Two tales of a nightingale. One bargains with death for life with song for love, and the other trades its life to death with song for love.



1. "...And Death gave back these treasures for a song. The nightingale sang on. It sang of the quiet churchyard where white roses grow, where the elder flowers make the air sweet, and where the grass is always green, wet with the tears of those who are still alive. Death longed for his garden. Out through the windows drifted a cold gray mist, as Death departed..."



2. "...Then she gave one last burst of music. The white Moon heard it, and she forgot the dawn, and lingered on in the sky. The red rose heard it, and it trembled all over with ecstasy, and opened its petals to the cold morning air. Echo bore it to her purple cavern in the hills, and woke the sleeping shepherds from their dreams. It floated through the reeds of the river, and they carried its message to the sea..."



The two tales are strikingly similar to me, not merely thematically but in tone as well. Both contain resonances not only of an achingly strong and tender love of mythical proportions from a humble nightingale, so blatantly told in parts that they flirt along the lines of saccharine oversentimentality. It's the lacings of passages of more acerbic tone in regards to the superficiality of human interactions that draw each story back to more bittersweet ground:



"...'What a silly thing Love is,' said the Student as he walked away. 'It is not half as useful as Logic, for it does not prove anything, and it is always telling one of things that are not going to happen, and making one believe things that are not true. In fact, it is quite unpractical, and, as in this age to be practical is everything, I shall go back to Philosophy and study Metaphysics.'..."



And in the more wry tone of Andersen: "...The music master wrote a twenty-five-volume book about the artificial bird. It was learned, long-winded, and full of hard Chinese words, yet everybody said they read and understood it, lest they show themselves stupid and would then have been punched in their stomachs..."

I have found worthwhile teachings and practices in many religions and disciplines, but I cannot bring myself to subscribe personally to one, nor participate in the mix-and-match patchwork pseudo-mysticism prevalent in our age. I will admit to such indulgences as a youth while experimenting, but I can respect that no longer as an adult. As an aside, I've been thinking much the same about the emotional/relational practices of our present age. I think that one does harm to oneself and to those from which one takes, whether that's religions or people, when taking the approach of "A little of what I like from this, a little of what I like from that." As a musical group I like has said: constant shallowness leads to evil.



I also dislike when people say "I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual". I wouldn't call myself religious or spiritual, but I do believe there's more than what we generally perceive or can perceive. Worlds beyond and in worlds. I'm drawn more by the subtle liftings of the veil, however, than seeking for the full frontal.



I strive to be awake and alive and aware as much as I am capable. I strive to find balances between extremes, but not to the point of shunning the extremes - balance does not mean stagnation at a single point, because change is a constant and the centre is always shifting, so movement and adjustment matters. I strive to experience without becoming lost in experience. With others, I personally strive to inspire rather than command or control, and respond best to a similar approach.

Listen to my fiance live on KBOO tonight (http://kboo.fm - 90.7 fm in Portland) between 11pm and midnight PST. They'll be playing his music and interviewing him. Aside from music, he'll be playing sound samples he recorded in New Orleans and talking about our experiences there, amongst other subjects. You can listen to the webcast from their website if you're not in Portland/don't have an fm radio. He makes amazing music, you should listen to it anyway.

Naftali was his given first name, but he went by Simon. The name suited him. He was short and gnomish, with wiry tufts of grey hair, spectacles, shiny black orthopedic shoes. You expected him to have a secret workshop where he cut, sewed, and hammered together leather shoes by hand. I favored black combat boots, and my hair was cut spiky-short and dyed pink. He was 87 years old when we met, and I was 20. We hit it off famously, of course.



I had recently moved back to Phoenix after a year's stint in Seattle. Simon had recently moved to Phoenix from New York City. His wife had died the year before; he had a painted portrait of her in her white wedding dress, dark-haired with lovely laughing dark eyes. He had loved her deeply. His elder son lived in Phoenix with his wife and their newborn son; worried about his father living alone so far away, he had coaxed Simon to come live there, near them. I never warmed up to his son and daughter-in-law, especially the latter; she seemed shrewish and impatient, and I don't think she understood Simon well. She was a new mother of course, and very busy, but I never got the sense she had the proper appreciation for him.



Simon had owned a small and respected rare & antiquarian bookstore in New York for many years. Well-crafted books were his passion. He came to Phoenix and rented a fine 2-bedroom townhouse. Simon was not the type to sit around doing nothing. The first thing he did was hire a carpenter to line every single possible wall of his house with custom-built tall bookshelves, which were immediately crammed end to end with books. Then he got to work setting himself up on the internet as an online rare bookseller, with the help of a 30-something man he hired to handle the computer end of things.



Simon was like that. He was nearing 90, but he was never afraid to embrace new technology. The possibilities excited him; he wanted to see what would next unfold. He had difficulty reading the screen, and his rheumatism made his hand shake too much to control the mouse, but he never stopped trying. I loved that so much about him.



Simon was a German Jew in WWII. He told me about his escape from Germany, the hundreds of miles he walked. Shortly before his escape, he was once in a cafe when Nazis burst in and began arresting people. He was there with another Jew. Thinking fast, he stood up and immediately pretended that he was with the authorities; taking his friend "under custody", Simon marched him out of the cafe and to safety.



He went to medical school after his escape and became a doctor, but later turned to book publishing in England, becoming a small publisher of quality books. One of the books he published was an early limited edition novel by William Burroughs. He consorted with many of the famous and infamous literary figures of that time. Much later, he moved to New York City and began selling books.



At first I was only entering books into an online database for him. I met him by luck; a friend of mine did data entry for him for a day through a temp agency and really liked him, but she was moving to Portland. She recommended me to him. I went to his house and was immediately captivated by the wall-to-wall books.



The used bookstores around town all came to know him well. He'd take cabs, peruse their aisles for hours, and come home with boxes stuffed with books he'd picked up for cheap. For Simon, it was a treasure hunt, finding those castoffs that no one else could recognize. That worn, dusty book he snatched out of the $1 bin? Rare limited edition first printing, worth hundreds to the right buyer. It was never about the money, of course.



We'd research and decide together how to price these treasures, and I would enter them into the online database. He taught me the terminology, how to describe book conditions accurately. Folio, quarto, foxed, gilt edges, marbled endpapers, vellum binding. How to recognize first editions, first printings. The differences between the grades of good, very good, near fine, fine.



After a short while, I took over all parts of the business, from customer service to shipping to accounting to managing the online aspects. The other guy Simon had originally hired went on to something else, so it was just Simon and me for a while. Later, I brought in my then-boyfriend to help with book-sorting, shipping, data entry, and be an all-around extra hand. Most of the time, though, Simon and I would sit and look through old books and talk, argue, tell stories. He was tremendously well-read, sharp, opinionated, broad-minded, and eloquent, with an endless supply of anecdotes drawn from personal experience.



We doted on each other from the beginning, with simple and unreserved affection and mutual respect. Simon could be cranky and querulous at times, but this was more often than not with my boyfriend, towards whom he never quite warmed. That wasn't my boyfriend's fault; if Simon had been my grandfather and felt that he had a right to give his opinion, he would have thought no one was good enough for me.



A part of him tried to hang on to living, to keep that flame burning, after his wife died. But a greater part of him was slipping away, and I knew it wouldn't be long. It was a year or so after I began working for him that his heart began to fail. He was 88, and he lived a long, rich life.



Good night, Simon. I am fortunate and glad to have known you. I loved you like a grandfather. I hope I brought some measure of brightness into your life in your last year, as you brought to mine.

I rode my bike to a store earlier for cigarettes. A couple blocks from there, I passed an old man with long grey hair on a bicycle. He turned and said something about his slow speed; I flashed him a smile and sped by. When I emerged from the store, he was there with a red rose he'd picked for me, saying "You have a pretty smile. You seem like a nice person." He headed inside, I biked away. It pleases old men often to flirt this way with young women; I find such encounters usually harmless and sweet, intended simply to brighten the days of both parties. I biked home and hung the rose on my mailbox. When it's withered, I'll throw it away.



When I was half the years I am now, I kept mementos of everything. From concert ticket stubs to birthday cards, to flowers dried and pressed between pages of books, whether from small encounters or grand escapades. I liked having them there to remind me, and it gave me a twinge to ever throw such mementos away, as if I was somehow betraying the reality of the events, somehow erasing their value. (Keeping a journal is different: I write to figure things out, not to remember.)



This kind of sentimentality is something else that's gradually fallen away over the years. On the last night that I was in New Orleans, a friend strung Mardi Gras beads around my neck. When I left the following morning, I deliberately left them on the bathroom sink. I don't need or wish for keepsakes; that it happened is enough. I do homage to the moment by being present within it.



When I am dead, scatter my ashes to the wind.