Invades Us to the Skin

A study in complex ironies:  behold the bald man, functioning on something like three hours of low-quality sleep, working on a sinisterly seductive mix tape for a woman he half-dated in 2005.  You could get more sensible results by rolling two ten-sided dice and consulting a random chart in your Dungeon Master’s Guide.   As an old companero of mine used to say, if I knew what I was doing, I’d be done.

Because I am Master of the Sidelong Segue, however, my mixtape mischief will inform my treatment of the theme I left dangling last time around.  It’s not a wrasslin’ metaphor, but it will have to do.

At the moment, the track list of the tape in question consists of eight suggestive songs, ranging in proximal naughty from Dead Can Dance’s “The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove” (subtitle:  The Bald Man Theme) to Korn’s “Make Me Bad.”  Love me, love my whimsy.  I am struggling to round out the selections, however, because I have a compellingly strong sense of mixtape rectitude:  nothing goes on the tape unless it feels right, unless my uncanny bald man senses tell me that no other song could occupy its place.  I have accordingly been scouring my collection for forgotten gems, and I’ve also been perusing discographies to try on new tastes and flavors.  On any tape I make 4-6 tracks will usually be pleasant surprises, yet they too must be subjected to the tests of rectitude.  Discovering a compelling new fit (like Massive Attack’s “Inertia Creeps,” which dovetails perfectly in the space I have assigned it) is one of the greatest delights of the process.

And what, you might wisely ask, are these tests of rectitude?  Damned if I know.  I don’t know the source of the sensibilities that cause me to pick a given song, I don’t understand the rationale that convinces me a song must go in one location and nowhere else, and I can’t fathom what made me decide why the theme of this particular collection would be “sinister seduction” in the first place.  I also don’t know why I’m making the tape to begin with, for that matter.  Such is the Tao of Me, and there you have the mysteries of verse (as I understand them) in a nutshell.

The work of verse makes good sense to me.  I appreciate the mechanics of the process, and most days you’ll find me plotting out tactical enjambment, trying out adjectives for sound, sense, and secondary suggestions, and doing all the things a journeyman poet should do.  Just don’t ask me where the plans and the building materials come from, however, because you’ll make me feel sad on the inside.  In any given poem I’ll make hundreds of judgment calls from conception to execution, and I could not begin to tell you what makes me hew and yaw as I do.   That’s double true when it comes to revision, which obliges me to identify and rectify faults and flaws that I could not perceive in the original.  There’s a mystery in the mix, and not the kind that Velma can solve in a half hour.

Thankfully I don’t question those impulses all that much in the act; that way lies madness, or at least ulcers.  (Today’s title is drawn from King Lear as well, by the bye, lest you sprain a pinkie googling.)  I’m tuned as I’m tuned, and while my range increases every time I write, while my mind is stocked and populated by everything I read, there’s some aspect of the work that remains appreciably if unquantifiably mine. 

Not much of an answer, I know, and I’d be more than happy to find one better.  The search reminds me of a talk delivered back at Emory during my first year, however, when a novel scholar promised to characterize the genre in convenient handlist form and produced a catalogue fraught with all the problems that plagued every other effort of the kind.  Some mysteries are better left to the experts, and some are better left alone.