By Stuart Mitchner
Writing on Sunday, November 3, I’m trying not to worry about the state of the nation on Wednesday, November 6. The backyard is painted yellow gold with leaves; the bird baths, front and back, are thriving; the new birdfeeders are wildly popular, and we’ve had a month of classic autumn weather — if you don’t count the drought. But I might as well be on “Dover Beach” with Matthew Arnold, the night-wind on my face on a sunny afternoon, the closing lines like one long sentence — “the world which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new, hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, not certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; and we are here as on a darkling plain swept with confused alarms of struggle and light, where ignorant armies clash by night.”
How about going with something a little lighter but dark around the edges, like Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” (“let us stop talking falsely now, the hour’s getting late”) — or else “Desolation Row,” even if Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot are “fighting in the captain’s tower.” Funny, as much as Allen Ginsberg admires Dylan, he complains about that line on allenginsberg.org because “Eliot and Pound were friends.” Hey, this is Bob Dylan, this is what he does, he mixes things up, so does Pound, who didn’t ride to the rescue of The Waste Land with gentle suggestions: he struck the lance of his pen deep into the heart of the first page. Otherwise we’d have something called He Do The Police In Different Voices.
OK, we’ll mix vintage Ezra with some buoyant electric bass from the Grateful Dead’s Phil Lesh, who died late last month. Lesh’s playing on “Dark Star” and “Alligator” kept me going as I tried to read The Cantos and early troubadour poems like “Na Audiart,” which reads like a verse translation of Lesh’s bassline, with the Dead putting the pulse of life into Pound’s refrain “Audiart, Audiart.” more
