Morsels

Well, I have tried all day not to write about last night’s Springsteen show. But I can’t help it. I’ve seen a lot of shows, a lot of his shows. And I cannot remember a better, more heartfelt, more open and generous show in my life.

Of course, I am predisposed to love him and the E-Street guys and I always feel my life flash a little bit before me when I watch them onstage — for a lot of different reasons which those of you who know me well will understand. And last night, they all looked just a little older, a little stockier. Even Bruce. So there was that. And then they started the show (I am TERRIBLE with set lists but there’s one and a good review here). He took us through the whole Born to Run album (I saw that tour when they hit Oxford Ohio in the mid 70’s) and the songs, which we’ve all heard in concert before, had such a new resonance when you heard them strung together as they originally were. It was just as it was when he seemed to spring on us all back then. After the last song from the album, he stepped forward with his original band minus Federici and said “these are the guys that put together the album” and you felt all their history and yours in that moment.

But he wasn’t morose or even really nostalgic. He played those songs with all the heart he ever poured into them and it just broke my heart wide open with everything a heart can experience. He played Back In Your Arms as if he might not make it through the song. I looked behind me and saw a woman rocking back and forth sobbing.  The whole night was like that. He walked through the crowd, was lifted to the stage (a la Peter Gabriel); hands, almost every hand swayed in the light. Of course we sang every word as loud and as long as we could.

It was even poignant to see that they lifted a disco ball to the ceiling for the points of light that we might have all raised up with our lighters way back when.  (sorry, now I am getting maudlin).

Anyway, for three hours and more he and the band gave us everything they had until it was clear we all needed a rest and I am so thankful I was there.

I’ve been reading a book on Yaddo, that famous (well, maybe only in NY art-land?) artist’s retreat in Upstate NY — doing some semi-directional “research” for some fiction I am maybe admitting to be working on (how’s that for commitment?) And I was struck by this statement from an essayist and academic named Helen Vendler about music and its composition: “I know the verbal arts, my subject, as expressive form; I can understand some art at least as a ‘visible core’…; but music comes from a form of mind I recognize but could never comprehend. Music’s invisibility - vis a vis words and paint - makes it for me more astonishing than the other arts. It is physically incredible , as instant and weightless as thought itself… only music is of the ether.

I think the truth is that she has no connection to music, to sound then. Music, for me is utterly moving. I remember sitting tight as close could be to the speakers in our living room while dad blasted, yup, Mozart. But the lift, the ready “hook” — there is nothing MORE elemental than sound. Think of our first cry, the struggle to speak. It all comes before actual verbalization, the thought that a line (I mean a physical line) might have some significance.

And I think of Arthur, who has been drawn (really no pun meant at all) to sound in a very different way; as something to be gathered from his environment. I remember one summer - he was maybe 12? and he walked out into the woods in Maine. It was one of his first solo summer jaunts. He was testing his wings, I suppose. Walking in our sweet-scented safe woods. And he came back not too much later with a great grin on his face. To tell me about a singing log that he had found. Turned out it was grubs chewing in the long trunk of a felled white pine. But he heard tones and rhythm. In fact, he could approximate all that he had heard in his telling and singing of it though we did go to visit it as well. He returned several times the week we were there. Just to sit and listen.

There is nothing invisible about that experience.