Roll Over Beethoven

When John Lennon was shot in 1980, I had a dream that he was sitting in a circle in heaven with my father and my Uncle Jerry, two fabulous small Jews who had only just died in the late '70s. He seemed to be giving them some valuable pointers about how to get along in the new neighborhood. Mind you, I don't believe in heaven in the angels-with-harps sense of the word, but there he was with one mustachioed New Yorker on either side of him, holding each by the hand and OM-ing away. It was a great comfort to know that my father, a non-believer, and my uncle, a conventional shul-on-Yom Kippur Jew, would be supervised in the world-to-come by someone with spiritual chops. I'm thinking about John because just recently Chuck Berry and Jimmy Breslin left us and it reminds me that the older you get, seventysomething in my case, the more you experience celebrity loss as well as personal loss. The people who have most impressed themselves on my awareness are at least as old as I am and are, in the nature of things, shriveling and dying off like garden lettuce in mid-summer.

It's always noteworthy when two famous figures die within a few days of one another. It causes a shift in the planetary angle of inclination. Certainly, Carrie and Debbie had that effect. Or Robert Mitchum, the compelling noir actor, whose obituary was vacuumed off the page by Jimmy Stewart who died the next day. The public can only digest one forkful of nostalgia at any given time. At the moment, I imagine Chuck and Jimmy in some smoke-filled celestial backroom chomping on cigars and telling outrageous self-aggrandizing stories. I don't know if Chuck Berry was aware of Jimmy Breslin, but you have to think that Jimmy appreciated Berry's high-wire act on the guitar. Celebrity deaths have the same day-glo vibrancy as unexpected celebrity encounters in life. I once saw Mohammed Ali walking down Seventh Avenue. Not only was he the most enormous person I had ever seen, but the wavelengths he radiated didn't seem to belong to the normal visible spectrum. He was literally larger than life.

Ordinary, finite beings like us are fascinated by death because it's where we go to play catch with the infinite. Otherwise, we have to settle for contemplative practices and certain chemicals that give us a taste of the vast, boundlessness from which we came and to which we will all return. But most people sober up the next morning and go to work or the dentist. Life on this plane imposes a great many demands. Because we don't have the luxury of time to consider death as a philosophical construct, our ideas remain under-cooked and tough from the urgency of fear.

People seem to think of themselves as separate units of consciousness and death as something wholly other, a complete departure from life that comes at the end, in the bottom of the ninth. This is the temporal equivalent of flat earth theory which is enjoying a comeback. You just keep going until you fall off the edge. The story I tell myself is different. I imagine one all-encompassing, integrated web of life and death with colors and forms transmuting in and out of kaleidoscopic designs. Strawberries and tigers come and go. Birds, friends, mothers, rock musicians and journalists. I saw this in another dream some years ago. I'm standing in the middle of a field and all the people I have ever known are flowing past me from the right and from the left like a complex traffic pattern. They keep gracefully arriving and departing. They keep sprinkling me with the fairy dust of their natures. I am the hub of this particular wheel, one of an infinite number of wheels. I am also ephemeral, like you, like all the people coming and going in the dream. Like Chuck Berry's last squealing guitar riff. But the reverberations of that insistent sound, the bridge that it builds out of Beethoven and over the troubled water will go on and on. Moonlight Sonata meet Maybelline.


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