Several years ago, I enrolled in a college photography class with a friend. This was something I had been meaning to do for about thirty year but had never made time for it before a breast cancer diagnosis shifted my priorities. Until then, I had been very busy being busy, bemoaning the pace of life as a woman trying to play equally well the roles of professional, mother, wife, daughter, sister, friend, all the while wishing Tom Petty would show up on my doorstep one day and beg me to be one of his Heartbreakers.
A pleaser, I wanted to be the photography instructor’s favorite. I was off to a promising start – like me, she preferred Nikon over Canon. Like me, she had breast cancer and neither time nor patience for pink ribbons. Less technician than artist, she had a penchant for Photoshop and its post-processing capabilities that she knew would made us look more competent than we were. Her dead-pan dead-on sense of what was important inspired me to do my homework and to never miss a class even though I dreaded disappointing her, or even worse, boring her. And, she was often bored – to the point of openly bristling at our predictable photographs shot straight-on, subject in the center. What did we know of the rule of thirds? She would sigh and stress that there was no magic in great photography, that it was “just light.”
“It is just light, and you just need to find it.”
Trying to relate – and reminding myself that it was also about composition – I told myself that photography was “writing with light.” I wanted to learn how to do it and to one day take just one photograph of the variety Amyn Nasser admires – a magical, grand photograph:
I believe in the photographer’s magic — the ability to stir the soul with light and shape and color. To create grand visual moments out of small and simple things, and to infuse big and complicated subjects with unpretentious elegance. He respects classic disciplines, while at the same time insists on being fast, modern and wild.
Determined that her students would create at least one grand moment – a moment of vision – in our often pedestrian pictures, my photography teacher assigned as homework over that Thanksgiving weekend, what she coined a “prepositional scavenger hunt.” It would require us to shoot from various angles, to shift our perspective – against, across, beyond, beneath, around, behind, below, between, inside, outside, on top of, toward, through, upon . . . It would require ‘a good eye.’
So it was that I found myself on that Thanksgiving morning, wandering the grounds of the Arizona State Capitol, and pausing beneath a canopy of shimmering green and pink. I forget how long I sat there, looking skyward and thinking – just thinking. I remember that it was long enough for prepositions and perspectives to give way to gratitude and grace – Amazing Grace – and thoughts of Astral Weeks and Van Morrison in full flow at The Hollywood Bowl on another November evening more than a decade ago.
There, he mystifies those gathered before him the way he does when he seems younger than the grumpy old man he can appear to be. His rendition of Astral Weeks/I Believe I have Transcended is immaculate as he teases out the song he once described as “one where you can see the light at the end of the tunnel,” from the album of the same name described by legendary rock critic, Lester Bangs, on the tenth anniversary of its release:
Insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend.
Now, over fifty years since its release, people like me continue to find their own understandings of “Astral Weeks.” Rolling Stone magazine’s Gavin Edwards says it is “still the sweetest slice of mystery in Van Morrison’s catalog.” Naturally then, I serve it up every November, especially around Thanksgiving.
Sitting in Phoenix in the shade of trees that do not grow in Belfast, I could not be further from Cyprus Avenue which boasts over 85 trees sprouting from wide cement pavements to providing light and shade. Pine, maple, sycamore, lime, beech . . . Once upon a time, this avenue would have been a place beyond Van Morrison’s station as a working class boy from Hynford Street:
Cyprus Avenue was a place where there’s a lot of wealth. It wasn’t far from where I was brought up and it was a very different scene. To me it was a very mystical place. It was a whole avenue lined with trees and I found it a place where I could think.
Eventually, the avenue of trees would belong to him. It would belong to all of us. For his 70th birthday, Van Morrison would play a concert on Cyprus Avenue, and pilgrims would come from all over the globe to experience it, to share his ‘sense of wonder.’
In the spirit of the holiday season, I could maybe say that it was the Thanksgiving holiday that had something to do with my moment of transcendence as I gazed at those pink blossoms shimmering above me. That would not be true. The celebration of America’s most significant holiday does not come naturally to me, even after over thirty years here. Christmas is still the holiday that warms me, so I know whereof she speaks when Carole Coleman, an Irish woman living in America, apologizes to her American family and friends,
With apologies to members of my American family joining us for Christmas, we will be doing the turkey thing all over again five weeks from now.
No, it wasn’t thoughts of Thanksgiving that took me where I went that November afternoon in a green space in downtown Phoenix. It was ayearning. Looking up, losing track of time and place, I could find my footing again, knowing full well I would lose it – and rediscover it – again and again. And, fearless, I was grateful for it.
A dog can never tell you what she knows from the smells of the world, but you know, watching her, that you know almost nothing.
Edgar came into our lives early one October morning. I vividly recall our first encounter. He was standing in the center lane of a street already busy with Monday morning traffic. My daughter and I had just left the gym, and she noticed him before I did, alerting me to that fact by screaming at me to stop the car, jumping out, and flailing wildly at the oncoming traffic which she successfully brought to a momentary standstill. Within seconds, she had scooped up the tiny Chihuahua that trembled in the widening beam of the headlights before him, named him Edgar – an homage to Mr. Poe – and announced that he would be moving in with us.
In spite of having just run several miles on a treadmill, I had still not had coffee and was neither alert nor ready for a Monday let alone a Chihuahua. In the back of my mind, I planned to post a few “Found Dog” signs around the neighborhood, sure that by the end of the day “Edgar” would be back where he belonged, answering to whatever name someone else had given him.
Sophie almost convinced me to let her stay home from school that day, so she could be with “her” new dog. Shaking and scared, submissive and sweet, his little ribs were as noticeable as the heart shaped markings on his coat. Sophie was vexed and without saying it, I knew she knew that based on our experience with Molly, a beautiful brindle, some years back, a new dog was probably not in the cards. On the heels of a spectacular crisis in my professional life, we had rescued Molly in the Christmas of 2008. She adored me, and the feeling was mutual. Molly was elegant and affectionate and knew how to be retired. She wanted to lounge around the house all day, but she did not want to do it alone.
Molly & Me (Xmas 2008)
Ultimately, we had to surrender Molly to the Arizona Greyhound Rescue. Her separation anxiety had grown so severe, she just couldn’t stay in the house by herself. I was heart-broken the day I returned her to the man who would place her in a foster family where someone would be home all day as well as another greyhound to keep her company. Life with Molly – although brief – had helped seal the deal as far as future pets were concerned. We would be a one-cat family.
No more dogs.
No way.
But there were tell-tale signs that this little Chihuahua was making his way into my husband’s heart. “Surely someone is missing this little guy terribly,” he said. He bought dog food. He drove around the neighborhood, posting “Found Dog” signs and looking for “Lost Dog” signs, hoping to make some family’s day by returning their dog. Every morning, he perused the newspaper and Craigslist to see if someone in Phoenix had lost a cute little Chihuahua. He took Edgar to the Humane Society where he was informed that while they didn’t take lost dogs, they would check for a microchip. No chip. No collar. No clue that he belonged to someone. They estimated “Edgar” at about seven years old, determined that he hadn’t been neutered or cared for. He had ghastly breath and worse teeth. He was malnourished and dirty. He weighed three pounds. Barely.
Within three weeks, it was clear that nobody was looking for this little dog, who in spite of having four perfectly good legs, expected to be carried everywhere. Dutifully, we all obliged. He gained weight. He stopped trembling. He slept in our daughter’s arms every night. He scampered towards us when we called “Edgar,” and soon we were all in love with him, as poet Mary Oliver writes,
Because of the dog’s joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift. It is not the least reason why we should honor as well as love the dog of our own life, and the dog down the street, and all the dogs not yet born. What would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass? What would this world be like without dogs?
Edgar was ours.
About a month later, my daughter and I left Edgar and the cat with my husband so we could take a trip back home to Northern Ireland to visit my parents. I remember that Friday clearly. On another continent, in another time zone, I had been keeping my fingers crossed that a friend would come through with tickets for the free concert Van Morrison was giving at the Waterfront Hall after being granted the Freedom of the City of Belfast. But I was distracted – repeatedly – by thoughts of foreboding, by the unexpected sound of my own voice as my phone-calls home went straight to voice-mail. Worried, I did what I always do when I have “a bad feeling,” I sent a text to my best friend, Amanda (the original BFF) to ask if she would drive to my house to check on things.
I have a flair for the dramatic and, conventional wisdom be damned, I sweat the small stuff. The devil is in the tiniest of details after all. I make mountains out of molehills which sometimes works when I can produce a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. But this? This was the second most significant detail of my adult life, wrapped up in a persistent phrase that travelled via text from Castledawson to Chandler at 12:25PM Mountain Standard Time:
“Trying to be calm, but afraid he is hurt or dead.”
I was on the phone with her as she walked to my front door, as she looked through the bay window to see little Edgar looking back at her, still and silent, knowing what we had yet to discover, waiting for her to find the keys under the doormat, to come on in and call my husband’s name three times before finding his lifeless body on the bed, hoping he was just resting but knowing he was gone.
He was gone.
Gone.
Six years on, in the quiet of an early morning, when I am reflecting on all that has transpired, I find myself wanting to be reassured that as his fragile heart stopped working Ken’s last interaction on this earth was tender, with three pounds of unconditional love curled up like a comma on his chest.
Sophie tells me that these days, every day without her dad begins not with sorrow and dread, but with Edgar licking her face and making her smile – ready, always ready to help her get ready to walk out into the world.
Edgar’s not doing too well today. Shortly after we rescued him, he had to have 15 teeth removed due to his life on the streets and his poor diet. Remember that ghastly breath? Now, due to genetic predispositions and his past dental issues, his remaining teeth are rotting at the root and causing him pain. The only solution that will bring him relief is to fully remove the last of his teeth through oral surgery. Of course Sophie wants to give him the care he needs and is hoping that if he has ever brought a smile to your face, you might consider a donation.
To raise the $1,000 fee for the procedure, she has created stickers featuring her rendering of her soon-to-be-toothless best buddy with all proceeds going towards the cost of his surgery.
So, gentle reader, if you have a fiver to spare, I hope you’ll consider helping her out. Now a full-time college-student with a part-time job and medical bills of her own, Sophie wants to raise the funds for Edgar’s surgery and pre-surgery blood work/aftercare by working extra hours and this fundraiser.
Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit. There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you. And so, my fellow graduates, make the world before you a better one by going into it with all boldness. You are up to it and you are fit for it; you deserve it and if you make your own best contribution, the world before you will become a bit more deserving of you.
~ From his remarks to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill graduates, May 12, 1996
Dear Seamus Heaney,
Six years since you left us, I want to let you know your poems are still with me, all those well-crafted words showing up like old and true friends who catch my heart off-guard and blow it open. I often wish I’d had the chance to let you know in person, that one day, maybe at the bus-stop down the road from Barney’s Forge, our paths would cross. All “happed up” in your duffel coat, you – our laureate – would remark on the drizzle. It would be colloquial, reminding me of the way my father speaks – and I would agree and then weave in a thank you before it was too late.
I would thank you for all those times I was braver and bolder because of something you had written, and for the way you schooled me to love from afar the language and the graveled lanes of Castledawson and Bellaghy. I would thank you for showing me how to “credit marvels” in the unlikeliest small things, and for nudging me to set down words on a page or light up a screen with them, so I might one day be able, “to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.” But the opportunity eluded me.
My Mother’s Bookshelf – By Sophie
Over the years, during the worst of times for those I love and who love me, when I didn’t know what to say, I would turn to your pitch-perfect poetry and wrap up my condolences in your certain sure words. When you died, Seamus, I remember being struck by the realization that only you would be capable of producing the right words to assuage Ireland’s sorrow over your passing. Only you. You always had the right word right when I needed it, when I found myself in “limbo land,” uncertain – Incertus – between faith and doubt, a rock and a hard place, fear and wonder, magic and loss – myth and reality – maybe not unlike Van Morrison’s dweller on the threshold
If you have the words . . . there’s always a chance that you’ll find the way.
On this, the sixth anniversary of your death, I am pulled back to “The Underground,” one of my favorite poems. I didn’t know until recently that it was a favorite of yours too, and that back in 2009, when asked to choose a poem or two that would exemplify your lifetime achievement in poetry, ‘The Underground’ was one of them.
The Underground
There we were in the vaulted tunnel running,
You in your going-away coat speeding ahead
And me, me then like a fleet god gaining
Upon you before you turned to a reed
Or some new white flower japped with crimson
As the coat flapped wild and button after button
Sprang off and fell in a trail
Between the Underground and the Albert Hall.
Honeymooning, moonlighting, late for the Proms,
Our echoes die in that corridor and now
I come as Hansel came on the moonlit stones
Retracing the path back, lifting the buttons
To end up in a draughty lamplit station
After the trains have gone, the wet track
Bared and tensed as I am, all attention
For your step following and damned if I look back.
You never looked back.
When I found out that your final words were in the form of a text to your wife from your hospital bed, I remembered your Orpheus in the Underworld, and the Latin you loved.
Noli Timere.
Just two words from an ancient world illuminating a tiny dark space – “Be not afraid.”
There was a surety in that, wasn’t there? All those years after first publishing your poems under a pseudonym, Incertus (Uncertain), you left us with a simple, spare, and forward-looking reassurance, reminding us of what you had told us once before, that “it is important to be reassured.”
So thank you, Seamus. I am still looking forward. I am walking on air.
A version of this article appeared in the Ulster issue of Reading Ireland.
There is no denying Gerald Dawe’s sense of wonder for Van Morrison – and for Belfast – in his lovely book In Another World.Culled from all the material Dawe has published on Morrison since the 1990s, it is a portrait of these artists in and of Belfast, their “otherness” in the city that made them, a city that changed forever when sectarian violence took possession of it in the late 1960s. In his preface to this little volume of essays, Dawe welcomes us in to partake of all on offer in Belfast the early and mid-1960s, a wondrous time for the northern capital, a mecca for live music in dancehalls and ‘hops’ all over the city, and in living rooms and parlors, its people tuned into the radio. In his North Belfast home, young Dawe is immersed in a world of creativity, “fascinated by stories overheard” about the way things used to be – in the songs of his opera singing grandmother, of Cleo Laine and Sarah Vaughan, of Ella Fitzgerald on the gramophone. This is another world, a lost world where all the young dudes in Belfast wore black arm-bands following the news that Otis Redding had died in a plane crash in Wisconsin. It was in this other world that Ella Fitzgerald performed one night, and when Dawe’s mother returns home from the gig, she tells him, “I’m sent.”
In the heart of this rocking city, he places Van Morrison, a working man working out his songs with “the accent you heard in the streets,” helping lead the way for Dawe to emerge as a poet, with a new confidence that it was possible to be both “a Belfast guy and lyrical.” Armed thus, two Orangefield Boys School alumni begin their journey in a “city dominated by work, work, work.” But theirs is a creative labor, a different kind of work than expected of them in industrial Belfast. In Another World is a tribute to that labor and to the city that inspired it before The Troubles “put into quarantine those kinds of energies.”
As he has explained elsewhere, Dawe is a poet in love with “the notion of cramming a world into a short space on the page, by allusion, turn of phrase, suggestion,” a notion that is realized in this slim volume of just 116 pages. Reminiscent of Seamus Heaney’s thatcher, Dawe has the Midas touch, “pinning down his world, handful by handful,” with trademark exactitude. The world that produced Van Morrison and Gerry Dawe is a red-bricked “civic landscape of class distinction,” in which children learn their place very early in life. In his music, Morrison revisits this Belfast, in songs of innocence and experience as the guy who worked in a meat-cleaning factory, a chemist’s shop, and as a window-washer in Orangefield. It is in these lyrics that Dawe finds a kinship with Patrick Kavanagh, in the “walking down familiar streets in search of that elusive authentic past, although when he asks Morrison about the Kavanagh connection in a 1995 public conversation, the transcript of which is included in the book, the singer keeps it simple: “It’s really all the same. The difference is you just do it with music.” This suffices for Dawe, the acclaimed poet who once responded when asked If he could write his epitaph in no more than 10 words, what it would be and why,
Gerald Dawe, Poet, born 1952 Belfast. The simpler it is the better.
In retrospect, Dawe is surprised by Morrison’s candor, aware as the rest of us of the singer’s reputation as a notoriously difficult interviewee. Throughout his career, Morrison has explained repeatedly that he will not and, more importantly, cannot “intellectualize” or engage in the kind of navel-gazing analysis of his music that will compromise what Dawe calls “the fate of genuine artistic endeavor.” Not surprising then that Morrison has delivered more than a few blunt responses to interviewers who have not been paying attention, reminiscent of Bob Dylan in that famous 1965 press conference in San Francisco. When asked if he thought of himself as a protest singer or a rock and roll singer, young Dylan replied, “Oh, I think of myself more as a song and dance man.” Case closed.
Similarly, any attempt to pigeon-hole Van Morrison is a fool’s errand. Hip to this, Dawe probes to determine the source of the songs, where the lyrics come from. And, Morrison tells him.
Morrison now in his seventies is the consummate performer, a recording artist still on the road honing his craft, doing what he refers to as “earning my living” as he has done since beginning his musical apprenticeship in the early 1960s. Already as gruff as John Lee Hooker, he seemed much older, having written “Gloria” when he was a teenager, playing in the city’s clubs, Sammy Houston’s Jazz Club on Great Victoria Street and at The Maritime.
Asserting himself with all boldness, he served his time in Belfast until 1967 when he “ran out of space” and left for New York. “I worked my way from my Belfast to New York and didn’t even know I was there because it was work,” Morrison once remarked in a 1987 interview. A year later, he would record Astral Weeks. Dawe clarifies that contrary to what many music critics have described as a breakthrough record for Morrison, Astral Weeks is a compilation of work – a vision – that he had begun sketching in Belfast. Considered together, its songs mark a poetic shift, presenting another mode – another mood – for the singer. Most resonant and relevant for Dawe is its centerpiece composition, “Madame George,” a farewell not only to Morrison’s youth, but also to a way of life in a city still unblemished by bombs and bullets and unnecessary bloodshed. For young Gerry Dawe, it is a farewell to a place where curiosity and creativity had flourished, where he and his friends “did not know a great deal about sectarianism. It just wasn’t part of the psychic landscape.” As Dawe describes it, “’Madame George’ is a portrait of a society about to withdraw from public view at the same time as the voice which describes it is also leaving the scene.” The reality is that fifty years ago, Astral Weeks may not even have been on the radar in Northern Ireland, its people more intent on what was happening in Derry in 1968. For some, it would take thirty years to fully absorb the blow that Astral Weeks was their Paradise Lost – it was Seamus Heaney’s “music of what happens.” This poignant goodbye to Belfast may indeed prompt readers to indulge in fantasies about another world that might have been.
What if the storm never came?
With the insight of a local, Dawe meanders through space and time, from the attic of his house in North Belfast overlooking the city’s amber lights below to streets and characters and urban rituals now familiar to a global audience – to Cyprus Avenue and Fitzroy, to the lower Falls and Orangefield, to Hyndford Street and the Beechie River and out to the Castlereagh Hills. There’s Madame George, and Sam and Van cleaning windows before breaking for tea and Paris buns and lemonade in the corner shop; there’s “the soldier boy older now with hat on, drinking wine”; there’s the train from Dublin up to Sandy Row, and, in “Boffyflow and Spike,” which Dawe reads aloud while Morrison accompanies him on guitar, there is a sense of wonder: “wee Alfie at the Castle picture house; pastie suppers at Davy’s Chipper, gravy rings, barmbracks, wagon wheels, snowballs. A Sense of Wonder.” Going back to a time “when the world made more sense,” as Morrison proclaims in his 1991 Hymns to the Silence, it would be reductive to characterize In Another World as a sentimental trip to a place where the grass is always greener. Nonetheless, it is a journey of nostalgia, and it is worth noting, as Dawe has pointed out previously, the etymology of the word: “Nostalgia is about the pain of home, -nostos – home, and algia – pain.” In Another World is a more nuanced imperative to get on with the show, summed up in the title track of Morrison’s 2003 album, “What’s Wrong with this Picture” – “Don’t you understand I left all that jive behind?”
His journey from “the home place” in pre-Troubles Belfast to a space where he could pursue artistic life on his own terms is not one that can be packaged in the myth of modern celebrity culture. As Dawe describes it, Morrison’s work inhabits a space that “has continuously moved in and out of his audience’s expectations,” the artist a wily critic of the crassness and commercialization of a music business that “thrives on and exploits disclosure” of the private persona behind a typically recalcitrant public self. Morrison leaves no doubt about this, once stating that “music is spiritual, the music business isn’t.”
His spiritual journey began in a childhood home that was full of music. His father, a shipyard worker and an avid record collector, was the key influence, with an enormous collection of rare American blues and jazz vinyl. As Morrison himself acknowledges, “There was probably only ten big collectors of blues and jazz in Belfast and my father was one of them.” Fitting then, that at the age of nine, Morrison was already a fan of Jelly Roll Morton, Lead Belly, and Solomon Burke. Orangefield Boys School was no match for the education he received from his father’s astonishing collection of jazz and Wild West books or from the movies of the day. His years at school were not helpful. A self-described freak, Morrison explains that
“There was no school for people like me . . . either we didn’t have the bread to go to the sort of school where we could sit down and do our own thing or that type of school didn’t exist.”
Thus, he was never taught about the Irish writers or any literary traditions. It was through other often solitary means that he discovered Dickens, Kerouac, Yeats, Blake, Kavanagh, Joyce, Heaney, and his own distinctive voice as an Irish writer. Unlike Dawe, a poet, literary critic and former Professor of English and Fellow of Trinity College Dublin, Van Morrison brings no academic credentials to his craft. He brings to it what he tells Sean O’Hagan in 2008, an exploration of the themes of “all Irish writing . . . Basically, Irish writers, and I include myself here, are writing about the same things . . . Often it’s about when things felt better. Either that, or sadness… It’s the story about going back and rediscovering that going back answers the question, or going back and discovering it doesn’t answer the question. Going away and coming back, those are the themes of all Irish writing.” Or more succinctly,
There are two stories in music – leaving and going home.
Now in his early seventies, having released his 40th album, The Prophet Speaks, Morrison describes himself as a “work in progress.” His second album of 2018, it is a collaboration with jazz multi-instrumentalist Joey DeFrancesco and marks a return to the blues and jazz that inspired him as a young musician in Belfast, a journey back to “the old way, the jazz way.” Previewing it from the Europa Hotel in Belfast, Morrison says “It goes back to Into The Mystic and various things I’ve written so it’s new and old; there’s a thread which is ongoing.” Still a journeyman, honing his craft, Morrison reiterates his commitment to the labor as inseparable from the homing instinct that is a powerful motif in his work, explaining in a statement to Rolling Stone, “It was important for me to get back to recording new music as well as doing some of the blues material that has inspired me from the be- ginning. Writing songs and making music is what I do, and working with great musicians makes it all the more enjoyable.”
Morrison shares the cover of the record with the ventriloquist dummy from Educating Archie, evoking the radio program from his childhood. Apt, this tribute to a time and a place Dawe captures as one where “people really did get on with it; and get it on,” the kind of stoic yet soulful quality Seamus Heaney summed up as “keeping going.” Journeying back, it is a tribute to radio, a wireless portal into another world – a free world – in “the days before rock n roll.” As Dawe reflects,
“radio was our way into the wider world. At first it was the big old woolen-faced box in the corner and then the moveable transistor which was carried around like an iPhone . . . the radio was a great connector; it made a younger generation feel that even while you might have been up in the back bedroom on your own, you knew there were thousands like you ‘listening in’ and that conversations were had about whose new single was just out, or an album. Or simply playing back music from before.”
Dawe’s final chapter of this particular journey In Another World opens with lines from the late Mose Allison, a genre-defying artist revered by Morrison, who once referred to himself as “the man without a category” in a world eager to place him in one. Closing the book on Van Morrison’s Belfast, it is through Allison’s lens that Dawe ponders the only question that continues to matter. This world is another world once more:
