Ten Music Boxes
by Harvey Lillywhite
I’m having this dream in the wee hours of the morning as the frozen rain flicks at my bedroom window. I’m on the David Letterman show. Evidently I’m a writer there to plug my new books.
I hand Mr. Letterman two books that I’ve written. On their bright covers are terrific blurbs of praise and short descriptive hooks that seem to catch his attention.
But, I’ve switched dust jackets on the two books. So when he opens the first one, it has nothing to do with the contents from the cover, and when he opens the second one, the same.
This cheap trick puzzles and engages him. He laughs, and asks me, “What does this mean?”
“Life and the extra ear it takes to understand it, Dave.”
This is my answer. And it’s so profound it actually wakes me up. I stagger to my desk in the twilight and write the phrase down, sure I’ve grabbed at and taken firm hold of the mystery of life.
Before I mention the three young white-tailed deer I saw on my neighbor’s backyard playing the equivalent of deer-tag later that same morning, let me relieve the suspense and tell you exactly what this dream sentence means.
As with most dreams, it’s not especially subtle; its enigma lies, in fact, in how obvious it obviously is. We have ears to help us read the world in an emotional way our eyes can’t. Although we do most of our reading with our eyes, our ears allow us to see around corners—we can read what we can’t see—thus the religious, emotional quality of hearing. By reading, of course, I don’t mean exactly what you’re doing now. I mean, more generally, discerning, making sense of sensory information. Here are some synonyms: apprehend, comprehend, construe, decipher, discover, go over, interpret, know, make out, perceive, peruse, pore over, scan, scratch the surface, study, translate, unravel. These are all good words, and you get the idea. So why not a third ear?
Wikipedia says the third eye (also known as the inner eye) is a mystical concept referring in part to the ajna (brow) chakra in certain Eastern spiritual traditions. It is also spoken of as the gate that leads within to inner realms and spaces of higher consciousness. The third eye may alternately symbolize a state of enlightenment or the evocation of mental images having deeply personal spiritual or psychological significance. The third eye is often associated with visions, clairvoyance, precognition, and out-of-body experiences, and people who have allegedly developed the capacity to use their third eyes are sometimes known as seers.
(While I do believe in the three young deer with their short white tails flashing in and out of the little strip of ice-coated woods behind our houses here outside Baltimore, Maryland a couple of mornings ago, and in the visible gasps of breath they kept exhaling into the icy air, I don’t believe much in inner realms and spaces of higher consciousness. Ironically, I’m more of a what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of guy. I don’t believe in enlightenment. I do believe in deeply personal psychological significance, however. And I sort of believe in visions, clairvoyance, precognition, but not out-of-body experiences. Were those three deer not a vision? And have I not pre-conceived my whole life? And don’t I know what will sometime happen to me before it happens?)
So why not a third ear? A third ear that would allow you to hear what’s going on underneath the hubbub of TV and traffic and the clatter of animals half-hidden in the suburban scrub? I’m not talking about transcendence here, not an enlightened state that blinds us to the Every Day but simple attention that tunes us into the heart of “enlightenment”—the discovery of the obvious, what actually is—that music I can believe in.
Let me take you back for a second to my childhood in Utah. My stepfather was the first serious abstract expressionist painter in Utah. I know that sounds funny, or at least it does to me. And my Mom, who’d once danced with the San Francisco Ballet, was a local poet who was intimately connected with the famous Repertory Dance Theater. One day I came home and there were lots of people at my house. Two of them were Merce Cunningham and John Cage, who’d come to Salt Lake City to present a program at the University of Utah with RDT. Because my stepfather and Mom were locally well known, John Cage was in my kitchen cooking wild mushrooms—that I remember, and, NO, it wasn’t a dream.
I was 15. I went to the bookstore and bought A YEAR FROM MONDAY by John Cage and read it. His idea of music was, it seems to me (and who am I to opine about John Cage’s philosophy of music???), very simple. Music is sound. He was interested in the operations of chance (a.k.a., life/living). And while he did once put electric pickups on a cactus and play it as a musical instrument, he was someone who took everyday sounds (NOISE I think it’s called) seriously. Clearly he possessed the third ear.
And last evening, I was driving back home after dropping my son off at school in Connecticut. I found a radio station that was playing “Joshua” from the Miles Davis 7 Steps to Heaven album. But when it finished, the disc jockey who came on turned out to be a jazz player who’d played with Miles. He discussed the track passionately and in detail, stopping the tape to point out places of interest, replaying certain parts, counting out the music and showing how the time changed from 4/4 to 3/4 then back again, showing how George Coleman’s sax added to the mix, showing how the drummer, Tony Williams, was using his cymbals in innovative ways, explaining how Herbie Hancock was moving the music, and how Ron Carter worked with him on bass.
He never said his name. But he was the third ear there for twenty minutes. I’ll never listen to that track in the same way again—a track I’ve heard many, many times before. But it wasn’t transcendent. No hocus pocus. It was just getting deeply into what was actually there, the music where wonder must begin.
This, naturally and obviously, brings me to Art. It’s the third ear. It’s that connection to the music where wonder must begin, whether the music is seen or heard, tasted or smelled, or felt. And, to this end, I think of poems. Aside from any issues of quality—hey, I’m no Miles Davis when it comes to poetry (or anything else for that matter)—but I’m interested in poems and will, momentarily, offer a Music Box of my own poems, for what it’s worth.
Poetry is sound. Robert Mezey, my first poetry teacher, exclaimed to us that poems don’t exist until they’re spoken (sung?). You could disagree with his idea, but it is backed by tens of thousands of years of poetic history, right? And since poetry is sound, it is also music, by definition (see: Cage, John). Here’s sonnet 73 by Shakespeare.
That Time Of Year Thou Mayst In Me Behold
William Shakespeare
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the deathbed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
No, I’m not explicating the poem. But I would ask you to read it aloud, especially those first four lines. And pay close attention to that 4th line: Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. This conceit is one of his most famous in the sonnets. He’s comparing the leafless trees to himself in old age, of course, but he compares those trees to empty choir lofts. Thinking of trees as choir lofts is pretty cool. (The birds are the choir.) But when the leaves and the birds are gone, there’s the skeletal woodwork of the choir lofts themselves. The music has vanished. Old age?
But not so fast. That very line is so full of music. The sonic marriage of bare and birds is ironic. The contrast of ruined and sweet, also ironic. The “r” sounds in bare, ruined, choirs, and birds stitches the line together so well. The assonance in late and sang reinforces the underlying idea, suggesting, as it does, that song is dead. And the sibilance in sweet, birds, sang actually sounds a little like birds whistling. The rhythm is also effective: the irregular beats of the first four syllables against the regularity of the last six, and the way birds (so important to the idea of the line) is forced to be an unstressed syllable, what has vanished, between sweet and sang is perfect.
I play guitar a little (a very little), but I always wished I could play well. I’ve tried my hand at painting, with poor results. In my mind, I’m a good dancer, but then that’s only in my mind. Nevertheless, Art is important to me. The ability to pay attention to life, to me it’s just that plain. And then to take what we read with the third ear and make it an instrument for our Art—to do this is to make music, broadly speaking.
So I offer a little collection of music boxes composed for the third ear. These are ten ten-line poems with ten-syllable lines. They’re about where I live here in this second-ring suburb outside of Baltimore, where the deer eat my garden and play tag on my neighbors back lawn. Listen to them, the little music I have to offer you, maybe say them out loud.
10 Music Boxes
1
How the sun comes up behind the houses:
By slow degrees a distant glow pushes
Against the darkness; stars go back to dream;
The black camisole of night unbuttons;
The far edge of the earth turns a little
Closer to the great warm body of light;
The New Year’s new day gray clouds turn violet
Then red against the air, which is coming
Gold—the whole eastern sky turns brilliant gold,
A bright torch welding the day back into place.
2
Every January for a few days
The Bohemian waxwings—crested, masked,
Gray-brown, almost yellow underbellies,
And a bright yellow strip at the tail end
Of their tail feathers—a large flock, a hundred
Or more, perches in the top of the leafless
Beech, calling a faint, shrill seeee seeee, almost
Like purring in the freezing morning sun;
Just passing through, they’re here for the berries
On the holly tree, then they’re off for good.
3
The January cold night huge black sky,
Against the deep midnight blue horizon
The trees’ arms stretching up silhouetted—
Thousands of candles waiting to be lit—
In half-moon light, and Venus just falling,
City of stars shining for no reason;
It’s hard to believe, the streets empty,
Only the icy wind drives down the road;
Everyone sleeping locked in their homes,
The soft clattering of limb against limb.
4
Insects, people, birds, dogs, cats, squirrels, rabbits,
Mice, rats, foxes, raccoons, opossums, deer.
The psychics say our common life on earth
Is the best thing on in heaven. Angels
And all the dead watching happily there,
The January cold notwithstanding.
Socrates argued that learning is just
Remembering—where we all used to be,
A place we return to in our dream world
Where we look down on life, love all creatures.
5
Dancers’ convoluted pas de deux mimes
The traffic patterns on the congested
Freeways of our passion spanning the town
And tempest-tossed years of our long lifetime
Together: the ups and downs of true love,
A bond as weak as lunar gravity,
Slow to pull us down from breathtaking leaps
Of soaring disappointment when we thought
The other would be there to catch us safely
But we found we’d jumped too high, gone too far.
6
In this neighborhood, all the houses look
About the same. Maybe it’s always been
This way—in January, a cave is
A cave—clearly function over form. Then
Can you pull into anyone’s driveway,
Make yourself at home, become the loved one?
Why not musical houses, completely
Interchangeable parts—every month, year,
Unannounced, pick up and go. No suitcase.
No possessions, no possessions at all.
7
The green tennis courts’ white nets are down now.
Still kids will play the game that’s in their mind.
The rules stay the same though, without the nets.
Players lean into each shot hit just right.
Still the old court is divided in two.
A high green chainlink fence surrounds them all.
In January’s continuing cold,
Kids slam balls at the shut gate. Some lodge tight
Between links. Seasons changing faster than
We do—their winter still years down the road.
8
An almost warm first January night—
Two-hundred fifty tons of broken glass
Ground in these lanes: millions of sequins glint
In the streetlight. Fitting, contrapasso,
That we drive over what is shattered in
Our world that we made where nothing fragile
Stands much of a chance. The new Greek family
Out walking—the baby, a bit cold, starts
To cry as red lights flash from the heels of
Her big brother’s shoes at every impact.
9
From a distance this blue earth looks peaceful.
You don’t see the bare, cold January
Arms of the oriental beech squeezed by
A line of alternating green fir and
Blue spruce. Big storm’s whirling thumbprints’ squishing
The coastline—Georgia to the Outer Banks—
Looks like conceptual art, a spiral
Of cotton. And the engines of despair
And frustration that power cities are
Quite invisible, pinched off dreams and all.
10
How the sun sets behind the tree-lined hills:
The explosion as the sun crashes down
Leaves ribbons of scarlet and purple, a
Glamorous magic fan of falling light.
For a few minutes, the sun-warped world stops,
Shadows crumple, the whole sky dissolves
As though all the last shadows sewn into
One great shroud lifted into the air and
Became this pure January darkness—
Black, the color we fear, that we desire.