Friend
Jesse Neuro/Short writes me & I expound. He told me about David Bowie's
surpassing effect on him. I love Jesse's parenthetical thingy here: "(in one
angry song on “Scary Monsters” he has a lyrical phrase which ends with the word
“society”, except he, or his “character”, cannot complete the word: he hisses
“so-ci. . . so-ci. . . so-ci-eh. . ., never getting to the “tee”. So to me,
that’s poetry.)"
He
asked me about my cabal of pal artists (every name of whom he remembered! good
heavens.) This is what I said.
===================================================
You
throw out such enticing bait. Both in telling me about what you love and by
asking me about what I love. Finding that out about anyone is really the only
interesting thing to me. Well, it also interests me a little that I never seem
to love 'artists' (the word used as porously & encompassingly as possible)
or their work as models of something to aspire to, or of whom I want to become,
or gods to kneel before. I see them as brilliant cronies I am inordinately
blessed to know. Peeps I would hang out with if they were breathing and on the
planet (if I could), peeps I DO hang out with in the possibly more satisfying
ways communing with dead people can mean. I'm never not interested in the life.
I know Henry's and Judy's lives as if they were - well - what? family members, I
guess. Emily's so-called reclusiveness seems to me a sort of gift she gave to
the world: that is, she knew she would have to shelter us from her full-on
intensity. She was not the kind of gal you 'hung out' with. To do that (in the
unspeakable event she'd ever permit it to happen) would probably kill you.
William James is the only 'psychologist' worth listening to because he didn't
report anything that didn't come from his own perception/experience. He's the
only writer I know who can use abstract nouns and make them seem like they
breathe. Henry's force was galvanic. Is that a word? It galvanized and warded
off and beckoned in and generally sent out a force field (in this regard exactly
like Judy Garland) which was the first and last and probably 'only' (in the
sense of being central & identifying) thing you notice about him - a
trembling thing that simultaneously attracts and repels. They are my preferred
companions. Though not for longer (as is the case with anyone) than about an
hour and a half at a time. I don't, it turns out, 'idolize' - that seems silly,
and to rob any encounter of its juice and real allure. I am Huck & Jim on
the raft ("come out to the raft Guy honey" I can hear them call to me from that
raft on the flowing river; and/or me calling to them from my raft: "Over here,
Judy!") (In this mind's eye scene she's a very good swimmer.)
Here,
I found a metaphor. I lick them like grape lollipops.
Well,
all but Bach. I ask Bach's permission to speak his language. (He's never not
granted it.) I don't lick him like a grape lollipop. But in a way I lick his
musical language like a grape lollipop. (Grape lollipops were my fave thing to
get at Amityville Public Beach when I was 9.) He has taught me that the skill and luck and
funk and grace in & of sustaining wild intense impassioned sex amount to the
exact equivalent of speaking his lines. And you do speak his lines. And you
don't care, after a time, about anything but their meaning - 'meaning' which is
so remarkably full that no part of you isn't employed in its expression; no part
of you doesn't somehow both deliquesce and, with suppleness, toughen (melt and
grow muscular) in response to it. So that's why I have a screen shot of me
playing him to illustrate this. Its caption is "Bach the Sun Likes Best". I also
found something that captions itself (it's from some sort of youtube thingy)
'Savage Snake Licks Lollipop Vine" mostly because it features an appealingly
easeful man licking a grape lollipop - a Tootsie-Roll one to boot, so he gets
that fudgy thing in the center. Which makes me think, yes, I lick my fave dead
companions like I'd lick a tootsie-roll grape lollipop. Something fudgy at the
center.
.
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