Illustration by James Lee Chiahan. Source image: Karol Jalochowski / Santa Fe Institute / Miller Omega Program.

13 June 2023

I can’t listen to music and write simultaneously. For example, right now I’m attempting to crank something out while listening to the Human Beinz only hit, “Nobody But Me.”

“Nobody, Nobody, Nobody, Nobody . . . “[fade out]

Big day today. It’s William Butler Yeats’s 158th birthday, Trump’s been arraigned, Cormac McCarthy has died, and an obviously un-embalmed would-be corpse in Ecuador disrupted her wake by banging on her coffin lid, which brings to mind the Irish song “Finnegan’s Wake” and that Bloomsday is only two days away.

Yeats, Joyce, and McCarthy, three undisputed geniuses.

Now, Lucinda Williams is singing “2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten,” which reminds me of these spiral notebooks kids passed out in junior high. I can’t remember what we called them, but the owner would pass the notebook to you, and you signed your name in the front page with a number, and each kid in the class had his or her own page, and you wrote what you thought about the person on that page using the number as your signature. At the top of one of the pages, you’d see your name, then in various handwritings assessments of your character and personality. To find out who thought what, you’d refer to the first page with the names and numbers. I’d get a slew of “OK”s, a couple of “cools” but no 2 Kool 2 Be Forgotten”s. Then you’d cast your own judgement on the participants and hand the notebook back to the owner.^[1]

Now, I’m hearing through my headphones Nancy Griffin’s cover of Kate Wolf’s great song “The Great Divide”. When I was teaching, I used the song to illustrate TS Eliot’s notion of what he called “the objective correlative,” the idea that ideas need to be embodied in imagery.

The finest hour that I have seen
Is the one that comes between
The edge of night and the break of day
It’s when the darkness rolls away.

It’s gone away in yesterday.
Now I find myself on the mountainside
Where the rivers change direction
Across the Great Divide.

The great divide, Cormac, Treat Williams. Nanci Griffin, Kate Wolf, Judy Birdsong, but not the woman from Ecuador, not Donald Trump, not Henry Kissinger, not Jason Chambers, not Caroline Tigner Moore, not you, not I-and-I, not yet.

And Not Van Morrison, who, conveniently enough, is singing “Here Comes the Night” as I abandon this silly little experiment.

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^[1] Note the shittiness of the music-marred prose. Like I said, I can’t write and listen to music at the same time.