Notes From Leo Kottke

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SADNESS
3/17/2003
by Leo Kottke

When Dartmouth asked Joseph Brodsky for a commencement speech, June '89, he showed up at the podium and warned everybody of boredom, and its virtues. Pronouncing boredom, after Dartmouth, the most enduring stone they'd face in their lives--"At best, Dartmouth may acquaint you with the sensation by incurring it"--Brodsky appears to have been talking more to himself than to the graduates; Dartmouth may have wondered, but his speech was not boring--not to read, at least.

My address will be on sadness, when Dartmouth asks; not the sadness that follows the death of something, or the premonition of the death of something, but the sadness of nothing, the sadness that sends us to bed early with no big struggle. Not boredom...simple sadness. Empty quiet. Not melancholy, or blueness, only sadness. The first chill in the air, or the first warmth.

I'm sad now. I'm sad because I'm writing this. Brodsky was not bored when he wrote his commencement address. Sadness, though wispy, can be persistent and catching. Boredom is too human to last for long, especially if you're not completely nuts; work can erase it, for example...but work won't eliminate sadness. Sadness will spoil your work. It's global. Sadness will keep you, as my father might say, from getting outside and getting a little fresh air.

When I was a child in Wyoming and my father thought I was becoming a nerd from reading too much, he told me to go outside. He didn't tell me to stop reading, he told me to go outside and get some air. So I floated Huckleberry Finn to a vacant lot in Cheyenne, smoked a pipe Kent Ekloff and I'd stolen from a work train on the air force base, and got sick. I think I was ten years old. I remember the milkweed in the vacant lot, the raft, and the nausea. It's a great book. And I still read... but right now, I'm sad. And I'm sad for the guy whose pipe I stole.

On a record called Great Big Boy, I mentioned jumping in a lake when I was a child:

"My earliest memory is of water. I was submerged in it. I had stepped off a dock into Clark Lake. Before my Aunt Rui jumped in after me, I had time to hit bottom- about three feet down- and look around. A bubble formed around my head and I could breathe in it. I was two and a half. I learned this much: adults couldn't breathe underwater, but a child could do anything. About four years later I held a paper bag above my head and jumped off a roof. I reached full speed and slammed into the ground. I learned this much: adulthood begins at six."

But what I was was sad. Later I was a Sad Sack. Now, grown up, I am sometimes, like now, simply sad. This is not the tragic view, not acknowledgement of the human condition, it's just sadness.

One access to sadness is to be too literary for one's own good, to suffer with Moby Dick in an ocean of Calvinism. You could cheer up, maybe, with Henry James: Take a dilletante's interest in melancholy and recline on someboy else's croquet lawn. Or you could go trout fishing with Hemingway, and sadness could become style: A clean, well-lighted place. Or sadness could become habit--and us mammals (or the tragic view)...smaller.

If the tragic view continues to shrink--and, with it, the strange, sad chance it offers to cheer up--there are worse things than the too literary: there is boredom, there is the total avoidance of the literary, or the dismissal entire of the "tragic view"...and the ensuing headlong, or headless, rush into kitzch: refrigerator magnets, un-founded optimism, soul-less-ness, blunted faith, religiosity. This is worse than sadness. (No, let's just say it's different.) It's still nothingness, though. It's being a reindeer, and reminding rooms full of people that there's something to be said for free-floating gloom. It's being ribbons on a poodle, fake flowers on pencil erasers, a bumper sticker...not fate, but flaw.

All of which makes me sad. Angry, even. It may be self-loathing that makes a thug, but it's a numb smile that pisses him off.

But we can be happy. We can swim with the mammals, maybe. If kitzch is the denial of shit (just to be literary and quote Milan Kundera) reality is the tragic view--Maybe Dick, to quote Bullwinkle. We are pinned by choice...because we're too damn sad, or stupid, to make up our minds.

Maybe I am only talking about myself.

The exhaust fan above a stove looks like a giant Flo-Bee. It's possible to make a potato cannon out of PVC tubing and hair spray. We can tune a yapping dog by snipping its vocal chords, from yip to woof in an hour. By reversing a clothes pin we can shoot flaming kitchen matches at our potato cannon. We can make a gun out of a bicycle spoke. Run a garden hose six feet up to the surface of the lake we're swimming under, try to breathe and drown.

Ingenuities, misunderstandings. We can be born dumb, but we have to make ourselves stupid. We can live our lives just fine with twenty nouns or two thousand, but if we don't learn to say "ouch" we'll never live at all. It's possible to fall asleep with our eyes open--I've done it twice on freeways, especially the one through Pennsylvania, the one that never ends. Pennsylvania never ends. I've never figured that out.

Are we still talking about sadness? I don't think so. Maybe this is about something else, about Hertzian poodles. About being asleep. About Gore Vidal? Not really. William F. Buckley?, too many nouns. George Will?... doesn't like "The Catcher in the Rye"... a tin ear, he has. The kitzch of Fox, the spout of Snopes?

Are we talking about politics? No. Maybe Dick?

Perhaps sadness is an organizing principle. Maybe without it, as I am now, the random sparks of imagination can drag us off, sputter like Teddy Roosevelts of yesteryear, shove us into the engram jungle, and suggest we get along with nothing but an idea to fondle. Without sadness, in less words, we would be having too "good" a time. We might be asleep, and making unintelligible noises. Or: If sadness is only a drag, tragedy is only a mistake.

The virtue tragedy teaches, if it teaches anything, is compassion. If there is a lesson in sadness, it is in its impermanence--one of the values Brodsky finds in boredom. And if imagination can show us how to tune another species or how to make a weapon out of a potato, it cannot show us how to end a note whose only organization was a now vanished cloud.

Good-bye. (I gotta go get some air.)

THE SNOUT OF WATT
6/18/2001
by Leo Kottke

Ashcroft's election opponent was dead. And Ashcroft was defeated. And Bush, no Dan Quayle, lost his election...to an apparently living Gore. Does Jeffords forestall a tide of crud by himself, or is the corporate whip of Market-as-God only winding up for the next tickle?

Poland is the only country to elect a musician President, we are the only country to non-elect a Vacuum as President. We yearn for Haitian governance, for the charms of the Maniototo--for the soulful astringency of a girl living at the PO. But the judiciary is hoist by Pat Robertson's suspenders; and the Snout of Watt would huff where it's illegal for us to take a photograph but where it can snort the wood. Everything under and above, from Joe Blow to Jesus, can go take a leap...except our owners.

Exit?, what exit? The facts are friendly, witness is an obligation...USA Today?, CNN? If he had to witness fear, and God's foot on the treadle, Pip at least had a clear horizon. We have TV, and "demonstration areas."

It's getting darker down there: more government as grab, not less as mercy. A monopoly-greased Barney Fife squats at our feet; and we, the twee populous, the not-knowing-what's-good-for-us, are encouraged to smile...at this grinning rubdown? This faux-cowpuncher wit? This vending machine ethic? This thoughtless, un-tried, litigant religiosity? Do we face Mr. Common Sense, do-as-I'm-told-to-tell-you, day after day? This Watt-age?

Onward, thru the smirk?, through Cheney's skull-tilt sneer? Where is Oat Willie when we need him?

When I was on the second oldest diesel submarine in the Navy, the SS Halfbeak, we surfaced somewhere out east, chugged along for a while, and collided with something bigger than the submarine. I was the port watch in the sail, there were two other guys up there: the OD and the starboard watch. The OD was facing the stern when I saw the ocean rise in front of us--something the size of a Starbucks was pushing the Atlantic UP-- and I rendered myself speechless, and un-watchlike.

I'd been trained to locate things on the ocean, not under it. Even if I could have thought of something to say, such as, "There's a big bump right in front of us...," we'd have hit it before I'd reached the word "us." We hit it, the collision stopped the Halfbeak with a big bang, and we rose up out of the water--the bow did, that is--upon the thing, still visible only as a huge curve of Atlantic. The OD turned white (he thought we'd hit the Tusk, our sister sub); the starboard watch ogled port; and, as the Atlantic rushed down and off its sides, a grey-green and squiggly-skinned "Thing" became visible beneath us. For a few seconds I watched jillions of carrot-sized appendages wiggling independently (i.e., independently!) of the sea rushing down its "side(?)"; then the object/beast/speed bump slowly sank beneath the weight of the Halfbeak.

No one asked if I'd seen anything, the port watch hadn't seen it, and the OD missed it--so to speak. End.

Ever heard of this happenstance? No. Decades later, I see something resembling this Speed Bump. It is the Snout of Watt, visible at last, before a congressional committee. Air-breathing, but only perhaps. Questioned for billing a few Federal grand, it vanished excused below. But now, only an executive blink later, our Ordovician ethic, as slimed and non-discriminating as the bottom of the Atlantic, has not only surfaced, attracted by our winsome bow, but would sit on our face. That Snout was only the tip of the Wattberg.

Ran out of cute, there...it's just plain disgusting. Good-bye dry land.

Recently I dined in a greasy spoon in a large Midwestern state. We'll call the state Wisconsin. I was sitting against a wall and watching a crowd of locals deal with the scrumptious Sunday buffet. (These buffets, like stiffs in funeral homes, are all over small towns on Sunday. But five years ago, a crowd of little girls in confirmation dresses approached one of these buffets in Malaga, New Mexico, and exclaimed over the enchiladas...and no sun shines brighter than that. To hell with our divinations, someone always knows the truth.)

So I leaned against some imitation Wisconsin knotty pine paneling, which was the wall at the greasy spoon, gazing alternately at the swarmed buffet and at the dust on a little plastic flower in a bud vase next to my salt shaker. Bearing the load of my despair, I too was steeling myself for the buffet. A large fellow, whose name I was soon to learn was Frank, was angling slowly toward the bier, when a woman--one of two dining directly in front of me--called out, waving, "Hey, Frank! I'm May!"

"Good," said Frank, barely shifting his seventy-plus gaze from the diminishing buffet. He kept walking...even, perhaps, picking up speed.

"I'm May! Don't you remember me? We used to see each other when we were little!"

Frank now looked over at May. "We used to do a lot more than that," he said.

When a 75 year old woman blushes, she argues for the inextinguishability of the soul and for the imminence of death. The blush says: we are in the Protean bed, we are without time, our only fact is the human heart. Or, it says: we shouldn't eat so much of the buffet.

There were a lot of old women in this little dining room (an addition to what had once been a gas station), most of whom had probably heard every word of this exchange; as one, they attended to the back of the head in front of them, or to the remains on their plate. Earlier, a youngish man of sixty had been telling a table of ten that Chihuahuas were hairless: "They don't have any HAIR!"; but, even he was silent.

My eyes returned to Frank. His motives as opaque as his date's alarm (an 80 year old amanuensis was in attendance,) Frank made an abrupt left when he reached the salad bar. Frank, his assitant in embarrassed tow, headed for the door. I inhaled the bracing Wisconsin air. As one, I rose and headed for the buffet. Life was good. I'd risen from contemplation, from the witless dust on the flower, to privilege as witness. I was honored, by a narrowed perspective, to have entered the workings of Wisconsin and a buffet.

If Watt has anything to do with this, it is that things other than the human heart, other than wonderful May, are also inextinguishable. They endure like rocks, like death, like Watt. They float up from the forgotten bottom like the muck in our own dreams. If Janet Frame, or Eudora Welty, can understand a world arrayed against them, and speak of it with dispassion, the Snout of Watt can rise again, with a gimme snort, and displace our smug comfort. We are armed to the gunwales with an illusion of safety. The Snout demonstrating: no public trust, no common weal, no comity, just something obnoxious that gets in the way of what we had thought to be the ship of state; the Snout's value being as a reminder: wrong also endures. ("W" lost the election.)

We're told in the USA that it's us running things. Lincoln said so. The Constitution says so. The persistence of our belief in this canard is not astonishing, and so we vote (as Frank Zappa recommended.) But we wish we had something to vote FOR--and that our votes be counted.

MEETING THE PRESIDENT
by Leo Kottke

Like a lot of other kids I was wearing a sort of Hussars hat with a plume in it, I was holding a trombone, and I was as old as the guy in the picture to your left. I was standing in sunlight, sweating into a borrowed green wool uniform, camphorized on one of the White House lawns, stupefacting at the West Wing and bored out of my feathered skull. Then JFK breezed by, tanned by Addison's disease. He wore a perfect suit, a Roswell sort of suit. His hand in one of its jacket pockets, so I've read, hid a cigar, and he moved in perfect unison with the suit; without mimicing plastic or second skin or paint, the suit hung like a breeze on each of his Presidential centimeters. But I was wearing a hat with a feather in it. I was holding a trombone.

I may have been melting before JFK walked by, but I knew I'd get off that lawn; after JFK walked by, I wondered where to. JFK was going somewhere, the two men following him thought he was going somewhere, but I was wearing a hat with a feather in it. Nowhere. So I took my hat off. Somebody does that in a marching band and it's like a bomb going off. My career was over. Maybe the president got to wear that suit, but I was not going to wear that hat.

Heroin looked good. I'd heard Alexander King talk about it to Jack Parr, about shooting up with it, about laying on his basement floor, his cheek on the cool cement, listening to Beethoven--whose favorite food was noodles and cheese. King had a fine Tennessee Williams lisp and an ultra-suede, evidently narcotic cadence.

So I joined the Navy. Seventeen years old and underage, I joined the Submarine Reserve, escaped boot camp by this fluke, went to sub school in New London, went on active duty, struck for sonar, failed the hearing test, was assigned to the SS Halfbeak; trying to load my clip backwards, I further hurt my hearing shooting at three lightbulbs thrown into the Atlantic ocean. I was medically discharged.

What next?: another executive, this time in the Oval Office on Lincoln's Birthday, 1994. The latest president, and one of the better ones (good vetoes), was about to broadcast his weekly radio address. A White House Photographer had spent the ten or so minutes before Clinton's arrival arranging a bust of Lincoln on the President's desk; he'd sighted on it, moved it, sighted on it, moved it, until he was satisfied. Now he was kneeling by the desk, waiting for his shot. The first thing President Clinton did when he walked in was straighten out the bust of Abraham Lincoln.

I'd been invited by Mr. Clinton's appointments secretary, Rickie Seidman, to witness this weekly broadcast with about ten other people. I'd met Rickie the night before when I'd gone down to the Birchmere, in Alexandria, to harrass Shawn Colvin and steal some licks. Now, this day, I'd made my way through some unseasonal snow to the door of the West Wing, misplaced my ID badge, walked back through the snow to the guardhouse, and felt conspicuous (the neighborhood hadn't changed a bit except for some tank obstacles on Pennsylvania Ave.) I had retrieved another ID and headed back to the White House. Like I belonged there. I did belong, but not as did those citizens to whom Andrew Jackson had opened these doors--I think they came for the free cheese; I belonged to the ten or fifteen different people, strangers to each other, invited by civic-minded staff to hear these addresses.

Another president, there he was, Mr. Clinton, standing there, saying a few words--to the deflated photographer, to Rickie Seidman. An impressive man. Inspiring. Do these presidents all have something impressive in them, something beyond the endowments of office? Our President Clinton, a tweaker, Lincoln's bust askew. Minus the photographer, a moment in governance for me--as startling as Kennedy, plus snow.

But an engineer turned the microphone on, Clinton spoke offically, and if the few words we'd heard until then were the voice of a president, of a sober gravity, we now listened to treacle, to kitsch, to a rubdown. Somebody'd thrown a switch and turned off the President of the United States. This official noise could have been wearing my hat. Every President since Kennedy, and every presidential candidate, has talked like this, with that mortician's smile.

I don't remember Mr. Clinton's speech; because, while he spoke, I was too busy remembering my first grade teacher shepherding us on a two block field trip in Iron Mountain, Michigan; she'd worn her scarf backwards, with the point hanging down the bridge of her nose, and had watched a woodpecker attack the back of a kid's head. She'd warned us about that woodpecker.

At the end of the address, we lined up for our photos to be taken, one at a time, with Mr. Clinton. I thanked President Clinton for speaking to Salman Rushdie--a necessary gesture lost on President Bush. Clinton responded with a sort of a noise. I shook his hand and the bulb flashed. Kenneth Starr, the Flem Snopes of the beltway, was rising.

I'm still waiting for the photo. And Snopes owes me fifty million.

I miss my hat.

John Fahey

John Fahey died yesterday morning, February 22, after sextuple bypass surgery. In his last couple days he was unable to see, speak, or move. But he could hear and comprehend. His ex-wife Melody had been allowed to visit him. She and a group of friends watched over him. And said good-bye.

In a country full of crap, John created living, generative culture. With his guitar and his spellbound witness, he synthesized all the strains in American music and found a new happiness for all of us. With John, we have a voice only he could have given us; without him, no one will sound the same.

By choice, John lived a difficult life. He made my life what it is. He recorded me, supported me and remained my friend for over thirty years. I remember his beard in my ear, when we were both playing the Wort Hotel in Jackson Hole, and his stretched voice whispering, "Sing something! You have a great voice!" He hated my voice. I remember turtles, tons of them, around his office, his home. We built a turtle sanctuary in his backyard in LA-- on Palms Boulevard, a breezy name for a concrete noise. Even the turtles were unhappy. And I remember his Prairie State guitars, his knowledge and understanding, and much early tape: John as a youngster playing in a different voice. Like Robbie Basho, he seems to have been two people--and to have made a permanent break with the first, somewhere in his twenties.

But it is his vision that enriches us. He saw who we are. He wasn't happy about it, but he told our story. And we fell down laughing, moved by what we had missed. Thank you, John.


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