Nicholson Baker - Traveling Sprinkler

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I WATCHED SOME MORE VIDEOS of antiwar demonstrations, including one in which a policeman goes methodically down a line of seated protesters, squirting pepper spray in their eyes. I looked up the First Amendment to the Constitution and wrote a tune for some words taken from it:

Peaceably

To assemble

To petition

For redress

Maybe, with practice, my singing will improve. I practiced the bassoon for years until I sounded decent. But singing is more fundamental. You either can or you can’t. “Nice pipes, Tamika,” as Jack Black says in School of Rock .

I spent half an hour at Planet Fitness, and afterward I sat in the car and pressed the space bar to listen to bits of the songs I’d made. It occurred to me that the words—“Waiting for the time to come”—were perhaps uncomfortably close to John Mayer’s song “Waiting on the World to Change.” I have that song. I plugged my headphones into my iPhone and listened to it while I drove home. The funny thing is, Roz and I once had a minor difference of opinion about Mayer’s song, back when it was being played a lot. Her point was that you can’t just wait. You can’t just say, in a sort of smug way, We’re the new generation and there’s nothing we can do now, but when we come to power everything will be different and the soldiers will be home for Christmas and there won’t be yellow ribbons out. You have to object to the wrong right now, even though you’re at a distance from the action, and even though your elders are in power. Roz was right, of course, but on the other hand, Mayer’s song was at least the registering of a dissatisfaction. It’s true that he was saying that we should simply acquiesce for the time being, but patience can be a virtue, and he had a nice voice and it was a good song and I liked it. Turns out Mayer went to Berklee College of Music. Roz loved his song “Your Body Is a Wonderland.” That’s a Tyrconnell song.

I touched the little atomic genius sign to hear more songs like Mayer’s “Waiting,” and “Caring Is Creepy” came on, from the Garden State soundtrack. I skipped it, and I also skipped a nice remix by Nosaj Thing called “Islands,” and I skipped the Weepies doing “World Spins Madly On” because I’d heard it recently, and then I listened to part of Paul Simon doing “Slip Slidin’ Away”—Paul Simon never pushes his beautiful voice, and come to think of it, he’s got a small mouth. Small mouth, big songs. There are always exceptions. One Paul Simon album was so big and so controversial that it helped end the apartheid government in South Africa. And then I came to Tracy Chapman singing “Change.” I listened to the whole thing, really took in the words for the first time.

Tracy Chapman can sing. There’s a pent strength of held-back fast vibrato in her voice sometimes, at big moments, and then other times she just lets the notes slide out unobstructed. “If everything you think you know / Makes your life unbearable / Would you change?” Who knew that “know” and “unbearable” could rhyme? But they do. The music makes them rhyme.

And then John Lennon’s “Watching the Wheels” came on and I couldn’t listen to John because I was so completely destroyed by Tracy Chapman. I wasn’t ready for John right then. I wasn’t prepared for him.

Tomorrow I’m flying to Chicago to be on a panel about the future of poetry. I’m a mobile music-maker now: I’ve bought a small, twenty-five-key keyboard with keys that are slightly smaller than normal, like Schroeder’s piano. It fits in my briefcase.

I WOKE UP VERY EARLY, before it was light, and by the glow of my phone I read a little of Pat Pattison’s ebook on how to write better song lyrics. Pat Pattison teaches at Berklee. One of his students was John Mayer, he is at pains to let us know. At the beginning of his book he thanks Mayer and some of his fellow students “for showing how well all this stuff can work.” Pattison is not a humble man. The mother-of-pearl shell-diving exercise in his first chapter, he says, has over the years “proved to be a mainstay for many successful songwriters, including Grammy winners John Mayer and Gillian Welch.”

Here’s how you do the diving exercise, according to Pat Pattison. You imagine a random object — anything at all, could be a back porch or a puddle — and you dive toward it. You try to understand how it affects all seven of your senses, including your organic sense and your kinesthetic sense. You set a timer and do this for ten minutes first thing in the morning. You take notes. By the sixth minute, things really get going, Pattison says. You’re on your way down, “diving, plunging, heading for the soft pink and blue glow.” Then, ding, time’s up.

That sounded pretty good. I tried it in bed. I started the iPhone timer and began typing notes. What was I diving for? I didn’t want to think about a back porch or a puddle. I was diving down to reach the drain at the swimming pool at summer camp. The drain under the diving boards was twelve feet deep, I knew that. I had tried before and hadn’t been able to do it, but now it was toward the end of camp, and my swimming had gotten stronger. It was a YMCA day camp, and there were swimming certificates. They gave you little cards when you’d progressed to a certain level. This was when I was eight or nine. I’d gotten a Guppy card, and a Minnow card — I was nowhere near a Flying Fish or a Shark — and I took a huge gulp of air and surface-dived toward the drain. I struggled down, kicking so hard my body twisted in the water, till the drain began to come into focus. It was round and black and had a number of large holes in it. I thought I wasn’t going to be able to reach it. I saw—

And then my alarm timer went off, playing its loud marimba tune, with a final plink of syncopation. I turned it off. I reset it for another ten minutes. What I saw on the drain was a pale pink piece of chewing gum, the very same piece of pink baby-Jesus gum I’d seen at the drinking fountain at school. I didn’t touch it. I touched the terrifying drain itself. I looked up and saw somebody’s legs hit the water a mile above me. I pushed off from the bottom and clawed to the surface. I didn’t tell anyone I’d touched the drain that day, but I had.

Four or five years later, my grandparents took us on a cruise. It was a Swan Hellenic Cruise, with a full complement of tanned, elderly, witty classicists from Oxford who gave lectures on-site at Paestum and Pompeii and at the rebuilt ruins of the palace at Knossos. I took a picture of a black cat near one of the columns of the Parthenon that had been reassembled after the Turks stored ammunition there and it blew up. One of the professors, J. V. Luce, had a theory that Plato’s Atlantis was actually Minoan Crete, which had suffered a terrible tidal wave when a nearby island volcano blew and then sank into the sea, forming a caldera. Professor Luce said that there was a core of truth to the Atlantis story, that the sinking island and the tidal destruction of the center of Minoan civilization had merged, and that Plato had gotten the dimensions of Atlantis wrong by a simple factor of ten, which was an easy thing to do because of the cumbersome way in which numbers were notated at the time. I was tremendously excited by this theory. It was definitely true, no question.

The timer’s marimba went off again and I didn’t bother to reset it. There was, I recall, a beautiful long empty beach on Crete with a rusty wrecked ship on its side a few hundred feet from shore. I swam out to it with my new facemask on and saw the ribs of the wreck through the bright blue water. It was entirely covered with pale yellow seaweeds about the size of Lay’s potato chips that moved gently in the currents. I felt a fear of the empty blue water and the yellow weedy wreck and I swam back to shore.