Red wine again and 5.40 am. Been up since three o clock. I'm tired but my mind is in high gear -surfing the net I found some stuff on William Burroughs that I hadn't read before in a memorial/tribute by Levi Asher – transcript of Lee Renaldo phone conversation with Old Bill not long before he died. Interesting – Burroughs talking about Old Morocco and the Jajouka musicians among others. Burroughs comes across as someone with a great courtesy in his manner – not the wild drug addled old queer crazy naked luncher one might imagine. But for aficionados of the Great Man that was part of his enigma and charm. Patrician manner and all that old St Louis jive which reveals a wild and dangerous – and darkly funny - world underneath. Burroughs a massive influence on contemporary culture – especially in music. And I don't mean the Soft Machine, boys and girls. A lumpy band in my opinion, Brit jazz rock never having the street flash and bounce of the Fountainhead – the Prince of Darkness, Monsieur Miles Davis. Not that I have ever been much of a fan of Brit rock stuff in any form. That's another story/rant...
Soundtrack Last.fm again – looping some nice Steve Lacy playing Monk – and shit, Lacy is dead as well...
And of course Allen Ginsberg had died not long before this particular Burroughs interview. And the next section of the tribute/valediction is by Robert Creeley. Who also died a while back. And maybe there is some synchronicity here as my mother is probably dying slowly as I sit here, a few miles away in her Nursing Home. Far gone with vascular dementia and a failing heart – which sums it up, I think. While she still had the will to go on... one could still see something of the old Afrikaaner fire. But now, I guess that she has no heart any more for the struggle. But what do we really know of those who have slipped out of our world into some twilight zone which may be some biological mercy for the lack of memory and increasing physical malfunctions, the brain stuttering to grasp what is going down – and failing. Or realising only too well and compensating with surrealism... We just have to assume that they have some degree of happiness as they seemingly freewheel through the episodes of their life- like a Burroughs cut-up, slicing through the linear space/time of the so-called real world into some creation of their own beyond our immediate comprehension.
I suppose I should figure it out that at my age – knocking on sixty – most of the influences from my early life, people I dug mightily, like Burroughs and Creeley and co (and let's not forget an obscurer name, the late great Ed Dorn who really should be better known – a fine rebel American gunslinger of a poet whom I had the great privilege to meet a few years ago at a reading and afterwards. Next day we were sat in a bar in Aberystwyth – I kid you not – drinking Bass just after opening time to cure the previous evening's excesses – I was trying to finish my dissertation at the time – on Jack Kerouac's 'Mexico City Blues' – I'm nothing if not perverse! - but could not bring myself to be a fan or a groupie – I was too old perhaps – and although I knew Dorn had known Kerouac contented myself with a bizarre hangover conversation about football – a game I loath – and Paris – a place I love. Then the car arrived and Ed was gone to another reading in Cardiff or Swansea or somewhere down south of where we sat).
And I just had a strange but pleasing image come into my mind – thinking about Creeley and his poem – Drive he said – and suddenly I saw my father driving along some back road in Devon where we used to go as kids, no doubt on the way to some country pub. He was a drinking man. And maybe he is on his way to take my mother home with him to a place where they were both happy. Away from her present turmoil...
As the Art Ensemble of Chicago play it out with 'Song for Charles.' This Last.fm stuff is good...
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