The audience of the modern musical, for dramatic development, had to be shown that Eliza Doolittle was not only sophisticated in ladylike civilized artifice, but also filled with the feminine graces known to prompt poets’ odes and lovers’ praises, through the introduction of a rival suitor to the Professor’s as yet unspoken devotion.
Rival suitor sues to see her, and succeeding, has found a reason to sing of enchantment pouring out of every door, has cause for singin’ in the rain, and dancing in the street.
People stop and stare; they don’t bother me,This is before the rain, of course. Properly validated, Liza falls for the Prof.
For there’s no where else on Earth that I would rather be.
Let the time go by, I won’t care if I can be here on the street where you live!
Excised from the arc of plot, this recorded and rerecorded song is simply everyman’s love song. Again, the lyric is not about the beloved, whose presence merely imbues the setting, but a report on the state of mind and heart of, or simply part and parcel of the art of, the singer. As always, at first, I’ve just seen a face and can’t forget the time or place of that first sight. Then, with or without overtures or encouragement, merely because I want to hold your hand and can’t stop my brain, or maybe because I’ve been watching . . . every breath you take, the residence of the beloved is discovered. Then the wooing, the suiting starts, or the stalking—the difference lies in her consent—with the overpowering feeling that any second you may suddenly appear.
For me, now that she has moved here, and more importantly, now that I know that she has moved here, while her proximity, the possibility that she would materialize all fleshed out, does make me, like the rival suitor, feel several stories high, noting the nightingale, a lark somewhere begin to sing, where I never heard . . . singing before; it also makes me feel like a stalker, makes me alter my behavior, here on the street I call home, and I wonder whether she feels stalked, whether our uncommon psychic planets channel my attention, if it makes her feel my un-pent pen, feel herself penned in, again.
What behavior changes? Why, everything. Mostly the way my mind compels its organs of locomotion and perception. Whether I live on her street, or a hemisphere away, the way my mind fantasizes and compels its organs of expression does not change much. But the fact remains that, whether I consciously will it or no, should we meet by chance on her street, we will both suspect my devious, intrusive mind engineered the odds, somehow, behind the scenes.
This street is a central thoroughfare, leading across the city. I live on it at the edge of the ghetto. Another major thoroughfare crosses this street, her street—my street; over here it’s still certainly mine—like railroad tracks in an industrial city, or a broad, rushing river, would, separating the right from the wrong side. I’m on the wrong side, with the public housing and gang tags—shacks and shanties in any other country—and another of those 7-11s with more product stolen than it sells.
To eat, or participate in commerce, over the past three years, I would ford that intersecting road, to the right side, and head upstream on the sunny side of my street. One block to the community coffee shop, or, because it’s a local, individual proprietor’s store with erratic hours, another two blocks to Casa Lebrato, for drip-pot, hot-plate coffee. By that far upstream, the commercial character of the street is evident: rent-controlled apartments, warehouses and churches yielding to storefront. Another block offers groceries, shoes, passport photos, apparel, specialty records, some banks. Then a span of fast food mainstays as you approach the corner, where another intersecting street, the one with the nightlife, crosses, on which dives and posh joints compete to collect the cheese of the weekend revelers, who, with the assistance of Pizza Mart, redistribute most of it (with concomitant crusts, containers and greasy napkins) across the Saturday morning sidewalks. Here, what passes for a diner, and the corporate coffee shops, and the news stand and specialty cigarette purveyor who stays open ‘til 3 am. Bars and bars and clubs. Beyond the street of Friday nightclub cheese, my street continues—her street, our street now—with nicer restaurants, nicer storefronts, and finally, uptown apartments and the hotels on the hill.
Years ago, a suburbanite, I refused to come to this part of town for nightlife activities, as much as my friends would let me, because the frustration of the drive and the struggle to park made me angry. It is not so bad on the wrong side of the tracks, on the edge of the ghetto, where competition for spaces is only heated on street-cleaning day, or when all the suburban Baptists drive in for Wednesday services. Here, you worry less about finding a place to park and leave your car while you revel, and more about whether it will be there and remain intact when you come back.
So, for these years, I have walked up my street for commerce and community, and, of course coffee, in addition to which I also will admit an addiction not confessed to anybody yet: I have a vegetable helper.
In the years intervening from my release of energies invoked upon her, my looking for love, and God, in other faces, and other places, the years of developing this more subversive taste and relationship, and exploring and recognizing it, I have learned about intoxication and addiction, and learned about the black market. And here, too, the popular music is the cue, except, having loved and lost, and thus felt helpless, wondering what to do, where Huey Lewis went one way, I went the other. But nothing compares . . .
She’ll be driving six white horses when she comes.A vegetable hindrance, a moral weakness, you may say, or blame that same first-house planet, pointing me like a syringe at the seat of her wandering and my identity, the dreamy diffusion of the sign it rules, and my afflicted, exalted moon, or explain it as mere experimentation. I don’t care, no shame there. I don’t claim excuse for any misuse of the muse or the caduceus: You have to test a system under stress, to be assured of its success. You have to pluck the discordant string before you can tune it to ring true. You never know what is enough unless you know the potent and the lethal dose. But we can discuss shame in vegetal shamanism another time. Suffice it to indicate this vegetable relationship, hint at its importance as surrogate SSRI, and hence the call for commerce.
Believe it or not, the Man—who is never early; he’s always late: first thing you learn is that you always gotta wait (not that other the Man, the persecuting They of paranoid schizophrenics; They don’t show up for a couple more paragraphs yet)—lives on my street too. But these aren’t dub sack or nickel bag o’ funk transactions, like you can do in the ghetto with a handshake. These are sit and talk, weigh and wait deals: Sam’s Club consumer wholesale as opposed to the premium pricing, the anonymity, packaging and convenience of the “open air drug market.” Nor are they your suburban G.E.D., weighing out K-B on his dashboard, idling, on a side street in a residential development before stashing the funk, and the scale, back with the pills in the trunk, trance beats blaring from the subwoofer all the while. Not all that exposure and sketchiness, but black market, illicit barter nevertheless.
I know where the Man lives, have known since before I made my residence here (not a factor in, but perk of, the decision), although I am only relatively rarely interested in that location when I walk on my street. Usually, I am more driven by the licit concerns for food and company, and satisfying my more pressing and more acceptable chemical dependencies:
I’m moonin’ all the mornin’ and mournin’ all the night,That first-house planet does not explain my paranoia and information theory concerns, as much as perhaps Saturn opposed—more a cointelpro agent, I suppose, undermining the whole movement, than a spy, there, in the house of love—or rising Scorpio, and my confounded moon.
and in between it’s nicotine and . . . black coffee.
A better explanation is a lifetime of crime literature, a hefty dose of dystopia novels and science fiction, all the cloak and dagger police stories of cine and TV, and some brief flirtation with a career in intelligence, layered atop that ascendant and everything else. Rasta don’ work fi’ no C.I.A. I like to tell myself that it’s because the Pentagon announced that it would collect all information about everything everyone does so that HAL will be able to tell, from epiphenomena in the transactional patterns, who’s about to be a terrorist in the city or criminal, or voice dissent, if there’s even a difference, and dispatch thought police to preempt and apprehend them either way.
But it’s probably just the result of actual aberrant neurological and endocrine structures, or the drugs.
You’d better look out, little brown eyes, if you’re wise.Anyway, knowing where the Man lives, and being paranoid, I have caught myself, many times, gazing fondly at his building as I pass on my conventional errands, like I gaze at no other building, I imagine, and have tried to train my eyes not to look for light and shadow behind a certain window that might be his and think about our criminal commonality—our own secret meeting there amongst the precious flora—for fear that someone watching will see my gaze and divine the guilty conscience behind it.
I am far less concerned that the powers that be will see how hard I am struggling to not look at the Man’s building, though my eyes range freely everywhere else: That would take serious ubiquitous monitoring, like the psychotronic schemes of the mad regimes persecuting my science fiction and paranoia-addled dreams, and those of the silver screen that everyone has seen.
Total Information Awareness will divine, subliming knowledge of crime from the world financial data stream: charting bank transactions against amount, identity and time, to tap the telephone line, and then clamp down on cash transactions, traffic analysis. Tia Sophia won’t have to compare my saccades and pulse rate while I walk until after we figure out a credit based barter system for black market deals.
But there exist both, on the one hand, the nightmares of the science fiction prophets, depicted in the retinal identification and holographic ads of that movie about the man who had to take out his own eyes; and, on the other hand, a developing science of the communicative qualities of angles of sight in mammalian ethnography, which I have seen at work among the people I encounter on the street, and among the city’s tame wildlife, and have read of it among primates and pack animals in the peer review.
I don’t know what it all means, but I can say this much: There is a way of averting the eyes to another person that conveys, that betrays, nothing other than wary attentiveness to the person overtly ignored: fearful avoidance. And there are others, many such ways, many angles, bearing meaning to and significance within our deep rodent brains, acting on our ophidian brainstems: My eyes and those of another, forming the baseline, from which each focal deviation by direction and degree carries information. Not navigation by maintenance of angle, but communication by—or obsession with—position and angle, menopathy. Of course the dogs know and have happily been trying to demonstrate.
They sparkle, they bubble; they’re gonna get you in a whole lot of trouble!But because no signal is, itself, also, a signal, I cannot just avoid looking only at that building, whether Aunt Big Brother’s thought police are staking me out or not; imagining the paranoid scenario, my Scorpio ascendant won’t let me disregard the axioms of intelligence. Don’t give anything away; don’t tell a soul. So, once I hit my stride here, on my street, in my neighborhood, I just started looking at everyone and everything as though I were stupidly puzzling at a line of very distressed text, so that all the signal is mixed, the whole time.
This was my, admittedly artificial—and constructed in and for madness—behavior on my street. Sure, at the community coffee shop I could let down my hair, share other faces, make friends and care, but beyond there, and pretty much everywhere else the poker-faced behavior, cultivated earlier, before I met the Man or moved in his market, but merely applied as described, in his case, on this street, which was my street.
I used to pretend to be stupid to get by; now I really am.
But how can I casually walk, balanced, aloof and penetrating—this I call the more poised pole of my spectrum of stupid stumbling—on that block, past those stairs, past that awning of that first-floor shop, past that door behind which more stairs, her stairs, rise up to where I know she must breathe easy and sleep, prepare her meals, where her fingernail parings and cells and hair must occasionally escape the broom to collect in the corners and wainscotings; if I could only get in there, I could use those to put a spell on her, to, through black magic ritual witchcraft, compel her, red wax effigy in hand, willingly to my dark and dread command?
Knowing such thoughts, likely as bodies dumped in the shallows to arise, lurk and sway in the tides of my own mind, how can I walk past composed? Or, so what if they’re not thoughts of compulsion, but instead these dreams, these fantasies of intimacy and knowledge, or the humble hope of learning that the person she really is, is not, actually, this person who best fits the ludicrous demands of my fantastic plans and planets, who animates my anima and psyche in the voice of my enraptured imagination. And the hope that I can find another dream after she shows me this and I know it.
Fantasies of first allowing her to show me that she’s not at all the person I have romanticized her to be; to learn, to all that small degree humanly accessible, who she has, in fact, become, and of our natural lack of affinity. To hear her, now odious, voice articulate her goals, and, if her ascendant truly lies at the refined pole of my dream and restriction, to make mine those, as much as possible, without imposing.
If you wanna ride, don’t ask sweet china white to point out the perils of poppies. Don’t worry, it ain’t the poppy that got me, if it wasn’t clear earlier; though I have tried everything, I choose to breathe weed, sweet refrain, blessed fruit of blessed womb, now and in the hour of our need. But the poppy is a useful allusion to illuminate priority. First comes love, then the vegetable helper. The latter may sublimate the misery of routine, but the former moves me, idol of my idle pen and voice, makes me get up and say and do clownish, stupid things, as I would run risk to secure the junk. Oh, nurturing blue moon, you saw me needing a new leonine dream of heartfelt expression. Oh new moon, help me croon, and hearken to my confession.
Je ne veux plus pleurer. Je ne veux plus parler.That’s what the self-abnegating principles of the pointing planets and the opiate addict analogy insist, though I can hardly make that second pledge to she whose inscribed book bids me write with every pen and as yet unspent page. If not as peer and suitor then happily her eunuch and slave, the handmaid of a woman and . . . an angel.
Je me cacherai là à te regarder danser et sourire,
et à t'écouter chanter et puis rire. Laisse-moi devenir
l'ombre de ton ombre, l'ombre de ta main, l'ombre de ton chien.
Deptford and Greenwich’s recent translation for Barb Jungr’s revocalization of Jacques Brel’s lyric, which so eloquently spoke of cold turkey—and the way you’ll promise anything and anything again to God or to anyone else who holds the more immediate power to stem the unbearable unquenchable craving, but it’s never enough—finally no longer omits this stanza, unrepresented in the many renditions of McKuen’s sappy English paraphrase, popular over the years. But parsed semiotically, the singer seems to bargain more than beg when she cadges:
Let me be for you the shadow of your shadow,While that rhymes nicely, let me become for you misses the compulsive begging, the previously-mentioned, abject self-abneging. The fall down at your feet and . . . pleading, of Brel’s passionate lyric: Let me make of myself the shadow . . . your dog’s shadow, or any other humiliation your whim may require, anything, just so that I might, invisibly, be permitted to bask in your presence. I’d do anything, for the chance to turn from staring at the shadow of your smile superimposed like a flash over the dim flickering on the blue wall, turn and burn out my eyes on the opiate body of the sun itself.
the shadow of your hand, the dog at your command . . .