"Just One Star"

So another funny thing is that song you've just posted. It comes up a lot on my ipod. Because if you click on "Antony And The Johnsons" and not "Antony & the Johnsons," which is obviously a different group for my silly ipod, and also not just "Antony" all alone, which gives you special access to two songs by Antony, one by our friend Mr. C that sometimes makes me think of you because it's called "If It Be Your Will" and another that's footage of Antony singing "Rapture" on a film set that I had a very indirect nudge or two in orchestrating. So if you do click on "Antony And The Johnsons" and then click on "All Tracks" (or whatever it is in English b/c my pod speaks French to me) and then go to the album version of "Rapture," after that you get to fall "Deeper than Love," and then you get to hear tribute to "Divine" ("and I'll swallow their shit laughing on my bed of hay/ And I hold your big fat heart in my hand!..."), before "burning... I'm on fire" in "Blue Angel," followed by a brief and very sweet sojourn with a wicked witch whose loneliness is too lovely to leave beside the "Lake" that I found on a compilation. And then you get to that song. Which comes up again three songs later. Because I have both the EP and album version of it. Which is lucky. You'll understand once you get to the end of this entry.

I am scared of that middle place, too. And these days I've even been scared of that interlude he does, well, right smack dab in the middle of that song. When he lets his moans be song. Look at his mouth in that video! It's as crazy as the crying he does at the beginning. Which crying is disastrous, of course, and shows just how attuned he is to the disaster we're living through. That's the big "we" there. Not just you and me. Because the tears stop him, he wipes his eyes, and then he allows that break to modulate his infinitely porous voice through the rest of his line. And all the way to the end where he smiles big and talks about the crystal formations he's putting in the air through his piano keys and thanks everybody for the great time he's had. Fuck me, I love him.

But I've been particularly scared of that middle place he seems to sing his way through with his wide open mouth and pounding piano before I even saw him singing it on our blog. One can't help but imagine it must sound something like that. That middle place. Or at least be as terribly strange. Here, I do, though, come across something that consoles me. Which hurts, too, weirdly. Consolation, I mean. My mother was beside my father when he died. She helped him down the stairs as he was having his stroke. She laid him down at the foot of the stairs. Asked him if he wanted a pillow. Got him one and called the neighbor. Who put a cold compress on his burning forehead. So I've been told. Mom told me she was beside herself.With my father lying on the rug. Not knowing what to do. That was between 2:15 and 2:30 Paris time on the afternoon of Friday April 4. That she was telling me this story. And when she got to the part about being beside herself. I had to speak through tears and remind her. "Mom! You might have been beside yourself but you were beside him, too!" It was important to me to insist. I was rediscovering a moment I'd written and published about. If I say too much, I become immediately googlable. But suffice it to say that it'll be something like my academic Antony moment. Won't go there again, I don't think, in academic writing. Who knows though. One of the things I'm proudest of is a silly hyphen. That's not as easy to google. "She does—live on," I wrote about a character in a novel who finds herself consoled by somebody beside her who's also beside himself. That's consideration for you. I think a fairly precise definition of it. And the hyphen, to my mind, puts that sentence beside itself. With a catastrophic break in the middle that is the condition of "her" survival.

If you're listening to Antony And The Johnsons on my ipod. And if he hasn't already put you so far beside yourself that you have to push the pause key at the bottom of the wheel. You get a really beautiful song called "Frankenstein" that seems to be all about falling into the monster's arms and getting confused about whose arms are holding whom. And just after that. If you're me last Friday. The day after returning to Paris after leaving your father's casket at his grave. You got a song that I hadn't noticed. Hadn't really heard. Until last Friday. Sitting in the Luxembourg Gardens waiting for T who was bringing pastry and coming to sit beside me by the Marie de Medici fountain. Because it was a gorgeous, chilly, early-Spring day out. And I was in the neighborhood. And T works not far. And because I wanted to sit beside someone who's been so amazing about allowing himself to be beside himself beside me so many times. It's not always easy. Consideration doesn't happen every day. Especially if you're a couple. So waiting for T. And enjoying the weather. And the pause I was allowing myself. The luxury that can also come with mourning. A little beside myself because of the circumstances. And listening to Antony sing. Which so clearly puts him beside himself. Literally, too, since it's a recording. "Just One Star."

"I am just one star caught in the shine
My friends, my mama loves me, but it's not enough
I wanted to be more, more than I could bear
I am just one star born of grace and soon to die
But if I can just learn how to love then I could live
My honey, my little baby, my honey"