What I've Been Hearing

It's darker than dark in America as we stare down the brain-stained barrels of our first fascist presidency. One election, just one, now stands between Donald Trump and the Oval Office. (After typing that sentence, I pause, shake my head, and laugh mirthlessly; it's time again to remember Philip Roth's great insight, written many decades ago, about the reality of America outrunning the imaginations of its novelists. Of our major writers, only Nathanael West might have written the tale of Trump--and called it An Ice-Cold Billion.) And judging from recent polls, the weather in Ohio one day in the first week of November may decide whether our next president is a competent centrist technocrat too comfortable in her corporatism or an unhinged cynical asshole pretending to be a right-wing nutjob. If Stephen Dedalus were here and not perpetually trapped in the glowing amber of Joyce's prose, he might remark laconically that the American present is a nightmare from which we all deserve to awake.

Awash in these foul waters, I'm remembering Roethke: "In a dark time, the eye begins to see..." And the ear, Big Ted, let's not forget the ear beginning to hear. Lately I've been listening to Bessie Smith, Amalia Rodriguez, Carminho, Cecil Taylor, Milton Babbitt, and Elliot Carter. That's the queen of American blues, two Portuguese fado singers,a great jagged mad jazzer, and a pair of American Modernists. They all come to remind me that there's a better America and a better world out there. Grab it before it goes.