Dear Mr. Jackson,
Thank you for your music, and thank you for reading this far in a letter, if it reaches you, from a stranger. Though we have never met face to face, I could say that I’ve known you since I was a teen-ager growing up in Pittsburgh, Pa., in the fifties, born fifteen years or so before you were born, Mr. Jackson, and I wanted to be you, or rather wanted with all my soul, a soul real to me as the faces of people in my family, to sing like you would sing the music we both inherited and you would keep alive in the eighties, nineties with your talent and gifts. Listening to your voice, I hear the old music again—the Dells, Diablos, Drifters, Flamingos, Spaniels, Five Satins, Midnighters, Soul Stirrers—and it takes me back to those voices on the corner, in church, on records, radio, teaching me the fires in my belly, dance steps in my feet, the hungers, fun, sadness, loves lost and found all around me I only half understood and still don’t, old man that I am today, but yearn so badly, teen-ager and now, to stay part of, that swirling, full-to-the-brim, overflowing life that sometimes fills me up, sways and staggers me, sweeps me off my feet, that elusive, loud, shaking, shouting world that could sometimes go silent and disappear, here then abruptly gone, passing me by as if I were nothing, nobody, less than a speck of dust or a tear no one sees falling, all of that, and more bitter and more sweet because, like you, Freddie Jackson, I was a colored boy and my world, my people, surrounded by others not colored, others inexplicably mean, crude, intimidating, evil as death.
Anyway, I don’t need to tell you about coming up colored. When I hear you sing I remember you were there beside me and here I am now beside you, listening once more to all the stories, facts, times, people, voices that the music passes on, gives back, recalls, steals, wishes for, touches and lets go.
I should admit straightaway I can’t claim to be a devoted fan or student of all your music. I’m writing to let you know one song in particular that you recorded, “You Are My Lady,” seems part of a story I’m trying to compose. Composing now as we speak. Or rather as I imagine myself speaking and imagine we are speaking together. Pretending to speak with you my way of telling a story. Our silences really, not our voices, engaged in conversation. Though I hear you singing. Softly. Clearly. Your song, “URML,” in my story, inseparable from it before there is a story.
Point of this letter is not exactly to ask permission to put you in a story I’m writing, Freddie Jackson. Rather, I’m letting you know (informing/fessing up/sharing) I have no choice. You are in it already without being asked, without any exit offered, like the color we share, which this country assigns to us before we are born.
Story I’m attempting to put together concerns my son, youngest of my three grown children, a prisoner now, in Arizona serving a life sentence for committing murder in 1986, when he and his victim both fifteen years old. I have tried to write his story many, many times—as a short piece of fiction that stands alone, as an episode in longer narratives, fiction and nonfiction, published and unpublished. Each attempt failed. Failed probably for a variety of complicated reasons in each case, but the simple fact is none of my efforts to write my son’s story freed him. And that one negative outcome they all share certifies their collective futility: my son remains incarcerated. Getting him out is the sole justification, if any legit justification exists, for me writing about him. Even a grieving, conflicted father possesses no right to ignore his injured son’s request not to discuss in public his son’s wounds, especially when at best the father able only to speculate, guess the nature of the wounds and their effects. No excuse for a story’s probes, prods, provocations unless they promise to produce, at a very minimum, the possibility of a cure. Why else disturb a son’s privacy (an inevitable result no matter how scrupulously I endeavor to avoid it). Why intrude after finally, expressly, he’s forbidden me to write about him. Why discuss in public a horrific series of events unless the retelling, the painful, incriminating exhumation liberates my son, sets him free. None of my previous efforts to tell his story have disentangled him from the consequences of a crime beyond my power to change. My helplessness feels unalterable. I find myself unable to foresee a different scenario. So I’m asking myself, asking you, Mr. Jackson, if I should try a story about my son once more. And if I try to write it, for whose benefit, whose sake, on whose behalf, for what purpose would I be performing.
I ask you because you are an artist, Mr. Jackson, and because sometimes your singing achieves what the best art accomplishes. A song you sing creates a space with different rules, different possibilities. A space opens that doesn’t exist until a listener tunes in and hears your voice, a sudden space that may disappear the very next instant but changes that instant, too, no doubt, and it doesn’t matter that the previous moment and the ones before remain whatever they were and lock a person down with unforgiving, unalterable rules and possibilities. None of that matters when I experience the undeniable presence, the unique truth a particular song can deliver—your song, “URML,” my best example—because then I know time, my time, my life is always more than it appears to me. Didn’t that voice, that snatch of music just remind me that there’s more in any moment, more to the life I think I’m caught up in, than I can ever know, ever understand, ever come to terms with, make peace with, survive, so much more and more and different and other than it had seemed an instant before the music. If I listen, if I let it be, let it alone, just listen to the music while it delivers inklings and intimations of things very different than I thought they were, are, and sometimes I do go there, into a different space, thank you, thank you, the music reveals, that other, more than possible place, and I go there, can’t help myself, because I need it, need help so much, I do, I do, I yearn, I hear the music and nothing is what it was an instant before or ever after, maybe, if I listen, keep believing, learning my life is less than nothing and also perhaps a tiny, tiny bit more than everything I believed I already knew, every damned body already knows, if I really listen, let myself hear when a song speaks.
How do you work the magic of your art, Mr. Jackson. What makes your music special when it’s special. How do you offer a space with your voice that feels real enough for a listener to enter. What secrets have you learned to please an audience. How do you put all of yourself into a song, but then disappear so there’s only music and it belongs to the listener. When your voice breaks silence, how does it make silence speak. You did it at least once, certainly, for my son and probably countless times for others, including me. How does a song reach out and touch. Do you sing to please yourself. When a song feels good to you while you are singing it, is that the best test. Is that the answer to all this letter’s dumb questions. Or maybe simply an answer I want, need. “URML” ’s secret.
Ihad a friend once who killed his lady. Crime occurred in Philly, about eight years before a song you addressed to your lady reached No. 1 on Billboard’s rhythm-and-blues chart. Years before he committed a murder, I’d lost touch with him, my former friend, occasional cut-buddy when I was an undergrad at Penn in the early sixties. A guy who hung out around campus, long-haired, scraggly-bearded, a kind of sloppy, happy-go-lucky, sinister phony, a powerfully persuasive and manipulative guy with a malodorous charm about him, Charlie Manson before anybody had heard of Charles Manson, other than my friend and his coterie of fellow eccentrics and visionaries who circulated among themselves counterculture news and views through a kind of crude precursor of the Internet before anybody else had heard of Internet or Manson. My friend, a nice kid on the lam from middle-class, suburban Jewish parents, had transformed himself into a Philly street character whose intimidating range of knowledge, arcane reading, provocative ideas, and batty eloquence, despite my reservations about his lack of personal hygiene, drew me to him as he was drawn to me, despite or because of our obvious differences, me growing up poor, therefore street tough, streetwise, he assumed, a jock who played college ball, physically attractive, smart enough, though intellectually underdeveloped, politically unsophisticated, naïve, poorly read, innocently gregarious, but my new buddy soon perceived that I was ambitious, ruthless and predatory in my dealings with other people as he was, my insightful, observant, preternaturally selfish, shamelessly inquisitive, greedy new acquaintance. In the role of professor/guru he enjoyed explaining himself to me. Claimed he answered to no one. Responsible only to himself. Made it clear that nobody possessed rights he was bound to respect. Even in Powelton Village, Philly’s wannabe version of the Village in New York—your city, Mr. Jackson, where you grew up in Harlem—we must have been an unusual sight: tall, fit black guy, and squat, flabby white guy, the unlikely pair of us roaming neighborhood streets, parties, participating in rallies, arts festivals, demonstrations, defying cops and authority, hitting on women, getting stinking drunk in local bars, but welcomed almost always, anywhere we showed up, by the helter-skelter mix of all sorts of people that constituted Powelton’s inhabitants. An odd couple, but didn’t we embody, maybe, a new day, a new dispensation, a social and cultural revolution everybody back then wanted to believe they desired or at least were willing to accommodate since it promised better sex, better drugs, unbounded freedom and license, an option to be contemptuous of traditional styles, conventions, and rules, an inalienable right to hit the road, Jack, and head out for far away, for exotic destinations when the place where we find ourselves becomes unsatisfactory.
My former hangout partner, whom the cops arrested in 1979 for killing his lady friend, who still maintains his innocence though convicted twice—once in absentia because while out on bail awaiting trial, he’d fled the States, then found guilty a second time in another Philadelphia courtroom after being extradited to America from a farm in France, a fugitive seventeen years on the run, hiding under assumed names and fake identities—my old intimate, my fellow bullshitter and relentless pursuer of any pretty girl we hoped seducible (including one he admitted he tried hard to catch and didn’t catch, but I did, a girl whose background mirrored his, except her parents lived in Connecticut and much richer than his, a girl I eventually married, mother of my children, including my son in prison, the marriage in name anyway lasting for thirty years neither party has yet to forgive the other for inflicting, enduring, and even so during those thirty-plus years, Mr. Jackson, on numerous occasions I would have counted myself lucky to have possessed a voice like yours and your song, “URML,” to serenade her, which goes to show what . . . nothing of course, as my bearded mentor would insist, except the poor taste in choosing lovers certain pretty, seducible girls exhibited back in the day and how fickle, how unfaithful songs and singers can be). My former buddy continues to claim that he is an innocent victim of a C.I.A. frameup organized to discredit and get rid of him because the C.I.A. knows he knows too much about contacts it established with an advanced, extraterrestrial civilization, contacts that notorious agency desperately wishes to keep secret from the American public. But I bet if I visited him in prison and we got an opportunity to converse in guaranteed privacy, he might not leak any nitty-gritty about the C.I.A./Star Wars connection, but if the chance arose, he would confide to me that he killed his lady for more or less the identical reason that I attribute to you as your explanation of why you sing as you do. He’d confess, just short of bragging, and perhaps with a wistful semi-grin, yes, he loved his lady but she split, and when she came back to pick up her stuff, he believed that if he killed her, not only could he keep her, he’d please himself, and pleasing himself always good, so he did.
C’mon. Think about it, dude. Pleasing yourself the best possible reason. Unless you wanna be a stooge for somebody else’s bullshit. A stupido stooge. Doing what the man says cause the man says it’s good for you. Go fuck yourself, what I say. Your wars. Your pissy little no-brainer jobs, a whiny wife, litter of whiny, ungrateful brats. For them. Do it for them, man tells you. Family the reason. Or God. Country. Any goddamn reason just so you do what you’re told. Don’t think. Just get in line, turkey. Bend over, turkey. Be over before you know it. Before you can finish saying, What the fuck am I doing here. Well, not me. Not today. Not tomorrow. Huh-uh. I will always do what pleases me. Me. Me. Me, friend. What pleases me. Best reason and only reason. And I recommend strongly, old chap, mon semblable, my darker brother, that unless you want to be the man’s bumboy chump, you best do as I do. Be insolent, abrasive. Extend to yourself bottomless generosity and benevolence.
Or words more or less to that effect, what my old buddy’d say to me, if somehow we hooked up one more time for a private moment with nobody else listening in. But eavesdroppers or not, bet he’d pass on the message I paraphrased above. No reason my old pal should be shy about repeating his rule. Especially since no one, in the forty or fifty centuries preceding this one, nor in the interval of thirty, forty years since I have been face to face with him, no matter what they practice or preach, has come up with a more compelling, self-evident rationale for how folks should behave in this best of all possible worlds. Mystery (chaos) abides. Whether a person wants to create art, shop for clothes or dinner, wage war, fall in love, discipline kids or criminals etc., etc., no recipe exists that guarantees success. So why shouldn’t my friend say please yourself. Same rule for prison inmates or Presidents of the United States. My old pal would shout, scream, cackle, laugh, giggle, holler, preach his rule today, just as he used to expound, expostulate, rap it in the middle of campus parties, street crowds, into a mike, into your ear, into a garbage can while he was barfing.
Let me quickly, unambiguously assure you, Mr. Jackson, that in no way, shape, or form am I equating what I guess might guide you to sing as you sing and what guided my former friend to take his lady’s life. Discovering as you perform onstage that you please audiences most exactingly when your singing pleases you is immeasurably distant from my buddy discovering that terminating another’s life and pleasing himself could go hand in hand. Rather, I’m illustrating, admitting my own confusions, worries, fears, my inability to decide on my next move in this story. My next choice. Whatever the ramifications of any choice—choices as different as how to sing or whether to kill or not kill—nothing is knowable until we choose. No less mysterious after we choose. No matter our intentions, we’re involved in guesswork, after all. Gutwork. Trapped inside ourselves. Our minds. Our feelings. Selfish, arbitrary, and dark as my once-upon-a-time friend’s.
And that truth cuts much deeper than different strokes for different folks, I believe. Any point of view not the only possible one. Always many. Always changing. Smallest piece of something represents, replicates, renews, becomes larger, becomes whole. The whole always fragile, shatters, incomplete as the smallest piece. Both the entire shebang and each infinitesimal byte forever exchanging places, and we can’t have one without the other. Though often I wish I could forget, Mr. Jackson, Freddie Jackson, that endless simultaneity, recover those flurries of forgetfulness.
Distance from Phoenix to Flagstaff, Arizona approximately one hundred and forty-five miles. A drive north of about two hours, eighteen minutes on I-17. If you are interested, time-lapse videos posted on the Internet can get you there faster, in anywhere from 1:42 to 47:10. The two lawyers, one in charge, one to drive, who met my son’s plane at Sky Harbor airport in order to escort him to a jail in Flagstaff, where he’d be locked up until tried for murder, may or may not have been in a hurry. Being in a hurry doesn’t necessarily get you any quicker to where you wish to go. Nor does the wish to never arrive at a particular destination necessarily retard arrival. I wasn’t in the car hauling my son to jail that day in Arizona, thus can’t say who was in a hurry and who was not. My son a fugitive for twelve days before he called his uncle and asked for help. Before his uncle called us and we engaged lawyers. How do my son’s twelve days of running compare to my old buddy’s seventeen years of flight and hiding. I should know better than to ask such a silly question, Mr. Jackson. As if aging and loss and cancer and fear and mourning and despair are not species of time. As if instead, time consisted of a certain quantity of repeating, unchanging, definable units, like inches, miles, pounds. As if the length and weight of a boy’s time on the road were measurable, a fifteen-year-old who hasn’t maybe had sex yet or attended a funeral or slept alone away from home a single night with no family, no adult, no companions keeping him company, as if such a boy’s terror after killing, for no reason, he comprehends his roommate in an Arizona motel on a pleasure trip supervised by an expensive, élite boys’ camp in Vermont, as if anyone not that boy might grasp how time passed for him on the run or passes now in prison where bars and cages do not stop the running, but torture and bend time so time collapses, empties, or swells like a corpse decomposing, or towers like some suppurating beast many stories tall with bloody talons pawing the air. Stink, moans, a dreadful roaring to halt my son in his tracks, keep him fleeing.
Three days of running from the fact I did not know my son’s whereabouts had broken me. My son’s roommate, assigned randomly one August night from the pack of boys on a trip to the western U.S., boys who’d been summer campers together in Vermont for years, that kid found stabbed to death, and my son gone, no one knew where, perhaps a captive of the madman who stabbed my son’s roommate, perhaps my son bound and being tortured somewhere by the kind of marauding monster who would storm armed into a motel room, stab one boy and kidnap the other at gunpoint to enjoy, dismember, maybe eat him at his leisure, his pleasure—that’s what I could not stop myself from imagining as I ran away from and ran after facts that might explain a vanished son. Three days, three periods of twenty-four hours each on other people’s clocks, stretched for me longer than any life span I could bear, and I slid down a pine tree I’d been hugging in a Vermont forest, crumpled to a weeping heap on the ground beside the tree’s trunk, my life’s time abruptly passing, consumed. Enough. Nothing. More time than I could handle.
If I’d been an occupant of the car proceeding north on I-17 taking my son to stand trial in Flagstaff, I would not have been privy to what other occupants thinking, the lawyers’ thoughts, my son’s thoughts invisible to me then as now, tapping out letter by letter an invisible story to make it visible. And rescue him. Over the many years following that car ride, Mr. Jackson, I got to know both lawyers pretty well, stayed in one’s palatial Phoenix home once, commiserated often in my mind with the other as he suffered problems threatening to drag him down, out of his profession, till he got well and practiced law again and still may be. On the afternoon I handed over my son to them, the lawyers were strangers to me, except for several phone calls exchanged and a description from a lawyer friend of my then wife, my son’s mother, recommending the one in charge more than highly, without reservation. Strangers or not, men I’d never laid eyes on before, men into whose hands, literally and figuratively, I was placing my son’s life while I waited for my wife’s plane so we could drive to Flagstaff together. The two lawyers’ thoughts, my son’s thoughts unguessable in the car they were riding in to Flagstaff. Unguessable for me now, nor could the occupants see each other’s thoughts that day in 1986 on an Arizona highway, though each must have been wondering, more than wondering, probably searching for clues in each other’s expressions, gestures, silences, maybe asking out loud, Who are you, why are we here, where are we heading, what is happening to me, us, how will it end, whose story is this. As I try to tell mine, will I find myself rolling along, in a hurry or not, listening, learning their stories on the way to Flagstaff. Will all our stories end or start once more when the car doors open and cops stand there waiting with handcuffs . . .
At some moment before that Flagstaff arrival is when your voice, Mr. Jackson, your song, “URML,” entered the car. I want to say filled the car, but I wasn’t there, was I. Don’t know who in the front seats, who in the back. Was car radio on or music just in my son’s portable tape deck, earphones. Car radio playing I’m almost sure, somehow. Pods wired to machines not so ubiquitous in young people’s ears back in 1986. Element of surprise part of story. “URML” suddenly. A moment altered. Who is playing car radio. How loud. Who tuned it in. Who listens. How can a person help listening. No matter what else, where else your thoughts. If you wish to listen or not. Could you ignore the radio, drift off through a window, study fractured, flat desert, gaze at spines of mountains rimming the distance. Remember another’s voice you are missing or trying to forget. How can you not hear if a loud radio fills a car. Or a good tune fills it softly. “URML.” Did a lawyer or my son pick the station. Random d.j.’ing. Let the kid do it. Let him play with the dial, push buttons, let him make this terrible ride shorter or longer or make it disappear. Just so he doesn’t drown us, sink us, minstrelsy us, mug us on some urban dark corner, station very, very, overbearingly loud, filling the car so impossible to think. Remember, young man, not just you inside here, as big, as sorry as your sorry story is, truly, truly, bad and ugly—we heard about the other poor gored kid in Flagstaff, son—but there’s three of us stuck together in here awhile, like it or lump it and the dead boy, too, but do not despair quite yet, young man, maybe we will plea-bargain the judge down from first-degree murder and death to life imprisonment (though Arizona looking for an under-sixteen to execute and thus lower the death-penalty age threshold and here comes your son, a handy colored killer to make the State’s case easy, the lawyers warned us). Our job to save your life, seems a nice enough scared kid, his skinny fear filling the car louder than anything he might punch in on the radio, but we are big boys, we can bear it, the noise, the heat, the fear, besides he won’t get that urban-station way-too-loud stuff way out here middle of nowhere, anyway let him d.j., seems a reasonable enough, smart enough kid, nice parents, what in the world happened—and just about somewhere in there, hills now to the left, one behind another to a hazy horizon, to the right, dramatic contours of frozen sand, countless cacti, layers of every drab-color cloud climbing, clamoring an endless sky to heaven, the thickets of thoughts coming and going to and fro and battering air inside the car like wings of gigantic bats too large to see, two middle-aged, palish human men and one slightly colored boy, three total to whom the thoughts belong, hovering insubstantial as images in desert heat, trapped on the road to Flagstaff and there’s Freddie Jackson singing “URML” suddenly there also in the car, and my son as if with wings not as big as the bats or so much larger, so, so much, he’s lifted, rides their draft and gone.
And if such were literally the case—my son free, Mr. Jackson—I wouldn’t be writing this letter or story, would I, Mr. Jackson. Yes and no, maybe. “URML” a beautiful song. Worth a story at least. Many. One of my all-time favorites so perhaps one day I would be tempted to try. Try despite an incalculable sadness your song always invokes for me, whatever else. I keep going back to “URML” for many of the same reasons I believe people want to hear again songs they love. Revisiting unhappy songs as often as happy ones, and, strange as it seems, people recall sad ones, my guess, more than happy songs. Or perhaps no difference. Certain songs too deep to be happy or sad. Both. (Smokey’s “Tracks of My Tears.”) Neither. More. Less.
Who am I to tell you about songs, or singing. Or audience responses, Mr. Jackson. But I admitted from the git-go, I’m writing this to myself as much as to you. Plenty people (all?) sing to themselves, don’t they. I do. Even in the shower, or especially in the shower people sing—alone, wet, warm, soaping up, scrubbing up, usually not the worst of times. Rushing water’s close-up noise in your ears if it’s a good, strong shower, water to take the edge off false notes, water to swim in, drown in. Why not listen to myself. Though you are a pro and sing for a living, do you still sing to yourself. Do you listen, Freddie Jackson. In the shower. No offense intended, but could the shower be where you, too, do your best work. An audience of only one hears my best work. Hears the voice inside my head no other person will ever share. Better than anyone else’s voice. Unspeakably good. Closer to what I wish to sound like than any sounds I’m able to produce. When I get it going in the shower, I give my voice more than the benefit of the doubt. All benefits. No doubts. Let imagination work between the lines, speaking a story for which there are no words, speaking for what’s missing always. I imagine more than what’s there, fill in what’s impossible, lost, searched for, those things a song desires to happen while it’s sung and plays inside, one listener only, only inner lips, ears, eyes, feet, hands working and the invisible elders busy remembering, reminding me how it goes, what it means and says, once and only once, audience of one, never exactly the same, never over, because a person keeps it inside, alone always when she or he sings, writes.
I couldn’t help smiling, Freddie Jackson, thinking one afternoon about poor, long-suffering tough-guy mafioso Tony Soprano on TV, romanced and undermined by his female psychoanalyst as vice versa he endeavors to undermine and romance her in her office. She sits, big, nyloned legs crossed across the room and he leans forward in his chair straining to hear her saying what she hears him not saying and he can’t say aloud even inside himself. Her office a shower of sorts, too, spa where Tony goes to come clean, where every once in a while butt-naked Tony lets go, belts out his privacies, his innermost, imprisoned stories verse by verse, singing away, no holds barred, to seduce his shrink with beaucoup boo-hoos and hangovers from bad old days when he was coming up the hard way on mauling, murderous streets, and worse at home, Tony Soprano croons, chirps, coos to her. She hears, “URML.”
I wonder sometimes when I watch the classic video of you, Freddie Jackson, totally fly in your pure white suit, serenading a young woman, “URML,” with your eyes as much as your voice, if the face and body beside you in the video are the ones you are addressing or if, inside your head, in a song only you are able to see, there is another lover listening, not the pretty actress caught on tape smiling back at you. I wonder, of course, because I glide so seamlessly into the make-believe scene I’m watching, letting your voice be mine, wishful-thinking that voice into the ear of a woman you don’t know, have never seen, but I adore her, want her to adore me. Room for us, my lady and me, though you and your lady don’t disappear. Both of you professionals, more than convincing performers who reach out and touch, skilled, sticky as a tarbaby, who once Brer Rabbit pokes in a paw, Gotcha, old Mr. Tarbaby say and he ain’t never gon let go. It’s once upon a time each time the “URML” video commences. Viewers see, listen, tumble live into a song’s story. Shape-shifting. Black holes. Voodoo.
Rumors, speculations, full-blown conspiracy theories circulate on the Internet, in fan magazines, newspapers, TV, and radio about the nature of your sex life, Mr. Jackson. According to the perspective of many commentators who get paid or blog to please themselves or maybe just can’t stop themselves from pursuing and commenting on such matters, you have been coy, evasive, manipulative, fearful, not helpful to the cause, irresponsible, exploitative, naïve, inconsistent, dishonest for the long duration of a very successful, very public career because you never flat out declared your own gender identity, or gender preferences when it comes to choosing lovers. I’m no expert on this aspect of your life, any more than I’m an aficionado of the entire corpus of your work. However, searching for examples of what your voice might sound like when you’re not singing, I found an interview I particularly enjoyed in which you didn’t—as I’m pretty sure I would have—tell the interviewer to go fuck himself, yet still in your dignified and uncompromising fashion let him know in no uncertain terms that your business none of his business. Your life, your privacy not material for interviewers to label, commodify for other people’s consumption. You let him understand that simply because you possessed the gift, the art to sing your ass off, did not license him to be coy, evasive, manipulative, not helpful to the cause, irresponsible, exploitative, naïve, inconsistent, dishonest during an interview. Not forgetting to add your humble suggestion that perhaps in a contemporary world inches away from exploding or imploding there are more urgent, more germane issues for the media to attend to than the in-and-out gossip of your sex life.
Still, I’m guilty, more hungry than that interviewer to learn your secrets. But different secrets for different reasons, I hope. The most crucial reason being how much I’m moved by your song’s power to free my son. Not exactly envious, but more than desperate to figure out how you do what you do. I want to learn to emulate your example and save him. Please allow me to continue to wonder about the particular face or faces conjured up for you when you sing “URML.” How do songs, stories—the unique ones that are art, the no less special everyday ones locked up inside people’s heads or bantered back and forth with other folks—become narratives in which daydreams, words and sounds of actual lives/life are embedded. Maybe stories, fiction or not, give solace, context, possibility, as much with their stable, recurring forms as with their infinitely various contents, and thereby produce examples of lives shaped, framed so they are recognizably distinguishable from emptiness, from darkness that seems always to surround and render lives unseeable. I’m reaching out, asking you. Do songs and stories create real shapes, colors, smells, sounds. Real even if futile vis-à-vis the absolute arbitrariness of what happens to be happening moment by moment, day by day.
I’ve had mummies on my brain lately. They keep cropping up unexpectedly. In unpredictable, unlikely, unavoidable places, Mr. Jackson. Mummification old as the oldest documented civilization and practiced globally. My old Philly buddy who killed his lady attempted to mummify her, sealing her corpse in a box with stuff he believed would preserve it, stowing the box in the ceiling rafters of his Powelton Village apartment, hoping to conceal his crime by causing his lady to disappear. That mummy didn’t work. Leaked, stank. Led to my friend’s arrest. I have no doubt his extreme oddness, bookishness, dabbles in the occult, fantasies of invincibility, though they failed to provide him with a proper chemical formula for mummifying his lady’s corpse, supplied him copiously with lore, ritual, history, chants, prayers for launching her into immortality. Whether my former friend believed he could arrange life after death for his lady, I can’t say, but I know he thought a lot about his various projects. Often intelligently, with a meticulously organized, relentless, insane, patient thoroughness and self-assuredness. And that horrific launching my once-upon-a-time friend perpetrated, his desperate, doomed attempt to spare himself from the consequences of his crime and spare his lady’s body the indignities of decay and dissolution, his effort to save her and save himself, made the choice of mummification perhaps an irresistible option. No matter what he was thinking, his choices, his actions barbaric, despicable, profoundly unacceptable. All of the above and more. Worse. His actions especially spooky and unsettling because they linked his crime to an ancient, honorable, sacred art, an art cultures devised to prepare their dead for a journey that would be a continuation of life.
As I learned more about the traditions (desperate, selfish, foolish) of mummy launching, their secret formulas, mysterious protocols, the motivations that conceived them—the imagining of a voyage that connects life and death, the envisioning of immortality, of the necessities humans would require and desire during a perpetual trip—the innocence of those practices of mummification touched me, Mr. Jackson, revealed to me how a similar willed innocence possibly underlies all arts humans practice.
Same way people depend upon mummy-makers to insure the dead are ready and able to enjoy, to survive whatever pleasures and perils a journey that never ends might bring, people rely on artists and works of art (with equally scant, problematic, or no evidence at all, that such reliance achieves desirable results) to act as guides. Art embodies, improvises rules of sorts for negotiating imaginary worlds—defines rewards and punishments in such worlds—confirms the existence of those imagined worlds where occasionally a person can hang out, vacation on demand, daydream or chatter about without sacrificing too much time or energy better spent on the business of ordinary living. As if art—mummy-making, writing symphonies—changes time. As if certain artisans can lift the veil of mystery that divides life from death. As if lifted, there would be anything under the veil. As if consciousness might trump time.
Mummies intended to serve the dead. Just as songs you sing (story I compose) intended to serve the living. Make sense of treacherous terrain. Travelling companions on an arduous journey. Helping people along the way or opening ways. Opening time. Space to inhabit. A choice to continue. Or not. And lo and behold . . . sometimes it works. “URML.” Song in a car. My son heard it, Mr. Jackson. Thank you.
I hope my intrusions into your private business, my questions, worries, and insinuations about your art haven’t chased you away. Who is this guy, what does he want from me, you may be asking yourself—if you’ve read this far. Let me assure you I expect no response to this letter that is not even a real letter. I’m asking you for nothing, Mr. Jackson, though I understand how you or other people might believe that I’m asking far too much. For a piece of you. Like any parasite demands. You must have encountered plenty of parasites, especially when you were at the top of the charts. Notorious pests in the entertainment industry as elsewhere. Parasites. A word I looked up once and discovered its origins Greek. In that ancient language the word signifies folks who are always showing up at your table for a meal, hands empty, mouths full of gimme and much obliged. Parasites. A word associated frequently with artists. With art’s arrogance when it proclaims art for art’s sake. With the proverbial, well-earned reputation of artists for laziness, greed, selfishness, nastiness, irrelevance, fecklessness, and fickleness. Parasites one more compromising word in this letter, this story. A word getting in line with murderers, mummies, mafiosos to suggest art’s unsavory and/or failed ambitions.
Walking last fall in Brittany with a neighbor on a 10K charity trek to earn money for the local elementary school’s arts program, I pointed to a stand of trees atop the crest of a low hill in the gently rolling terrain of mainly pastureland surrounding us. The trees I indicated were not quite bare of foliage but stripped enough for limbs and branches to reveal lots of roundish puffs or nests suspended in them, big blots, blobs within the larger, more or less oval-shaped crowns of five or six trees ahead in the distance. Gui, he said after I stumbled through an explanation in English and halting French of what had caught my eye and wanted him to give me the French word for. Closer up, they are networks of something like spider webbing or skinny threads of black bone on an X-ray plate of bright morning light. Gui. Mistletoe a loose translation. Mistletoe carrying, mixing, and matching stories from numerous languages, the plant’s name in each language suggests. Saying the word in English gets me thinking about Christmas. St. Nick. Santa. Love. Lovers and strangers tempted, ordered to kiss under mistletoe. Nat Cole crooning about chestnuts and fire. Druids with their mastery of oak lore and oak magic in charge of forests. Deer. Wizards and Witches. Elves.
Gui are parasites, my neighbor said. Infest the host tree. Berries poison, I learned later. Sticky. Berries stick to a feeding bird’s beak and when a bird scrapes them off on a branch, tiny, tiny patches of resiny stuff adhere to the tree’s bark, gradually penetrating it, though some species of gui in a hurry, I read, shoot missiles, clocked at fifty miles an hour when they exit, deep into a tree’s heart, where they begin to suck and grow and send back messages of food, water from the tree to nourish the microchip-sized growth on the surface, and if the chip is lucky, it flourishes and becomes a shadow, a cloud, a thriving, bulky colony of new life like I’d been curious about in those trees on the hill, silhouetted against the horizon we walked toward.
That morning in Brittany as my friend got me finally to repeat the sound of the French word he was pronouncing by spelling it aloud—g-u-i—and also explained in a slightly disparaging tone that gui a parasite, I resisted my usual negative reaction to the word parasite. Parasite. What was not a parasite. Who is parasiting whom. From what privileged point of view do we decide parasite or host. Were gui parasites any more or less than those six or so trees, behind us now, scuffling for nourishment from sky, ground, neighboring trees, rain, stars, those trees feeding on birds, mice, cows, insects, microbes feeding on them, up and down the food chain, Great Chain of Being, the latter chain a concept originating in the fifteenth century, popular through the eighteenth, that I had come across when I studied the birth of the English novel, both chains signifying the same grand plan and interconnection and infinite coupling and interdependencies and eating and being eaten necessary to create and sustain each moment, everyone, everything large and small, past, present, and future, Mr. Jackson, all of us parasiting our way through. Chains linking, binding us, like slavery’s chains link and bind us, though slavery seldom if ever mentioned by my Oxford professors in the early sixties, whose stories taught me the origins of fiction.
Chain, Chain, Chain . . . like Aretha sings, Mr. Jackson. Like you sing. ♦
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