Riff Album Challenge

Vampires, Ferlinghetti, and Endings

“I am that I am”

I waited patiently in 2013 for Vampire Weekend’s Modern Vampires of the City to drop. I didn’t know what the album would contain, but I had grown to love the band since I had listened to 2010’s Contra. And I lamented not attending a concert they had given at my older daughter’s college, Wofford College in Spartanburg. The band showed up, I heard, but not many others came to hear them.

I figured it was going to be a fraternity party of sorts and so I didn’t feel it appropriate to go mix with the late teens and early twenty-somethings, just as at my own institution, I’d never dream of hanging out at the customary weekend parties. I know other faculty who have, and it never ends well.

So, my one chance to see VW lost, I began focusing on when the next record would come. And it did, and when it did, I had to think over some old feelings about God, about being Jewish, and about how beat I felt with the whole nature of trying to explain to anyone how it felt to teach at a religiously-based college and not to adhere to any religion myself.

Over the years I’ve taught, I’ve had many questioning students. One of those, let’s call him Brad, got me more interested in reading, and then teaching, Beat writers. I did a special topics course on the Beats, having students read On the Road, Go, and Howl. The only “Beat” I had been exposed to before was Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who died this week at age 101. Here’s a beautiful tribute to him published today by Alysia Abbott in Lit Hub:

Ferlinghetti helped me rethink poetry, too, as an endeavor of searching and singing oneself and one’s relationship to the known and unknown universe. I remembered reciting Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing” back in fifth grade, thinking, “This is a poem?” It was, it is, just as my favorite poetry collection is Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind, a copy of which I bought at City Lights Bookstore two summers ago, just after I passed the great champion of artistic freedom on the streets of North Beach.

One of my favorite poems in the collection, “Junkman’s Obligato,” implores,

“Let us see the City Dumps for what they are. My country tears of thee. Let us disappear in automobile graveyards and reappear years later picking rags and newspapers drying our drawers on garbage fires…”

I didn’t know all that poetry could do or be when I first read those lines almost half a century ago.

But I held onto these images as I noticed the world around me, and though they seem unrelated on initial glimpse, I thought of them again in the days right after Modern Vampires of the City was released.

Right after I listened to my favorite cut on the record, “Ya Hey”:

“All the cameras and files All the paranoid styles All the tension and fear Of a secret career And I can’t help but think That you’ve seen the mistake But you let it go Ya Hey…”

In the song, one of the great laments is how the being guiding us must feel in the wake of all the ruins, in the wake of

“The faithless they don’t love you The zealous hearts don’t love you…”

And I thought again of the beauty of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, where all the “best” and arguably most beautiful minds of his generation had been destroyed, wasted, thrown down by the seen and unseen powers, whomever they were. People who would cast off those who didn’t or couldn’t conform to the status quo; people who invoked God and claimed to “know” him.

In “Ya Hey,” perhaps my favorite lines, because they harkened to the Jewish part laboring inside of me, intone,

“Through the fire and through the flames You won’t even say your name You say ‘I am what I am…’”

That last line changes later to

“I am that I am.”

We all are who we are, though some of us understand that who we are changes as we live; that the songs of our lives, of ourselves, keep adding new stanzas as we read and sing and recite and chant all the names of ourselves, our beloved poets and musicians, and as we honor and revere those who pass before us and from us, reminding us of who we are, were..and whom we can be.

Ya hey/Yaweh.

The record still kills me, and I play it as much as I did on that day in 2013 when I first bought it from my local record store, Horizon Records, in Greenville. Some chances you just can’t miss.

Thanks to Noah Levy again for the prompt, and thanks to all the readers and writers who make me want to keep reading, writing, and listening.

Oliver Norris, Frank Mastropolo, Steven Hale, Kathryn Dillon, Kevin Alexander, Graeme A Henderson, Rob Janicke, If Ever You’re Listening, MDSHall, and Jessica Lee McMillan