Song for Bringing Out the Winter Doona

(To be sung from under the doona, as it processes like a Chinese dragon):

Raise paw, lower paw,
Roar, roar.
Lash tail, breathe fire,
Roar.

(step forward & repeat as necessary)

Why does X keep coming back?

It was a large and widely attended retirement party at work: the new retiree had worked there almost 40 years. As the door opened again I registered the arrival of X, who had retired a little over a year ago, when I had transferred in. And also registered my flash of annoyance. I know she'd worked in that room for 20 years or more, know she was responsible for all the stately, decades-old plants, and that I love the plants. I know that. It's just that she's been here at least once every two months since she retired. She doesn't work here...What does she want?

And now I register my mother's not entirely put-on horror at my father, who retired from the plant he'd worked at for 30 years or more, and who “never darkened the door again.” I understand that, don't even think to question it. As far as I'd thought about it at all, I assumed that, as I resemble my father in many ways, this was just one more of them.

And so I came to think about the times I have gone back to former workplaces. One large building, I remember: when I went back to sub there a couple of months after transferring out, I realized I'd forgotten my habit of putting on mental body-armour as I traversed lobby. (The lobby is huge; it always evokes the word traverse.) When I returned there on a short-term exchange a few years later, I found it... Hard to describe. I did leave early, twice, not caring whether I was found out or fired: the first time I was internally screaming, the second I was about to burst into tears. To this day I don't know what happened to my mind or soul those late Tuesday afternoons, that I was ready to gamble everything we have and everything the job keeps in existence, in order to get out now.

Other places I have returned to, temporarily, for one necessity or another... have invariably seemed smaller, darker, dingier than when I was there; essentially & ineluctably external.

I have always worked by absolute necessity. I had to earn a living. I've never worked anywhere I would have chosen to, have always struck the best deal that seemed available to me. When I walk back into a place I've worked in, it always subliminally presents itself to me as a cave which I have to stoop to re-enter. Though my sense of my internal self is pretty much amoeba-shaped, I have always had to edit myself/become someone else to fit work. And so I think my experience of revenance is this: I'm no longer willing to shrink to enter that particular darkness, fit that particular Procrustean bed.

But my mother's employment... During the Great Depression she worked as a milliner in the only millinery shop still open in the city. The girls were laid off before public holidays and re-hired the day after. They were unionized, but the union had been bought off; my mother saw the coins go into the inspector's hand every time he visited.

My mother ran a table of 40 girls; each girl had to make 6 hats a day. My mother was to initial the note each girl wrote, declaring that she had completed 6 hats. She and the girls laughed all day long, my mother always said. They got together once a year for lunch for well over 30 years afterwards. My mother quoted them often, talked about the things they did, the warden-like nature of the assistant-like manager(ess), and the meanness and hypocrisy of the owner. The daily matter of the 240 hats was handled by one girl, an expert forger, writing the notes, my mother initialling them. The hats went into storage, the notes went to the warden-like woman. The totals were never checked, and so this went on for years, until my mother married my father and so was legally forced to leave.

And so my mother never did try to re-enter her former workplace; if not forbidden by law it would have been so unusual as to be suspicious. And she liked working, had great native intelligence and shrewdness, liked running the table. Though she would really have preferred to be a hairdresser, her work never sounded as though it had crimped or crippled her.

I have no idea what my father thought of his job; though he was a man of great fundamental decency, I have no idea, any more than anyone else in my family, what my father actually thought about anything.

So now I come to look at it after all these many years, I can see why X might want to return to the room I'm in now.

Me, 5:30 p.m. on my last day (if I haven't already said bugger it and buggered off early), I'll be gone for good and all.

Song of Exasperation

And so at work I listen to Pandora. The free version because I'm cheap (an oligarchic synonym for poor). I'm at my desk all day, on an intellectual assembly-line, a kind of battery-hen of the mind. (Archetypal women's work of the last five to ten thousand years.) And so I listen to Pandora.

And so, fishing around for things to listen to, I made the mistake of telling Pandora (from whose box all hope is long since fled), that I liked "Hallelujah."

I have a troubled relationship with LC. The most evil woman I have ever known ad such a way with metaphor that I stayed in her company until I had learnt the trick and her betrayals were many and complete and far beyond doubt. It was in her company that I first heard "Suzanne," which caught me with its insistent and paradoxical chorus, its assonant images, and the melody's limited, circling range. That was the Noel Harrison version. I didn't actually know who'd written the song. I assumed it was Harrison.

When we were first married my faithful dinner companion played a lot of LC - Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrre is my gypsy wife tonight - until I'd bellow across the living-room, "She left you because you're such a lugubrious son of a bitch." (I loved son of a bitch and don't give a good goddam in daily speech. Different rhythms, long middles of short syllables, very different - trochaic? dactylic? from the invective I knew.)

But a Cohen song is one thing and a Cohen LP is another. Standing and listening, it becomes clear that the song is not the work; what emerges from a cycle of Cohen songs is the sense of women/Woman as a reservoir of sustenance and forgiveness. Kind of OK, less cruel than some of the single songs, but, Jeez. When will women ever be just human beings, like the unnamed other in the poem about the gay man's encounter, no animal, vegetable, or mineral metaphors?

Eventually the faithful dinner companion's LC phase faded. I can live with a lot of Brian Eno & Phillip Glass & Bowie & ECM jazz (& just as well).

However, telling Pandora that I liked "Hallelujah" was a mistake. Firstly: like is not  exact. Was fascinated by the linguistic intricacies of, wanted to dissect, wanted to steal what I could from and so needed to hear several times  - any of those would have been closer, but they're all beyond Pandora's range of choice. (You say algorithm, I say playlist.)

Secondly: unless I order up Madre Deus or ambient or Segovia instead - categories I can let run for hours without having to alter, which vignette the corners of my mind - see extreme attention to detail eight hrs/day - I end up hearing "Hallelujah" at least twice a day, five days a week - far too often for any song in any language you actually speak. LC, Annie Lennox, KD Laing, Sinead Bloody O'Connor (all of whom I like). Rufus Fucking Wainwright, who's too busy producing beautiful enunciation to honor the lyric by singing it as written, to sing "you" as "ya," which is the fucking rhyme the fucking song actually fucking depends on-ya -
 
I suppose Anthony's version wd. cost me $10 a month. Hooray for being poor.

With Leonard Cohen it's the LC single song thing - a single song will be OK, depending on the song (Suzanne is better than Sisters of Mercy - is that its name? - for example) in terms of not being mildly depressing or infuriating if you hear it once. With Pandora, it's really best not to communicate at all.

Song for Moving the Winter Doona

Raise paw, lower paw,
Roar, roar.
Lash tail, breathe fire,
Roar.

(repeat as necessary)