Of Lilacs and Old Lace

                                                                                    *** 

Woke up to the smell of lilacs and old lace.

Got up to the sound of the razor on my face.

Tried to find the morning,

But the sun was still in mourning,

And there were sun dogs dancing round the waning moon.

Woke up to the smell of lilacs and old lace.

Got up to the sound of the razor on my face.

Listened to the radio,

But it was just insane, and so

I ground my coffee staring at the moon.

I thought the job was boring.

It’s the thing I was ignoring.

And the daily news was like a dancing clown.

The lilac memories 

Always brought me to my knees,

And the church bells ringing at the edge of town.

Woke up to the smell of lilacs and old lace.

Got up to the sound of the razor on my face.

Found it was a dream 

That I could never quite believe,

And so I left my coffee underneath the moon.

***

Creativity is one of the great, joyous mysteries of human life. It’s better than almost anything I know. Better even than the wonderful sensation of intestinal void. 😉  

I suppose everyone who engages in some kind of creative effort, whether it be making a cake, making music or writing in a diary, has precious, rarified moments when she or he steps back and thinks, “Wow, that’s great. Where did that come from?”

And I agree: Where the hell does it come from?

It’s pretty obvious: No matter how much thinking may go into a creative project, most of our actual creativity takes place behind the scenes, tucked away in what we glibly call “the unconscious”, but which is so very much more complex and sophisticated than mere “not-awareness”. 

We may get flashes of insight, glimpses of the road before us, but they always emerge from somewhere else, a place we cannot see or hear directly. It’s dark and both inviting and scary. There may be dragons. Sometimes there are fireworks. Sometimes ghosts. Sometimes it’s: what the…?

Fortunes are made (and lost) in “helping” people create meaning out of the products of this creative void that frequently seem impervious to meaning. It’s easy to get scared. Each of us from time to time experiences some bizarre thought or other bubbling up into awareness, often in our most private, unguarded moments. 

I certainly do. It happens a lot, actually, especially around 2:30 in the morning. Or sometimes in the shower. More often now even than when I was, you know, playing with brain chemistry. Is it a function of age? Or merely of paying attention to it?

Sometimes I actually understand. Sometimes I get it: Oh, that was about the dog pooping on the sidewalk yesterday. Or: That was because I saw my neighbor’s foot as he was stepping out of his house three months ago. Abstract shapes. Falling stars. Cupcakes on parade. Any or all of it has the potential to creep into my mind and give the gears another turn.

A lot of the time though, I don’t get it…and I’m OK with that. I find the strange thoughts reassuring, the sense of mystery oddly amusing. Hilarious, even. Because of this, I know I am alive, with my creativity intact. God help me if it ever goes away!

AND SO, I don’t normally flinch when a song comes to me, and I realize that I have no idea at all what it’s about. I figure: Hooray! My nonsense is still intact.

There is time for “meaning” to reassert itself…or not, as needed. Why should I spoil a pretty thing, maybe work it over to squeeze it into a little box of meaning that it may not fit, kill it maybe, just for the sake of making sense?

When I reflect on it, I probably got this from a couple of sources. First was certainly my older brother, Jerry, who used to challenge me as a lad to question nearly everything in my world and in my mind. No assumption was safe; no convention was left unturned. It was the 60s, after all: Ideas were up for grabs. I had my own personal rabble rouser!

Then came Frank Zappa. I don’t think I need to say anything more than that.

And when I got a little older, I had the chance to talk with Jerry about his process as a painter. The thing was, he spoke as if he was somehow discovering the painting as he was painting it, as if the image was already there, waiting inside him for the chance to be realized on the canvas. He never seemed to have much of a plan, beyond the next couple of elements he could “see”. Yet he had faith that the result would be Beauty. And he was right an awful lot of the time.

All of which brings me to the genesis of this essay: the story behind my song, “Lilacs and Old Lace.”

It began with the world starting to come apart at the seams in early October, 2016. There was this haunting feeling that everything was on the verge of spinning completely out of control. If you were an adult with your head screwed on straight living through that time, you know exactly what I mean.

Walking the dog on dank Brockport evenings, waking and walking to the office for early-morning work, watching Leyla play at the Strong Museum…at some point or other, I got this phrase, this image in my head: lilacs and old lace. 

I thought it was pretty. I thought it was intriguing. I thought it was evocative. But I was clueless about what it meant and where it came from. As usual.

At some point, it started to be about waking up to the smell and hearing the razor on the face. That made the rhyme…but so what? Where to next?

I soldiered on. More images came. Sun dogs around the moon; morning and mourning; making coffee (even though I don’t drink the stuff myself); and the image of the news being like a dancing clown. I liked that particular idea a lot — that much I understood!

When I tell it now, it gives the impression of something coherent emerging…but that was far from my experience of it. In the moment, it was just a bunch of disconnected images lolling about, begging for a melody and a structure. 

I therefore supplied them, and eventually it all came together into a song. There’s something like a story there: images, perhaps, from a broken love affair, maybe someone jilted “at the altar” as they say. I dunno exactly. And horns, lots of horns. I enjoyed composing it almost as much as I enjoyed writing it…which pretty much ideal, right?

For a year, it was just a nice song with a nice melody and a funky image that really came out of nowhere…and pretty much stayed there. I didn’t know what it was “really” about, and I didn’t need to. It was “just” another one of my beloved offspring.

Then came a turning point.

There’s an organization here in Rochester that sponsors a songwriting contest each year. I only heard about it secondhand, through a friend, about a week before the deadline. But I thought, “OK, why not? Do I have to play at Emily Dickenson the rest of my life?”

The idea was: write a song on the theme “How did we get here?” You had to use that line in the song and in the title. Well, since I’m shamelessly flexible, I gave it a go. 

Shameless.  

I laugh about it now, as I laughed about it at the time: No doubt the sponsors were looking for something fun, something celebratory, something that true Rochesterians would recognize as somehow fitting for their town. Or whatever.

Me, I just wanted to see if I could do it: Could I take a song that I had already written and spin it a little differently to speak in a different voice. Or something like that. It was a challenge. Like threading a needle. With mittens on.

The setting was fine. Either my songs are good, or not. I wasn’t worried about that part. But the lyrics? Could I take on the task of totally rewriting the lyrics of a song, just for this contest?

…?

Naaah. What would happen, I wondered, if just…er…massaged a bit? And the victim: “Lilacs and Old Lace”. After all, I reasoned, I still had no idea what the song was about, anyway. Maybe I was just waiting for an excuse like this to finally tame the thing.

The first challenge was that the song was in third-person singular (He woke up, the sound of the razor on his face, etc.), but the theme was in the first-person plural. OK, so first-person it is — singular? plural? Meh, I figured I could finesse that.

Then there was the matter of putting the contest theme into the song somewhere. The only reasonable place for it was at the end of the bridge — there was no room anywhere else: I'd have to do some actual rewriting...which I was not up for at all. 

Thus the church bells ringin’ at the edge of town became how did we get here to this crazy town?

So I recorded the new lyrics, slapped the correct title on the song, and uploaded the recording and lyrics to the web site on the closing day of the contest.

And of course, I never heard back from them. Meh.

I’m not surprised, really: The song, as rewritten, could not possibly be interpreted as celebrating Rochester at all. The radio is insane, the sun is in mourning, the job is boring, “how did we get here?” becomes more of a plea than anything else, and in the end, I can’t believe the dream so the only thing to do is leave.

The audacity of it all.

BUT that is not quite the end of my tale, because this exercise eventually produced an aha! moment. A lightbulb-over-the-head moment: I suddenly understood it all, the whole song. It was actually about Rochester all along!

For a year I had been living with and loving this song, and then I finally connected the lyrics with Rochester…the self-professed Flower City…which has one of the largest collections of lilacs in the world…where there is an annual Lilac Festival in the spring! 

Rochester – even the name suggests something grand and old-fashioned, like lace out of the Gilded Age. Or something.

Only when I had put the song in the first-person did all the pieces suddenly fit together in my mind. For yes, I do wonder sometimes how the hell I got to this place. And yes, I do not-so-secretly wish I could fly away somewhere else.

My creative subconscious had been trying to tell me something. You think?

So there you have it: Strangely enough those eruptions out of Nowhere that we call creativity sometimes wind up staring us in the face in their all-too-obvious glory. 

It still does not explain how or where or even why. 

But it was good for a laugh.

P.S. As it happens (and I literally just discovered this just now, a year later), the event where all these “How Did We Get Here” songs were performed took place at Hochstein School of Music on November 11, 2017, which happened to be my 56th birthday. 5 + 6 = 11, which is a topic for another essay entirely.