How Tom Waits Got Himself Knocked Up

"Je est un autre" writes Rimbaud with ungrammatical wisdom. "I is another."

This is the experience of reading--the doubleness of reading: we enfold ourselves in another consciousness, blurring but not crossing the boundary between the two. I am still I, but I can no longer conjugate myself quite the same way. My predication is displaced.

Georges Poulet, in his terrific essay, "The Phenomenology of Reading" writes that the work "thinks itself" in the reader. But the process isn't quite that simple. When one first picks up a book, one is still intensely conscious of the room in which one is sitting, of the look of the page, of hunger pains or sounds or drafts or...

And the process is never total, however much the Romantic in us would like it to be so. Reading is always intersubjective--we still are there, engaging and questioning and saying "I"--even if we now say "I is" rather than "I am."

There is a famous poem by an otherwise unknown poet, Cleobulus, from pre-Athenian Greece. His poem goes something like this:

I am the bronze maiden who lies on the grave marker of Midas,
And as long as the waters shall flow and the trees grow tall,
I will remain here on this famous tomb,
Announcing to passersby that Midas is buried here.

Now this is a strange and wonderful poem--whether or not these words were actually inscribed on a funerary statue is a matter lost to the ages, but the delicate and peculiar irony of it persists either way. The bronze maiden will surely be lost to time, just as was Midas, and she invokes the very agents of her own destruction: the flowing of water which will erode her, the trees whose roots will disrupt her subterranean ward.

But the poem is even stranger considering that silent reading was unknown to the Greeks--they read only alound, even when they were alone. So that a passerby encountering this poem (if the grave were real) or any reader encountering it, would say these words out loud: "I am the bronzen maiden..."

The reader literally envoices, embodies, the words here--he is simultaneously a performer and the bronze maiden and the passerby to whom she speaks.

So as I ponder the the imponderables of reading and performance and whatnot, I'm listening to Tom Waits' "Blue Valentine" and I realize that he's got it worked out better than I ever could.

"Christmas Card From a Hooker in Minneapolis" is a pretty stunning bit of performance about the nature of performance (or something less stupid sounding than that--you know what I mean, though).

The song (you should totally download it, if you don't know it--it's awful good) starts out with Tom Waits' gravelly and unmistakable male voice singing "Charlie, I'm pregnant."

Throughout the song, Waits' voice wavers between his own whiskey rasp and the gentle breathiness of the woman he's ventriloquizing. He are another.

Waits' performance also points up the fact that the girl is herself performing. She's telling Charlie about how she's getting her life together--how she's got a new husband (he plays the trombone) but she still remembers Charlie fondly. She keeps a record album he gave her. Little Anthony and the Imperials.

The story isn't true. It's the brave front of a woman whose life has gone from bad to worse. And even as she spins these stories for Charlie, reality intrudes. She tells him that she can't listen to Little Anthony and the Imperials because her record player was stolen. Even as she's trying on this new persona, she is still herself. Or rather, Tom Waits is both of them.

And so are we, I guess, when we listen. And sing along.

One of the most touching bits of the song is also a pretty terrific metaphor for what happens when we read, when, as Poulet says the work "thinks itself" in us:

I wish I had all the money
that we used to spend on dope
I'd buy me a used car lot
and I wouldn't sell any of 'em
I'd just drive a different car
every day dependin' on how
I feel.

A library's kind of like a used car lot--objects inhabited by ghosts, waiting to be enlivened by another driver.