Nicholson Baker - Traveling Sprinkler

This is what The Rite of Spring is all about. It’s an act of ambitious aggression, a mockery of chromaticism — it’s chromaticism taken to the point of pure polytonality — and he’s forcing us, the backward bassoonists, to lead the charge. And we love it because we get so few solos. Almost never do we get to start a huge orchestra going. But here we do. We’re grateful. The solo is still in my fingers. When I sing it to myself my fingers make the old motions.

• • •

THERE’S ANOTHER GOOD REASON why Stravinsky chose the bassoon and not the flute. I understood this only later, when I’d begun making my own reeds. He couldn’t begin the Rite with a flute because a flute is a tube of metal with a metal blowhole. It isn’t biological. It’s something melted and smelted. What he wanted was the squirming, elemental, tropical, green-fused growth-urge of Spring: he wanted cane plants, Arundo donax , sprouting an inch a day out of wet soil, hacked down by migrant farmers in Arles, dried and soaked, dried and soaked, fashioned with a bit of wire and some thread into a primitive croaking thing, a double reed, and stuck on the end of a breathing tube whose keys were veins, not levers, like something out of H. R. Giger’s bio-machine interiors for Alien . The bassoon solo is a joule of sunlight hitting the cane marsh. Grubs and aphids stir cuntily in the bass clarinet. Night soil decays into a broth of fetid but nutritious water and is pumped high in the xylem vessels. Virgins in muddy ballet shoes press Miracle-Gro tablets into the roots of the chosen canes. The bassoonists murmur their prices to the cane dealers. Norman Herzberg and Maurice Allard, representing the German and French designs of bassoon, respectively, do a grunting dance, jabbing ceremonially with their files and gougers. It’s all there. It’s all about the bassoon.

And I never got to play The Rite of Spring . I regret that. I listened to it pump forth from the Bose speakers, and I practiced it in practice rooms, imagining the rest of the orchestra, and I played The Firebird Suite and even performed one of Stravinsky’s later pieces, his Symphonies of Wind Instruments , which has a difficult patch of low-register bassoonery. But never the Rite .

I CALLED ROZ UP and I asked her how she was doing.

“At the moment, not great,” she said. “I’m having one of my epic bloodlettings. It’s not as bad as last month, though.”

“That’s good, at least. Maybe the worst is over.”

“I doubt it. I’ve got something important I want to talk to you about. But not right now. Peter Breggin is here to give an interview about psychotropic drugs and murder.”

“Sounds provocative.” I knew what she was going to tell me — that she was engaged to Harris the doctor. Fuck that!

I’m eating a peanut butter cracker right now. These little round snacks are my mainstays sometimes. I’m up in the barn. I’m beginning to get a studio arranged. I’ve got a folding table, and my speakers, and my keyboard, and my guitar, and my guitar pick, and my new microphone pointing directly at my mouth, which is full of cracker. Electricity comes in via an orange extension cord I’ve run up through a hole in the floor. It’s not too hot yet. I’ve got my dirty flip-flops on, and my dark green vat-dyed T-shirt, and I need a serious haircut and I look like a Gerry Rafferty back from the dead. Remember “Baker Street,” with the gigantic sax solo that single-handedly brought saxophone session players out from dark corners where they’d been hiding, begging for pennies? When I landed in the USA, home from Paris and full of Rimbaud and Mallarmé, Gerry Rafferty was singing, “This city desert makes you feel so cold, it’s got so many people, but it’s got no soul.” Everything lay before me.

Let me just take another bite of cracker. Dang, that’s good. Each molar-crushing expression of taste has more to offer, till finally you’re down to the dry crumbly nubblies that pack themselves into the crevices of your molars. If I were writing a poem I’d worry about the fact that I’d just used “molar” twice in a sentence. But I’m not writing a poem, because right now I’m getting ready to write songs, baby. My fingers and toes feel ready.

I’ve published three books of poems and an anthology. That’s plenty. Nobody wants to read more than three books of poems by anyone. You see these poets who are up to seven, eight, nine books, ten, eleven books of poems. It’s grotesque. They should have stopped at four.

• • •

OKAY, I just spent all day doing music. I worked through a chapter of the official Logic manual, which is 504 pages long, learning how to think like a producer and politely prune away some distracting Moog synthesizer chirpings from a song that came in a DVD in the back of the book. Then I spent an hour recording random percussion sounds from around the house. The empty guitar box made a kick drump thump. The top of a rusty can of anti-mildew paint made a sort of panting, brush-on-cymbal sound when I moved my finger over it. The pasta pot, filled with half an inch of water, produced a spacey warped noise — I’ve always liked the way it distorts the sloshings of water as I wash it. Slosh wash. With my fingernail I plinked a china bowl that Roz gave me. I banged the broom handle on the floor and got another kind of kick drum. Then I had an inspiration, and I got out the egg slicer from under the kitchen counter. I wanted to make a song of the egg slicer. I plucked the wires. There were four notes that were surprisingly close to a minor scale. I sliced the egg slicer samples in Logic and figured out how to use the fade tool to get rid of the little pops where I’d made the cuts.

I recorded some harmony, using the Steinway Hall Piano — I always seem to go back to the Steinway — then added several jingly, tinkly rhythms from the Indian and Middle Eastern drum kit, and some guitar, and then experimented with some sampled classical male voices singing “ah” and “oh,” and placed the egg-slicer sounds on top. I guess I was making some kind of sound salad. But the egg slicer didn’t fit well and I muted it. The broom was pretty good, it had a sort of double thump, but the egg slicer was a disappointment. I couldn’t find any handclap samples anywhere in Logic — although I’m sure they’re there somewhere — so I recorded some of my own, and I watched a YouTube video on how to take a single, inadequate handclap and double it and then shift the claps around so that they sound realer, moving one clap track to the left and one to the right of the stereo center. But the handclaps sounded corny and I cut them out.

I played what I had so far, and thought I had the beginnings of a song. All it needed was the melody and the words. I set up a “Male Ambient Lead” vocal track. My underpowered voice became enormous in my headphones. I started singing along to the loop with my huge stereo voice. At first I sang wordlessly: ba-doodle doodle doodle doo, doot doodle doo. Then I sang, “Waiting for the time to come, waiting for the time to come, waiting for the time to come.” There it was, the beginning of a song, and it had only taken me four hours. Four hours of sweating in the ridiculously hot barn.

I went into the house and had some iced coffee and checked email. Tim had gotten arrested again in Syracuse at a drone protest outside Hancock Field, along with five other people. He sent me the link to a short video about the protest, and a link to the antiwar song by Eric Bogle, “No Man’s Land,” aka “Green Fields of France,” as performed by the kid in his dorm room. The kid’s YouTube name was Kirobaito. It’s just him and his guitar and a webcam. He’s got a flag of Scotland hung on the wall behind him. At one point his roommates try to distract him, he explains in the notes to the video, but he keeps singing, acknowledging them with a tiny smile. His computer screen is reflected in his glasses. The song is addressed to a nineteen-year-old boy named Willie McBride, who died in France in World War I. I thought I’d just watch a little, just enough to thank Tim for the video. But it was so good I kept going. “A whole generation was butchered and damned,” Kirobaito sang. “The suffering the sorrow the glory the shame / The killing the dying was all done in vain.” It ended. I watched it again. I read some of the comments. “Well done dude.” “Woah. That was beautiful.” “Listened to this on repeat for at least an hour now. This is awesome.” When it ended for the second time, I said, “These fucking stupid wars!” to the empty kitchen. I wrote Tim to thank him. “Tim, you were right — I’m crying. Thank you for telling me about this song. And thank you for going to Syracuse.”