Song

by W.H. Auden

     The chimney sweepers
Wash their faces and forget to wash the neck;
     The lighthouse keepers
Let the lamps go out and leave the ships to wreck;
     The prosperous baker
Leaves the rolls in hundreds in the oven to burn;
     The undertaker
Pins a small note on the coffin saying, “Wait till I return,
     I’ve got a date with Love.”

     And deep-sea divers
Cut their boots off and come bubbling to the top,
     And engine-drivers
Bring expresses in the tunnel to a stop;
     The village rector
Dashes down the side-aisle half-way through a psalm;
     The sanitary inspector
Runs off with the cover of the cesspool on his arm-
     To keep his date with Love.

This poem was read by Garrison Keillor (I would love to take his job when he retires) a few weeks ago for his The Writer’s Almanac radio spot. I did not have a chance to hear it that day, but I knew that something like this was bound to happen, so some months ago I subscribed Sarah to the mailing list for the show. Being the wonderful wife that she is, when one of these emails from Keillor is any good (which is more often than not), she forwards it to me. So, I read this gem and immediately thought - that sounds like a Nick Cave song. Googling Nick Cave and Auden shows that it might as well be. The second and third links on the page were the two that caught my eye.

Nick Cave’s Lecture on the Love Song, besides being cached on a site that can keep my attention for hours, is a fascinating revelation of Cave’s worldview, while his interview with Grant McLennan (an equally fascinating piece) tells a bit more of his early years.

Now, I know that Cave has been around long enough that his fans have already poured over anything I could possibly find about him. In fact, I think Sarah had read the lecture years ago. So, if this is old hat, I apologize. It was news to me.

I almost think we’re all of us Ghosts… It’s not only what we have invited from our father and mother that walks in us. It’s all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we can’t get rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper, I seem to see Ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be Ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sand of the sea. And then we are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light.

–Henrik Ibsen, Ghosts

There’s a really brilliant article by David Foster Wallace on the maddening phenomenon of talk radio in the most recent print issue of The Atlantic, that takes about as long to read as any of his novels.

There was a young energetic, sandy haired girl that rushed, swiftly, back and forth from her middle-aged mother, and blood pressure machine, and the section of an aisle containing infant formula. I stood beside her mother, at the pharamcy, waiting my turn while the pharmacist, in his crisp white coat, looked at various papers and computer screens. The little girl skipped over to her mother singing songs about Sunkist orange soda, and begged her mother to buy her infant formula, that she loved it when she was little, and would love some more, and please, please. The mother explained to her little girl that people typically don’t like the taste anymore once they grow up, but that she’d buy her some Ensure. The girl good naturedly begged for another minute, before her mind wandered, and she asked her mother about her heart valve. The mother picked her daughter up and told her, putting on her best face, about how sometimes people die but still have good bodies, and sometimes the people and their family decide to make their body parts available to others, because there are people that are very sick and need help. And how a young child had died and his parents and grandparents and brothers and sisters were very sad to lose their baby, and they gave his heart to a bank hoping that it could save someone else’s life, and how when she needed a heart valve, the mother called and the bank told her they had just the one for her little girl. And the hospital went and picked it up from the bank and put it in your heart to make you better. Her mother smiles, brushing the hair out of her eyes. And then says, well, I didn’t actually call. The doctor did. The little girl looked at her mother with big eyes.

I smiled to myself and wondered how the girl’s narrative would change over the years, how will she think of this when she is twenty. Or forty. How does one retell these things to oneself over time?

The pharmacist handed the woman her perscription, the woman smiled at me and apologised for the wait, took her young daughter by the hand, and walked up to the register to pay for the heart pills.

I. Fathers and Sons, Turgenev; tr. Ralph E. Matlaw
II. Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson
III. Elizabeth Costello, J.M. Coetzee
IV. The Man God Mastered, Jean Cadier; tr. O.R. Johnston

Not so sure about N. Fear & Loathing and a lot on and by John Calvin.