Introduction
Hey you…Welcome to the second issue! In case you missed last month’s first issue, head on over to the site and check it out. Thanks for being part of this experiment with me. My ongoing series continues! I am writing well ahead of each month, so I already have many things planned for the future. In addition, I’ve included a little writing sketch at the end. Think of it like the ginger you get when eating sushi. A little palate-cleansing treat before the next big bite.
♡ Luke
Memory for the Fruit to Grow
Part 2 of an ongoing series | Previous: Part 1
Restland-Lincoln Memorial Park is a cemetery near my mother’s house, and sometimes when I visit her I go here to run, to walk, to think. It’s a little macabre and cliché to wander cemetery grounds, as the home of the dead and its manicured construction, the tombstone markers of dates and sayings, all forces someone very quickly into a contrived existential crisis. How many times can we hear about the wonders of the hyphen, the moments lived in between the numbers? The expressions go right through me, bring no comfort. For me, cemeteries are poorer than some photos at conveying a life, as their bludgeoning has no artful tact. They carry no delicacy of the matter, even when they are trying their hardest. And yet, I can’t help but go into the places they send me.
Cemeteries hold one valuable component, though, over that of photos. A so painfully obvious point that to say it seems almost less than a sentence, a forgettable factoid that contributes nothing. My father’s passing made it clear. That is: they contain the very loved ones we’ve lost. Of course they do. Though it is a stranger wonder than at first thought, albeit a morbid one. Here in space and time some part of the deceased’s form remains intact. That earth holds bones in a particular place (excluding cremation here). We know where a part of them is and it’s a welcome familiarity, gives us a sense they’re still with us. Presence of bones, the material nearness of the deceased, allows for our approximations of them, in that way that photos do.
They carried these bones inside them, it’s what helped them move through the world, the person who was always underneath that other stuff. They’re still here, just a different version. It is why people return to graves, I think, and take care that there’s flowers, ensure the stone looks good, the grass is well cut. A little reenactment of how it was when the deceased were here and walking among us. They’re keeping house, cleaning up after these bones if they’ve made a mess, the flowers gone dead or blown away, clipping grass a little too high at the edges. Like doing someone’s dishes or laundry. They talk to the stone, to the ground, faint reverberations sent down through that darkness, as if the bones hear it, and might by those sounds move closer to life.
The future should not contain cemeteries as we see them now, long stretches of trees and fields, statues and stones. I think of a future cemetery as ubiquitous as a corner convenience store. Their locations are on every block, holding the remains or ashes of the local neighbors. It’s a building with names engraved on every wall, a crypt far below unseen. There are rooms for those who want to spend a night with their ancestors. No electric light here. Only the candles, the sharp strike of a match to light incense. A cold hard blackness. There are rooms for painting and writing grief-filled expressions. One more thing. I am reminded of My Dinner with Andre when Andre Gregory describes the story of enacting a burial, and his experience of being buried and coming alive again. And that too can be done in these cemeteries of the future. They put you through a process, carry you in a coffin, lock you away in a small chamber. For an allotted time they keep you in a dark so pure it is felt as a long black gown, rustling against the down of your skin.
Restland’s roads are not well kept. Gray and cracked, like the skin of withered old elephants. Geese surround the constructed pond and swim in its chilly water. It’s a resort for them. They come close, but not near enough to touch. Geese attacked my sister here, and so I have learned to avoid them entirely. I walk further up the hill and stand in front of a mausoleum with shiny surfaces and name plates. An engraving of Jesus, dressed in robes and his hands out like he’s holding cups of sunshine, is placarded into one of the shorter ends. A pattern of granite stonework surrounds him, that kind reminiscent of mid-century houses. Below the stonework are more plates with names. I do not look at the names or dates. I am tired of looking at them.
In the fall the trees are aflame, and their leaves are like tongues of flame, and float down like drifting sparks to cover the neglected roads, so that all is veiled, and the plots with bronze plaques become impossible to find. From certain vantages, the cemetery doesn’t exist. The leaves do their work. I am in a field where a Civil War battle will be fought. I am in Virginia. Somewhere in Maine. I am anywhere but where I am. The statues and tombstones blend away, and with the right twisting of perspective become like children with me, walking in white or gray robes. Mostly they disappear, and the orange and yellow is all that remains.
But, I am not here in the fall, though I think of it as I walk through stick season, that weird snowless mid-winter where branches are clumsy in cold wind, and the world is grays and browns, dead grass and mud. As I walk up another hill, the sky is slate, and the world exists under one long shadow. To my right stand dirt mounds in a clearing of woods at the property edge. To my left, another mound of dirt, but this one more purposeful, the beginnings of a new plot, the hole already at its six feet. I peer down into the hole. An outcropping of stones exposed on the hole’s floor appears like a shoulder blade or a shield found in an excavation site. The plot’s soil walls have dried to camel brown in the crisp air. The dirt mound next to it stands several feet high and reminds me of an ant hill. I remember reading about an ant supercolony somewhere, spanning thousands of miles, tunnels under the ground, billions of ants connecting over countries. So, too, the world’s cemeteries, a supercolony growing beneath the soil.
I turn around and descend. At hill’s bottom, a pine tree’s branches overhang the small dip in the road. A few brown needles have fallen, but mostly they’re intact, a holiday green that stands out in the season’s bland world. My favorite part of the entire cemetery is this little dip, the pine leaning over it, protective mother, keeping the path from battering weather. And it’s true, there’s less breakup here, the asphalt smoother and untouched. For a second I imagine, the field of tombstones out of sight, I am somewhere in Oregon. It’s the dipping pine tree, the coniferous background at Restland’s edge that forms a lush trellis of needles, the same expansive mysterious feeling I have when visiting the northwest. Every place has its doppelganger, much in the same way that people do. And here I see Portland’s Forest Park, some other bend I had taken where a conifer hung over a path.
Both places, too, have a sense of protection. Trees with needles bring me this comfort. Firs, pines, spruces, hemlock, yew. It doesn’t matter the species, the length of needle, anything with that forever-green quality, the countless fingers of their branches, that interlacing intricacy. I could turn and do a trust fall right into a blue spruce. The jagged quality of some needles does little to faze me. It is either pain or comfort with some trees. You run your hand the wrong direction, against the “grain,” a few might stick you. The other way presents a soft allowance, a tenderness that is much the same as some animals petted the right way.
The source of this feeling may be my parent’s home. A line of nearly identical spruces ran down one side of the yard. I grew up cutting the grass around them. They protected the house from strong winds and kept out the neighbor’s prying eyes. Guardians of our yard. Abstractly, I recall the humanoid God Warriors in Miyazaki’s Nausicaä who near the film's beginning stand above a burning skyline of crumbled buildings. They glow in orange and red, faceless but for eyes as pure a white as the lances in their hands. Their sturdy and unflinching poses, their uniformity, demands a fear, for it is an unleashed power without emotion or empathy. Does what it does because of its created nature, and slate-blank enough to have gone another way.
The spruces’ nature oscillated without the slightest emotion or animation. Bees and hornets made nests in them, as much as mourning doves cooed in their depths. Poison ivy could grow up the side of one, or a flower could sprout near an exposed root. Being close, when mowing around their bases, caused jabbing and cuts from their branches. I could never get away from them without pokes and scratches. Always cuts and scrapes, always blood from their claws and my shirts torn.
Ascending from this dip I travel up the road again. Ahead of me, at my right, is the pond, and in front of it, closer to me, lies a broad shallow hill with more tombstones and plaques, and a large white granite statue of Jesus. I stop. Years ago as a teen, with a two megapixel digital camera, I took a photo from this point. I was given over, then, to the gloomy vibrations of teenhood, and ventured here and there into the cemetery to ponder those downer thoughts. Being goth would have fit me well, if I had had the energy or motivation for it.
I printed that picture on a glossy photo paper. A shrine of printed photos, in fact, were taped to the wall above my bed. Looking down on me were those of great inspiration, mingled in with my “artistic” pieces. One was Jimi Hendrix burning his guitar like a sacrifice, a shot famous from the Monterey International Pop Music Festival. Another, that very photo of Jesus and the graveyard. Some of nature, leaves and hillsides. Of all my photos, one in particular will always stand out to me: Jeff Buckley, in a black-and-white profile shot, leaning back, looking down at his Rickenbacker guitar, a studded bracelet on his wrist, the oversized button-down, the neck length hair tucked behind his ears.
I had discovered Buckley by way of the barber to which my parents insisted on taking me. He was a fashionable late-Nineties thirty-something, and he worked for his mother who ran a salon out of her basement. Every haircut, we talked about music, and he became an unlikely source of inspiration for me. Of the many musicians he recommended, the name Jeff Buckley rose to the top. I am not sure why the name clung. Later, I went to my local Borders and purchased Grace, Buckley’s one LP during his lifetime. From there began the obsession.
On first hearing Grace, I respected it, but was not sure what to think. Every song has a put-together quality, a tightness and emotional stasis that contains the beauty to a permissible fifty-minute album with a few radio singles. “Last Goodbye” may in fact be the single. That is, until Shrek popularized Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” covered by Rufus Wainwright, that ultimately would unveil Buckley’s own take, even if indirectly. A lot of studio work glistens and shines, and Grace survives even critically, despite some of its over-polish, as one of the stand-out albums of the Nineties. It is a showcase: a few originals and covers, establishing Buckley as a premier vocalist and singer-songwriter. Eventually, I picked up a solo live EP and the posthumous Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, the rough recordings of the would-be second LP. With every listen, this trifecta cemented his depth and beauty, making him more like a kindred soul than another distant musician. As my understanding of his oeuvre grew, Buckley would be one of few artists I listened to for most of later high school (excluding Radiohead, can’t deny Thom).
In 2000, Mystery White Boy Tour, a live album, was released. Something, then, clicked into place. My heart dropped. Like cleaning out an attic, clearing away the dust to find a box of secrets. The music had full access to me, and I was transported. An excitement at hearing the full band live took me to a place I had not understood, until then, as the effect that art can reach into someone and rattle them. A wordless effect, music that is like sinking into a warm bath, your head going below the water, your mind floating up out of you. That kind of euphoria that causes you to dream, wide-awake. An eruption of possibility.
Buckley showed a level of command to his voice and guitar unparalleled to the studio recordings, or even his solo efforts. To hear him live with the full band, his voice soaring. He starts many of his studio singles stripped of their forthrightness. For him, there are no direct paths. He will not let you put on a song and just hear it. It’s a meandering road, his live material, weaving, slaloming through the mountains. With the guitar reverb droning, his voice hums scales to unworldly ranges. Like Plant and Morrissey sieved through the work of the Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn, an oft-cited influence.
Every live number consumes the listener with his spiritual stage-sets, his voice lulling, a siren call. Then the shamanistic ritual levels out, familiar notes flow in, a little riff on the guitar, the song from the album, yes, but with a rawer energy as if the first time someone you love undresses before you. That kind of expectation of what you thought the form might be takes on the mystery of what the form is, revealed. So much more to discover than you thought. His voice is stronger than ever, none of the studio orchestral background here, just the guitars, drums and bass, his voice guiding you through the terrain he has laid. He has taken you on a mountainous journey. He has set you down to rest and wonder. And when it ends, it is with his voice alone, fading, like that of a sad whimper, a note that dies and softly goes up again, hinting the assurance soon, one day, of its return.
He is, for me, one of the most dynamic and unique artists of Gen X. To prove that, I envision, you must be a big enough fan to have combed every performance you could find. If Buckley Archivist was an occupation, my resume would be top of the pile. By late high school, peer-to-peer downloading software, the advent of Napster and Kazaa, gave music lovers a way to find the rarities. Every night, my homework finished, I’d get on the computer, call up the internet with the screeches of our 56K modem, and scour for Buckley’s live performances. Each find was like panned gold from a river. I collected a box full of burned CDs filled out with the dates and times of the performances and the set lists.
To add to my fervor: from his notes and letters I’d found online, I gathered quotes and wrote them in Sharpie on white t-shirts. I even made a band shirt. At the local mall’s t-shirt place, I handed them the picture from my wall and they printed it out on a white tee. I wore this proudly. On my guitar, I tried mimicking his musical style. Every song I wrote in high school was a sad attempt at his vocal range and complex open chords, poorly written songs that were like the work of ratty hand puppets to those of the Muppets. Still, it felt like an access into his music to perform this mimicry, like those said persons who visit tombstones and reenact some form of care for their beloved.
Of the other media surrounding Buckley, from the countless covers and dedications, is an intimate photo and interview book by photographer Merri Cyr. Occasionally, I take it down from my bookshelf and thumb its pages. It is, if anything, a marvel of New York City Nineties, and a portrait of Jeff who seems one of the burgeoning lifebloods of that era’s New York underground scene. A wide shot captures him playing at Sin-é, a tiny club on the Lower East Side. He looks up at the ceiling. The floors are worn to that of old pirate ships. A middle-aged man smokes a cigarette nearby, reading the paper. Shots like this. But there’s the the natural and architectural shots too, more like a model. Him in Tompkins Square Park sitting on the Temperance Fountain. He has a cool and rebellious look, dressed all in black, short hair, a white t-shirt and dark vest under his black jacket, a wallet chain with an assortment of dangling keys, a silver wrist watch. Somewhere between punk and beat poet.
The photos move in a chronology. There’s the outtakes of him in the glam golden jacket from Grace’s front cover, singing into a vintage microphone. A photo shoot of him in a church, reposing in a cathedra in his black pants, suspenders, and white tee. Dressed in a thick wool coat, flower sticking out of the pocket, sitting on a stool. As the photos move forward in time, his hair grows longer. Shots of his live performances, in baggy plaid, stage lights swirling around him. Other shots of lively backstage happenings, a notable one with Paul McCartney. With city friends hanging in diners and bars and coffee shops. In Tower Records, looking at a CD like one more shopper in the crowd, among the hip and happening.
Further in time, he’s in Memphis standing on a dock, behind him an old railroad bridge like the remains of a long resting skeleton. Another, he’s leaned over a pool table in a dive bar, the light falling down on his arm, which glows like the limb of an angel. The chronology at some point seems to break apart. Or maybe it doesn’t. Near the book’s end are photos of a particular and prescient gloom. Jeff in some sort of photo art piece. One especially: he lays out on a cot, swaddled in a white sheet. The room is all dark mostly, very dim, except for a clock in the background laying on a podium, a beam of light falling on it. You can’t tell what time the clocks says, but you know for him that it won’t tick long until his untimely drowning in Wolf River.
The photo book presents a star in the making, in mid-movement. He was not so popular then, at least not in the States, to have made the splashes that he might have made with later albums. It is a book of things happening, a steady trajectory that would any day bloom, an expanding reveal of the future. Here, we witness the microcosm of his growing fame, that he still had his old friends and lived in NYC grunge, playing small clubs and bars, but that fans adored him, people clung to him like a modern-day rock god. These were the chosen few, the disciples. In the concert photos, they’re packed against the stage, gazing up into his face, the pained expressions he makes, the hypnotism of an unsaid greatness, pushed back upon them, so they too have a little of his aura in their faces, their eyes. Because they hear the songs, sing them, because these are their songs now as much as his. Some of the book’s interviews with friends say as much, that he was friendly with many groups, and that everyone felt like they had access to him, their closest companion.
I felt that access from my bedroom, listening to him, in that haze of teenage no-place, trying to find myself. Your parents and guardians impact your youngest years. But as the years progress, the next steps of parenting fleck away from the parental figures, their control lessens, and you’re given over to the forces of music and movies, TV and books, of art. Good or bad, there’s a possibility that something else helps raise you by teenhood. And maybe that’s where Buckley comes in, some surrogate friend who died before he could tell me about himself, or could teach me about me in turn. His belongings are left here, much in the way my father’s are, notes and letters and music, telling me something I could never fully understand, but that I could feel so deeply and was beautiful besides.
As I walk around the cemetery, its contrived existential atmosphere has got me again. It is hard to avoid it, even if I hate its pushing and over-sentimental forms. I’ve become the cemetery viewer. I am here like anyone else to ponder the end. Looking for a little peace, I descend the hill to the pond. My graduation photo was taken near here. Something my mother wanted. I’m done up in a way I don’t like, in khaki and dressy plaid button-down. It’s to appease the parents that I did the shoot. From under a drooping willow tree, I look out to an unknown point, no smile on my face. Not a flattering shot, in retrospect. My hair is slicked back, and my glasses are small wiry frames that I never liked. Acne spots my face, later will leave a scarring that smooths out, for some reason, in photos, but that I can spot in the bathroom mirror.
I look down into the water, as anyone does in a scenario when they think of the end. How trite, I tell myself. Pondering the end and looking down at my reflection across the pond’s surface. Though really, I am still thinking of Jeff, that night of his drowning. He had gone swimming in Wolf River Harbor, fully clothed. A roadie there with him, on the shore, turned to move some of their things from a tugboat’s wake. When he turned back, Jeff was gone. They found him days later, his body caught in branches. I could never get his death out of my mind. It shines through his songs. Beauty is double-edged. And it takes the sense of humanity’s end, that urgency of brief time, to commit to creating the precious truths and the shining emotions of our now.
For a second I think to do it. Maybe go into the water, fully-clothed. I would be safe, I think, though incredibly cold. I can see the pond’s sediment bottom, at least for ten or so feet. It would be safe, and no currents, no tugboats. Years later, I will realize the rude awakening. Cemetery sentiments cover over the horror of actual encounters. On a tubing trip with friends, we are caught up in a post-storm river. The current is harsh. Downed trees lay across whole sections of the river. We persist. Near the end of the trip, an entire tree takes up the river width. It is either push through an impossible network of branches and leaves to get to shore, a process that could take hours, or go where the current rips under a gap in the tree, to what might be the other side, or to branches stopping you up underneath. A major gamble.
Before my decision is conscious, I let go of the one branch keeping me from being sucked below. The current yanks me and I am flailing beneath the water, feeling with my hands for the tree above, the cause of this danger and yet also my one lifeline, since feeling it is all I can do to help me navigate. My eyes, closed, sting with pressure. I sense the tree and by its guide am led through the torrent. I think of nothing. My chest is tight to keep the little oxygen I have left. My heart races. I pop up later, gasping for air. I lose my favorite hat and pair of glasses. My tube is gone. Blind and in shock, I hold on to someone else’s tube until we reach our car. Barring a few cuts, scratches, and a poison ivy rash I am unscathed.
A year or so after, I discover a live show of Buckley’s later work. The concert is not anything I’ve heard yet. It’s like I’m listening to him for the first time. It has been years since I’ve heard him, since I vowed to shelve his music until it returned to me fresh. And here it is, coming up out of the water, living again. ▨
Cicada
A sketch
The cicadas were in full that summer. Loud, screeching cicadas. One long continuous song that never seemed to end. When several stopped, others filled in the notes of the chorus. Their trills lasted longer than it seemed they should, and they went on until late into the night, so that Claire and I were convinced that insects never slept.
You could see them, which was funny because they weren’t an insect often seen, commonly hidden away by foliage, sheltered on the undersides of branches. As a kid, I’d discovered their old ashy-white shells after the fact, brittle alien exoskeletons, but could never locate a live one.
But that summer they were bold and came up onto the porch and resided under the railings and arms of deck chairs. Claire would have me check the chairs and the deck and flick any out into the darkness. Then I would say it was clear and we would sit in the night without any of the lights on, talking against the drone. ▨
Coming Up….
Next release: February 25 - A continuation of Memory for the Fruit to Grow. Another writing sketch.
As always: If you missed anything or can’t find an email, just visit the website to read through the archives.