- for Zizek -
A brisk but not overly brisk terza rima.
I - Out Across the Macadam
I don’t know how to begin, except by simply
beginning as one usually begins,
in possession of something that flashes dimly
in the mind but that catches on the mind’s sequins
and sets a sparkling equilibrium
there. Later one tries to establish the sequence
of thoughts that produced this quiet delirium,
but the recovery always falls short,
demanding, as it does, a prolonged tedium
of exertion, and soon one gets lost in the court
of reason or the imagination,
opting for either on the basis of which sort
of thought produces a degree of elation
approximating the primal insight.
This comparison initiates creation.
Let’s backtrack a bit, as I’m afraid that you might
have gotten lost before the first full stop,
and I’d like to be able to get it all right
so that you, the reader, don’t feel compelled to drop
this treatise even before it’s begun.
Thus: insight may be likened to a spinning top
and Being to the surface upon which it’s spun.
The axis is a center of quiet
in an infantile ecstasy of whirring fun
which wobbles ere it collapses in a riot
of laughter against the immaculate
surface of Being. The child retrieves it, winds it
back up, pauses so as to remove his jacket,
then sends it spinning once more in the next
of a series of repetitions. The clack it
makes on falling is that which puts the child in check,
breaking the spell and inducing laughter.
But the motionlessness which holds through spine and neck
as he eyes this eloquently circling matter
mirrors the axis at the heart of form,
the cool serenity in the midst of clatter,
the proverbial hurricane’s eye in the storm
of impressions that, constantly breaking
upon the senses, lead us by steps to the Sturm
und Drang of poiesis, of art, of making,
or, alternatively, to the challenge
of theoretical reflection.
I’m taking,
I fear, a bit too much for granted. With malice
you’re probably muttering, “Just what kind
of liquor is this guy sucking from his chalice!”
Be patient, and I’ll tell you what I have in mind.
After all, it’s no less than a Tolstoy
who, in War and Peace, risks leaving readers behind
and making them crave an evening at the Bolshoi
with military theory and with reams
of polemic against the machinations, ploys
and deceptions of Napoleon and his dreams
to further internationalize French
glory, grandeur and pomp – and yet none of this seems
to mar, interrupt, or detract from his tale. Hence
I’ve begun as I’ve begun, with the hope
that the theory won’t prove a great hurdle or fence
and that the reader won’t feel he or she’s a dope
for having to read through some sections twice.
I guarantee the text won’t be lacking for trope,
simile and the usual poetic spice
that, after all, one expects from a poem
above and beyond the mere potatoes and rice
of the formal scaffolding which provides a home
for myself no less than for the heroes
and knaves with which I hope to fill this slender tome.
Returning to the theme of that youthful Nero
delighting in his little formal pyre
that blazes as momentum approaches zero
around an imaginary axis or wire,
setting its duplicate up in the mind
and abiding there after the images tire
(the images of the spinning top and the blind
path it takes out across the macadam);
returning, as well, to the earlier defined
equilibrium that is perhaps the Adam –
nay, the very Jahweh of human thought,
the knowledge of which leads to the “up and at ‘em”
of higher intelligence…One learns or is taught,
or else one intuits, one discovers
that it’s impossible to catch hold of the sought
stillness of the original, that it hovers
well beyond us in a noumenal sphere,
and we’re left to scrape our phenomenal gutters
for remnants of the odd, the uncanny, the queer,
the rare glimpses into an otherworld.
And is it a sieve or a pipe through which we peer?
But here we deceive ourselves, for in fact the curled,
squared, or linear shapes of the mind’s eye
are already things imagined – gilded and pearled
by the very questions that we pose as we sigh
for that fabled quiet at Being’s root.
But what counts for us is that we make, as we try,
what we make, though the silence remains truly mute.
There. Well, it doesn’t seem to’ve helped a lot.
You look at me as if to say, “Who gives a hoot
about terza rima and such Platonic rot?”
That’s from the readers of verse among you.
And others more up on contemporary thought
are saying to yourselves, “Just how should we construe
this pastiche of adulterated Kant
and who knows what other ghosts we thought we were through
with years ago. Specters of ancient thought, avaunt!
What’s more, it’s done in an absurd meter
in which that quarter-sane Italian used to taunt
his Florentine tormenters, masking as Peter,
Augustine, Aquinas and other saints.
How long can he sustain it? We’ll watch it peter
out slowly and stick around to see how he paints
his inability to find a way
out of the maze that develops through such constraints
as will inevitably lead him far astray
into Bach-like, canon-fugue-ish puzzles,
the keys to which are granted only to those ca-
pable of emerging from a prolonged tussle
with large-scale and small-scale forms that would baf-
fle would-be’s and lesser masters without muscle
or skill enough – like Guido in 8 1/2
by Fellini – to finish what they start.”
(Guido was forced, by the way, to dismiss his staff,
unable to finish his film through lack of heart.)
And I’ll make my mess the protagonist,
you say, and thematize my irresolve. (In part,
of course, this is the narcissistic aim or gist
which serves to denote the “Fellini-esque”
to his followers and detractors. And the mist
thrown up by such ad hoc aesthetic arabesques
may alienate many, to be sure.)
I take it you may by now have fancied or guessed
that I’ve yet to fix on a method, as it were,
to my madness – that I really don’t know
where I’m going from line to line, that it’s all pure
luck, hardly less random than a casual throw
of dice – or, in my case, whatever rhymes
are currently available based on the show
of endings for the previous five or six lines.
Believe it or not, I do have a plan.
But it does involve navigating around mines
that lurk in corners as well as having to scan
a monstrously difficult formal scheme
in a vehicle that’s insufficiently manned.
And I’ll admit that all that smoky stuff which seemed
at the outset to have something to do
with the creative process is nonsense I dreamed
up just to set the whole thing in motion. It’s true.
II - Elvis
Now let’s begin with a true beginning:
Elvis. Yes, you heard me right. Elvis. Elvis who?
Why, Elvis! What other Elvis is there? The King!
Dante, as I remember, piously
rhymes Christ only with Christ. Just the same, I’ll rhyme King
just with King. Let it be known that from here on he
will receive that honor due him, although
I screwed up the first time, seeing as my scrawny
mind hadn’t yet fixed on the best way to hallow
his name. And I’ll say just in passing that
I promise not to do anything so shallow
as to rhyme Elvis with Pelvis.
Perhaps the “Cat
King” himself (that’s how he’s known in Chinese)
would not be at all surprised to discover that –
not altogether unlike what happened to Jes-
us after Pilate had vented his spleen
and cooled the indignation of the Pharisees –
he’d become, like the hero of his youth, James Dean,
the object of a vast, posthumous cult
more fantastic yet than that of the Nazarene.
But all this was subsequent to the magic jolt
he gave America in the decades
following the Second World War. His catapult
to unprecedented stardom during the staid
and unnerving first years of the Cold War
took place long before public cynicism preyed
on our national innocence or had yet bore
a hole in our halcyon and treasured
belief in the stars and stripes and what they stood for.
This, of course, is how common wisdom at leisure
has fashioned, in the intervening years
since his death, a background against which to measure
the heights to which he rose against his crooning peers –
those prime-time cherubs of the middle class.
Yet history, some opine, is a play of mirrors;
and, while not wishing to do anything so crass
as pretend I have a view of my own,
still there must be a better way to view his ass
and the impact it had on the Beatles and Stones
than to see it as a dual between youth
and mass or the congealing of spirit in bone –
to give a phallic twist to Hegelian sooth
(for, while no one’s gotten to Hegel yet,
someone no doubt will look for a pattern of truth
in the King via crusty old Germans, you bet).
Let’s imagine, for a minute or so,
a young Elvis spanning his paw across the frets.
It’s a dreary day and he’s got no place to go.
He helps Mama hang the clothes on the line,
treading about absently in the melting snow,
then rides his bike over a trampled, leafless vine,
“pops a wheelie” into the slushy hedge,
returns to the trailer, asks his Pa for a dime,
skips down to the corner grocery to buy a wedge
of chocolate, moans he doesn’t have enough
for a new G-string, but thinks to offer his pledge
to bring the balance tomorrow. “Let’s not be rough
on the poor boy. His folks live on the brink
of poverty. Just think, ten years ago, how tough
it was for us with that rusty old kitchen sink
we couldn’t even afford to replace –
back when we had to walk next door to get a drink
or use the toilet. Can you look him in the face
and say you ain’t gonna lower the cost
a few pennies and then sit here and watch him pace
his way back home like a puppy that’s gotten lost?”
The shopowner pauses, nods to his wife,
and then, just like a rustic scene in Robert Frost,
he hands the boy the string, throws in a pocket-knife,
says, “Here son, consider the knife a gift,”
and shows the grinning lad the door. “Upon my life,
not even a thank you,” he groans, seemingly miffed,
but accepting it’s the way of the young.
Dear readers, please let your imaginations drift
forward a decade or so. Now counted among
his bandmates are Bill Black and Scotty Moore.
The great war is over and the cold one’s begun.
People worldwide fear an apocalyptic war.
The grim specter of McCarthyism
still lurks. America seems wormy at the core.
The Ed Sullivan show is a weekly prism
refracting the nation’s best hopes and fears
into countless shards that indicate a schism
growing between adults and those of tender years.
But this is all in the history books.
I want to tell you how Elvis, in spite of sneers
from those unimpressed by his uncommon good looks,
became the darling of the century
(and later, as we all know, the darling of crooks).
In addition to perturbing the white gentry
by singing in a style denoted black,
he won the hearts of their daughters, set them purring
with sounds from the other side of the racial track –
nothing, again, which you haven’t all heard before.
Lend me your ears, good readers, and I’ll here is take you back
to the year of nineteen hundred and fifty-four,
to the soon-to-become legendary
recording session with gentlemen Black and Moore.
They’ve been rehearsing a Mike Stoller and Jerry
Lieber ditty by the name of “Hound Dog.”
Stoller would later be told aboard a ferry
(which had been sent out across the mid-morning fog
on an emergency rescue mission –
Stoller’s boat having gotten caught up in the cogs
of a frigate), that his “Hound Dog” had been mentioned
in the Times as having hit Number One.
But they hadn’t yet worked it out at this session.
The men were exhausted. They’d been working since sun-
up to try to get the sound they desired.
Producer Sam Phillips some months back had begun
looking for a white singer that could croon and gyre
on a par with the young black troubadours
now all the rage – the same men who had long inspired
young Elvis on Beale Street (both in and out of doors).
My God, were they ever a crazy bunch –
they’d jump and howl, and some would get down on all fours!
To make a long story short, Phillips had a hunch
that with just the right mix of style and race
he’d make a few bucks and no longer have to lunch
with that crude pack of yo-yos down at Helga’s Place.
And now with drummer J. D. Fontana
added into the mix, he might well soon erase
his debts. Boy, were they good – solid to a man. A
better band than he had seen in ages.
The hour was late. Elvis removed his bandana,
wiped his brow, and tried to count how many stages
they’d played on for little better than zip.
The trucking agency said they’d dock his wages
the next time he didn’t show for work. He had skipped
just once, but once was one time too many,
and no way could he get by on the scanty tips
they gave at those dingy clubs, or the odd penny
he’d sometimes get for delivering milk.
The complaints from his parents weren’t getting any
less frequent. “Just how can you afford silk
neckties when we’re barely making ends meet?
And what the hell’s this mingling with that colored ilk
that can’t so much as keep their asses in their seats
at church, let alone sit still as they sing –
like this Berry clown, strutting like a duck in cleats!
Well, just remember, I want a fat diamond ring
just as soon as you’ve made that million bucks.”
That’s how it had been for months – bitter taunts and stings
from Mama and Pa. What should he do? Should he chuck
it all to the wind and forget fortune
and fame – depart with barely enough shirt to tuck
in under his loosening belt? And according
to Phillips, they’d better hit the mark soon
or it would be up for everyone. Affording
to keep the studio out of the red through June
was not on any account a foregone
conclusion.
With these gloomy thoughts he hummed a tune
he’d heard on the radio while mowing the lawn.
The rest of the gang were taking a break,
hoping against all odds to make one final strong
attempt to record that long-sought, mythical take
that would make their boy a really big star,
or at least bring in some needed cash. “For Pete’s sake,”
Elvis muttered, “how did it go? If I bar
the sucker here I can sing it in A.
Well, that’s all right…Well, that’s all right…”
The door ajar
into the smoky control room adjoining, they
looked on as Elvis absorbedly paced
the floor, growing more animated as he played.
Scottie Moore in excitement rushed back to his place
and began to feel around for the chords.
Bill Black put down his coffee, returned to his bass,
and drove the others on with his thumping two-fours
out of a slow blues into a quick R
& B, while Scottie, whose hands were reddened with sores
from overplaying, picked fresh from out of his jar
some country licks that hadn’t been mated
with the blues before or even tacked to its spar.
Thus, in just under two minutes was created
that American toy we know as rock
and roll. And whatever good or bad was fated
to come of it, whether one deemed it art or schlock,
whatever it was, it was here and now –
a notch up on Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock.”
Now I must digress, in order to discuss how
a personal style falls off from its height –
how art, a mirror of life, is not long allowed
to bask in the glory of its afternoon might.
“Spring may not follow past meridian,”
to quote Wallace Stevens. Intimations of night
and icy finitude haunt the Caribbean
warmth of each great artist’s maturity.
One removes by steps to a polar idiom
and, with Stevens, relinquishes futurity.
This accounts for the beauty of the late:
the poem which takes the place, through its hushed purity,
of the big-stepped and ruddy mountain, the mad spate
of songs that depict one’s deathly double,
the long oasis’d scholar who empties his crate
of accumulated knowledge, pricks his bubble
with the point of his now quieted top,
releasing the spirits therein to the Hubble
of final Being, slowly unfretting the stops
and embracing the music of the spheres.
Now Beethoven, whose eerie, enharmonic drops
indicate an acceptance well beyond one’s fears
of the great unknown, whose cadential sleights
and portentous silences remember the queer
and estranged, not the hero mastering the heights
or plumbing the depths of classical form –
who brightly sets out as a wandering youth, fights
his battle through the development’s raging storm,
and makes his anticipated return
to the jubilation of the gathering swarm
of semiquavers hovering over the churn
that gushes through the dominant’s floodgates,
where he boldly recapitulates what he’s learned…
No, not any of this to be found in the late.
Nothing’s a hero except what’s broken –
a withered stick that passes through narrower straits,
and form chopped up into a row of odd tokens.
Now Stevens himself, whose poems are reduced
to the barest elements: a few words spoken
to a stream in Connecticut, a moon let loose
upon a winter deprived of its snarl,
an extravagant bird perched high up in a spruce,
an old man freed of unutterable sorrow –
things a child might think up but never write.
Now the comedienne of logic, Nancy Farle,
whose jokes are reputed the longest ever told.
There’s the one about the chiropodist
who cuts off his patients’ chilblains and has them sold
as bargaining chips for the game of “Blindman’s Whist.”
That one runs to seven pages in print.
And there’s the one concerning the two severed fists
that come each night to haunt a torturer named Quint.
Farle’s final jokes, which were found in her bed,
consist of merely a punch-line, and one must squint
or look sideways to see where the logic has fled.
One laughs only after some time has passed.
She made them short so they’d roll around in your head.
Here are a few of them: “Then Bohr said, ‘Life’s a gas.’”
“The clues depend on how you ply the crook.”
“When the rain comes the donkey will better the ass.”
These are individual cases. One must look,
in addition, into the belated
attempt at the end of each tradition to brook
the inexorable fall into a fated
pattern of certain disintegration.
Witness Mahler’s profound attempts to have mated,
with classical sobriety, the elation
of the Austro-Hungarian folk song –
with universal truth, local aspiration.
Think not just of Mahler, but of the entire throng
of composers standing on a threshold
between common practice – now three hundred years gone
by since Monteverdi – and the surge into bold
new harmonies, as some try to dam it
all back up, to stop the flow, but nothing will hold
back the air that breathes as “from another planet…”
But hold on, readers, this ain’t Vienna –
It’s Vegas! Las Vegas! Just Vegas, goddammit!
Alas, no Kafka’s Prague, no Dante’s Ravenna,
no Alexandrian or Florentine
late grandeur, no final paeans to Athena,
no early 20th-century New Orleans –
not even poor Memphis, but Las Vegas!
In the midst of a desert with imported greens!
Where nothing betokens yet even the vaguest
connection to the realm of aesthetics!
Where money has spawned the creation of mega-
entertainments in which the King and his medics
(the medics to wake him up and put him
to sleep) are now showcased.
It’s a mad, pathetic
ending to a career of two decades – a grim
example of what is bound to happen
when a kid makes enough to grasp each sordid whim.
We needn’t dwell on how adulation flattened
the seamy nuances out of his sound,
how gradually his ego swelled and fattened
along with his girth – nor on how he gained those pounds.
Nor need we waste time on how the Colonel,
his sinister manager, made him film a mound
of bad movies, none of which makes the least kernel
of sense – not to mention all those vapid
songs with Elvis accoutered like some infernal
sidekick of Milton’s Satan. Alas, how rapid
was his embarrassing lapse into kitsch!
Twenty years later, now who but the most avid
of the King’s admirers will fail to get a stitch
in his or her side from laughter at how
we all allowed the poor guy to get filthy rich
while shaming the muse that resided in his brow
to move on to Hibbing or Liverpool?
We like to pretend it could never happen now!
He was never so true as when he sang “A Fool
Such As I.” Who in the end can we blame?
The evil Colonel, for whom he became a tool
for acquiring his own dubious wealth and fame?
Or the doctors, who filled him up with dope
till he could barely even remember his name?
Or his early poverty, which confused the hope
to get rich with artistic achievement?
“Elvis, son, you’re nothing but an image – a trope.”
The nations on earth were caught up in bereavement
when Elvis showed his face at Heaven’s gate.
Now he lowered his gaze in humble appeasement.
“We sent you an angel, but you were an ingrate.
Do you suppose God is not an aesthete?
You’re lucky, my boy – you almost slipped through the grate!
It’s just good you didn’t spit on the Paraclete.
Your Mama, god love her, taught you manners.
No, it’s not a bird, you stupid sot. I’ll repeat:
It’s good you didn’t spit on the angel’s banners.
There were many that lobbied against you.
And we don’t know where we should put you. Our planners
have discussed everything, including your menu.”
Peter shook his head and opened the door,
probably wondering what havoc would ensue
as Elvis stepped out across the heavenly floor.
Just what claim does rock music have as art?
Critics like to think it’s something beyond the store
of materials from which it derives. In part,
a magical subsumption of genre
in genre and a musical logic that darts
between them freely in a system of honor
that preserves an essential clarity
of elements in which we may not grow fonder
of one without jeopardizing the parity
in which it and the others co-exist.
And, beyond that, it’s a certain hilarity
of the vernacular which works to clear the mist
from the eyes of the confined, the local,
the blind love of precedent from which it desists.
Elvis as Eulenspiegel: an outcast yokel.
How often is this a matter of fact?
How often is rock more than a sum, a total?
Well, this precisely is where I want to hold back.
It’s not so much the sum that one prizes
as the generic strengths of both the white and black
models against which rock music proudly sizes
itself up – country, R&B, the blues,
all the there’s-a-hole-in-your-bucket-dear-Liza’s
of backwater Appalachia that came in twos
off of boats from Europe – and don’t forget
gospel, Tin Pan Alley, etc. Just who’s
prepared to deny we’ve a long way to go yet
before we can say it’s all been subsumed
in something to be eternalized at the Met?
One thing’s for sure: What happened in that tiny room
in Memphis with Elvis, Blackie and Moore
is enough to provide rock with its needed plume,
and what its future may or may not have in store
will always keep in mind their example:
when, no matter how briefly, in a quick two-four,
that elusive concurrence was found and sampled –
that fleeting equilibrium between
insight and the memory that might have trampled
it or, even worse, hidden it beneath its sheen.
But back to our subject: late Elvis in
Vegas…70’s Vegas, where Fredos, Mo Greens,
and countless other creeps vaguely reminiscent
of Godfather characters run the town.
How’s the King gotten up today? If he isn’t
decked out as a lacey, mid-Victorian clown,
strutting out of some Dickensian lane,
then he’s dressed as a bear tamer wearing a crown,
the audience screaming madly through the refrain…
Readers, let’s not go on. Let’s make an end.
An ill-omened John Lennon said of the King: “Fame
services you in the vices to which you tend.
When alone, you’re never really alone,
and it’s your courtiers who kill you in the end.
They recognize that a crown’s just a crown on loan.
If you’re brought down, they’ll die or go to jail.
It’s in their interests to tie your ass to the throne.
To keep it there they’ll stuff you with candy and ale.
People in this position lose their fort
of good sense.”
So ended his life, so ends my tale.
It’s time to adjourn to our beds and cut this short.
There ain’t no more wine left in my caraffe.
I hope that his heirs don’t sue and take me to court.
Please kindly disregard any factual gaffes.
Don’t be militant fans and have me tarred.
It’s beyond me to pen a fitting epitaph,
but surely you can find something as to how hard
it is to be or keep from being king
somewhere in the pages of the immortal bard.
All things are mutable – most of all for a king.
For where’s he now? Six foot down in the earth –
though to the best among us he’ll always be King.
Please don’t think of this all as an excuse for mirth.
Why couldn’t we just let this poor guy strut?
It shows us how little our souls are really worth.
Perhaps you’ll say, “Go to, Gilchrist! Come on! Tut, tut!”
I hope it won’t cause any attrition
among you, my good American readers, but
if you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen,
‘cause telling you this is my sole mission:
It’s clear there’s nothing for us beyond perdition.
- to be continued -