Either the temple itself is rising—how can such massive stone columns float in the air?—or you are descending beneath the floor’s bared lip, the massive floor’s meter-thick lip, to an underground (underworld?) stone chamber, airless, where a man stands as if already crushed by the ceiling’s weight. “The fatal stone” is set. In the deeper shadows a whisper, a rustle, alerts the man to another’s presence, a partner with whom to sing “il nostro inno di morte” : “our hymn of death.” Their voices unbounding pressure in duet will brace the stone, and turn their death house into a resonance chamber.
But you’re not watching a Metropolitan Opera broadcast of Aida. You’re here to listen to Aprile Millo and Placido Domingo (especially Aprile) sing for me. “O terra, addio; addio, vale di pianti” : “Oh, earth, farewell; farewell, vale of tears.” Aprile will throw her Egypt-blackened face skyward—to where the sky beyond the tomb-top would be—and spin her voice into a silver thread—attenuated to that point where matter must become spirit—as she sees “our wandering souls fly to the light of eternal day” : “volano al raggio dell’eterno dì.” ‘Ours’ in this case is hers and mine. I have died of AIDS. And this is my memorial.
Listen ceremonially to some of the music that has meant me—a scrapbook requiem of ever-elaborated enthusiasms, polyphonic collage. As Immense Ptah, “supreme creator,” is invoked by the priestesses, the temple seems to be lowering—for the tomb must be entombed—and the final note is an Italian plea for peace, “pace!” Already that silvery purified note of “al raggio” : “the light” has escaped its mortal prison: We’re singing to you from beyond the grave. [“Remember me,” pleads Dido in Purcell’s opera, “but ah! forget my fate;” and I keep misremembering and hear “but don’t forget my fate.”]
Ecstatic transubstantiations in song recall my fate—but wait! OK, I’m an opera queen, a drama queen, a melody queen, a moody thing (a “Thrilling Thing,” says Genet), and the gay DNA in my hypothalamus or wherever has dutifully progressed me from aria to lieder, but I don’t (evidently) have HIV and I haven’t (yet) died. But listening and listing—splayed on the sofa—I compose my sources: as the speakers play, as the speakers speak, they textualize parts of a funeral service calling backwards over me. There’s self-dramatization worthy of a comic book queer, here, but the grand guignol theatrics are played out on a thrusting stage larger than my small foyer. What transpires on it is multiple, choral, and the recital is repeated in terrible modulations. Light the honey-glow candles in the wall sconce (gilded oat sheaves) and sharpen your antennae toward the tufted San Francisco night. Falling notes breeze in and out of beveled-glass windows, apartment to apartment, receiver to receiver …
I have held Leland’s leaf-weight hand as the blood-feeding tubes were disconnected; I wiped Johnny’s morphine-hallucinating forehead as if to clear away the false images (though it was his sister who changed his diapers); I read aloud as Chuck’s dropsied brain finished my sentences with sleep; I whispered in Ken’s bone-bare ear the responses that meant he could still be heard (though it was Marshall who changed his diapers). And from time to (too many) time I’ve gathered in company, ritually, to remember these and other loved men. Death’s proximity. Death’s daily life. As I couch myself, listening to music [“I loafe and invite my soul …”, Whitman], I fabricate, inescapably, the tenor and texture of my own memorial. The solar-plexal moans and muscle chords of Bach’s unaccompanied Cello Suites, or the harmonic inhalations of Chopin’s Ballade #1, rupturing into cascades that flood the lungs as if a chest might really open into wings … I’ve attended memorials made of such deeply coded catharsis.
There’s a tape you could borrow; written on its side with a blue felt pen is “Honeybear’s Memorial”. It contains the music Marshall assembled for his lover Ken, and the cassette box details Yoko Ono’s plaintive “Beautiful Boys”; K.D. Lang wailing “So In Love”; Kiri Te Kanawa as Schubert’s “Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel” (ah, Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos); Monserrat Caballé, from a rare live Nov. 24, 1970 recording, unveiling Bellini’s aria “Dopo l’oscuro nembo” : ”After the dark cloud”, a crackling record surrounding Caballé’s beneficent soprano with ambient noise, ticks, coughs, the walls themselves demonstrably reverberating and so responding; and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf (“through want and joy we have/ walked hand in hand”) singing the last of Strauss’s “Four Last Songs” (“At Dusk”), where the supernatural Strauss tones and planetary orchestrations disperse into even rarer constellations (“around us the valleys fold up,/ already the air grows dark”) as the orbital soprano seems to unite with expanded space. Interspersed with Rilke and Whitman poems, this memorial “concert” is for Ken by Marshall, and reveals the precision of a high queen’s high sentimentality, and the excess of a florid lover’s furious love. “Dass wir uns nicht verirren/ in dieser Einsamkeit” : “We must not go astray/ in this solitude.” … After the music we climbed Tank Hill to spread seeds of California wildflowers, as elsewhere I have tossed fistfuls of body-ash mixed with the seeds of forget-me-nots … We were sewing Johnny then, and at his memorial we had listened to …
Is it an endless threnody, then, that rehearses itself in my candle-lit house? A melodrama where the music (“melos”) has returned to claim the stage. Not my own valediction, but this ceremonialization proper: the power of art to encode affection itself. The living eager attaching eros. “Of that softest hair” (Elly Ameling sings Obradors’s “Del cabello más sutil”) “which you wear in braids/ I must make a chain/ to draw you to my side …” In the music/poetic that I’m hearing, human desire is enacted in the creative strain and release of phonemes or blue notes—and these enactments, in turn, become the objects of desire. We adore as we listen and read; our adorations lodge. This is the charm I imagine at work cast upon Rachmaninov crescendos or Reynaldo Hahn’s modulated smoke: I can be found there! [Whitman: “Now it is you, compact, visible, realizing my poems, seeking me …”]
This retrospection we might share is now engaged. A loved-one’s loves are lived again in the favored words or songs that we attend. “I should like, my darling, to be a jug in your house,” sings Elly as Obradors, “to kiss your lips/ when you went to drink” : “para besarte en la boca,/ cuando fueras a besar.” Or be released as music toward your elegiac ears. Generous act of your attendance upon my own attention.
Listen: Remember me.
(1994)