68 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER25, 2019
irresponsible, exploitative, naïve, incon-
sistent, dishonest for the long duration
of a very successful, very public career
because you never flat out declared your
own gender identity, or gender prefer-
ences when it comes to choosing lovers.
I’m no expert on this aspect of your life,
any more than I’m an aficionado of the
entire corpus of your work. However,
searching for examples of what your voice
might sound like when you’re not sing-
ing, I found an interview I particularly
enjoyed in which you didn’t—as I’m pretty
sure I would have—tell the interviewer
to go fuck himself, yet still in your
dignified and uncompromising fashion
let him know in no uncertain terms that
your business none of his business. Your
life, your privacy not material for inter-
viewers to label, commodify for other
people’s consumption. You let him un-
derstand that simply because you pos-
sessed the gift, the art to sing your ass
off, did not license him to be coy, evasive,
manipulative, not helpful to the cause, ir-
responsible, exploitative, naïve, inconsis-
tent, dishonest during an interview. Not
forgetting to add your humble suggestion
that perhaps in a contemporary world
inches away from exploding or implod-
ing there are more urgent, more germane
issues for the media to attend to than
the in-and-out gossip of your sex life.
Still, I’m guilty, more hungry than
that interviewer to learn your secrets.
But different secrets for different rea-
sons, I hope. The most crucial reason
being how much I’m moved by your
song’s power to free my son. Not ex-
actly envious, but more than desperate
to figure out how you do what you do.
I want to learn to emulate your exam-
ple and save him. Please allow me to
continue to wonder about the particu-
lar face or faces conjured up for you
when you sing “URML.” How do songs,
stories—the unique ones that are art,
the no less special everyday ones locked
up inside people’s heads or bantered
back and forth with other folks—be-
come narratives in which daydreams,
words and sounds of actual lives/life are
embedded. Maybe stories, fiction or not,
give solace, context, possibility, as much
with their stable, recurring forms as with
their infinitely various contents, and
thereby produce examples of lives shaped,
framed so they are recognizably distin-
guishable from emptiness, from dark-
ness that seems always to surround and
render lives unseeable. I’m reaching out,
asking you. Do songs and stories create
real shapes, colors, smells, sounds. Real
even if futile vis-à-vis the absolute ar-
bitrariness of what happens to be hap-
pening moment by moment, day by day.I
’ve had mummies on my brain lately.
They keep cropping up unexpectedly.
In unpredictable, unlikely, unavoidable
places, Mr. Jackson. Mummification old
as the oldest documented civilization
and practiced globally. My old Philly
buddy who killed his lady attempted to
mummify her, sealing her corpse in a box
with stuff he believed would preserve it,
stowing the box in the ceiling rafters of
his Powelton Village apartment, hoping
to conceal his crime by causing his lady
to disappear. That mummy didn’t work.
Leaked, stank. Led to my friend’s arrest.
I have no doubt his extreme oddness,
bookishness, dabbles in the occult, fan-
tasies of invincibility, though they failed
to provide him with a proper chemical
formula for mummifying his lady’s corpse,
supplied him copiously with lore, ritual,
history, chants, prayers for launching her
into immortality. Whether my former
friend believed he could arrange life after
death for his lady, I can’t say, but I know
he thought a lot about his various proj-
ects. Often intelligently, with a meticu-
lously organized, relentless, insane, pa-
tient thoroughness and self-assuredness.
And that horrific launching my once-upon-a-time friend perpetrated, his des-
perate, doomed attempt to spare him-
self from the consequences of his crime
and spare his lady’s body the indignities
of decay and dissolution, his effort to
save her and save himself, made the choice
of mummification perhaps an irresist-
ible option. No matter what he was think-
ing, his choices, his actions barbaric, de-
spicable, profoundly unacceptable. All of
the above and more. Worse. His actions
especially spooky and unsettling becausethey linked his crime to an ancient, hon-
orable, sacred art, an art cultures devised
to prepare their dead for a journey that
would be a continuation of life.
As I learned more about the traditions
(desperate, selfish, foolish) of mummy
launching, their secret formulas, mysteri-
ous protocols, the motivations that con-
ceived them—the imagining of a voyage
that connects life and death, the envision-
ing of immortality, of the necessities hu-
mans would require and desire during
a perpetual trip—the innocence of those
practices of mummification touched me,
Mr. Jackson, revealed to me how a sim-
ilar willed innocence possibly underlies
all arts humans practice.
Same way people depend upon
mummy-makers to insure the dead are
ready and able to enjoy, to survive what-
ever pleasures and perils a journey that
never ends might bring, people rely on
artists and works of art (with equally
scant, problematic, or no evidence at all,
that such reliance achieves desirable re-
sults) to act as guides. Art embodies, im-
provises rules of sorts for negotiating
imaginary worlds—defines rewards and
punishments in such worlds—confirms
the existence of those imagined worlds
where occasionally a person can hang
out, vacation on demand, daydream or
chatter about without sacrificing too
much time or energy better spent on the
business of ordinary living. As if art—
mummy-making, writing symphonies—
changes time. As if certain artisans can
lift the veil of mystery that divides life
from death. As if lifted, there would be
anything under the veil. As if conscious-
ness might trump time.
Mummies intended to serve the dead.
Just as songs you sing (story I compose)
intended to serve the living. Make sense
of treacherous terrain. Travelling com-
panions on an arduous journey. Help-
ing people along the way or opening
ways. Opening time. Space to inhabit.
A choice to continue. Or not. And lo
and behold ... sometimes it works.
“URML.” Song in a car. My son heard
it, Mr. Jackson. Thank you.
I hope my intrusions into your pri-
vate business, my questions, worries, and
insinuations about your art haven’t chased
you away. Who is this guy, what does
he want from me, you may be asking
yourself—if you’ve read this far. Let me
assure you I expect no response to this