“I passed an ancient cherry tree bound in frayed burlap. The cold light deepened the texture of the binding and I framed my last shot: a comic mask whose ghostly tears seemed to streak the burlap’s worn threads.” –Patti Smith, M Train

Tiny talismans. A collection of silk sacks filled with what boils down to amulets against the loss of what remains most precious. Totems to the actually gone. The lesson that someday many things will be actually gone. The experience that this binary will prove very, very difficult to undo. Love is like a boomerang, but sometimes all that comes back is what that buzz of return sounds like. And it sounds like, god, who needs tattoos when memories are burnt so inseverably into music? And well, let’s just say I’m back on the radio. I’m on the subway I’m walking through Tribeca I’m on E Houston but now I’m inside the clock without hands. There is no A.M. or P.M.on that face. Everything is all right here. Right now. “Don’t let me down” starts to play and my mind is turning, swirling vinyl. And a needle is the only hand that can touch me.

Perhaps the only option left is the alchemical relief of turning spooks into words. To be a conductor. Shazam. Copper replaces gold. I’ve been reading Patti Smith’s M Train. In it, she goes to places I’ve been in Japan to pay homage to authors I’ve also turned over and over and she does exactly what I would do. She washes their graves and leaves them flowers. Every time I see Akutagawa’s name, I hear it in Dr. Hulvey’s second generation Californian Japanese accent: “Ah-coo-TAH-ga-wa.” I tried to mimic her as a college freshman learning how to put these clean words into my dirty, redneck mouth. A hilarious exercise in transforming a sloppy southern English drawl into the carefully clipped bonsai of Japanese. I hear that voice every time I scan his name in M Train. I wonder how Patti’s Japanese is, and what it sounds like when she says “Akutagawa.” Something like Joey Ramone’s mom, but reverent instead of confused. Like at the beginning of “Horses/Land.”  Just like that.

  In my parents’ record collection I always went first to the Beatles, then to the John and Yoko solo albums, then the rest. I would sit in the living room by myself and flip and flip and flip, trying to understand the cover art. Again and again I’d scrutinize the differences between the four suits on the cover of Abbey Road. Disapproving of Paul’s bare feet, feeling John’s shamanic strangeness all in ivory and tennis shoes, but liking George the best. George all in denim like Dad. I imagined that he also smelled a little industrial and a little like pine trees and polished his own boots with mink oil every night before bed. No one listened to the Blues in our house. There weren’t even any Stones records. “She’s so Heavy” was the first taste I had of those feelings. I always skipped quickly over the Patti Smith albums. I couldn’t understand her thinness or the underarm hair like my Mom’s, a sign in our house of drastic changes soon to come.

In Japan, when kimono are worn, the left side is crossed over the right. If a corpse is dressed in one in preparation for cremation, it is crossed right over left.  Sometimes I wish that such resounding gestures could be made by the living. Wouldn’t it be easy if we could announce the death of something and the mourning of a loss with a sartorial gesture?  White tennis shoes for a breakup. A single pair of leather ankle boots every day for divorce. If you’re not mourning you can’t wear them–irony ruins the ritual. I guess I’m kidding, but in a moment of extreme desperation I once asked a dear friend to create a spell powerful enough to banish heartbreak. This is what she told me to do:

1. Take 2 chopsticks.

2. Stick each of them in a flower pot or clay to make each stand up firmly.

3. Tie string around them to make tight rope between them.

4. Name one pole “you.”

5. Name the other pole after the person/sadness/or unresolved conflict.

Maybe you can imagine the next steps.