To chart my interest in the Mekons, I’d have to go back to
1986, and my friend Tim showing up with a copy of The Edge of the World. But that album didn’t make quite the inroads
on my consciousness as its follow-up Honky
Tonkin’ did, which is the first Mekons LP I bought. Their albums weren’t
always as easy to find as one might like, though 1989’s Rock’n’Roll, again on tape at first, became a big favorite around
the time I moved to Princeton. I remember walks by the canal with it on my
walkman, quite well.
But let’s flash forward to more recent history. After a dodgy half-decade from about 1994 to 1999 (when I was out of commission myself, so to speak), the Mekons emerged with top-flight stuff on Journey to the End of the Night (2000)—the tour for which was the
first time I saw them live, with Kajsa and my friend Nancy in DC—and Out of Our Heads, or OOOH (2002). And that’s the disc from
which we draw today’s ditty.
To do justice to the early 21st century is harder than
reaching back much further, I find. In
part that’s because the farther back something is the clearer it is, if you can
recall it at all. The fact that it remains in memory is what makes it
worthwhile. And the memories, far back, are memories of things done in youth. But recent history demands more concentration because everything
seems to be sown together and it’s harder to see which “grains will grow and
which will not,” as Banquo says. And, the older we get, the less likely we'll see things come to full fruition.
What’s more, since this is about my tastes in
music, I have to register a salient fact of my listening history at that point. From 1984 I’d been sharing my musical collection on tapes to
my brothers, and from 1994 to my daughter as well. I’d made a slew of tapes (to say nothing of
the ones for myself) by the end of the 20th century, and during my daughter’s
college years—1999-2003—the tapes were like a “letter from home” and pretty
much monthly, at least the first year, then more sporadic as we went on. So, new music to me, for quite some time, was
stuff that got churned into the Great Tape Factory and by 2002 I might say
there was the problem of how to keep this fresh when I’d already filled tapes
with most of the best stuff I own.
Every
now and then, as happened in the early part of the century, I’d get to know someone where sharing musical tastes was
important and there would be a flurry of tape-making that would try to combine
new stuff with the stuff—as in most of these posts—that’s part of my
ancient history. And that brings us to this song. Is there anyone I would’ve
made a tape, or even a comp CD (a lesser artifact) for, during the first decade
of this unhappy century who would not get a copy of this song?
Not only because there are songs by the Mekons that are just so close to my personal horizons, from the late Eighties onward—making a song by them de rigueur as an expression of my general psyche—but because this song refers to the very situation I was living through, which is a way of saying that it’s about aging in place and yet wanting to—with some late but still valid and vivid hurrah—surge up out of the everyday and take the moment by storm. It’s rousing, in other words.
“The friends you had found / It’s like they’ve all gone to
ground,” it begins, and we know at once this is a survivor’s story. You’re
still above ground while your friends aren’t. And I’m not going to insist that
the friends spoken of are dead, necessarily. “It’s like” they are. It could
just be the friendships that have died. “People disappear every day,” Jack
Nicholson’s character says in Antonioni’s The Passenger, “every time they leave
the room.” Heavy, yeah. But true. And if they ain’t in the room with you, right
now, they’re gone. And in the early Aughts, to me, mostly everyone was gone, most of the time. Ghosts.
Earlier this week, a glance at Kristin Hersh’s “Your Ghost”
started us down the path of mourning the departed and trying to reach them.
Today’s song isn’t so much about that—it’s not full of the dread and longing
that Hersh packs into her song. The Mekons take us instead to our death-bed
moment, “first the chill and then the stupor, then the letting go” (echoing, to
my mind, “O Death,” but in a very different register). This isn’t exulting in
death’s power, it’s more or less just accepting it as the condition for that
final reflection, the one that, as the Mekons sing about it in unison, sparks
the song. “If you found one thing out on that road / Only you, only you, only
you, only you, only you and your ghost will know.”
This has nothing to do with a final reckoning in saved or
damned terms. This has to do with what comes to mind,
what leaps into focus as you fade out. “Was
there a place to leave or a place to go / A mouth to kiss or a hand to hold.” We might want there to be someone nearby in
our last moments, but that’s not the point they’re getting at, with those
impassioned repetitions. They’re asking
you to judge yourself, at last. Was there someone or something, out there on
that road? In your lifetime, did you
make that connection, no matter how fleeting or lasting, no matter where or
when, no matter how it started or ended, but . . . did it happen? And, as fast as they offer the hope and the
possibility that, well, you didn’t waste your whole fucking life, they give you
the only answer that matters, friends, the fact that, however you answer, you’re
taking it to your grave: “only you and your ghost will know.”
Now, we could easily say “only you will know,” in the
end. But of course, if the answer is “yes”—there
was a mouth, a hand, a place—then someone else knows too. That he or she as the
case may be. But do we know that? Maybe
that person is already gone, maybe that place is long since emptied of any sign
that anything happened there. More than likely. So, that’s where the phrase “your
ghost” makes its necessary contribution.
Because it’s not just “you”—at this point you are more spirit than
flesh, if spirit exists, and that other, that shape you barely recall (but do
recall), receding into that impossible distance that is your entire life and
all the time allotted to it, is a ghost too. Is part of whatever spirit you
take out of here when you go.
This is not the moment for the father confessor; this isn’t
mea culpa time. This is time for you to grab hold of your ghost—and listen to
how Tom Greenhalgh enunciates so clearly the syllables of “you’ve got just one
sym-pa-the-tic com-pan-ion”—and head for the hills.
Because you had one at least, didn’t you? For a time . . . . Maybe a lot of times, but,
really, never too many.
 |
| 2008 |
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