Traveling Sprinkler

by Nicholson Baker

  But at the same time as he was writing Firebird, Stravinsky was working on The Rite of Spring. And he thought, Here’s what I’m going to do this time. This’ll really get the Frenchies. I’m going to take the whole nineteenth century and all of its comfortable clubby conveniences—its umbrellas, its empire wainscoting, its pigeonhole desks, its velvet cases of surgical tools, its reassuringly civilized chamber concerts—and I’m going to use the bassoon with its keys and its pads and its maplewood smoothness to sum all that up, but then I’m going to torture it. I’m going to pitch it up high where the flute normally plays. I’m going to make the music strain to achieve its innocence. I’m going to start on a high C, way up in the impossible uppermost register of the bassoon, and then I’ll take it even higher and ask for a high D. It’ll almost sound like a flute—Rimsky-Korsakov had said in his book on orchestration that the high bassoon can sound rather like a flute, and it does—but it won’t be a flute, it’ll be the agonized first-desk bassoonist, who must struggle with every tendon showing in his neck to reach that high D, leaking air around the reed, ignoring the patronizing backward glances from the cellos. Debussy knew what was going on. He knew that The Rite of Spring was in some ways a direct attack on his and Mallarmé’s flora-and-faunish pan-pipingly impressionistic idea of springtime. He wrote a letter to somebody after he’d played the piano-four-hands version with Stravinsky and said he was disturbed at its violence. Debussy must have sensed what was happening and been irritated by it, as well as jealous: the falling chromaticism of his gentle flute solo replaced by this sweating, straining mop-headed bassoonist who leads the way for the sonic pandemic to follow. Just to make the connection perfectly clear, Stravinsky uses a flute to play part of the melody once. And then he returns to the bassoon to reprise it, half a step lower. It’s even harder to play shifted down a half step.

  This is what The Rite of Spring is all about. It’s an act of ambitious aggression, a mockery of chromaticism—it’s chromaticism taken to the point of pure polytonality—and he’s forcing us, the backward bassoonists, to lead the charge. And we love it because we get so few solos. Almost never do we get to start a huge orchestra going. But here we do. We’re grateful. The solo is still in my fingers. When I sing it to myself my fingers make the old motions.

  • • •

  THERE’S ANOTHER GOOD REASON why Stravinsky chose the bassoon and not the flute. I understood this only later, when I’d begun making my own reeds. He couldn’t begin the Rite with a flute because a flute is a tube of metal with a metal blowhole. It isn’t biological. It’s something melted and smelted. What he wanted was the squirming, elemental, tropical, green-fused growth-urge of Spring: he wanted cane plants, Arundo donax, sprouting an inch a day out of wet soil, hacked down by migrant farmers in Arles, dried and soaked, dried and soaked, fashioned with a bit of wire and some thread into a primitive croaking thing, a double reed, and stuck on the end of a breathing tube whose keys were veins, not levers, like something out of H. R. Giger’s bio-machine interiors for Alien. The bassoon solo is a joule of sunlight hitting the cane marsh. Grubs and aphids stir cuntily in the bass clarinet. Night soil decays into a broth of fetid but nutritious water and is pumped high in the xylem vessels. Virgins in muddy ballet shoes press Miracle-Gro tablets into the roots of the chosen canes. The bassoonists murmur their prices to the cane dealers. Norman Herzberg and Maurice Allard, representing the German and French designs of bassoon, respectively, do a grunting dance, jabbing ceremonially with their files and gougers. It’s all there. It’s all about the bassoon.

  And I never got to play The Rite of Spring. I regret that. I listened to it pump forth from the Bose speakers, and I practiced it in practice rooms, imagining the rest of the orchestra, and I played The Firebird Suite and even performed one of Stravinsky’s later pieces, his Symphonies of Wind Instruments, which has a difficult patch of low-register bassoonery. But never the Rite.

  Sixteen

  I CALLED ROZ UP and I asked her how she was doing.

  “At the moment, not great,” she said. “I’m having one of my epic bloodlettings. It’s not as bad as last month, though.”

  “That’s good, at least. Maybe the worst is over.”

  “I doubt it. I’ve got something important I want to talk to you about. But not right now. Peter Breggin is here to give an interview about psychotropic drugs and murder.”

  “Sounds provocative.” I knew what she was going to tell me—that she was engaged to Harris the doctor. Fuck that!

  I’m eating a peanut butter cracker right now. These little round snacks are my mainstays sometimes. I’m up in the barn. I’m beginning to get a studio arranged. I’ve got a folding table, and my speakers, and my keyboard, and my guitar, and my guitar pick, and my new microphone pointing directly at my mouth, which is full of cracker. Electricity comes in via an orange extension cord I’ve run up through a hole in the floor. It’s not too hot yet. I’ve got my dirty flip-flops on, and my dark green vat-dyed T-shirt, and I need a serious haircut and I look like a Gerry Rafferty back from the dead. Remember “Baker Street,” with the gigantic sax solo that single-handedly brought saxophone session players out from dark corners where they’d been hiding, begging for pennies? When I landed in the USA, home from Paris and full of Rimbaud and Mallarmé, Gerry Rafferty was singing, “This city desert makes you feel so cold, it’s got so many people, but it’s got no soul.” Everything lay before me.

  Let me just take another bite of cracker. Dang, that’s good. Each molar-crushing expression of taste has more to offer, till finally you’re down to the dry crumbly nubblies that pack themselves into the crevices of your molars. If I were writing a poem I’d worry about the fact that I’d just used “molar” twice in a sentence. But I’m not writing a poem, because right now I’m getting ready to write songs, baby. My fingers and toes feel ready.

  I’ve published three books of poems and an anthology. That’s plenty. Nobody wants to read more than three books of poems by anyone. You see these poets who are up to seven, eight, nine books, ten, eleven books of poems. It’s grotesque. They should have stopped at four.

  • • •

  OKAY, I just spent all day doing music. I worked through a chapter of the official Logic manual, which is 504 pages long, learning how to think like a producer and politely prune away some distracting Moog synthesizer chirpings from a song that came in a DVD in the back of the book. Then I spent an hour recording random percussion sounds from around the house. The empty guitar box made a kick drump thump. The top of a rusty can of anti-mildew paint made a sort of panting, brush-on-cymbal sound when I moved my finger over it. The pasta pot, filled with half an inch of water, produced a spacey warped noise—I’ve always liked the way it distorts the sloshings of water as I wash it. Slosh wash. With my fingernail I plinked a china bowl that Roz gave me. I banged the broom handle on the floor and got another kind of kick drum. Then I had an inspiration, and I got out the egg slicer from under the kitchen counter. I wanted to make a song of the egg slicer. I plucked the wires. There were four notes that were surprisingly close to a minor scale. I sliced the egg slicer samples in Logic and figured out how to use the fade tool to get rid of the little pops where I’d made the cuts.

  I recorded some harmony, using the Steinway Hall Piano—I always seem to go back to the Steinway—then added several jingly, tinkly rhythms from the Indian and Middle Eastern drum kit, and some guitar, and then experimented with some sampled classical male voices singing “ah” and “oh,” and placed the egg-slicer sounds on top. I guess I was making some kind of sound salad. But the egg slicer didn’t fit well and I muted it. The broom was pretty good, it had a sort of double thump, but the egg slicer was a disappointment. I couldn’t find any handclap samples anywhere in Logic—although I’m sure they’re there somewhere—so I recorded some of my own, and I watched a YouTube video on how to take a single, inadequate handclap and double it and then shift the claps around so that they
sound realer, moving one clap track to the left and one to the right of the stereo center. But the handclaps sounded corny and I cut them out.

  I played what I had so far, and thought I had the beginnings of a song. All it needed was the melody and the words. I set up a “Male Ambient Lead” vocal track. My underpowered voice became enormous in my headphones. I started singing along to the loop with my huge stereo voice. At first I sang wordlessly: ba-doodle doodle doodle doo, doot doodle doo. Then I sang, “Waiting for the time to come, waiting for the time to come, waiting for the time to come.” There it was, the beginning of a song, and it had only taken me four hours. Four hours of sweating in the ridiculously hot barn.

  I went into the house and had some iced coffee and checked email. Tim had gotten arrested again in Syracuse at a drone protest outside Hancock Field, along with five other people. He sent me the link to a short video about the protest, and a link to the antiwar song by Eric Bogle, “No Man’s Land,” aka “Green Fields of France,” as performed by the kid in his dorm room. The kid’s YouTube name was Kirobaito. It’s just him and his guitar and a webcam. He’s got a flag of Scotland hung on the wall behind him. At one point his roommates try to distract him, he explains in the notes to the video, but he keeps singing, acknowledging them with a tiny smile. His computer screen is reflected in his glasses. The song is addressed to a nineteen-year-old boy named Willie McBride, who died in France in World War I. I thought I’d just watch a little, just enough to thank Tim for the video. But it was so good I kept going. “A whole generation was butchered and damned,” Kirobaito sang. “The suffering the sorrow the glory the shame / The killing the dying was all done in vain.” It ended. I watched it again. I read some of the comments. “Well done dude.” “Woah. That was beautiful.” “Listened to this on repeat for at least an hour now. This is awesome.” When it ended for the second time, I said, “These fucking stupid wars!” to the empty kitchen. I wrote Tim to thank him. “Tim, you were right—I’m crying. Thank you for telling me about this song. And thank you for going to Syracuse.”

  • • •

  I WATCHED SOME MORE VIDEOS of antiwar demonstrations, including one in which a policeman goes methodically down a line of seated protesters, squirting pepper spray in their eyes. I looked up the First Amendment to the Constitution and wrote a tune for some words taken from it:

  Peaceably

  To assemble

  To petition

  For redress

  Maybe, with practice, my singing will improve. I practiced the bassoon for years until I sounded decent. But singing is more fundamental. You either can or you can’t. “Nice pipes, Tamika,” as Jack Black says in School of Rock.

  I spent half an hour at Planet Fitness, and afterward I sat in the car and pressed the space bar to listen to bits of the songs I’d made. It occurred to me that the words—“Waiting for the time to come”—were perhaps uncomfortably close to John Mayer’s song “Waiting on the World to Change.” I have that song. I plugged my headphones into my iPhone and listened to it while I drove home. The funny thing is, Roz and I once had a minor difference of opinion about Mayer’s song, back when it was being played a lot. Her point was that you can’t just wait. You can’t just say, in a sort of smug way, We’re the new generation and there’s nothing we can do now, but when we come to power everything will be different and the soldiers will be home for Christmas and there won’t be yellow ribbons out. You have to object to the wrong right now, even though you’re at a distance from the action, and even though your elders are in power. Roz was right, of course, but on the other hand, Mayer’s song was at least the registering of a dissatisfaction. It’s true that he was saying that we should simply acquiesce for the time being, but patience can be a virtue, and he had a nice voice and it was a good song and I liked it. Turns out Mayer went to Berklee College of Music. Roz loved his song “Your Body Is a Wonderland.” That’s a Tyrconnell song.

  I touched the little atomic genius sign to hear more songs like Mayer’s “Waiting,” and “Caring Is Creepy” came on, from the Garden State soundtrack. I skipped it, and I also skipped a nice remix by Nosaj Thing called “Islands,” and I skipped the Weepies doing “World Spins Madly On” because I’d heard it recently, and then I listened to part of Paul Simon doing “Slip Slidin’ Away”—Paul Simon never pushes his beautiful voice, and come to think of it, he’s got a small mouth. Small mouth, big songs. There are always exceptions. One Paul Simon album was so big and so controversial that it helped end the apartheid government in South Africa. And then I came to Tracy Chapman singing “Change.” I listened to the whole thing, really took in the words for the first time.

  Tracy Chapman can sing. There’s a pent strength of held-back fast vibrato in her voice sometimes, at big moments, and then other times she just lets the notes slide out unobstructed. “If everything you think you know / Makes your life unbearable / Would you change?” Who knew that “know” and “unbearable” could rhyme? But they do. The music makes them rhyme.

  And then John Lennon’s “Watching the Wheels” came on and I couldn’t listen to John because I was so completely destroyed by Tracy Chapman. I wasn’t ready for John right then. I wasn’t prepared for him.

  Tomorrow I’m flying to Chicago to be on a panel about the future of poetry. I’m a mobile music-maker now: I’ve bought a small, twenty-five-key keyboard with keys that are slightly smaller than normal, like Schroeder’s piano. It fits in my briefcase.

  Seventeen

  I WOKE UP VERY EARLY, before it was light, and by the glow of my phone I read a little of Pat Pattison’s ebook on how to write better song lyrics. Pat Pattison teaches at Berklee. One of his students was John Mayer, he is at pains to let us know. At the beginning of his book he thanks Mayer and some of his fellow students “for showing how well all this stuff can work.” Pattison is not a humble man. The mother-of-pearl shell-diving exercise in his first chapter, he says, has over the years “proved to be a mainstay for many successful songwriters, including Grammy winners John Mayer and Gillian Welch.”

  Here’s how you do the diving exercise, according to Pat Pattison. You imagine a random object—anything at all, could be a back porch or a puddle—and you dive toward it. You try to understand how it affects all seven of your senses, including your organic sense and your kinesthetic sense. You set a timer and do this for ten minutes first thing in the morning. You take notes. By the sixth minute, things really get going, Pattison says. You’re on your way down, “diving, plunging, heading for the soft pink and blue glow.” Then, ding, time’s up.

  That sounded pretty good. I tried it in bed. I started the iPhone timer and began typing notes. What was I diving for? I didn’t want to think about a back porch or a puddle. I was diving down to reach the drain at the swimming pool at summer camp. The drain under the diving boards was twelve feet deep, I knew that. I had tried before and hadn’t been able to do it, but now it was toward the end of camp, and my swimming had gotten stronger. It was a YMCA day camp, and there were swimming certificates. They gave you little cards when you’d progressed to a certain level. This was when I was eight or nine. I’d gotten a Guppy card, and a Minnow card—I was nowhere near a Flying Fish or a Shark—and I took a huge gulp of air and surface-dived toward the drain. I struggled down, kicking so hard my body twisted in the water, till the drain began to come into focus. It was round and black and had a number of large holes in it. I thought I wasn’t going to be able to reach it. I saw—

  And then my alarm timer went off, playing its loud marimba tune, with a final plink of syncopation. I turned it off. I reset it for another ten minutes. What I saw on the drain was a pale pink piece of chewing gum, the very same piece of pink baby-Jesus gum I’d seen at the drinking fountain at school. I didn’t touch it. I touched the terrifying drain itself. I looked up and saw somebody’s legs hit the water a mile above me. I pushed off from the bottom and clawed to the surface. I didn’t tell anyone I’d touched t
he drain that day, but I had.

  Four or five years later, my grandparents took us on a cruise. It was a Swan Hellenic Cruise, with a full complement of tanned, elderly, witty classicists from Oxford who gave lectures on-site at Paestum and Pompeii and at the rebuilt ruins of the palace at Knossos. I took a picture of a black cat near one of the columns of the Parthenon that had been reassembled after the Turks stored ammunition there and it blew up. One of the professors, J. V. Luce, had a theory that Plato’s Atlantis was actually Minoan Crete, which had suffered a terrible tidal wave when a nearby island volcano blew and then sank into the sea, forming a caldera. Professor Luce said that there was a core of truth to the Atlantis story, that the sinking island and the tidal destruction of the center of Minoan civilization had merged, and that Plato had gotten the dimensions of Atlantis wrong by a simple factor of ten, which was an easy thing to do because of the cumbersome way in which numbers were notated at the time. I was tremendously excited by this theory. It was definitely true, no question.