Cosmic Music

What do we mean when we call a person "musical"? A tune can be musical, like a symphonic melody; sounds can be musical, like running water or birdsong or the wind in the gutters. How is a person musical? Is it simply someone who likes music, or invests in equipment in the service of home sound reproduction? Or is it a person who actually plays an instrument? No matter - I consider myself among the first, an audiophile within a limited range of musical genres, ranging from Paganini, Palestrini, Puccini and Purcell and through (roughly) Schubert, Strauss and Shostakovich - what I consider the sirloin of musical history. I should in all fairness (and devotion) include Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and Bruch. I could go through the alphabet (Handel, Haydn) but you get the idea.

So I am not at all musical in the sense of playing any instrument, the explanation for that deficiency being quite simple; when I was in elementary school the opportunity arose to join the school band and take the first steps as a participant in the history of music. I mentioned this at the family hearth one evening; my father, with his customary heavy-handed patriarchalism, suggested that I might enjoy learning the cornet, an instrument that he had played twenty years earlier in his high school band. As he had suggested it with some force, I silently demurred. I have never learned to play an instrument.

In all fairness my father was the one who instilled in me a love of classical music. Every Sunday ('Sabbath' in our house), he would slip a stack of red vinyl 45 rpm's over the post in our 'hi-fi', each disc dropping with a splat onto the next as the symphonic movements developed and ceded to the next - Rachmaninoff and Schumann and Lizst and Mozart and Brahms - the Romantics figured large in our Sunday morning pre-roast beef concerts. Eventually he upgraded to LP's and the clack-and-slap of the 45 was heard no more in the land.

The Romantics were what my father knew and approved, and hence they were welcome of a Sabbath in a Calvinist Presbyterian household. The  pipe organ may have been another matter, smacking of it did of European cathredals and Catholicism and (even) Episcopalianism. And so I knew nothing of the symphonic powers of a single person until I was in my 30s and long freed of the encumbrances of Calvin. As it happens, the single instrument I would have ever wished to play. But an instrument having three keyboards and two ranks of pedals (not to mention two banks of stops) and looking like a commercial airliner cockpit, was more than I could ever master. I can still ride a bicycle but can barely add three words of Spanish to my vocabulary in a six-month.

My first introduction to its sublimity came late; in the 1970s I was living in a decrepit northeastern city whose manufacturing was dying or moving south but whose Catholic parishes were still numerous, ethnically arranged, and still maintained their well-kept parish churches with proper organs. I walked into a bar (well, no, that was subsequently and frequently). I was introduced to a priest, a large-souled, raffish and bibulous fellow, in short, all the qualities which serve to make a good pipe organist. He had, in his short tenure as a cleric, instituted a series of organ recitals throughout the various parish churches and managed to attract some well-known organists (admittedly within those constrained circles) to fill his bill of events. 

He was himself a fair, if not very disciplined musician. In those years I was living in the third floor of an old and very tall Victorian, not far, or not far enough, from the rectory of St. John the Evangelist where he resided. Some long departed tenant had installed an old iron bell outside my window, attatched to a rope which hung within reach of any vagrant, pedestrian or convivial cleric who happened by, and frequently I was awakened in the wee hours by a discreet ding. He would mount the stairs, proffer a half-full bottle of Chartreuse, and off we would go on foot to any nearby church to which he had been vouchsafed a key - usually it was St. John but not always.

The massive church door would creak open, we would walk in unceremoniously, clatter up the central aisle and ascend the narrow stairs above the nave to the organ loft. Side by side on the polished bench we would sit. He would open the lid to the stacked ranks of ivory keys, turn on the distant hum of an air pump, and strike the first cord into the deep silence of a dark firmament. I would sit beside him, back to keyboard, light a Camel straight, and feel the reverberations, through air and wood and solid stone, through the dark of vaulted space above, peals of Widor, Cesar Franck, of Jehan Alain's Litanies, of Bach's Toccata in D Minor. The cigarette smoke followed the music upward to the high roof. I was hooked.

My friend is dead now. I enjoy the music when I can, rarer of access now than it was then. But I have never savored it so deeply as when we were in a darkened and vaulted church, seated on a wooden bench, feeling the vibrations coursing through the bench, through my legs and backbone, lifting into the dark and uncluttered cosmos.

The Eternal Smile

It is a small head, about the size of my smallish fist. The face holds a subtle and pleasant smile, a Buddha smile, because it is a Buddha's head. It has the large, long-lobed and oddly rectangular Buddha ears. A distinctly Japanese Buddha. It sits on a bookshelf in my room; a bookshelf has been its perch since my earliest memories of it. The head once formed the finial of a stone post, I was told, and was snapped off and carted away by a twenty-something U.S. Navy sailor from the Pacific fleet, away from the boat on shore leave in Okinawa during the Occupation in 1945. I am certain it was not an act of drunken stupidity (only one in an astonishing constellation of stupidities), because this sailor only began his drinking career in abstemious neighborhood cocktail hours several years after I, his more bibulous firstborn, had begun mine.

It was in his effects at his death, the only one of his effects that I had any desire to cart away to my own bookshelf. So, spying it in a box, I did just that. And there it now sits with its eternal smile, its bald Buddha head smoothed by generations of adherents giving it a passing rub for fortune. Better had he been left in place but nothing lasts, not even peace.

It constitutes a bit of the furniture of my childhood. In childish fashion I once asked what it was and was told that it was an "idol." I knew what an idol was because part of my early family regimen was to hear my father reading us tales from the Old Testament, the only novel with which he was remotely acquainted. So I knew of Baal, and of Molok, the hollow iron image within which a roaring fire was built and firstborn babes (like me) placed in the glowing arms as sacrificial offerings. Given the range and depth of human depravity, I consider this one of the only facts to be garnered from the book. But this little stone head didn't seem, to me at any rate, to be an idol quite on the scale of Molok. 

I decided, at the age of about seven I suppose, to do a little theological investigation. So, gathering my sister and brother in the living room, I placed it on the floor in the middle of our small circle, and told (or dared) them to bow down to it (explaining first what I supposed idols were and probable consequences of any signs of obeisance). I forget now whether there was compliance or demurral, but I nonetheless got on my knees and touched my head to the floor, this being my rather standard idea of religious devotion. I wasn't certain what I expected might follow upon this blasphemy - probably some peculiarly antedeluvian scourge like leprosy or the clap. I remained unscathed, of course, but not unaffected - it was my first small foray into ecumenicity, a venture I am convinced none of my forebears had ever made. Atheism, as I see it, is ecumenicity in its broadest form. 

I don't think the young sailor who snapped the head from its place along the street thought of his act as one of vandalism. Possibly it was (knowing him as I did in later years) a kind of subliminal act of theological ravaging. The Okinawan Japanese were culturally inferior because they were pagans (ones who had recently lost a war) and pagans were idolators and ipso facto submerged in falsehoods of all sorts (the Old Testament being the real stuff). He was no more interested in their salvation than he was in their prosperity or happiness following on the Navy's departure from their heathen shores. It wasn't by itself an act of evangelical zeal so much as an act of cultural indifference. The zeal, the hidebound refusal of ecumenicism, the willful ignorance of difference, the evangelical's monopoly on truth, all of these hardened in later years. In that, he was a good American.

So the little Buddha head (I cannot think of him as mine, he belongs to himself and the world) is permanently displaced to a country that has scarcely known anything of harmony. Of the standard trinity of eternal sages, no one ever listened to Socrates; Jesus seems a facile fellow, co-opted to sanctify any passing brutal strain of nationalist primacy; and Buddha, remaining silent, merely smiles an eternal smile and awaits a visit from some solitary wandering soul who wonders what this is all about. 

Anno Mirabilis

"That year, the amapas bloomed twice."

It could be the opening line of a Hemingway novella. Better yet, of a Garcia Marquez novel ("One Hundred Years of Pulchritude," 697 pages). It drips of portent, of matters metaphysical or theological - an anno mirabilis, eternal recurrence, a great awakening, a second chance, the Second Coming, a renaissance, another Great Revival (god forbid) - something grander and laden with meaning beyond merely a summer of good rains. This winter, the amapas really did bloom twice.

What to make of that? Probably just the good luck of the summer rains. But still, the line seems too good to leave at that, to simply throw away or consign to the dustbin of mundane cause and effect. It's too good to waste, too allusive not to want to see what could happen with it in successive pages of, say, Hemingway or Faulkner or V. Woolf.

Would it be a light be a light tale or a dark one; remain brightly optimistic, perhaps turn sinister? Surely it deserves to be followed by more than a gardening memoir or a "Guide to the Trees and Shrubs of Sonora." It begs a metaphysical turn, a tale (dark, one hopes) involving Chaos, the Fates, the titans, the valkyries, the shekhinah, the cyclops and harpies and lokis, immanences that bedevil our lives and jar us in our daily transit.

For my part I don't know what to do with it, not being inclined to writing novels, or novellas for all of that. I can see nothing else for it but to offer it gratis to any takers, and let it have its head. 

No Kings Today

House Speaker Mike Johnson told Fox News last week that Democrats are refusing to end a government shutdown because “they can’t face their rabid base.”  (The Independent, October 14, 2025)

Today brings the second No Kings national protest to our weary little cow town on the Colorado prairie. Miguel and Madame de Montaigne are planning to leave the precincts of the chateau and totter into the city to participate in a day of Marxist hijinks and merry japes. We have assembled an assortment of petits fours and dried bouquets of meadow flowers to distrubute among the encircling squadron of ICE agents, FBI infiltrators and any other benign protectors of the approved public order our consuls and praetors in a distant city may deem it sound policy to deploy. I find it advisable to wear logo-ed clothing (Patagonia vest and outdoor pants, SmartWool hiking socks, Merrell hiking shoes, anything from Gwyneth Paltrow or the fascist fashionista Hugo Boss, etc.) hoping to "blend in," as the saying goes, by not seeming overtly anti-capitalist.

"I got all this stuff on Amazon."

According to Sean Duffy, our non-public, coal-fueled, over-the-road transportation secretary, we are a mercenary antifa, clearly being paid, everything transparently transactional in the New America. So I am looking forward to the additional income such outings provide, the gutters on the north coping of the chateau being currently in a parlous condition. Word among the local protest organizers is that George Soros may favor our group with a visit to personally disburse large personal checks, but I find that a bit fanciful, much like Santa Claus actually turning up at your chimney on the night. After all, George is only one fellow, his minions are legion.

My speculation is that the funding for these events will come from a dark consortium of all the baddies who range freely in Republican fever dreams - people like the Clintons (who even have a foundation to fund such frolics), Hunter Biden and his Laptop (it has a life of its own), the Marx Brothers, Antonio Gramsci (we don't know who he is but we know Mussolini didn't like him), Bill McKibben, the climate doomsayer, Taylor Swift, George and Amal Clooney, James Comey if he's not in jail by now. (And lest we forget, "Hanoi Jane" Fonda.)

Marxists

We are the Terror, the Red Scare, a Marxian elite, in the decrepitude and poverty of our imagination incapable of seeing the better world offered us, the Shining Magmire on the Hill, no liquor on Sundays. Only a mad person, a terrorist, an inveterate thinker, a sceptic, a mocker of authority - a "rabid base" no less - could refuse a forcible invitation to return to the land of John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, William F. Buckley, John Birch, Joseph McCarthy, Strom Thurmond, Lester Maddox, George Wallace, Barry Goldwater, Curtis LeMay, Boss Tweed and the Tammany Hall grifters, of Smoot-Hawley Tariffs and Jim Crow, of Dr. Strangelove and Catch-22 and the Watts Riots. Only the wilfully blind could fail to find the promise of a rosy new order in W.D. Griffith's Klan epic, Birth of a Nation. What could be better than a return to America's Golden Age - 1950? 1850? 

Without the polio and tuberculosis.

Oh, shit.

On Making of Lists

Of the making of lists there is a grand tradition in (what we may still call) Western literature. I am not thinking of the lists found in Herculaneum or Pompeii, lists of papyri manuscripts stashed in private libraries, or those lists of groceries, household utensils or shipping manifests - casks and barrels, jugs and amphorae, salt and ale, rope and sail, thole and pin; not the catalogs in cuneiform of granary or warehouse, harem or household, tax office or counting house; not what we think of as laundry or (worse) "to-do" lists. Nor even of such awful and august lists as the list of our ten principle sins in the Bible, arguably the first novel of the Western canon.

I am speaking of the rich, rambling, allusive list as an integral form of imaginative literature in a tradition stretching from Cervantes' Sancho through Rabelais (Gargantua and Pantagruel) to Robert Burton (The Anatomy of Melancholy), Jonathan Swift to Laurence Sterne (Tristram Shandy). Here for starters is one of Sancho Panza's typical rambling soliloquies in Don Quixote, stringing together (to Quixote's disgust) a medley of freely associated proverbs to make an obscure point:

“I can sign my name,” responded Sancho, “because when I was a steward in my town, I learned to make some letters like they use to mark on bales, and they said that it was my name. Besides, I can pretend that my right hand is maimed and I can have someone else sign for me. There’s a remedy for everything except death, and holding the power and the staff, I’ll do whatever I want. And what’s more, he who has a bailiff for a father . . . or They’ll come for wool and go back shorn, and the lucky man has nothing to worry about. And the foolish remarks of the rich man pass for wisdom in the world. And being a governor and liberal at the same time, as I plan to be, they’ll think I’m flawless. Make yourself into honey and the flies will eat you up. As my grandmother used to say, you’re worth as much as you have. And you can’t take vengeance on the landed gentry . . . . My only wealth is proverbs and more proverbs. And right now four of them come to mind that fit the situation exactly, like peaches in a basket . . . . What better ones are there than never put your thumbs between your wisdom teeth, and to ‘leave my home’ and ‘what do you want with my wife?’ there’s nothing to answer, and if the pitcher hits the stone or the stone hits the pitcher, it’s bad for the pitcher? All of them fit perfectly. . . . So, why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye with never a thought for the plank in your own, lest it be said of him: the dead woman was frightened to see another with a slit throat. And your grace already knows the one about the fool knows more in his own house than the wise man in someone else’s.”

Or consider Rabelais's registry of curses the Parisians hurled at Pantagruel when the giant unzipped in urbe and let go a flood of piss as payment for the rude welcome they gave him:

"God's plagues upon him! (There can't be a god.)

Mother of God, Francine!

By Christ's holy head!

Passion of God confound him!

God almighty!

By the belly of Saint Quenet!

O, the heavy hand of God!

By Saint Fiacre of Brie!

Saint Trinian help us!

By Christ's last supper!

By God's bright day!

The devil take me!

Pon'st a gentleman's honor!

Holy Saint Andrew!

By Saint Godegrin, stoned to death with his own apples!

By the saints Foutin and Vitus!

O Saint Mamica, you virgin martyr!

By all pigs in pokes! We've been drenched for a laugh!"

Robert Burton's Melancholia (1621) is a cornucopia of lists, not least in his enumerations of the various crannies in the brain where the animal spirits are stored - animal spirits being, as you will recall, the medium for such subtle events as our "thoughts, passions and imaginings, all sentiments light or heavy, joyous, melancholic, whether reasonable or mad, a highly refined and rarefied liquor whose subtle influence occasions the motions of the humors in all the assorted ventricles, chasms, receptacles, creeks, channels, conduits, rivulets, ravines, puddles and reservoirs, byways, courses serene or rapid of the brain, transmitting commands and volitions to the limbs and likewise transforming the perturbations and oscillations of the nerves into images, impulses, sensations, smells, sounds, appetites, wishes, perceptions, doubts, deliriums, visions and what have you."

The urge to list things as a literary mode seems to me a lost art, a glaring lacuna, a gaping loss, a deficiency of invention, a paucity of imagination, a timidity of thought, a malaise of vocabulary, a want of brio in the literature of (at least) the last two-and-a-quarter centuries. I may easily be proven wrong by the occasional counterexample, a literary lister who proves my rule by exception. My general point stands.

Listing in the course of a fine telling can strain the vocabulary to eloquence, exhaust or adumbrate the possibilities in the subject at hand, open the ventricles of the heart and the hibernated recesses of the brain, open the kidneys, stimulate the bowels, make the legs twitch and the eyes roll, cleanse the palate, clear the mental sinuses, open new vistas and reillumine familiar views. All in a few extra words. Which will perhaps not escape a commercial literary editor, a task which any reasonably intelligent person is well advised to take up on her own.