Clutches of Sad Remains

Half-finished Cormac McCarthy's The Road early this morning, up late with Bowie's Aladdin Sane on the stereo, trying and failing to get back to sleep at 3 a.m. after being roused by some drunken asshole down in the street bellowing, "Come back, bitch, and HAVE SOME MORE!" at the top of his lungs. Lights on all up and down the block, apartment windows banging up. A strangely prompt VPD cruiser, its radio clearly audible on the sixth floor, the red and blue bubble lights slowly turning, casting colored shadows up the blinds, like a hovering jukebox, or Close Encounters' mother ship. So, with sleep impossible, and the cats blinking at me from the bureau, I folded the futon up into its couch configuration and began McCarthy's short, dense tale of a man and his son making their way south by southwest through a postapocalyptic landscape alternately reminiscent of McCarthy's own Blood Meridian, Paul Auster's In The Country of Last Things, George Romero's zombie series, and Jack Ketchum's Off Season. At some point, Mike Garson's piano work on Aladdin Sane's title cut began to rub against McCarthy's tongue-in-groove prose.

For the first minute or two, Garson's piano notes are spaced above, and only roughly parallel to, the steady one-two beat of guitar, bass guitar, and Bowie's voice, only occasionally dropping into lock step: once to echo the hilarious phrase, "Saddening glissando strings," and twice for the "Uh-h-h-uh-h-uh" refrain. Then, midway through, a free-form piano solo ends in pure abstraction, notes sprinkled like paint on a Pollock canvas.

It seems to me that Garson's performance -- first emulating his fellow performers, but at some distance from them, then later departing into an extended jazz solo -- resembles McCarthy's prose, which also oscillates between "spare" naturalistic description and more grammatically and symbolically abstract compositions. Two passages, picked at random from The Road's first half, well illustrate these ostensibly opposed tendencies in McCarthy's style:

"He woke toward the morning with the fire down to coals and walked out to the road. Everything was alight. As if the lost sun were returning at last. The snow orange and quivering. A forest fire was making its way along the tinderbox ridges above them, flaring and shimmering against the overcast like the northern lights. Cold as it was he stood there a long time. The color of it moved something in him long forgetten."

"He tried to think of something to say but he could not. He'd had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the dull despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever."

Many critics who admire McCarthy's plainer prose ("He woke toward the morning with the fire down to coals and walked out to the road") seem to dislike, or at least to be visibly puzzled by, his frequent shifts into abstraction ("The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality"). To me these are all one piece, just like Garson's performance. McCarthy's "abstract" passages are summaries of content; they repeat, with great compression and emphasis, the content of surrounding paragraphs, seeking to break content free from things, just as Garson's "abstract" solo retains its own internal logic, a logic resolutely opposed to playing in time with the rest of the band.
- posted by cjb @ 8:36 PM