Deena Metzger, writer, mentor, healer, political observer and, for many years, respected Topangan, has given birth to a new book. But "Doors: A Fiction for Jazz Horn" is more than the physical limitations of pages bound simply between two covers. It is a visceral experience meant to be savored - as delicious and as thought provoking as a world-class discussion where minds, brilliant and committed enough to change the course of continents, meld. It is a stylized, literary jazz feast that soars through – pays homage to - portions of a life forever on the edge – that of the great Argentine writer, Julio Cortazar (‘Hopscotch’, ‘The End of the Game’, ‘Blow-up’, ‘Around the Day in Eighty Worlds’, ‘A Manual for Manuel’ etc.). Here is a man, whose gritty presence on the cover reminds us that all things are possible. A man who, as Metzger writes, ‘…looked like storm falling upon granite’. A man never satisfied with his lot in life as one of the most gifted writers of the twentieth century – he had to provoke political change – and for one woman, his powerful personal presence continues even after his death. Here is the translation of spirit into words and words into the rhythm, the flow, of jazz music – music infused by a narrator obsessed with getting it as right as Coltrane – and that can take a lifetime.
PHOTO BY KATIE DALSEMER  |
The story begins in 1974, a time of political upheaval. A young American writer and longtime devotee of the literary giant Cortazar, travels to France with her husband to meet him. She is riveted by everything about him and hopeful they can form an artistic alliance. But the timing is wrong - life circumstances are not conducive to such an endeavor. "El Golpe" has taken place in Chile. Central and South America is pressure cooked to burst its CIA tampered with seams. Ten years pass. Cortazar dies. After ten years worth of correspondence – enough to keep the fantasy of collaboration afloat – Iris, the young novelist, is devastated. But as she matures, grows more seasoned as a writer, more evolved as a woman, more attuned spiritually – she refuses to accept his loss and seeks - and welcomes - instead, his postmortem assistance with her seminal novel. Her sojourn - or is it madness? - begins, and now there can be closure - perhaps.
This is a masterfully written novel and certainly not as simple as described. It takes its readers down complex, unexpected paths. It triggers the mind and brings out emotion. It is a life within a life – a book within a book, as risky as it is personal.
‘Now I know that something has begun. We are in terrorland. The jays listening to J.C. "My Favorite Things," are silent before it. A humming bird is perched, unmoving, on a branch. The wind is paying mind. I’ve written about this before: They say the river that separates the living from the dead ceases running on the Sabbath so that one can cross from one realm to another. It is Tuesday but it is a Sabbath nevertheless because the separate worlds are gathering themselves into a we. The light in the trees. Utter stillness. The skull of a steer on the post silver in the shadow. Holy letters in the spaces between the needles. Bless you, Julio, in whatever ways the dead receive the hope of the living. Bless you.’
For Metzger, this work explores, fleshes out and bears witness to those elements that are meaningful to her. "It was an honor to write it…" she says. "It was terrifying and for most of the time I didn’t know what I was doing, if I was doing anything, if I had the right to imagine that I might put such things in print. But the question ultimately behind the book was whether spirits exist and this was a question that came to me truly in a literary way – almost as if another parallel part of my life was nonexistent. I was interested in those spiritual, indigenous traditions that spoke about ancestors and the spirits coming through (with them) wanting to serve the humans. Not the individuals, but the human community."
Metzger's commitment to "the human community " and to defending what is just, is a significant attribute she shares with Cortazar who continually followed his convictions. He refused government appointments, thus sacrificing material gain in his native Argentina during the Peron regime, and, in later years, gave his book royalties to the United Chilean Front. He was never hesitant to offer a unique point of view on whatever came to mind – with his readers left to navigate those thought patterns. A perfect example of this is his extraordinary, surreal and experimental novel "Hopscotch," which Metzger quotes in her book.
‘…life is trying to change its key in and through and by them, that a barely conceivable attempt is born in man as one other day there were being born the reason-key, the feeling key, the pragmatism-key. That with each successive defeat there is an approach towards the final mutation, and that man only is in that he searches to be, plans to be, thumbing through words and modes of behavior and joy sprinkled with blood and other rhetorical pieces like this one.’
Julio Cortazar – "Hopscotch"
"Here is a man," says Metzger," who towards the end of his life, though his writing was so essential to him, became involved increasingly with the liberation movements, particularly in Latin America. And was supporting where ever he could, those individuals who were involved with the struggle for liberation, and those movements that were so oppressed and suffering." Metzger was introduced to Cortazar’s work through her love of Latin American literature. "I was taken by it because of what it represents philosophically and intellectually. It is a form that permits rather than prohibits. Its imagination, courage and depth – its willingness t o deal with all the world – the living and the dead, and their interaction, that fascinated me."
‘As the gods of the crossroads do not distinguish between literature and life, it’s not only that something happens and the writer pounces on it immediately, making material from everything she/he sees so that no one is safe from her/his appetite for experience, but the movement is in all directions at once, what is written affects the living and the dead as much as the living and the dead plop themselves down in the living room of the novel and put their feet up on the furniture.’
On a trip to Chile in 1972, while travelling with an exhibition of posters of protest arranged by renowned art historian, David Kunzle, Metzger was deeply moved by the spirit and the hope of the people whose lives were being torn apart by Western interests. "I met many people, many writers and that was exciting to be involved in the ferment of the kinds of conversations and concerns that they had. They were asking themselves what was the right relationship, the deepest possible relationship a writer could have with the hope that would serve the country." The following year she was in Cuba with the same exhibition when the U.S. engineered coup "El Golpe" took place in Chile. Its implications and aftermath haunted her. Nine years later the film "Missing" would address the issue - its story based on the life and death of her friend Charles Horman, with whom she worked in Chile. It was within this political framework that she met Cortazar in England in 1974. "My interest then was in what possible political collaboration we could have on behalf of the people of Chile we had come to know and love. There were writers, musicians and artists in prison and we were deeply concerned."
It was a strange time of invasion and disruption, of camaraderie and violence and Iris was learning about it in deed and not in theory. That is what brought her to Rio to begin with. A war had come into her heart and she needed to assist those she loved, to provide succor for them. She had not expected that war would teach her what it meant to have brothers but she had become like the young girl who had to weave white linen shirts out of nettles for her twelve brothers who had been turned into birds by the evil one and only such labor could restore them to human shape.
Metzger admits that her initial collaborative focus with him was never realized, partly because of her youth, an issue she addresses in the book.
Iris felt the damnation of her youth and its obscene hopefulness.
"Here we are twenty years after he died and in those twenty years I’ve gathered the kind of writing experience that twenty years can give you if you work hard, if you’re lucky, and if the spirits are generous," says Metzger. "This is a book that starts out being about a young woman and how young we are when we are "young". And follows her development until she is no longer a young woman by any means. And I have to say this is not a book a young woman could have written."
In retrospect, she wasn’t clear within herself whether the thought that Iris had been a flirt had come out of the scorn an older woman might have for her younger and most foolish self, or whether the Iris she had been had truly once lived by icy seduction.
A recurring and disturbing "character" whom Metzger calls "thewomaninthecellar" appears throughout the book. It is that which is prevalent but never talked about - torture. And with today’s political climate in Iraq and elsewhere, it is particularly relevant. "Concerns that were a part of my own life," says Metzger," and were also a part of historical moments, were moving through my mind while I was writing the book. And if we look at the book as a musical composition, and I think we must, there is a continuum, if you will, there is a single base note that goes through the book, and that base note is thewomaninthecellar. It terrifies me, it electrifies me, it breaks my heart that I should even be talking about a character called thewomaninthecellar at this time." Metzger feels very strongly that "political literature is not propaganda" and that her work must reflect the times in which we live. "How can I not believe that Julio Cortazar is not behind this book in this way? I speak about this in the book, his need toward the end of his life, to serve the struggle for freedom even when his heart called to him to write. And though his stories are completely involved with these issues in a most profound way – it wasn’t only as a writer that he was involved, but using his reputation as a writer to do the political work that needed to be done."
He’s left her with a muddle. She knows he couldn’t take it anymore, no more than if they had arrested and tortured him. They did, ultimately, break him down even if they never, literally, had their hands on him. But, it’s gotten worse since he was Here and she needs him, they all need him, need what only he knows that is useful to such a time, this hell. Torture so widespread the individual voices are lost in the din and one wonders what the point is anymore even from the point of view of the torturer, since it’s all become so loud and commonplace, the useless pain of it, like trailers for the movies.
There was much that was unrealized for Metzger at the time of Cortazar’s death. "Julio died in 1984 and I was bereft. I always thought there was the possibility of some kind of literary, imaginative alliance. Out of shyness and partially out of respect I didn’t pursue it as I might have. So I wrote him a letter after he died and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got unfinished business, here.’ And my belief is that he answered because within a very short time I was asked to review one of his books that I didn’t even know existed. So it was as if he had directed this book to me." Metzger let the book form with her own evolution as a writer and as a spiritual seeker. "This book comes out of the restlessness of an event that I didn’t understand. I can say that I have never quite written this way before. Sentences, paragraphs and ideas - they are not mine."
‘A breath behind the wood. The rub of cloth between the legs. A finger fumbling in the pocket. A hand sliding down wood and metal. The shadows of sounds. But they are sufficient, she is not such a fool that
she requires a bare footstep or a fist against the door in order to rouse herself. At the subtlest rustle she goes to the door. Now. Even before the knock. Her heart is beating and her palms are wet. She does not know how it is to be done. Yet, she is the one at the door. What action is called for? Should she wait for the knock? What gesture is demanded under the circumstances?’
One of the most innovative and brilliant of Cortazar’s books is his tribute to Thelonius Monk, Louis Armstrong, Clifford Brown and other jazz giants in "Around the Day in Eighty Worlds". "Julio," says Metzger," was also an amateur trumpet player and his reputation was that he was good enough to sit in. I felt the music come through the book and started to listen to jazz in a very different way. I understood it was one of the great forms of genius and that there was an intelligence there that we hadn’t begun to fathom. I began to ask myself what kind of writing would follow this same form? And how can one learn it? I would listen to someone like Miles Davis and hear how he stood at every moment on the edge of an abyss and had to find the note, the sound that would eventually take him back to the pattern that he was holding in his mind. There’s a risk in every note and writing this book, I don’t know if I succeeded or not, every note risked the abyss. There was a fundamental chord that was inherent in the structure. And I don’t think I could have done it without (Julio)."
Astonishment. His low key, her extravagant astonishment, her amazement, his trumpet, her saxophone, in the face of what cannot be explained within the vernacular of the rational mind or by the abstruse speculations of researchers on government scholarships who want to discover the physical basis of life and thought so that they might invent it better. The astonishment before the unexpected, inexplicable parallels between them. The astonishment before the incredible and implausible intersections…
Metzger is grateful for the help she received in writing this book. "In the African Shona tradition, what they say is that here alive we are practicing to be ancestors so that we can come back and help the living. After someone is dead for a year they make a shrine in the house. They invite the ancestors because they know they will help. I think Julio’s writing remains that kind of altar where he’s alive and helping us. And I hope the book is something of that nature as well. Another place for him to live and to help us…
Julio comes in the door and settles down, his long legs stretched out the length of the couch that is still too short for this colossus, and so he moves the coffee table, arranges himself on the carpet but not before signaling toward the CD player. He’s on the floor and so (Iris) is on the floor. They agree on "Kind of Blue" and here comes eternity, a wind stirring up the transitory and the dust in the room.
