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Friday, May 11, 2007
Heroes, Memories And Harbingers
Fran here. Please forgive the tone of this essay. The worst oolies are the ones driven by melancholy.
In case the term is unfamiliar to you, an "oolie" is a craving that comes upon one unexpectedly and won't go away without being slaked. Dieters know the power of the oolie; ask anyone who loves pasta or baked potatoes, but is confined to other foods for medical reasons, or is desperate to be rid of his abdominal annex.
There are as many sorts of oolie as there are things we consume or enjoy. Food oolies are commonplace; pregnant women's oolies for odd food combinations are well known and well explained. It's not unheard of to be struck by an oolie for an old favorite movie or television show, and be sent zipping off to Blockbuster in search of the DVD. Your commentator occasionally gets oolies to reread a favorite novel, solve a few differential equations, or return to the village where he matured, for a sentimental stroll down the canopied streets where he, ah, first discovered his super powers. No doubt you, Gentle Reader, are inventorying your own stock of oolies as you read this.
One cannot be certain what will cause an oolie to strike. The most powerful ones are usually completely unexpected. Sometimes they won't be satisfied. I've been suffering from just such a one for nigh on two weeks.
The Sunday before last, the C.S.O. and I took in a concert, the first we'd attended in quite a long while. The performer was Gordon Lightfoot, renowned these past forty years as the very best singer-songwriter ever to emerge from the wilds of Toronto. We'd grown up on Lightfoot's music, and had rich memories of his performances from long ago.
When I learned that Lightfoot is still performing and would be on Long Island for one evening, I was struck by an oolie of unusual power. I'm an acoustic guitarist of modest ability. It was Gordon Lightfoot's music, along with that of a few lesser performers, that had been my main inspiration for advancing my skills. The chance to see and hear Lightfoot perform again, after so many years, was irresistible. The C.S.O. was similarly inclined. We would have mortgaged our kids rather than let the opportunity slip past us.
In the Seventies and early Eighties, when he was at the height of his popularity, Lightfoot possessed a baritone of remarkable smoothness and power. He gloried in it, often disdaining to use voice amplification even in the largest halls. In those years Lightfoot's voice was a golden instrument, a thing of such rarity and beauty that one could listen to it without end. Harnessed to his graceful ballads of love and loss, struggle and strife, triumph and tragedy, it seemed somehow immortal. We arrived at the concert hall with that remembered voice resonating in our heads.
But all things must pass. Time is less kind to vocalists than to others sorts of virtuosi. Lightfoot is nearly seventy now, and has recently suffered severe injuries that almost took his life. He still performs like the trouper of old, but that magnificent baritone is only a memory. Two Sundays ago, at the Westbury Music Fair, his voice was so weak as to be almost inaudible.
Nevertheless, the concert was a fine thing, for it was suffused with love: Lightfoot's love for music and performance, and his audience's love for him, emotions so pure and strong that they were well nigh visible in the darkness under the Music Fair's dome. Hardly anyone in the audience was younger than fifty; no doubt nearly all of us had come to love Lightfoot's music as teenagers or young adults. We were there as much to celebrate a great artist's life and career as to hear him sing and play.
Still, his voice was gone. No one who remembers him as he was could fail to be affected by the loss. (At odd moments, a few attendees actually tried to help him by singing along. We let them live.)
We left the concert in a strange, two-sided mood. Our desire to see and hear the old genius had been fulfilled, but at a price: the recognition that something of great beauty and value had departed from the world, not to return. The memories we'd brought to the concert had been overlaid by a darker reality: the inevitability of deterioration and decline.
I've been trying to slake an oolie for the remembered Gordon Lightfoot ever since that night. I've played every recording of his that I own, several times. I can't dispel the memories of his hoarseness, or his overall frailty.
We're progress addicts, we Americans. We expect things to be better this year than last: more money, better homes, nicer cars, more entertaining entertainments, and better prospects for our kids. By and large, due to the dynamism of our society and its markets, we're not disappointed in those expectations. It's that as much as anything else that makes it so difficult for us to face the depredations of age...to grapple with the knowledge that from about age twenty-five on out, we're headed irreversibly downhill.
Yet it is so, for every one of us who's reached the quarter-century mark. That's when anabolism yields the reins to catabolism; when the vital forces that seemed to rise without limit plateau and then start to slowly fall. All men are ground down by the rub of Time: commoners and kings; geniuses and churls; great artists and lowly engineers from Long Island.
At 55, I probably have some years left to live. Still, I can feel my vitality slipping away, my life drawing slowly to a close. I've been doing what I can to adjust to it, on the theory that it's better to prepare early than late. Keeping my own insignificance firmly in mind helps with the process. I have no real claim on anyone's attention. I don't expect to be remembered once I'm gone. What loved ones I leave behind won't spend much time in mourning, nor would I want them to; life is for the living.
It's harder to cope with the loss of something rare and precious. Much harder. He who appreciates his own littleness can sometimes cultivate Robert Louis Stevenson's parting euphoria:
Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie:
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he long'd to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
...for what he takes out of the world with him is of little import. But to see a giant reduced to a shadow, and to watch him totter toward the one-way door that marks the true beginning of Eternity Road stamps one deeply, perhaps indelibly, with the sense of loss: the loss of him by all who'd known and admired him.
Everyone has his heroes. Thrill to them and applaud them while you have them, my friends, for they are as mortal as you. Sometimes more so. Memories of what they were are thin cloth against the winds that whistle past their graves, and our own.
UPDATE: Because it's appropriate...and because I feel like it:
The last time I saw her face,
Her eyes were bathed in starlight and her hair hung long
The last time she spoke to me,
Her lips were like the scented flowers inside a rain-drenched forestBut that was so long ago that I can scarcely feel
The way I felt before
And if time could heal the wounds,
I would tear the threads away
That I might bleed some moreThe last time I walked with her
Her laughter was the steeple bells
That ring to greet the morning sun
A voice that called to everyone
To love the ground she walked upon
Those were good daysThe last time I held her hand,
Her touch was autumn, spring and summer, and winter too
The last time I let go of her,
She walked a way into the night
I lost her in the misty streets,
A thousand months, a thousand miles
When other lips will kiss her eyes
A million miles beyond the moon,
That's where she isBut that was so long ago that I can scarcely feel
The way I felt before
And if time could heal the wounds,
I would tear the threads away
That I might bleed some moreThe last time I saw her face,
Her eyes were bathed in starlight and she walked alone
The last time she kissed my cheek
Her lips were like the wilted leaves
Upon the autumn covered hills
Resting on the frozen ground
The seeds of love lie cold and still
Beneath a battered marking stone
It lies forgotten-- Gordon Lightfoot --
Comments
I had somewhat similar feelings the day I heard that Robert Heinlein had died, although happily he did not seem to lose his authorial talents as he aged. Larger-than-life figures such as that in your childhood and adolescence seem to be fixtures of the world, part of the natural order, and it shakes your foundations when they shuffle off this mortal coil. I doubt I’ll leave such an impression in the world; I just hope that my kids (and hopefully grandkids) remember me occasionally with fondness and a tinge of regret.
Posted by on 05/11/2007 at 03:29 PMIf the sound is gone from your ear, appreciate the genius of the lyrics:
If youd like to spend the afternoon approaching lavender
Youll feel just fine but one things sure
Youll never be the same
If youd like to try your hand at understanding lavender
Then you must be very sure
That life is not a game
You might even learn a thing or two approaching lavender
Youll soon be on a one night tour
Forgetting your own name
You wont need a reason just to be alone with lavender
For the light so warm and pure
Will draw you like a flameThe colors that surround you there will be the shade of lavender
Shadows dancing everywhere
Like flowers in the rain
You will find your tongues on fire while lying next to lavender
With words you never spoke before
And will not speak againOh sweet lavender I understand you perfectly
There is no way that I can see
You living by yourself
Oh sweet lavendar I must be with you constantly
Your presence means so much to me
Much more that life itselfOh sweet lavender as fragrant as the name you bear
Please cast away the clothes you wear
And give your love to me
Oh sweet lavender your smile is like the golden sun
Id love to see you laugh and run
As naked as the seaIf youd like to spend the afternoon approaching lavender
Dont try and get the best of her
She will not share the blame
If youd like to try your hand at understanding lavender
Then you must be very sure
That life is not a game
There is no shameM
Posted by Mark Alger on 05/11/2007 at 04:06 PMFran - R. L. Stevenson had me from the time I first discovered his children’s poems, and “Treasure Island and “Kidnapped” are among my all-time favorite novels. The famous verse by Stevenson that you quote is poignant, but I also like the way Emily Dickinson describes the passing of her frinds:
“Taken from men—this morning --
Carried by men today --
Met by the Gods with banners --
Who marshalled her away --One little maid—from playmates --
One little mind from school --
There must be guests in Eden --
All the rooms are full --Far—as the East from Even --
Dim—as the border star --
Courtiers quaint, in Kingdoms
Our departed are.”
Emily DickinsonPosted by Bill Weaver on 05/11/2007 at 05:31 PMClearly the oolies are contagious.
Posted by Fausta on 05/11/2007 at 05:50 PMAll of our heroes die. Sometimes they live pretty good lives before they do so.
Donald Fagin isn’t what he once was. Nor Don Henley. Nor George Harrison, God rest his soul. We are priveleged to share the earth with them for a time. Maybe see their brightly illuminated faces in a concert hall wiht ten thousand other admirers. All we can do is enjoy them while we can.
And remember, almost everyone is someone else’s hero. Don’t forget those people who will mourn your weakening and passing.
Posted by og on 05/11/2007 at 10:26 PMSecond thoughts:
You know, we humans have an infinite capacity for self-deception, and sometimes it can have an ameliorative effect.
In aid of which, Gord’s songs can be had for a song—99 cents a pop—at Musicmatch. (And elsewhere, I dare say.) Moved by Fran’s post, I have dl’d The United Artists Collection, 50+ songs from before the Sit Down Young Stranger LP which propelled Gord into prominence in the US. $16.99. And ordered two CDs from Amazon.
To my mind, it beats, to borrow a phrase from another, younger singer/songwriter genius, standing around like friends at a funeral. And I can enjoy Gord’s gift of song, pretend he’s still around somewhere, rather than weep in the churchyard.
M
PS That last tortured borrowing is from “Bitter Green”:
But now the Bitter Green is gone the hills have turned to rust
There comes a weary stranger whose tears fall in the dust
Kneeling by the churchyard in the autumn mist
Dreaming of a kissPosted by Mark Alger on 05/12/2007 at 07:35 AMSir,
I had the pleasure of enjoying Mr. Lightfoot in concert in oh, 1992 or so. San Antonio, TX, at the Lila Cockrell Theatere...which may no longer exist, due to massive “renewal”, i.e; New Convention Center.
Pure. (Censored). Magic.
You’re right though. There I was, a pup but nudging forty, listening through tears to tunes new in my youth; legendary in my heart.
And in my very soul.
TO THIS DAY.
Gordon Lightfoot wrote the poems of which I can but dream of writing but one line.
And then he put them to song.
Sweet, beautiful song.
I was not blessed with such talent, but I remain in complete, utter and total awe of his powers.
Sinatra, in his decline, was a sad, pathetic and weak-winded hack.
Lightfoot, conversely..... transmorphs into something entirely different......his voice, suiting the frailty of his years.
Quite seriously, I would pay to hear him sing the alphabet.
Jim
Sloop New Dawn
Galveston, TXPosted by Jim on 05/13/2007 at 02:22 AMAh. Looking for magic.
Just remember, though Lightfoot’s voice may have passed from this realm, his magic has not— someone else has taken up his banner, and the magic carries on.
The magic carries on.
Posted by B. Durbin on 05/15/2007 at 12:11 AM
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