Dark Eyes and the Music Makers: Part One

Home Burial essay series: Number 11

Note: I’m publishing this essay in two parts. Part Two will be out next Saturday, Feb. 17. You can hear Bob Dylan’s “Dark Eyes” here.

Now the dreams begin, realms begin to intermingle. Now time collapses like waves on a beach.

He sits at the dining room table in a house like that of his childhood, except the floorplan is wide open. I sit on a couch with my back to him, looking out the second-story window over an ocean. The sun behind clouds, the light outside shines crisp but indirect, bright and gray. Inside the air glows shadowy, warm.

Dad pours over old photographs at the table, barely aware I’m there. My older cousin arrives and brings him more photographs from her parents’ attic. I suggest to Dad he and his siblings should do the same, go through all their old photographs and give ones to the relatives who would find them most meaningful. He looks up at me.

“That’s asking a lot of everybody,” he says.

I realize he’s not merely looking at old photographs. He’s performing a ritual all dying people – one way or another – must do. He is going through the biography of his life, remembering the whole of who he has been in this realm before passing over to another, recollecting himself.

The dream shifts. The house we are in has sold. I’m frantic, upset. I don’t want to lose this place. Is there no way we could have kept the house in the family? It seems there is not. What’s done is done.

Dad remains quiet, looking at photographs.

The dream shifts again and I’m in a shack of a boat with two companions, choppy waves, a long voyage ahead of us. The house is worlds away. Dad is nowhere to be seen.

***

We don’t know if Dad has weeks or months left with us, but upon hearing the first leg of his dying journey has begun, my two older brothers quickly come to town.

It’s mid-January. I drive to Madison to pick them up – Jimmy in from Brooklyn, Matt from Charlotte. At the hotel room, Matt shares a bottle of grappa, a sweet, Italian liquor our Dad’s oldest brother introduced to us. Before long, we do what we’ll do many of the nights during Dad’s dying days, what we did with Dad over the years: listen to music.

This sounds mundane, what everybody does. You have some drinks. You listen to music. You chat. You go to bed. Next part of story.

And it definitely is mundane. We’re not lighting incense or worshipping the Godhead at the moment, at least not consciously. But of the many mundane things I will miss when I am no longer in this world (if I miss things then), listening to music with my brothers will be high on the list.

My brothers’ love for music mirrors our father’s, and when we listen together, he’s always in the room, even when he’s not. The music is not just background, but nor is it foreground. Music sits in the room with us like a friend, present, part of the conversation.

Tonight, for instance, Matt has made a playlist of songs we all listened to growing up – Clarence Carter’s “Patches,” David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” Bob Dylan’s “Man on the Street,” REO Speedwagon’s “Can’t Fight This Feeling” – and it’s just another playlist, nothing especially esoteric on it. But as with Dad, any song filtered through the ears of Jimmy and Matt gets elevated from its assumed artistic perch.

Take “Your Love,” an 80s pop song by The Outfield. If you were around then, you’ve heard it, and likely passed over it without a second thought. But my brothers hear it and somehow find beauty, at least an element of it. They go on and on about those unforgettable, high-pitched opening notes that the singer – even in a live concert recording! – hits perfectly. It’s like this guy was born to sing this one particular line in this one particular song and he found it, mastered it, and nobody else could have done it. You might hear the song and just hear crappy pop from an unfortunate era of music, but, well, first you’d be debated for writing off the 80s, and regardless there’s no denying this guy’s genius for those notes. Surely you can hear that!

And this is just the opening of one song that draws so much conversation and joy and replays. The range of their love for music is like Dad’s, vast and genreless, from high art to low art to old art to new art to whatever, play it and we’ll see.

***

I’m digressing from the story at hand, I know, but I do it with purpose.

When a person is dying, they sit in the center of a ceremony, the heart of concentric circles of love and grief, wounds, healing and stories that radiate out from their dying body. People who know the beloved well and not so well, who live near and far, who were close with him at another phase of his life but not so close now, get word of the coming death. Prayers, stories, emails, phone calls, cards arrive. Some visit. Some remember the dying one on their own, quietly. For a short period of time, for the days, weeks or months that the dying ceremony lasts, the body in the center of those outwardly flowing concentric circles sends waves into the hearts of those who know them. The closer you are, the bigger the wave and the more it shapes that time.

The dying isn’t all that’s happening, but especially for those closest to the dying one, it transforms all that’s happening.

My brothers and I have listened to so much music together over the years. It’s an old family habit, a pattern, even a ritual. But tonight, with Dad’s death approaching, it’s elevated even more.

After dinner, we go up to our hotel room and start the night with “Dark Eyes,” a Dylan song Dad played for us growing up, but that I hadn’t heard for years. The opening harmonica stops us in our tracks, and we’re mostly silent as we listen to the hymn. Dylan sings:

Oh, the gentlemen are talking and the midnight moon is on the riverside.

There are so many worlds in it – Dad’s love for Dylan, the countless Dylan songs we sang with him over the years, the melancholy melody, the lyrical mingling of a lost child, a drunken man, fallen gods, the dead that rise. Dylan sings:

They're drinking up and walking and it is time for me to slide.

In the morning, we will drive to see our dying father who blessed us with his reverent-irreverent, massively full-hearted love for music, who sang Dylan so much that sometimes their two voices blend together in my mind. Dylan sings:

I live in another world where life and death are memorized.

But tonight, though he sleeps elsewhere, he’s with us already, in this room where we three or more have gathered, our lives tangled for 40-plus years, now drinking terribly sweet grappa, with that rusty, familiar voice blooming from the harmonica, helping us feel perfectly what we feel, where, as Dylan sings, the earth is strung with lovers' pearls and all I see are dark eyes.