Grid Girls and Poems (part 3)
I was never going to be a good guitarist. Tall people never are: the ultrafine motor coordination required for virtuoso musicianship requires the shorter sorta arms normally found attached to a shorter sorta torso. But I plodded gamely away at it, practising the scales and twanging my awkward way through Sor, Carulli, Tarrega, Bach, Bert Jansch, Stefan Grossman, Chet Atkins and all the usual suspects through my teens and twenties. In the process, partly out of frustration at not being able to get the fast runs right (esp in the Bach Chaconne), I found myself churning out bass lines, chord sequences and melodies, optimistically labelled "songs" (a handful even had lyrics), in accordance with the maxim "if you can't do, teach" (or in musical terminology, "if you can't play, write"). I authored perhaps three or four hundred of these, touting them around the various bands I was in. The response was always the same: "too difficult", presumably politespeak for "crap". Eventually, I gave up (at which the last band I was in promptly became famous). A few of the songs made it into MIDI format (I used to have Cakewalk), and a few of those eventually ended up on YT, where they've languished ever since, visited by few and liked by none.
Then my guitar was nicked in a burglary. Since when, all I've had is a beat-up, almost unplayable toy guitar, purchased from a kind neighbour for twenty bucks: being a married man with a sprog, obviously spending any more than that on myself would have been an obscenity. My wife is relieved: I sometimes wonder whether she sponsored the burglary in order to make the guitar disappear, as she never liked the sound I, or it, made. Nor did anyone else over my 56 years of existence, come to think of it, except Carmen. All of which is to say that I have perforce had to figure out how to enjoy my own music in the absolute metaphysical certainty that no one else was ever going to.
Which, of course, will strike some people as inexcusably solipsistic. Surely the point of making music is to please other ears than one's own? I don't disagree with this, but would merely point out that there is a species of human, of which I seem to be the perfect specimen, who is constitutionally incapable of pleasing anyone else, in any way whatsoever, no matter how hard he tries. And I have tried. I don't know what the problem is - if I did maybe I could fix it - though there have been hints. "What genre is this meant to be?" was a frequent question: apparently, to be liked you have to fit in a category, which sort of makes sense (I've tried to dutifully genre-ise everything since). There's also the unfortunate fact that I have a lugubrious, melted-candle voice and face, which means that my lyrics, which were almost invariably intended to be funny in a surreal Monty-Pythonesque way, were always misinterpreted as serious, therefore disturbingly unhinged (I am one of those people you just can't picture as having a sense of humour: me laughing would be like, I dunno, Marilyn Monroe picking her nose: the mere idea of it would be enough to traumatise many people). But ultimately I think it has to do with an incorrectly wired brain. I just can't tune into anyone else's wavelength on an aesthetic plane because my neurones are laced up wrong. Therefore, I'd better take off my Homburg, since my overcoat
Is evidently too long.
OK. If you have no talent for music, you better try something else. I did. I tried poetry. Same story. Here, though, I have more of a clue what the problem is: my verse is too obscure. Which is a fair criticism, and one I accept. However, to my mind this shouldn't matter that much, provided the obscurity is merely on the superficial level of reference. I know my poems are going to be judged on what they say, or whether they appear to say anything comprehensible, and hence, after a certain point in my development, I started making sure that they actually did say something more or less understandable, as a sop to the reader (apparently, I was none too successful in this endeavour). But this is not, in fact, how I judge my own verse, or anyone else's come to that.
I rang a silent bell, beneath a shower of pearls,
In the eagle-winged palace of the Queen Chinee.
I don't mean I like nonsense verse. The above, which fellow Deadheads will instantly recognise, is not nonsense. But it is detached from any surrounding explanatory context or narrative, forcing you to focus on sound and the interplay of multiple denotations and connotations. It works because it is internally consistent, paints a sensually rich picture, and builds up to an epiphany, an explosion of unbridled ecstasy in the last syllable of the last word. Which brings me to something I've been wanting to say for a long time (approx. 40 years) and somehow never got round to until now:
Jewish Aunts is arrived at through subtraction.
I should explain (it's all in the Spanish blog, if you go look) that "Jewish Aunts" is my attempt to orthographically naturalise the poncey and pretentious French word "jouissance", beloved of literary critics everywhere: as a concept it equates, approximately, to joy, and is on let's say nodding terms with happiness. Which is what I take it we're all after, excepting the odd Canadian professor. Certainly I always was. You never can have too many Jewish Aunts. Which is why I like poetry, and music, and why I see them as very nearly the same thing.
As for "arrived at through subtraction", well, here's the thing. I have been unlucky in most things in life, but reasonably lucky (I think) with my brain chemistry, at least once I was safely out of the Slough of Despond known as adolescence. By which I mean I find myself full to bursting with Jewish Aunts, I won't say a lot of the time, but at reassuringly regular intervals. I get high easily, I won't say without drugs, but on (lately) nothing stronger than nicotine and coffee. I have found it especially easy to chuckle evilly at slow-moving reptiles since my sex drive quietly whirred and shifted down into Hibernation Mode about ten years ago, freeing up powers of concentration, contemplation and appreciation I didn't know I had. It's odd, perhaps paradoxical, but I also find myself admiring women more now that I don't actually, y'know, want them. Wanting, in my case, seems to get in the way of seeing.
But where I'm really going with this is the simple observation that every time I've been happy, it's been as a result not of getting something but of losing something. There: after forty-odd years I finally said it. And the odd thing is that this simple realisation never fails to catch me off guard. I seem to have been programmed to expect happiness to result from the acquisition of some desired commodity, such as, I dunno, a night with Carmen, an ice-cream, a copy of A Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe, a decent recording of Verklarte Nacht, a day off work, a bottle of Chinchon, a plate of squid in garlic, or a whiff of horse dung floating over a fence. Whereas when the Jewish Aunts arrive, it's always as a result of some words, some snatch of melody with a clarinet in the background, some hilarious typo, some receding oaf in a curtain of rain, which has the effect of temporarily shortcircuiting the part of my brain responsible for making me consistently and reliably despondent by the simple expedient of focussing my attention on the distance between me and the object of desire. So it's not that I get what I want, it's that the wanting part of me trips over a kerb and gets momentarily left behind, leaving me free to want nothing more than whatever is there. And it's glorious.
All I seem to need to be happy is to forget certain things, including my own internal mappamundi. It's extraordinarily simple and, at the same time, extraordinarily difficult.
Hence, poetry. I see poetry not as a poncey, puffed-up way of saying things but as incantation, by which I mean freeing words from their leaden ballast of prosaic meaning and servile adherence to deadening narrative and letting them soar, lifted aloft by the helium buoyancy of their own natural promiscuity and venturesomeness, freeing them to sound and to combine as they will, and take you to places you didn't know existed, places whose existence is incompatible with everything you thought you knew about the world. In this process, they naturally give birth to Jewish Aunts. They do so by contradicting expectation, by bucking the chunks, clumps, collocations and clusters our daily speech is filled with, by switching frames of reference as often as necessary to keep you off balance, by refusing to let themselves be caught and gutted. Ambiguity, esp. via paronomasia, is an important tool in this: I naturally gravitate towards a semantically diffuse lexicon, and labour hard over creating phonologically credible alternative readings, with the aim of muddying the semantics just enough to force the brain to backtrack and re-parse, thus keeping it occupied and out of harm's way while the imagination is free to swim in the sounds. It doesn't always work, as a technique, but I like it when it does. Which is not to say that when I am bad I'm not horrid. Of course I am. Anyone can see that. But to be good in about six to ten odd lines is enough for any reasonable man, and I think I almost managed that, so there.
I do plan, though, to annotate the lot when I have time. Poetry, of course, should never (have to) be explained - that's the first rule you learn at Bard School - but what the hell, no one is going to read it anyway, so might as well. Keeps me off the streets, innit. Though I'm buggered if I know what was ever wrong with the streets in the first place. (I may need to think this one over.)
Then my guitar was nicked in a burglary. Since when, all I've had is a beat-up, almost unplayable toy guitar, purchased from a kind neighbour for twenty bucks: being a married man with a sprog, obviously spending any more than that on myself would have been an obscenity. My wife is relieved: I sometimes wonder whether she sponsored the burglary in order to make the guitar disappear, as she never liked the sound I, or it, made. Nor did anyone else over my 56 years of existence, come to think of it, except Carmen. All of which is to say that I have perforce had to figure out how to enjoy my own music in the absolute metaphysical certainty that no one else was ever going to.
Which, of course, will strike some people as inexcusably solipsistic. Surely the point of making music is to please other ears than one's own? I don't disagree with this, but would merely point out that there is a species of human, of which I seem to be the perfect specimen, who is constitutionally incapable of pleasing anyone else, in any way whatsoever, no matter how hard he tries. And I have tried. I don't know what the problem is - if I did maybe I could fix it - though there have been hints. "What genre is this meant to be?" was a frequent question: apparently, to be liked you have to fit in a category, which sort of makes sense (I've tried to dutifully genre-ise everything since). There's also the unfortunate fact that I have a lugubrious, melted-candle voice and face, which means that my lyrics, which were almost invariably intended to be funny in a surreal Monty-Pythonesque way, were always misinterpreted as serious, therefore disturbingly unhinged (I am one of those people you just can't picture as having a sense of humour: me laughing would be like, I dunno, Marilyn Monroe picking her nose: the mere idea of it would be enough to traumatise many people). But ultimately I think it has to do with an incorrectly wired brain. I just can't tune into anyone else's wavelength on an aesthetic plane because my neurones are laced up wrong. Therefore, I'd better take off my Homburg, since my overcoat
Is evidently too long.
OK. If you have no talent for music, you better try something else. I did. I tried poetry. Same story. Here, though, I have more of a clue what the problem is: my verse is too obscure. Which is a fair criticism, and one I accept. However, to my mind this shouldn't matter that much, provided the obscurity is merely on the superficial level of reference. I know my poems are going to be judged on what they say, or whether they appear to say anything comprehensible, and hence, after a certain point in my development, I started making sure that they actually did say something more or less understandable, as a sop to the reader (apparently, I was none too successful in this endeavour). But this is not, in fact, how I judge my own verse, or anyone else's come to that.
I rang a silent bell, beneath a shower of pearls,
In the eagle-winged palace of the Queen Chinee.
I don't mean I like nonsense verse. The above, which fellow Deadheads will instantly recognise, is not nonsense. But it is detached from any surrounding explanatory context or narrative, forcing you to focus on sound and the interplay of multiple denotations and connotations. It works because it is internally consistent, paints a sensually rich picture, and builds up to an epiphany, an explosion of unbridled ecstasy in the last syllable of the last word. Which brings me to something I've been wanting to say for a long time (approx. 40 years) and somehow never got round to until now:
Jewish Aunts is arrived at through subtraction.
I should explain (it's all in the Spanish blog, if you go look) that "Jewish Aunts" is my attempt to orthographically naturalise the poncey and pretentious French word "jouissance", beloved of literary critics everywhere: as a concept it equates, approximately, to joy, and is on let's say nodding terms with happiness. Which is what I take it we're all after, excepting the odd Canadian professor. Certainly I always was. You never can have too many Jewish Aunts. Which is why I like poetry, and music, and why I see them as very nearly the same thing.
As for "arrived at through subtraction", well, here's the thing. I have been unlucky in most things in life, but reasonably lucky (I think) with my brain chemistry, at least once I was safely out of the Slough of Despond known as adolescence. By which I mean I find myself full to bursting with Jewish Aunts, I won't say a lot of the time, but at reassuringly regular intervals. I get high easily, I won't say without drugs, but on (lately) nothing stronger than nicotine and coffee. I have found it especially easy to chuckle evilly at slow-moving reptiles since my sex drive quietly whirred and shifted down into Hibernation Mode about ten years ago, freeing up powers of concentration, contemplation and appreciation I didn't know I had. It's odd, perhaps paradoxical, but I also find myself admiring women more now that I don't actually, y'know, want them. Wanting, in my case, seems to get in the way of seeing.
But where I'm really going with this is the simple observation that every time I've been happy, it's been as a result not of getting something but of losing something. There: after forty-odd years I finally said it. And the odd thing is that this simple realisation never fails to catch me off guard. I seem to have been programmed to expect happiness to result from the acquisition of some desired commodity, such as, I dunno, a night with Carmen, an ice-cream, a copy of A Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe, a decent recording of Verklarte Nacht, a day off work, a bottle of Chinchon, a plate of squid in garlic, or a whiff of horse dung floating over a fence. Whereas when the Jewish Aunts arrive, it's always as a result of some words, some snatch of melody with a clarinet in the background, some hilarious typo, some receding oaf in a curtain of rain, which has the effect of temporarily shortcircuiting the part of my brain responsible for making me consistently and reliably despondent by the simple expedient of focussing my attention on the distance between me and the object of desire. So it's not that I get what I want, it's that the wanting part of me trips over a kerb and gets momentarily left behind, leaving me free to want nothing more than whatever is there. And it's glorious.
All I seem to need to be happy is to forget certain things, including my own internal mappamundi. It's extraordinarily simple and, at the same time, extraordinarily difficult.
Hence, poetry. I see poetry not as a poncey, puffed-up way of saying things but as incantation, by which I mean freeing words from their leaden ballast of prosaic meaning and servile adherence to deadening narrative and letting them soar, lifted aloft by the helium buoyancy of their own natural promiscuity and venturesomeness, freeing them to sound and to combine as they will, and take you to places you didn't know existed, places whose existence is incompatible with everything you thought you knew about the world. In this process, they naturally give birth to Jewish Aunts. They do so by contradicting expectation, by bucking the chunks, clumps, collocations and clusters our daily speech is filled with, by switching frames of reference as often as necessary to keep you off balance, by refusing to let themselves be caught and gutted. Ambiguity, esp. via paronomasia, is an important tool in this: I naturally gravitate towards a semantically diffuse lexicon, and labour hard over creating phonologically credible alternative readings, with the aim of muddying the semantics just enough to force the brain to backtrack and re-parse, thus keeping it occupied and out of harm's way while the imagination is free to swim in the sounds. It doesn't always work, as a technique, but I like it when it does. Which is not to say that when I am bad I'm not horrid. Of course I am. Anyone can see that. But to be good in about six to ten odd lines is enough for any reasonable man, and I think I almost managed that, so there.
I do plan, though, to annotate the lot when I have time. Poetry, of course, should never (have to) be explained - that's the first rule you learn at Bard School - but what the hell, no one is going to read it anyway, so might as well. Keeps me off the streets, innit. Though I'm buggered if I know what was ever wrong with the streets in the first place. (I may need to think this one over.)
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