If You Can Hear Me

On James Blake's recent song for his father and how I deeply I relate to it

An insistent telepathy bridges the ghosts and me and that riddling clairaudience is what I deem music, what I search for in sound, the only substance that can enter the body at will and reprogram it from root to surface. In the beginning was the word and the word was dad, jazz, father, papa, pop music, jazz bruises, blues blooded pop of bullets from his fusil (gun in French), fuse the languages, refuse to differentiate them, pop of gold rings on pomade, patrilineal afrosheen of half obedience, half placation, tender grammar of unlearning everything but music.

When the word disappeared or receded, so did the beginning. We lost him, and we lost our way. For a while I forgot that poetry was the family business, that this soft nepotism or mandate or fate in a pleasant mood was mine like the music was, lossless. It had entered me before I could even consent, as my blood, my name, my deepest hunger and that endless rebirth of the largest looming missing person on earth. It’s in style to blame entertainers for passing their affliction down, their griot need to be witnessed to survive, their dangerous urge to tell stories no one requested in tones whose beauty no one can contest. But I wear my blood proudly, I’m unapologetic about it. Not with the obnoxious pride of jesters, but with the subtle involuntary pride of daughters. Every day is elegiac when the musician father dies. This is just how it is, it’s the wages of being born into so much violence and beauty. It’s obsessed with you and you become its reflection, its redemption, its ruins and renewal.

I confide this again and again and I wonder what other singers are born into obsession with the threshold between being and oblivion that is the musician parent, dead or alive, whose music is always playing in your body like scripture, a separate and secret DNA. At a party full of musicians last weekend, British musician James Blake came up in conversation. Someone accused him of nepotism for covering one of his father’s songs. A song about screaming. Another person asked, why, in this era, are we asking one another to disinherit our fathers’ music? Why does it matter that he’s carrying on the family business? Why don’t we commend this blunt and inescapable mafia, and recognize that it is never easy or linear as pedigree? I concur. On his most recent album Playing Robots into Heaven, Blake addresses his father directly. Can the robots be redeemed by a resurrection story so personal it can only linger as folklore, so personal it is depersonalized in the telling? This is a trick the disinherited play on ourselves to keep track of our dead ones. He tells his dad he went too far forward, the chords ache and bevel a scattered nonlinear grieving, we even grieve the living with our shared survivor’s guilt. Dad, if you can hear me, I chased it all too far… I followed your lead. And although it feels like trespassing to weep so freely, I do, at the sound of his confession. I wrote a book of letters to my own father and all of them secretly began, Dad, if you can hear me. It comes to this, we reclaim our innocence in disavowing it. We think to ourselves, now that I know everything, and having seen everything, you were right to play your way into heaven. We make a spaced out chorus of their most angelic influences until chrysalis is all that’s left of their endless transformation, endlessly handed down, which we must inhabit for them. 

The other night I had a dream of another life, maybe inspired by this song and its cautious longing, its way of whispering, don’t come back, just listen. I was at my father’s funeral, which I never attended in waking life. I was there with other family members and I was upset and a little belligerent. Everyone was so resigned to the circumstance of death and its rigid stillness. There wasn’t enough music. There were no dancers, no gospels to send anyone home by. I got up and went over to the casket in the front of the room. The room itself was disheveled for a formal funeral, as if it was some kind of impromptu luncheon. Nothing was ceremonious enough. I lifted the lid of the closed casket, he’s not dead, you people don’t know anything about anything I yelled. He was in there, perfectly still for a beat, looking clean and beautiful, before he raised one arm, then another, and began to get out of that box. See, I continued making my point, you don’t know what life is, and I quoted Sun Ra, life is endless. I woke up with one of those heaping situational hangovers like I had traveled to a forbidden dimension to enact justice and would have to gather myself as if it had never happened and go interview the musicians I’d be writing about soon.

It dawns on me that being so haunted by resurrection fantasies that are also real has changed the way I wield language. Every scene and sentence is an opportunity for drastic change, the stakes are spells and incantations. Saying something you don’t mean could bring it to life, saying something you do mean will make it real in everything you do. I relate to the sons and daughters of this affliction. I text Mingus’s daughter, now a friend, that same afternoon, not to mention the dream but tell her say I found a recording of him speaking that she might want. It’s like lifting the lid on his coffin. I feel invasive but I do it anyway. We talk for a while. Then, I run into Michelle Coltrane, daughter of John and Alice Coltrane at a celebration of  a Pharoah Sanders’ album reissue for which I wrote the liner notes. Pharoah’s daughter is there and we discuss loss with our eyes. I send Michelle a recording her and I made a couple of weeks earlier, discussing life on the Ashram with her mother. I’m lifting the lid of our myths involuntarily. The other side of nepotism is suffering in silence until we find one another and lift these heavy coffin text lids together, is how it feels some days. They can hear us, playing with their heaven, tending to the frail garden of shadows in which they become strangers for years sometimes, and then return to earth in new bodies or forms or languages that we are forced to speak on their behalf, that we love to speak, that only we have. 

Without music and poetry all of this going between worlds would amount to deep emotional trouble, but with these tools, it’s like knowing a cheat code. People hate you a little for your access to the distressed code, and rely on you for it, and resent you for it, and swarm you for it like the resolute buzzards of nothingness. And when you transmute distress into euphoric silence, they call you privileged, they treat you like a secret only they should know, and blame you for what you force them to disinherit to know it. They cannot overcome you because they refuse to overcome themselves. You become their surrogate ego, their cheat code. It gets casual, to be seen as both the oracle and the fool that way, it’s an easy misappropriation to return to where it came from. We wake the zombies just by having eyes that can see them; we send them back to their wasteland by pretending not to see them. The generosity of the witness, often forsaken, is finally revoked. I refuse to watch them die. I’ll be there in time for the resurrection. 

“If You Can Hear Me” is the shortest song on James Blake’s new album. It gulps down a subtle bitterness in pursuit of sovereignty. It decides against patricide, but just glancingly, and with a blade in hand. And we can’t be sure who is centered and who is relegated to the peripheral vision of the two minute prayer, but it’s likely that the self, the singer, is sent to the sidelines to watch his maker disappear into his myth. He covers his ears and screams, it comes out muffled and meek. The pace is tentative and grasping, ominous, not desperate. Then relief intervenes, that sad knowing. Soliloquy was invented to fulfill a human need to address the other as the self. It’s easier to speak honestly to people when they’re gone, leaving, or just in between.