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By Stuart Mitchner
Now I will do nothing but listen,
To accrue what I hear into this song….
—Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
It’s broad daylight, I’m driving in rush hour traffic, and my eyes are tearing up because of a song called “Sleeping” from the Band’s third album, Stage Fright (1970). In his liner notes, Rob Bowman calls it “a gorgeous ballad” that Richard Manuel co-wrote with Robbie Robertson. But “gorgeous” doesn’t do it justice, nor does PopShifter’s Paul Casey when he calls it a “desperately sad song,” Manuel’s goodbye to the Band “and Robbie’s goodbye to his friend,” who died in Florida 16 years later by his own hand. Casey finds it “hard to separate Richard’s bad end from the songs he worked on,” and this one “was the end of the line, and addresses the oncoming void openly.”
That dark reading misses the emotional and poetical magnitude of the song. My excuse for turning to Walt Whitman at this point is that while reading Leaves of Grass and listening to Stage Fright late the other night, I sensed that Walt must have had “Sleeping” in mind when writing section 26 from Song of Myself, with its reference to the violoncello as “the young man’s heart’s complaint” and to the way the “key’d cornet … shakes mad-sweet pangs through my belly and breast” while the orchestra “wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possessed them.”
For further evidence of Whitman’s across-the-centuries insights, listen to “Sleeping” and then read 26 from the top — “Now I will do nothing but listen, / To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute toward it,” such as “the sound I love, the sound of the human voice … all sounds running together, combined, fused or following, / Sounds of the city and sounds out of the city, sounds of the day and night.” And after a Whitmanesque litany of “death sentences” and “stevedores,” “alarm bells” and “steam whistles,” he delivers a stunning denouement: “I am cut by bitter and angry hail, I lose my breath” and “Steep’d amid honeyed morphine, my windpipe throttled in fakes of death, / At length let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles, / And that we call Being.”
Surely there’s room for the story of the Band among the puzzles in Whitman’s “Being,” and in view of the drug-driven destinies of the song’s singer/composer Manuel, bassist/singer Rick Danko, and drummer/singer Levon Helm, the reference to “honeyed morphine” and “fakes of death” is chilling.
A Dangerous Album
Quoted in Bowman’s liner notes to Stage Fright, the Band’s primary writer, spokesman, and lead guitarist Robertson is talking about sudden wealth and fame when he says, “Something comes into your life that’s unfamiliar and it surprises you and you react in a way that surprises you. When this is translated into music, sometimes it can be your best work,” which is why “there is something more dangerous, more helpless, and more vulnerable in this record…. To have the nerve to write ‘The Shape I’m In,’ to have the nerve to write ‘Stage Fright,’ to have the frame of mind to write a song about selling your soul for music, to write ‘Daniel and the Sacred Harp,’ to talk about this reflection of yourself in ‘The W.S. Walcott Medicine Show,’ “and to think that “this is really the origin of this music, that this is really where you’re coming from, this combination of carnival and musicality,” and “then to look around and see people nodding out” even while you’re “writing a song with Richard called ‘Sleeping’ is incredibly confessional.”
“Untranslatable”
“Sleeping” begins as a sweetly melancholy waltz: “For the life we chose in the evening we rose just long enough to be lovers again.” You can dance to that line even if you never waltzed in your life. Same for the next line: “And for nothing more, the world was too sore to live in.” The words are Robertson’s, the melody by Manuel, who crafted, as Bowman puts it, “an elaborately developed piano part,” moving “between 12/8 and 3/4.” Above all, it’s Manuel’s singing that takes your heart and, as Walt might say, “wrenches ardors” from you that you did not know you could feel, as when he sings, “Sad old ships, a morning eclipse, I spent my whole life guessing. Then I turned from the sun, and saw everyone searching.
The tenderness with which Manuel sings the line “I spent my whole life guessing” — which becomes all the more moving as “I spend my whole life sleeping” in subsequent verses — creates an emotional absolute that William Wordsworth phrased for the ages in the line “thoughts that do lie too deep for tears.” But then listen to Manuel sing the upbeat chorus, “We can leave all this hate before it’s too late. Why would we want to come back at all?” The emotion Manuel brings to that line is, as Whitman might say “untranslatable.” And the poet who wrote “All goes upward and outward, nothing collapses” would smile and close his eyes to savor the closing chorus: “The shepherd and his sheep, will wind you to sleep / Where else on earth would you wanna go? / To a land of wonder, when you go under / Why would we want to come back at all?”
That’s the ending of the song one listener reads as addressing “the oncoming void openly.” Let Whitman say it, from section 6 of Song of Myself: “there really is no death, / And if there ever was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, / And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.” Section 6 ends: “And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.” That last prosy turn is as naive as the shout of a kid on a playground.
Blogging
The childlike “and luckier” evokes the generally simple, heartfelt comments accruing to the online “Song of Ourselves” that is YouTube, where everything and everyone, living or dead, is available 24/7. What follows is a hasty, shoot-from-the-hip sampling of lines from “Song of Myself” suited to inhabitants of the Band’s “land of wonder: from section 2: “You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.” Or from 3: “I and this mystery here we stand.” Or 4, which opens: “Trippers and askers surround me.” Or 8: “What living and varied speech is always vibrating here, what howls restrained by decorum.” After that cue to Allen Ginsberg, this from 15: “And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them, / And such as it is to be of these more or less I am, / And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.”
Time to Yawp!
The prospect of lands of wonder brings to mind the upcoming 20th annual marathon reading of Song of Myself 3-6 p.m. Sunday at the Granite Prospect in Brooklyn Bridge Park. In the final, 52nd section, one of Walt’s most famous lines arrives on the wings of the spotted hawk that swoops by to complain of his “gab and loitering”: “I too am not a bit tamed — I too am untranslatable; / I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”
As is the custom, readers invited to Brooklyn Bridge Park, Pier 1, by the Walt Whitman Initiative (WWI) are called on to “yawp” one of the “52 all-embracing sections of Whitman’s epic (“Make it your own ‘Song of Myself!’).” Past participants have recited their passages in costume, in other languages, to music, in dramatic performance, by heart, with lassos, and in yoga positions. Readers are apparently still being recruited for this year’s event. For more information, contact songofmyselfmarathon@gmail.com.
According to Michael Robertson, author of Worshipping Walt, the events “are always joyous enactments of Walt Whitman’s central values: democracy, equality, diversity, and the pleasures of reading poetry in the open air (at least when weather permits).”
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