Rod Stewart’s Mandolin Wind
So, I’m up in the mountains again, and I’m reading Wallace Stevens — reading about him, reading his poems. I take music with me, listen to it before and after the readings. It’s very windy on the top of the mountain. Actually, the winds are ferocious at times. Merciless. And because I heard the Rod Stewart song in the car before I went to my place, my perfect spot, near the beautiful jagged rocks and the vulnerable pine trees, I hear the mandolin notes in that wind. They’re everywhere, including on the page. I see them dance around on the white pages of the biography and the collected poems, along with the wind that won’t let those pages be . . . still.
One must almost lose the mind of winter in order to feel the mandolin notes in that way, as a call to spring, to the past, to memories of that past. Melancholy as a natural force that won’t let us dwell in the present just yet. Or, as a force that won’t let us do anything else but dwell. Warm days, with that kind of wind, up in the mountains, away from the white noises of cities, suburbia, the semi-rural. Up above all of that, the wind rules, it holds sway and creates sway. It takes center stage, but breaks the center and casts it in all directions at once. No one owns the wind. No one owns the mandolin notes once they escape into the wind.
Not Stewart. Not Stevens. Not me.
In my view, Stevens is the greatest American poet of the 20th Century, and no one could jazz nature like he could. No one could spring word-traps on us like he could, in such eloquent, elegant ways, with a vocabulary that seems to come from an Oxford don in the midst of a surrealist bash, loving the sound and sense of the strangest words and the way they pull disparate things together. The imagination’s deepest sounds, its grammar set loose on holiday.
If he could be faulted for anything, it’s possibly his seeming lack of the topical. Of the immediately current. Of the politically relevant. But we have myriad artists who deal with that, so I never saw this as a true fault in his work. We go to other artists for that. We go to Stevens for the Sublime, the sharply whimsical, the beautifully arranged aesthetic of a mage in love with language itself, and what language tells us about the world as idea, as soul, as sound.