Write Me a Letter

Checker 814, recorded March 2, 1955.
And yes, this WILL be on the exam.

It was Tuesday evening, the first of March. I was sitting on my couch, vibrating with thoughts of Ted Roethke, Monica, and the Yardbirds, when my mother called. At the end of the call, she mentioned seeing my friend Rob in church a few days earlier. She often mentioned seeing him, but this time she said he had a specific message for me. "He said a couple of times. 'Tell Peter to please write me a letter.'"

I'd visited with Rob when I was home over Christmas. The conversation veered around to rock music, Rob having been a long-time AM deejay in his youth. I was praising the powers of Bo Diddley, and Rob asked if I had a certain song, he knew not what it was called, but thought Bo did it. A slow blues, really recognizable beat . . . and we used to listen to a much faster version by somebody else back in '76.

Ah, of course. "I'm a Man." And even by then I had acquainted myself with the striking correspondences between that Yardbirds' version and the words "write me a letter." The chorus spelled out the word Man, M-A-N, with the A tricked out for special spooky resonance by Keith. And then the N, directly followed by MAN to end the chorus, happened to spell out my surname, ENMAN, phonetically. I'd also recently discovered, in the reference section of the public library across the street from the office, the Chess Records Complete Catalogue, which of course included Checker, their R&B imprint. So I knew the original Bo Diddley version had been recorded on March 2, 1955. Hey, I said to myself, it's March 1st, so tomorrow will be the 33rd anniversary of Checker 814. Maybe something strange and mysterious will happen. But wait, what was I thinking? Something surprising and mysterious HAD happened, earlier that very evening. And yesterday, too. Oh, I was going to write Rob a letter, alright. He was one of the few longtime friends I knew I'd be able to trust not to write me off as an unstable spinhead if I laid it all out for him. I'd have to start with a quick resume of 1985 and the highlights from this year, but I had a feeling things had shifted into a higher gear—maybe even a higher sphere—since my breakup with Jana on Friday, Now it was Tuesday, only four days later, but I had the sensation of having travelled a great distance in that time. As I contemplated writing Rob's letter, I realized I'd better organize my thoughts and jot down some notes about that recent journey. What sort of journey was it? And was I travelling forward or backward? At that point I had no illusions: living the life I'd lived, and not having lived the life I'd failed to live, I knew I'd never been the brightest bulb on the tree. But when whatever was happening now was over, would I be brighter or dimmer?

*****

All that weekend, in fact since her birthday on the 24th, I'd been mesmerized not only by Monica but by Roethke's poetry, and the idea of expressing myself poetically. The child learns to imitate naturally, out of sheer delight and admiration, and by Monday, the 29th, the extra "free day" of the leap year, I had slipped into as near a resemblance to childhood as an adult can assume without trying. A bright simplicity and intensity, tinged with silent expectation.

The harvest metaphor and the vegetation images in "I Knew a Woman" had really jazzed me. Like hearing the Yardbirds in 1976, except it was hitting different receptors, verbal and sensual. All weekend a vague idea for an image of my own wandered around my brain, but I couldn't quite corral it. It was like a dream I was trying to remember.

Then, mid-morning Monday at my desk, I looked up from my work, and it was as if a veil had dropped; emblazoned on the retina of my mind's eye was the stanza I'd been working toward. All I had to that point was a notion that in love, as in agriculture (mmm, how romantic!), not every crop was meant to be harvested as such. Some crops were just ploughed under, like clover, to replenish nitrogen, etc. and not every nascent or incipient love affair was destined or intended to be consummated. Seemed like an interesting correspondence, but how to make it elegant enough to at least sound poetic?

Now it came to me, and I scribbled hurriedly, worried some of it might slip away. I couldn't name the subject of the stanza yet, so I enigmatically substituted four dots instead.

                . . . .
                Declines to describe itself,
                To hold itself up in measure or response,
                Except to whisper the old, first secret:
                That even a harvest left fallow
                Doth enrich the soil.

I put in the archaic "doth" at the end in tribute to the oracular mode of arrival of the thing. When I read it again, it calmed me, made me feel better about whatever it was I had set in motion. When I showed it to the office medievalist, Laurie Valestuk, she said, "it looks like the introduction to a riddle." Riddles had been a genre of their own during bardic times, she elaborated, my stanza would be a great example of a beginning. The entire riddle might run hundreds of stanzas, with many puns and coded clues that only the initiated would be wise to.

Riddles could also partake of ambiguity, as my stanza certainly did. Did it concern my feelings about a specific person, or myself, or something that transcended both? Two days later, on the way home from work, I plucked a book off the shelf in a neighbourhood bookstore that offered a clue. God and the Gods, by Walter Beltz, was a sort of concordance of Old and New Testament stories and their pagan counterparts. Browsing through it, I learned that in pre-Christian Jewish culture, the name of Yahweh, the one true God, was not allowed to be explicitly written, so either a blank space or an ellipsis of three or four dots would be substituted. Now my almost casual insertion of the four dots to begin the stanza seemed freighted with significance. I decided to title the poem "Dear Mortal," both to capture the ambiguity and to highlight the vast ontological gulf between little pipsqueak me and whatever or whoever lived within the four dots.

Without consciously meaning to, I had also turned the stanza into a letter.

It turned out that my brief missive on Leap Day didn't entirely exhaust my creative impulse. The next evening, over a plate of chicken fried rice at the Lido Cafe on 10th Street, I was meditating on a couplet from the Keith Relf song "Turn Into Earth" ("The morning dew turns into rain/Lonely winds will call my name") and decided to stick with the riddle motif and do a haiku-like end run around his lugubriousness by imagining seeing the advent of the morning dew at the break of day:

              Moisture trembling,

                all nimble audacity astride this thousand-veined leaf,

                    offers us this day its glittering riddle:

                How shiftless burden of experience can bear

                    this cathedral of wishes and dreams.

I couldn't resist showing it to Laurie at work the next day. "Wow," she exclaimed, "you should break up with your girlfriend more often! This is neat stuff. You should develop it into something more." I intended to do just that, eventually, but I had other things to pay attention to first.

*****

Yes, other things. Visited by insomnia all that week, I was paying more attention than usual to the night sky, where an almost-full moon was wrapped in a most beguiling halo. Not far away, the evening star blazed more intensely than I thought I'd ever seen it, although the attention I brought to it certainly contributed to my impression. Unbeknownst to me, Venus and Jupiter were heading toward a relatively rare conjunction, to be fully consummated on Sunday, March 6. There would also be a relatively rare total penumbral lunar eclipse on the night of the full moon, Thursday, March 3. All I knew at the time was that the sky seemed as brightly lit up as the inside of my head.

Unlike the moon and planets above me, who moved in predictable patterns, my brain was like a pinball machine. I could never tell what any given thought was going to lead to, and the speed with which they appeared, combined with my insomniac fatigue, made it hard for me to marshal them into stable, coherent ideas. (Oddly, this would start to feel normal once the Internet Age kicked in a decade or two later, but right now it was disorienting.) Fortunately, there were two lodestars (pun intended) I kept returning to for inspiration and comfort: the poetry of Ted Roethke and the gems of my record collection.

I was not exactly a stranger to lyric poetry, having studied it in high school and college, but Ted's stuff (we were on a first-name basis already) was something else. As with our first meeting on Monica's birthday, there were romantic couplets that seemed able to tell me what I didn't know I knew ("She moves as water moves, and comes to me / Stayed by what was, and pulled by what would be"); others that puzzled and yet delighted me ("I think the dead are tender. Shall we kiss? / My lady laughs, delighting in what is"); and some that shocked and mystified me ("Incomprehensible gaiety and dread / Attended what we did. / Behind, before, / Lay all the lonely pastures of the dead"). Whatever my reaction, they all shared shared two essential qualities: they were elegant and memorable. I'd accepted already that I would lose, mislay, forget a lot of what was in my head then—but not these poems in Words for the Wind.

At one point, as Wednesday, March 2nd turned into Thursday the 3rd, I found myself musing on that intoxicating feeling of inevitability one begins to feel once a romantic attraction has reached a certain point, a certain unmistakable intensity and momentum. Maybe even a comforting intuition that no matter how clumsily and cluelessly one behaves, it's going to happen anyway. Probably at least partly hormonal, I suspected, and an evolutionary adaptation to enhance the propagation of the species. Ted certainly connected it to nature: "Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay / I'm martyr to a motion not my own."

But this time, unlike 1985, my sense of inevitability seemed not just romantic, or physical, but also metaphysical in some as-yet-undefined way. All through the week since meeting Ted, I'd had the growing suspicion that something else besides a romantic attachment was looming, or beckoning. A big change was coming, not just in coming to—ahem—"know a woman," or know myself differently through a woman, but to know life and the world in a different way. 

And what better way to reinforce this intuition than to play the perfect tune from my record collection? In this case, a one-hit wonder from 1968 recorded by a fictional group, Max Frost and the Troopers, from the soundtrack of the counterculture satire Wild in the Streets. The song was real, though. "The Shape of Things to Come" (not to be confused with the Yardbirds' "Shapes of Things"), penned by Brill Building veterans Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, and had plenty of energy and momentum. And was telling me just what I wanted to hear:

There are changes
Lyin' ahead in every road
And there are new thoughts
Ready and waiting to explode . . .  

Let the old world make believe;
It's blind and deaf and dumb
But nothing can change the shape of things to come

Since I seemed to be heading for the culmination of something, I thought "When the Levee Breaks" from my long-neglected copy of Led Zeppelin IV would work too, but it came off as a bit too bombastic for this context. So I tried "Battle of Evermore," the Celtic-flavoured duet between Robert Plant and incomparable folk diva Sandy Denny. This certainly fit the bill. Amid Jimmy Page's relentless mandolin chording and some truly haunting vocal interplay, an apocalyptic medieval or Tolkienesque battle looms on the morrow, and as daybreak approaches, the narrator/protagonist, who has been, with some dread, "waiting for the angels of Avalon, waiting for the eastern glow," now calls on Fate to "bring the balance back." The balance between day and night? War and peace? Light and darkness? The Queen of Light, the Dark Lord and the Prince of Peace have already made appearances, so who knows. The song ends with him chanting, with growing ferocity and distress, "Bring it back! Bring it back!" His agonized scream fades into the ether, the voiceless static between tracks of the LP.

I could sympathize. My situation wasn't nearly as dramatic, but there was a part of me that would have gladly returned to my comparatively balanced life of a few months previous. I hadn't heard the song in years, and was surprised at its discombobulating effect on me. I too was waiting for the eastern glow, with a mixture of excitement, expectation, anxiety and confusion. What would my next day bring? My next week? 

The stylus had already grooved into the next track while I was thinking all this. One of those songs so familiar you don't even bother to recognize it at first. So overplayed by everyone by that time that I might never have intentionally listened to it again if my deep-night reverie hadn't stilled my editorial instincts. Now I found myself listening carefully, several times, another verse or two clicking into place each time until I felt I finally had a handle on this iconic musical enigma.

Note the recording time on Stairway. It will also be on the exam.

 

"Stairway," like "I'm a Man," is a song of seduction and salvation. The plaintive, dignified acoustic guitar and recorder opening offers the promise of release from the agonized keening that concludes "Battle of Evermore." The lady is introduced as a naive materialist, a consumer convinced that all her wants and needs have a price tag. The singer, knowing himself incapable of ever satisfying all her material desires, tries to woo her instead into another realm where love and mystery rule. Materialistic complacency and certainty are a sham, he says. "Sometimes all of our thoughts are misgiven." He has other thoughts now: he has seen the rings of smoke and heard the voices of the dead, "those who stand looking." Having taken another path, he enjoys another kind of certainty that fills him with wonder rather than smugness. He can see ahead to the promise of the piper, who will lead us back to reason—meaning not mundane positivistic rationality but real participation in the Divine Intellect. He knows that the lady has been stricken with love that she cannot yet comprehend. Her mind is a closed book whose pages are filled with white light, a book only full physical and spiritual consummation of her desire can open. Her confusion, "the bustle in her hedgerow," is but a preparation for "a spring clean for the May Queen," that age-old symbol of sexual love and fertility. Her head is humming; the piper has already woken her from her slumber; her stairway is not the escalator at the shopping mall, or even the ladder of academic or professional success, but the whispering wind itself, carrying the piper's tune that will lead her to the psychic rebirth she unknowingly craves. The exultant hard rock finale sees her transformed, shining white light and transmuting all she touches into gold—not the precious metal but something even more precious, and beyond price.

And, in the spirit of the moment, some of the lyrics brought Ted Roethke to mind: 

There walks a lady we all know

Who shines white light and wants to show

How everything still turns to gold. [Stairway]

I swear she cast a shadow white as stone. [I Knew a Woman]

Dear lady, can you hear the wind blow? And did you know
Your stairway lies on the whispering wind?   [Stairway]

The wind's white with her name,
And I walk with the wind.  [Words for the Wind]

And so on. I couldn't find any piper in Ted's lyrics, but it seemed to me Ted himself was my piper, calling me, if not to reason, then at least to a poetic appreciation of my circumstances. Ted had written that stuff in the early 50s, as far as I could tell from skimming his biography—a couple of decades before Led Zeppelin IV was released in 1971. And what about the other song that loomed large? Well, as we learned earlier, the original version of "I'm a Man" was recorded by Bo Diddley (as Checker 814) on March 2, 1955—exactly 33 years before. 

I'd been musing hard on 33. Keith Relf had died at 33, as had (reputedly) Christ and Alexander, messianic figures of their respective eras, and, like Keith, incarnations of the notion of East meeting West. And just that evening, along with God and the Gods, I had picked up at the bookstore Insurgent Mexico, journalism on the Mexican Revolution by early 20th century radical John Reed, later famous for his account of the Bolshevik Revolution, Ten Days that Shook the World. His bio on the inside front page revealed that he also died at 33, of typhus, in Moscow—and as for the East/West thing, he is the only American buried in the Kremlin. 

My little world had started shaking a week earlier, on Monica's birthday, February 24th. In my febrile little brain, the revolutionaries had already secured the armory and the telegraph station and were moving on the Winter Palace. If my itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny (in the grand scheme of things) revolution were to last ten days, it would culminate on March 4th. Which, by the time I found myself thinking this (long past midnight) was tomorrow. As far as I knew, March 4th was not the 33rd anniversary of anything. But my mind was doing a pretty good imitation of what a decade later would be called a search engine, and it dredged up, from the History of Capitalism course I'd taken the previous year, that March 4, 1933, was the inauguration date of FDR, and thus also the day of his inauguration speech, in which he outlines plans for the New Deal. So, tomorrow would be the 55th anniversary of the advent of the New Deal.

The numbers 55 and 33 were elbowing their way into the revolutionary crowd, and the fact that they added up to 88 made their new position secure. Just on a hunch, I consulted the biographical notes on Roethke I'd jotted down at the library. Sure enough, he died in 1963 at the age of 55—the exact complement to Keith's death at 33! And he died in 1963, the year the Yardbirds were born! Even their respective iconic (for me) creations—"I'm a Man" and "I Knew a Woman"—seemed complementary. Were there other resonances I had yet to discover? Certainly now, in my estimation, they were both wizards.

So what about the other 55 + 33, the New Deal, whose anniversary was tomorrow? Was a New Deal in store for me? Wait a minute: New Deal. We've already learned that the N-MAN from the chorus of "I'm a Man" was a homonym for my surname, EN-MAN. Could the N stand for NEW? Well, I was still nominally in charge of the government, so maybe one of my last acts before the mob stormed the Winter Palace could be to decree that N-MAN now signified NEW MAN.

It seemed a satisfying end to another long night, and I dozed off for a few hours before getting up and heading for work, surprisingly refreshed, on the third day of March.

*****

After a no-nonsense day at work, I supped at home and then dove back into the nonsensical play that my life had become. (Feel free to interpret "nonsensical play" in the sense of "childish amusement" or "specimen of theatre of the absurd." Both fit.) 

I started out by worrying (in the sense that a dog worries a bone) some lines of Roethke that puzzled me. First, that final line of "I Knew a Woman," Monica's line—I measure time by how a body sways—was I missing something there? Perhaps the previous line—These old bones live to learn her wanton ways—held the clue. Maybe I was just obtuse. Or maybe—and the "old bones" twigged a memory here—it was like that exchange in Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye between Marlowe and his client's poetry-reading chauffeur Amos:

“‘I grow old . . . I grow old . . . I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.’ What does that mean, Mr. Marlowe?”

 “Not a bloody thing. It just sounds good.”

 He smiled. “That is from the ‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’ Here‘s another one. ‘In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michael Angelo.’ Does that suggest anything to you, sir?”

 “Yeah—it suggests to me that the guy didn’t know very much about women.”

I phoned the only poet I knew personally, John McDermid, and asked him. He offered no answer, or perhaps realized it might be too difficult to explain to a novice like me. Maybe, like Marlowe's T.S. Eliot, I didn't know much about women. 

But I knew I was out of my depth about poetry. Instead, just then my imagination was trying to conjure up Monica's face, just as it had tried with that girl Kari's face the previous summer. In that case, my frustration had been partly assuaged when I stumbled on a postcard that seemed to capture the aura, if not the exact countenance, of the object of my quest. 

Kari's stand-in, on the verge of greatness

It was a photo of famed English actress Peggy Ashcroft taken by Paul Tanqueray moments before she uttered her first line on the London stage, as Naomi in Jew Süss in 1929, at about the same age (21) as the raven-haired beauty I'd recently introduced myself to.  

But finding that postcard had just been dumb luck, shopping on a long weekend in Vancouver. Now here I was stuck in my living room with only my wacky pinball machine of a mind to help me out. 

I thought to myself that if someone else were in my position, trying to conjure up my face in her mind (and, no, I wasn't deluded enough to think that either of the women of the moment, Kari or Monica, would be doing that), they could do worse than that photo of Keith I'd found in the Yardbirds book back in 1985. Taken in April 1967, it shows the band, by then a foursome, sitting outside on a bench or ledge, with Keith on the far left, gazing straight into the camera. I had it on good authority from numerous friends that he was a dead ringer for me, and I'd grown a beard since 1985, ostensibly on a whim, but also maybe perhaps spooked by the resemblance a bit. Trouble was, when I pencilled in my beard on a photocopy of the image, the resemblance grew stronger, and although I tried not to make a big deal of it, I had come to think of myself as Keith's twin—visually, at least.

Still spooky after all these years

So I fished out the Yardbirds book and began flipping aimlessly through it, and a photo caught my eye. It was a photo of Keith and his wife, April, taken on their wedding day in 1966. 

My twin with Monica's twin, on their wedding day,
February 24, 1966. Monica's 5th birthday, as it turns out.

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But it wasn't April; it was Monica. Monica had the same light brown, shoulder-length hair as April, the same knowing, sidelong glance. The same eyes, mouth, cheekbones. They could be sisters. SISTERS!? Oh, boy . . . 

After the Yardbirds had dissolved into Led Zeppelin, Keith and Jim McCarty had started the folk-rock group Renaissance, which included Keith's sister Jane. I had an album of theirs with a fold-out centre photograph of the group. I searched it out, and the resemblance between Jane and Monica was even stronger than I expected. This was a colour photo, and Jane`s hair was straw-blond, almost the same colour and cut as Monica's. The shapes of their faces were remarkably congruent, as we used to say in high school geometry. And, as old Euclid was wont to say, "Things that are equal to the same thing are equal to each other." There was also a photo on the back cover that reinforced the resemblance.

Were these circumstances eerie or was it just my imagination that was eerie? It wasn't as if, in either case, I had a chance to judge with detachment the intensity of the resemblance. It was too eerie to admit of degrees. It seemed that something was slowly, but inexorably, surrounding me. I kept glancing back at the two photographs, hoping that the illusion of resemblance would dissipate.

No luck. All that night, again, no sleep. It didn't help that the riveting, bearded Keith in the Renaissance photograph looked not unlike our modern cinematic fantasies of Jesus.

The morning would bring us to March 4th, the 55th anniversary of the advent of the New Deal. I decided I would take these photos to work with me and show them to John, gauge his reaction. If he didn't think I was too far out on a limb, I'd continue on to the university after work. Maybe I'd stumble into an encounter there with my other female enigma, the dark one, Kari. I had the strong feeling that might close some sort of circuit. Bring things to a tidy conclusion, roll the credits, and shake our head at what a weird movie we'd just seen.

Next Stop: A GOLDEN APPLE