Vera C
[Earth seen from Saturn]
Eucalyptus trees are native to Australia, but they had been transplanted somehow, through some complexity of the world’s movements, to this place on the other side of the world where I found myself in the sun.
I had never seen them in my life until I lived here. They whispered outside my window in the early morning hours, telling tales of the unfathomably ancient that I only half-heard as I sat absorbed in a song, two and half minutes of pristine sonic truth and beauty that I played over and over, until the dawn came to draw me finally to sleep, and to dreams populated by all things vanished and mourned.
Listening to those chords, death encircles me, but it is somehow warm, enchantingly recalling the dust of things departed. The death of the life I lived when I first discovered that music, now more than a quarter century away, and the passing of a passionate love, something I swore was eternal as it flashed in my soul and that now lies still in the grave of the past, something else gone that I believed eternal.
And death too in the disappearance of the man who wrote the music, who died some years ago, his music now propelled only by those who still people this world. Myself, the others who sell and buy his recordings or put them on the Internet where others still alive can hear them, all of us, each one of us, ourselves counting out the seconds until our own untimely end.
For all endings, no matter how much they have been anticipated with hushed reverence, are thus: Untimely.
This music bears a woman’s name.
Vera C.
I do not know who she was, or is, and I likely never will. The song is too obscure to have made a significant imprint on the interconnected web of data servers that are the basis of human knowledge at present. I search for her and find only an astronomer named Vera C. Rubin, who will soon have an observatory in Chile named for her.
Could the Vera C. of this music—my Vera C.—still be alive? How could I discover this fact without expending time and energy I do not have, tracking down the composer’s colleagues and associates to ask them about the mysterious woman I have created behind this haunting music? And for what? To be given mundane facts from reality which can never measure up to the pristine fantasy I have created for myself about her?
My Vera C. is a melancholy French-Algerian, with the same mouth and nose of Isabelle Adjani, raven dark hair, a gaze that tells of sadness without end borne with stoic diffidence.
She has hands and fingers so delicate you fear merely stroking or holding them would cause her physical injury, so you struggle against the overwhelming urge to hold to her as though she were life itself.
Her only physical flaw, which she hides as she talks with those thin hands and which is only visible when she laughs, is the stained rear teeth from the administration of tetracycline when she was a young girl suffering from chronic illness.
It is this one flaw however that is also the gift that brought her to me, as it produced in her the profoundly sad longing for another time and place that is precisely what drew the musician to her, led him to become her friend, to desire to be her lover without ever finding the way to make this come to pass, and eventually led him to compose this delicate ghost, this funereal shroud of a song for her.
Perhaps he wrote the song after noting the look in her eye at the moment he imagined her to be thinking about her own death.
The Vera C of this flitting shadow moment, she too is dead, whether she still walks the planet somewhere or not.
The original version of the song, the naked version, is only the acoustic guitar and, entering midway through, some strings, but there exists a more embellished version with additional instrumentation and vocals. In this version, a female voice mellifluously calls in Spanish: “Yo no quiero nada…” She is anticipating the catastrophe she cannot escape, relinquishing her claim to anything as an embrace of the diamond-hard hopelessness that is the human condition without faith.
By chance, by merest chance, John Cage died right around this time when I was obsessively listening to this song and dreaming of Vera C.
I had asked him a question once, from the audience after a reading he had done. What did he think of people applauding him? Was this an appropriate response? I thought it a clever, properly Dadaist thing to ask.
He said people could do as they pleased. It wasn’t his affair.
The night I heard of his death, with Vera C’s song resonating in my brain, I walked, in the middle of the night, perhaps 10 miles north, past a eucalyptus grove, all the way to the beach.
I sat and looked at the ocean and imagined all the infinite dead in that boundless, black sea, washing up before me in swimming molecules that had been parts of their bodies, touching my eager, warm fingers in their eternal lifelessness and prescience.
Sometimes I would play the whole LP side and wait impatiently for her to arrive at the end. Other times I’d just play the song over and over. Sitting into the wee hours. A phantasmal woman was reading in the other room, then sleeping. Cats would lie on the couch and watch me disdainfully.
I had just at that time met a new friend. Together, we read Situationism and dreamed of kidnapping works of art from museums and holding them hostage. We pasted signs all over campus, alerting our fellows about the cages that were their everyday lives.
The irresistibly naïve young person’s idea of overthrowing everything established and being unbearably cool in doing it. Détourned Archie comics on bright red paper with Sharpied political word balloons.
One of our posters was still there fifteen years later when I came back.
To see the ghosts.
And to look for Vera C.