Archibald MacLeish paid court to Amy Lowell in Paris. He was an assiduous suckup — he wrote her, “I have even seen your long library in my dreams, & in my so-called waking hours I spend hours there”—and with Lowell’s help he got Harriet Monroe to publish some of his poems in Poetry. Then later, when he’d become a hotshot Pulitzer man and had fallen under the spell of Eliot’s Waste Land and Hemingway’s marlin fishing, he dismissed Amy Lowell as a self-publicizer who wrote tinkly verse. And then came the CIA, which began rewarding Jackson Pollock for painting meaningless paintings. Nicolas Nabokov, a minor composer who was a friend of MacLeish’s, was the CIA’s liaison with the musical world. Nabokov used the CIA’s money to fly the entire Boston Symphony Orchestra to Paris — in the company of crateloads of abstract paintings — where the orchestra performed The Rite of Spring and other advanced works, to prove that American democracy was more hip than Communism.
The Cigar Inspector has a long and thoughtful review of the Bone Crusher. I’ve just read it on my phone. The Cigar Inspector loves it. He wrote that initially he’d assumed it was a descendant of a memorable Viaje limited-edition cigar called the Skull and Bones, but it isn’t. It’s made from Nicaraguan weed, grown in volcanic Nicaraguan soil and wrapped in a broadleaf wrapper raised in the wilds of Connecticut. “It starts out pretty tame,” he says, “with its power kicking in near the end.” The power kicked in for me about halfway through. Wowsers. Shit on a Popsicle.
Terrible things happened in Nicaragua when Oliver North sold drugs and weapons for the CIA and used the money to fund the Nicaraguan contras, with Reagan’s blessing. Thousands of people, including many children, were massacred in the fighting in the highlands near Esteli, where the good tobacco grows. Once the CIA stopped arming and training the contras, the country calmed down. Now it makes many good cigars, including the Bone Crusher. Peace reigns.
I have a strong craving to read a book that doesn’t exist, called The Manic Factor, which diagnoses the heads of corporations who buy up lots of companies, one after another, as men in the grip of straightforward manic sprees. They’re people for whom normal human spending levels are insufficient. They want to go to the big corporate tent sale and spend in the millions or billions per purchase. They don’t care that they’re accumulating an enormous debt, because they’re manic.
I want to read a book or an article in which someone goes around and talks to board members and people in the investment business, and psychiatrists, and tells the whole story of each of these corporate self-destructions from the point of view of the buying high of their leaders. Maybe it’s been done — probably it has been done, and I’ll never know it because I don’t read business books, or even Forbes.
Mania is the best way to explain the CIA, too. The manic high of knowing that you can change the history of a country by selling crack and arranging killings and handing out weapons like peanuts, all the while calling it “intelligence.”
I’m eating Planter’s trail mix and I’m not killing anyone. Like most people, I live my life and don’t have any interest in spending secret government money trying to overthrow inconvenient regimes. I like this trail mix, although it’s a little too heavy on the peanuts. We have to forgive Planter’s for that — they’re a peanut company, after all. The peanut guy with a monocle and spats. But the peanut taste is, to the tongue, a cliché. What you want from a trail mix are tastes that are a little less familiar — more cashews, more dried pineapple, maybe some almonds. I don’t like raw peanuts, frankly — they make me feel slightly sick. Peanut butter crackers are a whole different ball game, though.
• • •
AT QUAKER MEETING the clock ticked for thirty minutes before anyone spoke. Then the wild-turkey woman got up. She said that before meeting she was out near her well, at about eight-thirty, when she saw about seventy goldfinches clinging to tall weeds with many yellow flowers. She didn’t know what kind of weeds they were, but they were very tall, maybe seven feet tall. She wanted to tell us about them. There were long spider filaments stretching between them, shining in the sun, she said, and fleabane flowers below them that had still not opened for the day, and then in among the yellow weed flowers were all the marvelous goldfinches, which looked like things you’d find in cages, but they weren’t caged. They were just there because they chose to be there.
Twenty minutes of silence followed. Everyone in the room was thinking about birds and weeds and the color yellow, but nobody spoke. I listened to the clock ticking, and suddenly I wanted to tell them about the click track in Paul McCartney’s “Blackbird.” Gabe, who volunteers at the prison, shifted in his seat and cleared his throat. I thought he was going to speak, but he didn’t. It’s a little like To Tell the Truth, the old game show, in which the contestants had to guess which of three guests was not an impostor, and at the moment of revelation one of the impostors would pretend to start to get up but then wouldn’t. I began to feel the nervous fluttery feeling that meant I was going to have to say something. Finally I stood and got my balance and said that I’d heard my next-door neighbor sing the Beatles song “Blackbird” recently, and that I’d been struck by how perfect and simple a song it was, and then I’d listened to Paul McCartney sing it. It was about a man who hears a broken-winged blackbird singing at night, I said, and it’s a very short song, as all the Beatles’ songs were back then — just a guitar and Paul’s singing. Except for one unusual thing. In addition to the music of the song, the Beatles included the click track, which is a private audio track that plays metronome clicks that the musician can hear on his headphones, so that he can keep to the beat. Normally the click track was removed in the final mix of the song, I said, but here they seem to have left it in, and in that way the song became the blackbird of itself. Its wings were broken — i.e., folded — and then comes the moment it’s been waiting for, and it takes off and flies through the night forest, which is silent except for the click track of the trees. I said, “The bird has to negotiate, singingly, syncopatedly, around the trees — not hitting them, obviously — and learn to fly given the steady beat, the clock, the click track of what he’s been given. We have something small and broken and we just have to wait for the right moment and make something of it and allow it to fly, and that’s what Paul McCartney did, and did for us.” I sat down, feeling shaky and stupid because the end was too pat. There was more silence, and then meeting ended, and everyone shook hands.
Donna said, “Thank you for choosing to come here today.” There was a visitor from Saratoga, New York, who introduced herself. We said, “Welcome.” There were announcements. And then the wooden wall came up and I dropped a twenty in the wicker donation basket. The woman from Eliot, Maine, was there, and she said to me, “I used to listen to my parents’ record of ‘Blackbird’ over and over. You forgot to mention my favorite part, though. He says, ‘Into the light of the dark black night.’”
I drove home thinking, That’s true, that’s the best thing about the song. Singing into the lit blackness of Tennyson’s black-bat night, when suddenly his voice goes high and gives it a bluesy turn that is astounding. He meaning Paul, or Sir Paul as he is called now, and why not? Better that Paul McCartney is knighted than some petroleum baron or air marshal.
Thirty-one
I MAILED ROZ THE BOOK of Mary Oliver’s poems and a CD with some music on it. I was going to include some of my own songs, but I thought better of it. I sent her “Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5,” plus Kate Earl’s “Melody,” Tracy Chapman’s “Change,” McCartney’s “Blackbird” in case she didn’t have it, George Clinton’s “Atomic Dog,” Lennon’s “Imagine,” DNA’s remix of Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner,” and also, what the hell, Paul Jacobs playing Debussy’s “Sunken Cathedral.” I’ve got “The Sunken Cathedral” coming into my headphones right now. I’m listening to it all the way through for the first time since I began writing this book, if it is in fact a book, and I think it is. You have to be careful not to overlisten to a piece of music you love, or you’ll wear it out — it has to last your whole life. You know it’s there — the weight of the piano is there — but sometimes it’s backstage, covered in quilted padding, waiting for the tuner to arrive and tighten its screws.