Late Arcade

by Nathaniel Mackey

  Yours,

  N.

  15.V.84

  Dear Angel of Dust,

  I don’t doubt that what Penguin intimated happened in fact happened. It’s not that he made it with an imaginary Drennette, as you say, but exactly the opposite. Wasn’t that his complaint, that the Drennette of his dreams, his “Drennethological Drennette,” remained unavailable, not to be known corporeally, impervious to bodily embrace? Wasn’t his complaint that he didn’t—couldn’t—make it with the utmost or the inmost her, the very her of her, the her that, ostensible contact notwithstanding, could only be conceptual, only apprehended by the mind or the imagination? Wasn’t his complaint that the gulf between carnal capture and conceptual embrace persisted, unbridgeable, driving a thirst that would not and could not be quenched? Didn’t he say he’s beset by an ethereal buzz or an immaterial vibe with only bodily address to try reaching it with, an address not only necessary but compelled, yet insufficient?

  Anyway, to answer your question, no, the conversation didn’t go much further in that vein after we got out of the car at Dem Bones. Penguin tried to pursue it but Lambert and I discouraged that by moving on to other things. “You’ll work it out,” I told him, which was the last we said of it. Penguin, I’m sure, knew to begin with it wasn’t something we could help him solve. He was just getting it out, letting it out. He didn’t bring it up again.

  The other shoe sort of dropped at rehearsal earlier tonight. Drennette, who doesn’t often compose, brought in a piece called “Lapsarian Surfeit,” a piece she’d written, she told us, just in the last few days. Lambert and I looked at each other, wondering was the title, “fallen excess” put otherwise, a reference to what Penguin told us had gone on. Drennette, to a certain reading at least, was backing away from what had happened, parallel to but different from Penguin backing away, if that’s what it was. I wasn’t sure, however, that’s what it was, in either case. I wasn’t sure falling short of a metaphysical wish is a backing away, that a built-in default can be called backing away. The case with Drennette, I thought at first, seems more a matter of moralistic recoil but it soon occurred to me that “lapsarian” might refer to such a falling short, not necessarily to a fall or to the Fall. Where that left matters I wasn’t sure except to say that the title was anything but self-evident and that even “surfeit” might be defying its face value to say something less about excess per se than about incongruity or incommensurability, a lack of adequation or a lack of congruency that is, to put it colloquially, “too much.”

  So I say sort of dropped as I might also say sort of another shoe. It wasn’t clear what to make of the title, jump to an easy conclusion though Lambert and I were guilty of doing. Neither coming in with a composition nor the title of the composition seemed particularly loaded for Drennette. She was her usual self, as was Penguin. Only when she told us the instrumentation did anything happen that might’ve had implications. This was that when she said the piece called for Penguin to play baritone Penguin thought a while and then asked could he play oboe instead. Lambert and I looked at each other again, thinking the same thought I’m sure. Were we reading too much into it to wonder whether Penguin felt a judgment implied by his assignment to the low-pitched horn, that he too felt the piece might have to do with what had lately transpired between them, that he sought to reverse that judgment as well as reverse the fall or the falling short they’d undergone by way of recourse to the higher-pitched horn? Perhaps so, but when Drennette stood firm and reiterated that the piece called for him to play bari he put up no further resistance. He let the matter drop and said okay, he’d play bari.

  Things went uneventfully otherwise. We got the hang of “Lapsarian Surfeit” pretty quickly and we ran thru it several times. Penguin delivered a full-throated sound that betrayed not the slightest hint of reticence or misgiving. He brought Charles Davis’s playing on “Half and Half ” on Elvin Jones and Jimmy Garrison’s album Illumination to mind, both titles possibly relevant and obliquely allusive to his and Drennette’s recent tryst I couldn’t help thinking, not to mention the circular, running-in-place, treadmill motif “Lapsarian Surfeit” shares with “Half and Half.” I may have been reading too much into this I’ll admit, but you can see, I’m sure, why Lambert and I wondered might more be going on than met the eye.

  “Uneventfully” overstates it perhaps. There were moments during Penguin’s solos when he dug into that deep, guttural, expectorant sound Fred Jackson gets on Big John Patton’s “The Way I Feel.” He thrashed and cursed and spat, a study in frustration, a beast caught in a tarpit, a Sisyphean or Tantalean ordeal one couldn’t help feeling had implications beyond the business at hand. That Drennette, during these moments, upped the ante, veritably bashing and more loudly attacking the drums and the cymbals, driving, goading, testing and taunting Penguin, did nothing to negate that feeling. They were moments worthy of Elvin and Trane.

  Whatever the source or the array of sources, “Lapsarian Surfeit” adds a gruff, gravelly page to our book.

  As ever,

  N.

  18.V.84

  Dear Angel of Dust,

  I saw what seemed an immense crystal encasing the extent of the known world. “See how far it stretches,” a demure voice in back of me advised. “See how much there is of it, the it you’ll have traversed always.” I wondered why “always” and how that would work and was it true, wondered had “Some Other Sunday” found me, wondered was I its muse or it mine. I wondered about the sound of the future perfect. It seemed it offered a child’s-eye view of it all, magisterial in the sweep and the eventuality it afforded, the world it made one feel one could afford. “Some Other Sunday’s” day had come at long last, the song’s day and the song’s awaited day at last begun. “Some Other Sunday” I knew the title would be, “Another Sunday” not even close.

  Prospect and promontory were two words that crowded my thoughts, an alliterative consort I heard caroling long and wide. What was it that issued from the ground, I wondered and wished, whatever its contour, what if not a chorusing reward all hope abounded with, hope though it might be, all the sayers concurred, against itself? I was no sayer or I sought not to be at least, say given to what “Some Other Sunday” held in abeyance, on its way toward me if not yet there. A tree trunk’s uplift embroiled us I saw. Sound’s reconnoiter was what faces were front for.

  All sense of limit fell away as the initial notes came in. A children’s chorus’s trill was what vertebrae were, a twinge whose gamut strung light across the tree’s timbral recess, tweak attendant on tweak attendant on tweak attendant on tweak, all done automatically, all within skeletal reach.

  My back loosed its bone and it sang, a quiver notes were tipped in, of but athwart the tone world I translated, “Some Other Sunday’s” ruse its reason, tunefulness’s rise and regret.

  I sat up straight as my back burned and smoke lay at the top of my neck. This is why we do this I thought, my last thought before “Some Other Sunday” was finally there.

  As ever,

  N.

  20.V.84

  Dear Angel of Dust,

  Djamilaa told me Drennette told her and Aunt Nancy all about it. This was after Drennette, who’s not one to write much, showed up last night for the second rehearsal in a row with a new piece she’d written. The title, “Rick’s Retreat,” raised Lambert’s and my eyebrows, albeit Penguin, when she announced it, remained neutral, nonplussed, allowing not the slightest facial expression or any change in body language. Lambert and I couldn’t help wondering was this finally the other shoe, truly the shoe “Lapsarian Surfeit” only sort of was. Djamilaa and Aunt Nancy weren’t struck so much by the title, knowing nothing at that point of Penguin and Drennette’s get-together. They took note, Djamilaa says, of the fact that Drennette had brought in a second new composition so close on the heels of the first. Something had to be up, she says, and they wondered what. It was to find out that they suggested the three of
them go for a drink after rehearsal, a drink and a little “girl talk.”

  They took note as well, no doubt, of the tenor and tone of the piece. Lambert and I certainly did. Title notwithstanding (or, more precisely, title the flipside of what it announces, title inverted, title reversed), it brims with advance. Moreover, it brims with a distinctly military advance, march meter, a decidedly martial thrust in which Drennette’s drumming plays a conspicuous part. After opening with a 7/4 march figure introduced by the drums alone, it settles into a peculiar structure allotted in thirteen-bar segments in which it returns to the march figure throughout, alternating five bars of 7/4 with eight bars of 4/4. The piece brings the rhythm section to the forefront, Djamilaa serving up tall, resolute chords, Aunt Nancy gone well beyond walking to indeed be marching on bass. It reminded me a little of Horace Tapscott’s “Lino’s Pad,” which came out on one of the Live at Lobero albums two or three years ago, except the drums are much more out in front than they are there. It has Penguin, Lambert and me on soprano, clarinet and cornet, respectively, the head something of a round or a catch. It has us not so much playing as piping, blowing with a certain fierceness, blowing like Furies, blowing as if to clear the air, blow something away.

  “Rick’s retreat,” it almost goes without saying, seems another way of saying “Drennette’s advance,” a way of militantly saying it. The bearing on this of what recently went on between her and Penguin could hardly not occur to Lambert and me—or, for that matter, to Penguin as well. Lambert and I wondered was this her way of saying the memory of Rick had been exorcised, that her tryst with Penguin had blown the memory of Rick away, swept it away. It certainly seemed so, an appearance borne out by what Djamilaa told me later.

  Djamilaa says they were a little hungry and decided to go to Café Figaro and that, once there, they talked about this, that and the other before getting to Aunt Nancy asking Drennette what had brought on the burst of writing she’s been doing. “I don’t know,” Drennette said at first, “it’s been like ice melting, a glacier retreating.” She hesitated a moment but then she wasted no time, as Djamilaa puts it, getting to the heart of the matter. “I think it all goes back,” she said, “to a certain someone we call Penguin. I’ve lately gotten to know him in a way I never knew him before. I’ll go so far as to say I never knew a certain someone we call Penguin at all until now and that a certain someone we call Penguin never knew me.” It was odd, Djamilaa says, the way she referred to him, but she continued to do so throughout the conversation. She never simply called him Penguin but referred to him as “a certain someone we call Penguin,” perhaps even (there was no way of knowing, Djamilaa says, though the way she said it and insisted on repeating it made it seem possible) “A Certain Someone We Call Penguin.”

  I was struck by how differently she and Penguin have reacted. While Penguin despairs of there being a Drennette he can’t come close to, an auratic or a supplemental Drennette that’s more than meets the eye and that sensory perception can’t reach, a “Drennethological Drennette” not even carnal knowledge knows, she exults over them now knowing each other, at last knowing each other, insisting that before such knowledge they didn’t know each other and perhaps couldn’t have known each other. Did this make her a true romantic or an epistemic sensualist I wondered as Djamilaa told me all of this. Djamilaa says it didn’t take much coaxing to get all the details of her and Penguin’s “breakthru night” (Drennette’s words) out of her. They sat huddled at their table, she says, leaning over their food and drinks like grand conspirators, no detail and no particular too intimate for Drennette not only to relate but to relate with great relish, blush somewhat though she did.

  I won’t say I never knew “girl talk” could get as graphic as Djamilaa tells me theirs got, only that it surprises me Drennette engaged in it at all, let alone enjoyed it and, it appears, encouraged it, so stalwart, no-nonsense and all she comes across as. When I mentioned this to Lambert he said, “I’m not so surprised.” He then went on to add something I think I understand though I’m not entirely sure. “It’s the reticent ones you have to watch out for,” he said, “the needle-in-a-haystack types.” Anyway, Djamilaa says Drennette did repeat that the recent writing has to do with a kind of thaw, the retreat of a glacier she admits to be Rick or her feelings for Rick, a complicated figure that also had “glacial retreat” referring to her feelings toward men after her breakup with Rick, so that the thaw was in part her “glacial retreat’s retreat.” She made no bones, Djamilaa says, about attributing this to Penguin and their get-together the other night. “A certain someone we call Penguin,” she said, changing metaphors, “completely flushed Rick out of my system.”

  Drennette’s kiss-and-tell account, according to Djamilaa, was indeed long on metaphor as well as intimate detail, anatomical detail, graphic action, graphic mise en scène, a “rich mix of registers,” as she puts it, that had them going from smile to giggle to loud laughter more than once, shushing Drennette and telling her to stop. “We left no door closed. There was no door we didn’t enter, no door we didn’t go in thru. We left no depth unplumbed,” Djamilaa says she said at one point, pausing to look them in the eye, the beginnings of a grin on her lips, “no orifice unexplored,” whereupon they broke out laughing and ordered another round of drinks.

  So we would seem to have confirmation now, were such needed. This thing is definitely afoot, afloat, going or stopping where, as the Temptations would say, “nobody knows.”

  Yours,

  N.

  25.VI.84

  Dear Angel of Dust,

  Lambert wore a long, heavy overcoat steeped in sound. Sadness was the coat he wore. It was a cloak of sound like Stanley’s “Walk On By,” the weight of a tear and a warlock’s come-on athwart complaint. It was time walking by, time walking on, with which, for the first time, he was reconciled, with which, for the first time, he was okay. Time’s bouquet was the bitter beer we all drank it seemed he said, the first and forever church of hardheadedness reconvened. He was there, if not for that, he said, for nothing. It was heavy but light as a tear at the same time.

  Now and again he got to a point where his intonation got away from him (or so, at least, it seemed, so, at least, it sounded like), a ragged, frayed edge of sound or a collapsing core of cloth, a hoarse extenuation he could only let have its way. He told us later that out of the blue his affection for Marvin Gaye’s “Stubborn Kind of Fellow” when he was a teenager came back to him, a recollection of walking to school and hearing it on his transistor radio. It was the part where Marvin’s voice breaks and goes hoarse that came back to him he told us, the lines “Oh, I have kissed a few,/I tell you, a few have kissed me too,” the pleading way his voice gives out and recovers, gives out and comes back to itself on the word “too.” It wasn’t so much his intonation getting away from him as it was it sounding like that, him having it sound like that, him imitating or trying to imitate Marvin’s momentary loss of voice, his fleet, pleading hoarseness, the rough tenuity it for a moment falls into. It was nothing if not the stubborn, mind-made-up ministry his hardheaded church was or would eventually be known for.

  I took up my tenor and joined him. We were a two-horned bellowing beast, avowed monophysite twins whose affray was love’s last recourse. Death was in the house one could hear, neither of us not with its chill on our breath. We spoke with a quake in our voice. I almost immediately contracted Lambert’s hoarseness, a rough tenuity I found my intonation, like his, intermittently fell into. A contagious rash it might’ve been, so raw, so abraded, so sensitive to touch we winced as we played. While I wasn’t aware at the time of Lambert’s Marvin Gaye reminiscence, I was struck by one of my own, not of Marvin Gaye but of Dionne Warwick, whom Lambert’s Turrentine cloak had brought to mind. It wasn’t “Walk On By” but “I Say a Little Prayer” that came back to me, a certain weakness for which I found I couldn’t help confessing, a weakness for the perky Burt Bacharach brass that punctuates it. Something very
bright and upbeat and optimistic about Bacharach’s use of brass, even on a sad song like “Walk On By,” where a burnished underglow speaks resolve, has always gotten to me. It seems to arise from or reach out to a utopic horizon, all the more so in a song like “I Say a Little Prayer,” bordering on naïve in the bounding felicity it announces having arrived at, reporting prayer where there’s exactly no need for it.

  This was the recollection that hit me as Lambert and I bellowed and brayed. It wasn’t at all that I tried to get that sound on tenor but that the very impossibility of doing so and the analogous impossibility of the simple felicity and resolve, the simply happy life it celebrated, ever being arrived at goaded and got to me. Cognate with Lambert’s hardheaded, mind-made-up abrasion, it occurs to me in retrospect, was my own stubborn lament for what I knew and will always know to have been impossible from the start, damned or doomed from the start, impossibility perhaps the crux of its appeal. I bellowed and brayed and cursed the simple accord Bacharach’s perky brass wanted one to believe was available, the damned auratic resolve and felicity it teased one with. I bellowed and brayed and cursed myself for having taken the bait, blew as if to blow away my weakness for what I knew and will always know is only a cartoon kind of happiness, an ad man’s happiness, the unlikely accord I simultaneously confessed my sweet tooth for.

  Bacharach’s perky, burnished brass was a dangling carrot I chased and I blew to disavow my chase, a guilty pleasure I damned and disowned my indulgence in. It was an odd way to go about playing, an odd motive, as though reed envied brass almost, an insinuation Lambert would have fumed had he known he blew complicit with, stubborn kind of preachment and/or mind-made-up appeal in league with perk, albeit a disavowed attraction to perk. The very thought of it induced a lightness, a lightheadedness, that threatened to spirit me away, a floataway loss of weight I was all but lifted by, an infectious balloon blurb or blip I needed, I knew, to find anchorage against.