FALL 2020 | Volume 3, Issue 1

I’ve always had this hunch about Moonlight Sonata-it doesn’t require any special brand of dexterity, but you better be at least the best artist in your neighborhood to have any hope of getting the cadence right. But that’s all art is really- individualistic cadences; altered rhythms of the same shared tunes. We are not in a search for new subjects. Our realities and our fever dreams are linked to the same broken chains, now more than ever, and escaping into plot or genre is a kind of abdication; It’s theatre, not conviction of purpose. We find ourselves and argue for our positions inside cadence, and forge identity through emphasis, more so than even imagination. The world is laid out before us. What is it that we’d like to do with it? And which part of the painting do we wish to give our attention? We may have more choice than we’ve been led to believe. 

I’ve been an Emersonian since college. And yet, ironically, I’ve frequently been accused of many of the things he derides—been castigated as one of his “meek men” hiding out in libraries,  been told that I am a man imprisoned by reference, consumed by history, and overly influenced by and responsive to things that move and stimulate me. I plead guilty to all these charges. But while Emerson had the concept right, I think he had the reference point backwards. I’ve come to think that it is far more dangerous to be imprisoned by the smallness of contemporary citizenship than it is to be driven to distraction by a line of verse or a few bars of Dylan, Coltrane or The Alabama Shakes. We are besieged by smallness because we are stuck watching only the channels that feature small people, forgetting that when a man in black walks on stage and says, “I’m Johnny Cash,” the smallness goes away.  The moment in history we must unburden ourselves from is the one happening right now. And no, that didn’t just become true all of the sudden in this year of years.     

It's all so impermanent anyway, and that’s good news; permanence is one of those cravings we’d despise if we ever actually achieved it. There was a marathon of Season Four of The West Wing on the day before this November’s election. That season originally aired during the time that I was an intern/speechwriter for Sen. Kennedy, and I was struck by a tangible memory of how much it all use to mean to me, how much energy I used to have for it, and how far away I have drifted from that feeling now. In our little corridor of the Russell Senate Office Building were the offices of Sens. Kennedy, Kerry, McCain, Ted Stevens, and Ben Nighthorse Campbell. I’m not yet 40, and none of those men remain in the chamber, and half of them are dead.

I have too often been a sentimentalist masquerading as a romantic--one of Whitman’s “corpses” lingering a little too long in the old comfortable doorways—and its past time we all behave like romantics now.  I’ve always enjoyed the rusty eternity of Dublin and was worried we’d all lose some of that in the whitewash that inevitably follows a notoriously bad year. But it turns out that that was never really the point anyway and I should have had more faith. I’ll see you in the spring.

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Cheers,

Joseph M. Reynolds