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Friday, November 07, 2008
HOW CAN I MISS YOU WHEN YOU WON'T GO AWAY?
Dan Hicks and The Hot Licks
1969
Available on : The Most of Dan Hicks
Epic : 2001
[Buy It]
HOW CAN I MISS YOU WHEN I'VE GOT DEAD AIM?
Ida Cox
1926
Available on : Complete Recorded Words, Vol. 3: 1925-1927
Document : 1925
[Buy It]
Tiring week, no? Exhilarating, then exhausting, and the second part, maybe, because of the first. So, welcome, new President. I also went to a wake this week, for a friend's father, and that was exhausting without being exhilarating, except that exhausting isn't exactly the right word. It was sobering without being bracing, spine-straightening without being exciting. If I didn't already know that time marches on, this would have reminded me. Left boot, right boot.
The friend whose father died ended the week more or less tapped out, which is more or less predictable. One of the hardest things about the wake, he said, was having to conduct intimate business with so many people he didn't really know. What do you say to the man who was your next-door neighbor when you were four? You don't really remember him, but he's part of your past, and consequently, part of your present. His absence for most of your life doesn't erase a sense of presence at key moments.
Last night I had a book launch. The event was the opposite of a wake, or maybe the mirror image. Acquaintances showed up, along with colleagues, along with strangers. The people I see and speak to all the time were also there. Those people interest me the most, which is probably why I see and speak to them all the time. They interest me because the very fact of them is so strange. What makes you stay close to another person over time? Though I am not stupid--or because I am--that question interests me. Are you drawn back day after day because you believe that person to be a source of wisdom? Of amusement? Because the person is pleasing to look at? Because the mere fact of interacting with that person gratifies you greatly? Because that person's interest in you is also evident and you feed off of it? I'd say that it's some or all of the above. Cynics or depressives will say that friendships persist as a result of inertia, but inertia is harder to keep up than physics suggests.
There aren't many people I talk to or see every day, but there are some. How much is there to say to a person like that? There are two answers to this question. On the one hand, there is nothing to say, because you've used it all up. On the other hand, there's everything to say, because it's always all in play. Party conversations are a quick, clean illustration of this principle. With old friends, you catch up on plot. With new acquaintances, you acquire information about character. With everpresent friends, you reflect back the ongoing light. You talk about nothing and everything: small talk, non-talk, fragments of conversations from before. Yesterday's inside joke becomes tomorrow's cherished nostalgia.
Assuming, that is, that everyone remembers yesterday's inside joke. The circuit I've sketched out above is how it works when it works. But what about when it doesn't work, when one little wire goes haywire? At the party, I was talking to a friend I talk to all the time, and I reminded her of a comment she made a few months ago. She said that she didn't remember saying it, but that it sounded funny. I laughed and said that she was her own best audience, but for one split-second, I missed her. It was a crazy reaction. She was standing right there. I speak to her all the time. It was nothing. A few seconds later she asked me why I hadn't answered an email she had sent earlier today. I said I thought I had, but even if I hadn't, what difference did it make? I knew I'd be seeing her later. What was it about, anyway? She didn't remember. Another nothing.
Later, after my friend left, after my wife and I went home, after some food, after some TV, I thought about the party conversation a little more. Or rather, I thought about the week that had ended with the party conversation. The wake, in particular, had furnished hard evidence of what happens when the circuit between people breaks irrevocably, leaving all memories one-sided and all emails unanswered. Is that why the tiny hiccups in a relationship have a slightly larger ripple effect, because they're fore-echoes of the Big Forgotten Comment? Does presence in most of your life erase a sense of absence at key moments? I clarified with the assistance of two songs, one by Dan Hicks and the other by Ida Cox. Hicks's song is about being fed up with (or possibly pretending to be fed up with) another person's ongoing interest:Out of three billion people, why must it be me?
Oh why, oh why won't you cut me loose?
Just do me a favor and listen to my plea
I'm not the only chicken on the roost! I am certain that people feel this way about me sometimes, because I feel that way about them sometimes. Get another roost! But the best friendships outlast this impulse and return to finer feelings, in part because they are driven by the fear that when people really go away--back to the wake again--you are condemned to miss them forever. Cox's song shifts the power balance, almost completely, and gives advice for women recovering from their man's sudden withdrawal of interest. Here, too, a lack of attention activates intense attention, but of a different sort--the results have collateral damage:If your man quits you, don't wear no black.
Find the girl that bit you for him, and bite her back.
If you kill my dog, I'm gonna kill your cat;
I'm gettin' even with the world and there's nothing to that. The songs, taken apart and then taken together, draw a bead on the not-quite-conversation I had at the party and the not-quite-problems it raises--at the forgotten comment, at the unanswered email, at the remembered affinity. They reframe the question and, at the same time, answer it: The friends you talk to all the time are the ones you miss even when they don't go away.Labels: ben, blues, folk
posted by Ben
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