for orchestra that has a gigantic solo for three bassoons. When Bartók was in Europe he wrote dissonant, despairing pieces, but for Koussevitzky he wrote something sunny and accessible and immortal.
One week, when I went to have a lesson, Mrs. Trebert said her husband had passed away. She cried and I felt that I was shrinking to the size of a cashew in the presence of such unfathomable unhappiness.