Traveling Sprinkler (11 page)

I
WOKE UP VERY EARLY,
before it was light, and by the glow of my phone I read a little of Pat Pattison's ebook on how to write better song lyrics. Pat Pattison teaches at Berklee. One of his students was John Mayer, he is at pains to let us know. At the beginning of his book he thanks Mayer and some of his fellow students “for showing how well all this stuff can work.” Pattison is not a humble man. The mother-of-pearl shell-diving exercise in his first chapter, he says, has over the years “proved to be a mainstay for many successful songwriters, including Grammy winners John Mayer and Gillian Welch.”

Here's how you do the diving exercise, according to Pat Pattison. You imagine a random object—anything at all, could be a back porch or a puddle—and you dive toward it. You try to understand how it affects all seven of your senses, including your organic sense and your kinesthetic sense. You set a timer and do this for ten minutes first thing in the morning. You take notes. By the sixth minute, things really get going, Pattison says. You're on your way down, “diving, plunging, heading for the soft pink and blue glow.” Then, ding, time's up.

That sounded pretty good. I tried it in bed. I started the iPhone timer and began typing notes. What was I diving for? I didn't want to think about a back porch or a puddle. I was diving down to reach the drain at the swimming pool at summer camp. The drain under the diving boards was twelve feet deep, I knew that. I had tried before and hadn't been able to do it, but now it was toward the end of camp, and my swimming had gotten stronger. It was a YMCA day camp, and there were swimming certificates. They gave you little cards when you'd progressed to a certain level. This was when I was eight or nine. I'd gotten a Guppy card, and a Minnow card—I was nowhere near a Flying Fish or a Shark—and I took a huge gulp of air and surface-dived toward the drain. I struggled down, kicking so hard my body twisted in the water, till the drain began to come into focus. It was round and black and had a number of large holes in it. I thought I wasn't going to be able to reach it. I saw—

And then my alarm timer went off, playing its loud marimba tune, with a final plink of syncopation. I turned it off. I reset it for another ten minutes. What I saw on the drain was a pale pink piece of chewing gum, the very same piece of pink baby-Jesus gum I'd seen at the drinking fountain at school. I didn't touch it. I touched the terrifying drain itself. I looked up and saw somebody's legs hit the water a mile above me. I pushed off from the bottom and clawed to the surface. I didn't tell anyone I'd touched the drain that day, but I had.

Four or five years later, my grandparents took us on a cruise. It was a Swan Hellenic Cruise, with a full complement of tanned, elderly, witty classicists from Oxford who gave lectures on-site at Paestum and Pompeii and at the rebuilt ruins of the palace at Knossos. I took a picture of a black cat near one of the columns of the Parthenon that had been reassembled after the Turks stored ammunition there and it blew up. One of the professors, J. V. Luce, had a theory that Plato's Atlantis was actually Minoan Crete, which had suffered a terrible tidal wave when a nearby island volcano blew and then sank into the sea, forming a caldera. Professor Luce said that there was a core of truth to the Atlantis story, that the sinking island and the tidal destruction of the center of Minoan civilization had merged, and that Plato had gotten the dimensions of Atlantis wrong by a simple factor of ten, which was an easy thing to do because of the cumbersome way in which numbers were notated at the time. I was tremendously excited by this theory. It was definitely true, no question.

The timer's marimba went off again and I didn't bother to reset it. There was, I recall, a beautiful long empty beach on Crete with a rusty wrecked ship on its side a few hundred feet from shore. I swam out to it with my new facemask on and saw the ribs of the wreck through the bright blue water. It was entirely covered with pale yellow seaweeds about the size of Lay's potato chips that moved gently in the currents. I felt a fear of the empty blue water and the yellow weedy wreck and I swam back to shore.

And then we went to a small island—I think it was Mykonos—with many white houses on steep streets that led down to the water. “You need some fins,” my grandmother said. She went into a tourist shop and bought me a pair of black swim fins and a snorkel. The fins were difficult to walk in, but they propelled you through the water with remarkable speed. The beach was in a cove, with high rocks around, and I swam out to the deepest part, breathing through my gurgly new snorkel. It had little rubber flanges you could bite on to hold it in your mouth. I stared down at the green-black weeds and the lumpy rocks. I sucked in air and upended myself and dove, and I got about halfway down and then turned back. The water was deeper than the YMCA pool. It was darker, too. The light angled into it like light coming through venetian blinds. I thought I saw something moving down there, something oddly furry, like a hedgehog. Perhaps it was a sea cucumber. I took a breath and bit down on the now useless snorkel and began my descent, trying to swim like the scuba people in
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
, with my arms at my sides.

The fins helped me go deep fast. The facemask pushed hard against my upper lip and around my eyes. I kept going. And then the daylight dimmed and I felt currents of cold water touching me like arms.

I reached out toward the mysterious woolly sea cucumber, if that's what it was, but there were black seaweeds all around it and my fear was growing. I saw a spiny sea urchin next to it. I thought, I'm in an element that doesn't want me here. Don't go this deep. I turned and kicked my fins and swam upward. I flailed through into air and light and breathed.

So that is what Pat Pattison helped me remember. Is there a song in all that? I don't think so. Maybe if I were John Mayer there would be, or Gillian Welch. Who is Gillian Welch? I'll have to check her out.

I
'LL TELL YOU ONE THING.
Two things. First, I like wind. It blows things around and it blows the cigar smoke away. I've only smoked about half of an Arturo Fuente Gran Reserva and I'm already feeling subjected to an unusual force of gravity. The world has gotten larger and more massive, with more liquefied rock in it, and it's pulling me down toward its center, into the car seat, where I'm sitting. The second thing is, when you smoke a big, bad cigar first thing in the morning, it makes you need to go to the bathroom. You'd better be at home or parked near a bathroom when you smoke that cigar. It's almost uncontrollable.

I'm back from the Chicago gig. They gave me a gorgeous blue check for a thousand dollars. I stayed in the guest room of an English professor and his charming and funny wife who had not dyed her hair. I always like women who don't dye their hair. The guest room was in the attic and I had my own bathroom. Before the event I lay on the bed moaning, “Why am I here?” and trying to figure out what to say about the future of poetry, and then I “boweled down,” as Roz used to say. Of course the toilet clogged. It was inevitable. I flushed a few times with no results and then the chain broke. Shit. You know the scene in
Anger Management
when John Turturro says, “I took a dump on his porch”? That's what I thought of. I felt no anger, though, only fatalistic acceptance. The professor was out meeting another panelist at the airport and I didn't want to ask the charming, funny woman for a plunger. I took the back lid off, taking care not to clank it, and tinkered in the tank for a while, and then I took a rash chance and forced it to flush manually by lifting the slimy rubber stopper. Miraculously, the toilet conceded. What a beautiful sight to see that horrorshow of embarrassment swirl away. I put on my lucky tie—it's one of my father's narrow paisley ties.

At the symposium the consensus was that poetry had a rosy future. Lots of interesting work was being done in out-of-the-way places like Stockton, California, and new means of distribution were bringing imaginary gardens with real toads in them to poem-starved folk in the hinterlands and innerlands who'd never heard of Marianne Moore. I said how much I liked getting a poem of the day by email from the Poetry Foundation and that I'd rediscovered Thomas Hardy that way. There was a young panelist from Harvard named Somebody Abel who made the point that we think that people were reading poetry aloud to each other every evening by the fireside a hundred years ago, reciting Tennyson for giggles, and it simply isn't true. He read from a piece written by George Gissing in which Gissing said that in his experience among common folk nobody had the slightest interest in or reverence for poetry and nobody knew a line of it. Abel said it's always been that way and it always will be that way and the whole push to teach the Great Books is just a way of making students miserable. I thought that was refreshing, but another panelist got huffy. Afterward we all went out for a long dinner with some MFA students at a noisy “bistro” where we had to shout and scream and sample fancy wines while all the while pretending we were talking in normal voices. I was somewhat tipsy and wiped out when we got back, and I went to sleep and had a nightmare about having to serve slices of cold brain to rich people in a black-and-white movie, and I woke up at three a.m. I wrote Roz a note on a postcard of the Sears Tower, now called the Willis Tower: “Newscrawl, five Chicago panelists agree American poetry has a future. I miss your delightful scarved self. -P.” I still couldn't sleep, so I pulled out my new twenty-five-key keyboard and hooked it up to my computer and made a song fragment called “Marry Me,” using the computer's tinny microphone. I think maybe it's the best thing I've done so far. The end goes:

There's lots to do

Plenty to see

And that's why you

Should get married to me

In the morning, when the charming wife was gone, I told the professor that the attic toilet had gone
hors de service
, but that I thought I'd fixed it. He said, “Oh, I'm so sorry, yes, that toilet is very delicate.”

An MFA student, a poet, had been assigned the job of driving me to the airport. She played me her favorite song, which was a live performance of “In the Gloaming,” done by Jonatha Brooke in a cappella harmony with another woman. “Will you think of me and love me,” Jonatha Brooke sings, “As you did once long ago?” The MFA student and I drove up the ramp to the airport drop-off doing our best not to cry our eyes out. She closed the trunk and I thanked her and flew home.

•   •   •

I
'VE FINISHED SEASON TWO
of
Downton Abbey
and burned out on episodes of
The Office
—Dwight is simply intolerable. Instead today I watched a little of John Cusack's movie
War, Inc.
, and then I watched him and Minnie Driver in
Grosse Pointe Blank.
Minnie Driver plays a woman with a radio show in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and John Cusack plays a disillusioned hit man, formerly employed by the CIA.

People believe that the CIA is forever—that it's an immovable fixture of American government, like Congress or the Supreme Court—but it was begun with an executive order by a president and it could be ended just as easily. It exists by presidential whim. Obama could shut it down tomorrow, but he doesn't want to. People believe wars are inevitable, that human nature can't change, but think of capital punishment. In England people were once disemboweled and castrated in front of a cheering crowd, with their heads put on spikes for viewing. In India they executed criminals by dragging them through the streets and having an elephant step on their heads. Now most countries have outlawed capital punishment. Or think of dueling. Ben Jonson killed a man in a duel. Manet dueled an art critic and wounded him with a sword. Pushkin, who fought dozens of duels, died of a bullet wound to the abdomen. Abraham Lincoln almost fought a duel. Nobody duels now. It's inconceivable. It isn't basic to anything. Centuries of patrician tradition, absurd rituals, faces slapped, gauntlets stiffly thrown, times appointed, companions holding out pistols in velvet cases in the park at dawn, the iron laws of honor—we know now it's all hokum. Progress is possible. Drones on autopilot are not inevitable.

Although she's British, Minnie Driver can do a remarkably good American accent. She's got a good ear. She can sing, too, I just found out. She's got a song about how she wants to be taken out into the deeper water. I like it and I like her big mouth and her big jaw. She's a bigmouthed babe. She had a fling with the man who starred in
The Bourne Identity
. It ended badly, as I remember. Matt Damon. He broke up with her on
Oprah
, which doesn't seem like something Jason Bourne would do. Another actress who can really sing is Scarlett Johansson. She hums and wails and whispers in a song by J. Ralph called “One Whole Hour.” “I know just what it's like,” she says, “to wait for a voice inside.” The music makes the words fit. Did Scarlett go out with Matt Damon, too? No, but he starred with her in a family movie called
We Bought a Zoo
. No elephants step on criminals' heads in that movie. It's just not done anymore.

•   •   •

T
HE
B
OURNE
I
DENTITY
has one of the best movie scores ever written. It's by John Powell, a British composer. It begins with a big bassoon solo, sailing in over a long chord in the strings. Think of that, beginning a spy movie with a bassoon. I first saw
The Bourne Identity
in a hotel room in Washington, D.C. I had just been in a march against the Iraq War, which was imminent. It's the only protest march I've ever been in. We took to the streets and we walked around neighborhoods in Washington shouting crude rhymes: “One, two, three, four, we don't want your oil war.” My sign said:
THIS WAR WILL DO NO GOOD
. The march didn't do much good, either, unfortunately. We're still waiting on the world to change.

Roz was with me, and when we went up to the hotel room our feet hurt from marching all day. We took off our shoes and ordered a pizza and watched
The Bourne
Identity
and loved it, and I thought, This is about the best movie score I've ever heard, and I want to hear it again. So I bought it. For the percussion section, Powell uses crazy camera-shutter sounds, huge flabby drums, shakers, rattling sheets of what sounds like fiberglass or plywood, and sixty-megahertz electrical feedback hums. There's a touch of
Batucada
Fantástica
in it, but it's its own thing—and there's not a cheesy passage in the whole score. I'd give anything to have written that music. Composers have ripped off Powell's
Bourne
score many times since then. You'll suddenly hear it in a fight scene or a chase scene. I wonder whether Powell is upset at being strip-mined that way—maybe not. The movie score business has a low opinion of itself, and its leading lights seem unconcerned by everyone's habit of adaptive reuse. Powell worked for a while with Hans Zimmer, and Hans Zimmer is one of the biggest and cheerfullest ripper-offers of them all, to the point where the Holst Foundation brought suit against him for stealing music note for note from
The Planets
. One of Powell's colleagues in the Zimmer atelier was Harry Gregson-Williams. Listen to the
Bourne Identity
soundtrack and then watch
Déjà Vu
, with Denzel Washington—score by Harry Gregson-Williams. You'll gasp at the audacity in places. It isn't plagiarism—no spot is precisely the same—and yet it's a theft of almost everything good about Powell's score, harmonies, percussion, slow solos, mood builds. It's worse than the endless classical music recyclings by John Williams, who has rifled every late Romantic pocket, and James Horner of
Titanic
fame. And yet Powell and Gregson-Williams were colleagues and friends under Zimmer. Maybe Powell gave his permission, I don't know. I'd like to know. I think about this a lot.

Debussy was stolen from constantly during his lifetime, not just by Stravinsky but by everyone. His originality was smothered in a wave of second-tier Debussyism. It depressed him. In 1915 he told a friend that the Debussyists were killing him. No, as a matter of fact, tobacco was killing him.