Shadowbahn(39)
tracks 09 and 10:
“Dancing in the Dark” and “Spirit in the Dark”
All the twin songs change places in the light and the dark. “Dancing in the Dark” is written in the third year of the Depression. A love song, it also can be heard as a tune of defiance (we can face the music together) before one national dark displaces the next, until the looming prospect of nuclear obliteration’s atomizing light is so bright that everyone can only wish for a dark in which to dance. Renditions come and go, not to mention the song’s title, which later is used for altogether different songs. In a Hollywood studio musical of the early fifties, the song becomes a ballet, but the most terrifying version is performed by the ballet’s dancer in another context entirely, on a recording in which the singer slows down the song to the tempo of the small jazz combo accompanying him and delivers the lyric at little more than the volume of awed dread that occupies the song’s heart. One hears, over the singer’s shoulder, the darkness yawn to swallow him. Another two decades later, “Dancing in the Dark” is answered by “Spirit in the Dark,” written and sung by a minister’s daughter. All of my brothers, her song announces midway, move with the spirit, all of my sisters . . . the dark reasserting its promise of sanctuary, a reminder that light isn’t always life and that the death that God brings is better than that brought by men. We know what the dark is, the black woman sings to whatever white audience listens, because you taught us. You kept us there for three hundred years, so now let us guide you to it. Dance a little closer, a little deeper in the dark.
tracks 11 and 12:
“That Lucky Old Sun” and “Warmth of the Sun”
The first song is composed in 1949, recorded by artists both black and white before its definitive rendering by a blind rhythm-and-blues revolutionary in the same year as an American president’s assassination. On that same murder-day, the second song is composed by two young men born and bred in the California beach towns south of Los Angeles, the writing begun before the trigger is pulled and finished after the bullet tears off the president’s head—so who’s to say what epiphany explodes in the course of that bullet’s trajectory? Can the warmth of the sun, it won’t ever die only have been written before the gunshot, or only after? Is the song transformed—without any writer or singer having altered it—simply by the moment with which it coincides? Does “That Lucky Old Sun” have greater ramifications because its most comprehending interpretation turns the song from desperation to grace? Do its implications become more momentous only because that definitive performance coincides with not only the year a president is assassinated but also the year that an Atlanta preacher delivers to a quarter of a million people, before the country’s greatest monument, the greatest American speech of the American century? Both songs are sung in the shadow of the sun they claim to extol but actually distrust. They’re songs not of the sun’s warmth or light, but rather the singers’ memories of warmth once but no longer felt, light once but no longer seen.
aquarium
When Jesse opens his eyes, damned if he has the slightest idea where he is. On waking, he’s never sure whether he’s back high in the Tower beneath the roof of the night, or how he ever would have been there. The first thing he sees is the steel outlines of twin constructions framed in the window next to him—and then he remembers he’s in a holding cell at the police precinct on Vesey in Lower Manhattan. Somewhere in the building a woman bellows, “Cut them off! Kill the scum! Death to the testosterone rex!” as Jesse’s eyes rest on the unfinished Towers’ rising steel girders.
? ? ?
He wonders if they’ll be gone like a Boeing 767 with his first blink. He doesn’t so much recognize the Towers, since he only saw one from the other in his earlier existence, and since a hurricane can’t be recognized outside the eye from where one leapt however long ago it’s been. But even the Trade Center’s skeleton evokes something familiar, the scaffold of a memory, a home that never was. In his cell window the nearly full moon is caught in the metal brace of what someday will rise to become the second Tower’s ninety-third floor, a glowing white sea-castle in a sky-aquarium filled with the fish of swimming stars.
procedural
After establishing in cursory fashion and with stony neglect that Jesse is unscathed other than the ringing of gunfire in his ears, for hours the next morning police batter him with questions. What was his relationship with the shooter (“I don’t got no relationship with that crazy woman, sir, I don’t believe she has any such relationships”), what conspiracy was concocted and what were the motives (“I never before in my life met that there congressperson, can’t possibly imagine why anyone would want to kill such a fine fellow”), until—precinct eyes narrowing and lips pursing—the questions begin to contradict each other.
? ? ?
When Jesse is returned to his cell, Val’s invectives of the night before have gone silent. Someone brings him a burger and Coke. The course of the day passes; a public defender comes and goes, having no more conversation with Jesse than is necessary to identify himself. An officer informs Jesse that federal agents are being brought into the case given the victim’s identity. At some point Jesse is returned to the interrogation room for further questioning, where he waits another hour before being returned to the cell with no interrogation having resumed. Almost forty-eight hours after the shooting, another officer unlocks the cell, releasing Jesse with no explanation and no charges filed.