Traveling Sprinkler (8 page)

T
HE GUITAR LESSON
did not go well. My fingers didn't want to cooperate and I had some trouble with tuning. I tightened the E string too hard and snapped it—classic stupidity—and the teacher, who was a pleasant aging hipster sort of gentleman, showed me how to replace it. That was helpful. He also showed me “Blowin' in the Wind,” the proper way to strum it. That was a good song to start with, because Dylan's singing is sometimes a little shaky—not as shaky as mine, but he's no Harry Nilsson. I asked the teacher who his favorite singer was. “That's an impossible question,” he said. But he said he liked people like Steve Winwood.

Quaker meeting is in eight minutes. I'm parked in a space across the street. I don't want to go in, because I stink of cigar. But I am going to go in anyway, because I like the goodness in these people and I always feel better after I've gone.

•   •   •

A
ND NOW MEETING
is over and I'm back in the car. One of the elders, Chase—the man who sang “How Can I Keep from Singing?”—was shaking hands at the door when I went in. Meeting was crowded and there were a number of young children. I sat down in an empty stretch of pew far enough away from the next person, a filmmaker I knew slightly, so that I thought he wouldn't smell me. I put my finger through my key ring and closed my fist around my car key. People were smiling and looking around, as they do while latecomers arrange themselves. The last to arrive were a mother and her three children, followed by an older man in a white shirt who sat next to me. He was a bit out of breath from hurrying, and I heard his breathing gradually slow down. I listened to the clock for a while and thought about how many people were wearing plaid. One woman had gotten her hair cut short in a way that looked very good. I closed my eyes and felt that time was moving faster, maybe a little too fast. The windows were open, and the door was open, and the sound of a passing car traveled slowly through the room. After that there was stillness. A little boy held his mother's gold watch, turning it in his hands and smiling a secret smile. Then the silence changed and deepened, and for several seconds it was perfect and I felt a sort of ecstasy. Then someone shifted and adjusted a pillow for her back, and I could feel my pew bend when the man next to me crossed his legs. Again a car sound poured softly in through the windows and out the open door. We were permeable. We were a meeting permeated with openness.

After fifteen minutes Donna the clerk said, “We want to thank the children for worshipping with us. Can they shake hands around the room?” The children pushed themselves off their pews with serious faces and shook hands with the people who sat in the first rows of pews that faced the center of the room. There was a shockingly beautiful girl of about six with a barrette that was not doing a good job of holding her hair. She nodded politely as she shook the knobby hand of the oldest of the elders, a thin, tenderly smiling woman who wore hearing-aid headphones. Then the children left and I listened to them thumping down the stairs to the basement. Muffledly I heard the teacher call, “Don't touch the stuff on the table yet!”

Then again the clock and the silence. I looked down for a long time and bent over, leaning my elbows on my knees, still holding my car key, and then I remembered the helpful tip about posture and I imagined the hooks in my rib cage and sat up. I opened my eyes and I saw that nobody was smiling now and many people had their eyes closed. Time seemed to be going even faster, as if it were a train picking up speed. Many minutes went by. I wondered who would speak. Nobody did. I looked at the clock. It said ten after eleven. I wanted someone to speak. Surely someone would offer testimony about something. But I noticed that the woman who sometimes talked about her birdbath wasn't there. She was often the first to speak, and once she spoke others did. Silence was all very well, but in order to feel the silence you need a few words.

I didn't think that I should say anything, because I'd said something about chickens the last time I went. On the other hand, someone should speak. I checked the clock. There were only ten minutes of meeting left. A woman got up and I thought she was going to say something, but she just left to arrange the after-meeting food in the other room. Please someone say something!

•   •   •

I
WANTED TO TELL
the Quakers about Debussy's sunken cathedral. I kept formulating an opening in my head. “A little more than a hundred years ago, a composer named Claude Debussy wrote a piece for piano called ‘The Sunken Cathedral.' He was a man with a big forehead who loved the sea. His most famous piece of music is called
La Mer
, the sea. And in one of his early songs he set to music a poem by Verlaine with the words ‘The sea is more beautiful than cathedrals.' But when he wrote his tenth piano prelude, ‘The Sunken Cathedral,' ‘La Cathédrale Engloutie,' he was no longer young and he was harassed by money worries and he had symptoms of the cancer that would kill him and he was thinking that life hadn't turned out quite the way he had expected.” I wanted to tell them all this, but I couldn't because it was late, and it was really too much to say in meeting. I always felt a little like a godless impostor among these genuinely worshipful folk.

There were only four minutes of meeting left. I hoped that the woman with the big white hair would say something—she often spoke at the very end of meeting. She was sitting with a slight almost smile and her eyes were closed. Everyone seemed content with the silence. I've been reading a biography of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and I thought maybe I should say something about Hopkins's articles on sunsets for
Nature
magazine. After the Krakatoa explosion, Hopkins wrote three articles for
Nature
describing the unusual colors of the sunset that he'd meticulously recorded in his notebooks. But there was no time to say that, and it was too raw, really, to be a message anyway. Then again, at 11:29 a.m., I thought I absolutely must stand and tell them about the sunken cathedral. I wanted to say that Debussy played enormous still chords and out of them you can see the smoky blue water and the decayed pillars of the ruined church and the long blue fishes steering themselves down the nave and poking their snouts at the lettucey seaweeds. I wanted to say that in 1910 Debussy felt a great disappointment. That he wrote a friend that sometimes he wished he was a sponge at the bottom of the sea—
éponge
, a usefully squeezable word in French. But then he came up with this piece of music, the tenth prelude, and in it he created a great shadowy still place underwater, this place of peacefulness where when you listen to the music you can go and watch the medieval fishes swim. I wanted to say that he'd always wanted to
noyer le ton,
to drown the tonality, and he did it by closing the lid of the piano and holding down the sustain pedal and letting the elements of the chords pile up. I wanted to say, “He was sick, he couldn't play the piano as virtuosically then as he had in music school, when he could noodle for hours and amaze his fellow students with harmonies they'd never heard before, but out of his sense of disappointment and out of his money worries and out of his new sense of his own mortality he built an ancient crumbling lost ruin that nobody had known about, and we can hear it and see it hanging there or standing there on the seafloor in the silence.” I didn't say it.

Then it was one minute after eleven-thirty and Donna turned to shake hands with the man next to her, and she smiled, and everyone smiled and shook hands with the people around them. Donna thanked us for choosing to worship there and a visitor introduced herself. She was from Eliot, Maine. A woman announced that the soup kitchen needed volunteers. Another woman reminded us that a man was giving a talk on solar power on Wednesday evening. Then two members grasped the handles on the large wooden panel that closed off meeting from the room where the potluck food was, and pulled it up, not without effort because it was more than two hundred years old and stuck in its frame, and when they'd pushed it up above six feet, another person propped it into place with a long pole. I nodded hello to the old man and to several others and walked out into the marvelous morning sunlight. The woman from Eliot was behind me. “You're a visitor,” I said.

“Yes.”

I shook her hand. Something made me say, “Most of the time there are messages. Usually people say a few things during meeting. It's not always totally silent.”

“Oh,” she said. “Do people generally park on the street?”

I said that generally they did, yes.

“Because I didn't know and I parked up there.” She pointed to her car in one of the spaces in the small lot behind the meetinghouse. “After I did I wasn't sure if that was all right.”

“Oh, it's perfectly fine,” I said. I waved my keys at her. “Have a nice Sunday.”

“You, too.” She waved her keys at me.

I walked to my car and lit up the stub of my Opus X cigar and smoked it until the label began to burn. It's made in the Dominican Republic and wrapped with leaves grown from Cuban seeds.

T
HIS IS PAUL CHOWDER,
sitting in a plastic chair. I want—I want—I want to tell you something new. I feel that I have a new thing.

What is it when you have an urge to produce something, to make something, and it almost doesn't matter whether it's good or not? When I was a little kid, in first grade, there was a project that we had to do in class. We were supposed to make a holiday wreath. It was to be made from a bent coat hanger, tied with the plastic wrap that came from the shrouds that went over your clothes when you picked them up from the dry cleaners.

The strange thing was that the dry cleaners that my father went to used blue-tinted plastic. On the appointed day I brought the blue plastic sheet to school. But I noticed that everybody else's dry cleaner plastic was clean and clear. Mine was blue, and theirs was clear. I was horrified by the idea that I'd brought in the wrong raw material. The teacher gave me some extra clear plastic, but there wasn't enough for a whole wreath. “You can take pieces of clear plastic and do part of the wreath,” she said gently, “and then alternate with the blue plastic.” I shook my head. Everybody else's wreath was knotted with thick luscious densely packed bow-ties of clear plastic. I didn't want to finish the blue-striped wreath, but I did. It was a shaming disappointment. My mother wanted to hang it on the door but I said no. And yet why was I raising a fuss? It doesn't make any sense. What were we doing making plastic Christmas wreaths, anyway?

This morning I woke up at four a.m. and read the beginning of Medea Benjamin's book on drone warfare. Benjamin talks about meeting a thirteen-year-old girl who was begging on the road near the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. In 2002, a missile hit her house while she was outside carrying a bucket of water; it killed her mother and her two brothers. Her name was Roya. Her father, a vendor of sweets, had survived, but he did not speak. I got up and watched a video of Medea Benjamin telling the story to an audience at a library. She said that Roya's father had carefully gathered pieces of his wife and his sons from the tree near their house and buried them. Oh, Jesus. Roya. That poor girl. Her poor father. Their lives completely demolished. I was traumatized and angry—angry at General Atomics, the company that makes drones, angry at George W. Bush, angry at Barack Obama for increasing the drone attacks fivefold after he was elected. I paced the kitchen for a while feeling powerless and ineffectual. At least Tim is writing his book.

•   •   •

I
WENT TO
P
LANET
F
ITNESS
and had a long session on the elliptical trainer. By the time I was done, the parking lot was crowded with cars and I couldn't remember where I'd parked. I walked up and down and then I started singing, “I lost my car in the parking lot, I lost my car in the parking lot.” Was it a song? Yes, in a way it was.

Once I found my car, which was parked way over to the right, I started home. I saw a street sweeper—a big yellow street sweeper with an invisible pilot high up in the cab. It looked like it was driving itself. I love street sweepers, I always have, even more than garbage trucks. I love the way the big rear roller turns inward against the forward movement of the machine, flinging the mess that the front bristles have dug away from the curb up into some inner holding area. “Sweeper” was one of the first words I said, according to my mother's stories. “Sweeper” and “lung lord.” “Lung lord” was how I said “lawnmower.”

I lit a Ramones cigar, from Honduras—one of the shorter cigars in the grab bag—and I pressed the button on my recorder and sang, “Street sweeper baby, coming down the street. Spinning those bristles and keeping it neat.” That's definitely a song. When I got home I grabbed my guitar and went up to the barn and clutched out a few chords and matched the chords to the melody, and I was in business, in a primitive sort of way. It was very windy and the barn creaked—I could hear the joists moving and twisting—but I ignored the wind's white eyeballs. I spent the morning recording snippets of songs, and then I took Smack for a walk in the park near Strawbery Banke, where all the historic houses are. Strawbery Banke, is there a song in Strawbery Banke? No. I looked across the water at the submarine base. What about a song about a burning submarine? “The submarine was burning, going up in smoke.” No. “The sea warriors watched while their submarine burned.” No, definitely not, because Chuck worked on submarines and it would make Nan unhappy if I wrote a song about Chuck's precious submarine.

Oh, but the guitar sounded good. I couldn't get over how good a D minor chord sounded on the guitar. Little old D minor. I once played a Mahler symphony with a D minor bassoon solo, big deal—Mahler's interminable Sixth Symphony. But this guitar D minor was different. By shifting two fingers you can go from a D minor to some other chord with a suspended something-or-other. D minor, then strange chord, then D minor again. So beautiful. “It's early morning and the rollers are rolling,” I sang. “The rollers are rolling in the early morning.”

Everything's different when you write a song. The rhymes sound different and they happen naturally, and the chords don't sound like the same chords played on a piano. Your fingers make choices for you. The guitar is your friend, helping you find chords you'd never have found on your own, and then those chords help you find tunes you'd never have thought to sing. It's such a simple and glorious collaboration.

•   •   •

I
S IT POSSIBLE
to write a song about the beginnings of the CIA? About the fetish of secrecy? I know a little secret about the CIA. I bet you don't know this. I'm going to tell it to you right now. The true founder of the CIA was a poet, Archibald MacLeish. Well, that's not quite right. MacLeish was one of the true founders, one of the early recruiters and legitimizers.

When Franklin Roosevelt wanted to set up a bureau of secret intelligence—this was in the summer of 1941—he assigned the job of creating an intelligence agency to two highly placed people. One was William Donovan, a Republican lawyer who'd gone to Pearl Harbor to “inspect the fleet” before it was attacked and gone to London to cook up trouble and help set Europe ablaze. The other was FDR's poet speechwriter, the man who'd won a Pulitzer Prize for saying, with great self-importance, that a poem must not mean but be: Archibald MacLeish. MacLeish had already helped Wild Bill Donovan with some of his interventionist speeches—they stayed up late in Donovan's place in New York fashioning what Donovan would say on the radio about how convoys of American destroyers should be protecting British ships—and he was setting up a new propaganda agency called the Office of Facts and Figures, and he was, incidentally, Librarian of Congress. When Roosevelt wanted an Office of Censorship to keep the lid on bad news, he put MacLeish on the board of directors. MacLeish wanted to be in control of all government information. He was fascinated by air power—the physical air power of bombing, and also the ideological air power of propagandistic radio. He wanted us in the war, but he wanted us to fight smart, at high altitude, with careful targeting and big new weapons made in democratic factories—to fight, above all, with the really big weapon, managed truth. Elizabeth Bishop wrote dismissively of MacLeish's “mellifluous and meaningless” speeches. The
Chicago Tribune
called him the Bald Bard of Balderdash.

In August 1941, Donovan and MacLeish met on a cool porch and sketched an organizational chart for a secret agency, and afterward MacLeish sent out telegrams to academicians of war planning, including William Langer at Harvard and James Phinney Baxter at Williams: “Colonel Donovan as coordinator of information is setting up a central intelligence service with which the Library of Congress is cooperating,” MacLeish said in the telegrams. The war planners met, and one of MacLeish's librarians produced a long document titled “Proposal for a
CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE SERVICE
for the Federal Government Together with the Relationship of
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Thereto.” It ended up being called the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, and it did many counterproductive secret things during the war, some of which are still classified, and in 1945 Harry Truman formally abolished it and fired Donovan. But Archibald MacLeish carefully watched over the shreds of OSS intelligence that were left, in his new job as assistant secretary of state, and then a few years later Truman realized he needed a spy service after all, in order to do battle with the evil Communist conspiracy as it was manifesting itself in Greece and Italy and Southeast Asia and everywhere else. Truman wanted to overthrow Communist leaders by spreading around bribe money and napalm and ammunition, so he reconstituted the OSS. But now it was called the Central Intelligence Agency, echoing MacLeish's original name. And some of MacLeish's young Yale protégés from Skull and Bones, including Cord Meyer and James Jesus Angleton, eventually became the CIA's senior paranoid poltergeists. So now you know. Archibald MacLeish was one of the original instigators and organizers of this bloated monstrosity of assassination and violent regime change and unaccountable underhanded ugliness and skullduggery. And drone warfare. Which is why Plato was right: poets should never get involved in politics.

Is there a song in that? Probably not. I don't want to know about evil, I just want to know about love. Stephen Fearing sang this song in 2007 in a hotel lobby in Paris. Listen to it on YouTube and you will be happy: www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiJjLdcFF6Y.

•   •   •

I
SO ADMIRE
people who can sing. They tell their voice to go somewhere and it just goes there. Or they say, Don't go there, go almost there and swerve up into position at the last second. There's an unspeakable intelligence in what they're doing. No words can describe it.

I went out and spent twenty dollars on sushi at Fresh Market, and then I went to the chocolate factory on Hanover Street and bought dessert: some special pistachio bark sprinkled with chili powder and cayenne pepper and cinnamon. It has magical mood-altering properties, I think, and even if it doesn't it tastes good. On the ride home I got lucky when I was listening to my songs on shuffle: I came to something by Anna Nalick called “Breathe.” I was sitting at a stoplight and suddenly there was an amazing woman singing in my ears about how life's like an hourglass glued to the table and what you have to do is breathe, just breathe. Something papery in me crumpled and I crunched my eyes closed and sang tunelessly along with Anna Nalick, and I listened to every word. The last time I'd thought about that song was back in 2009, when I was in a hotel room in Cincinnati after a reading.

It was so good that I tapped the genius icon, the little atom, to make a genius playlist from songs that iTunes in its wisdom thought were like “Breathe.” The Weepies came on, another group I haven't thought about in a while, singing that the world spins madly on, and then came another good song that I'd forgotten, by Kate Earl, called “Melody.” “Melody” is about how Kate Earl listens to songs all day long and she has nobody beside her to go ooh ooh ooh, but her skin is warm and her heart is full and the music is loud so her hips can swing. I bet they do—those woman's hips, those hourglass hips, they don't lie. I think “Melody” was a free single on iTunes one week, that's how I got it. And here Kate Earl was just singing it for me. I started to dance in the car, taking a right turn into my driveway. She says something very profound and simple: “Every missing piece of me, I can find in a melody.”

This song is a wonder. There are sleighbells in the background for some reason, who can explain it?