ORNITHOLOGY OF ANGELS:
JAMES BALDWIN AND JULIO CORTÁZAR IN SEARCH OF CHARLIE PARKER
By Rolando André López Torres
Julio the Porteño and Jimmy the New Yorker take their time with the angelic. Julio is the King of the Cronopios, James the Patron Saint of Harlem; Cortázar is the aesthete of meta-games and Baldwin the author of emotive, sociopolitical autobiographies. One white and Latinoamericano, the other a black norteño. Both writing about a black bird.
The Argentine wrote “The Pursuer,” the American wrote “Sonny’s Blues.” The Argentine created Bruno, the music critic (“nothing more than a critic,” he says, dragging himself in moments of depression), and Johnny Carter, the genius—after Charlie Parker. The norteño created Sonny, the young man who wanted to play like Charlie Parker, and the Unnamed Narrator, whom I will name Jimmy because like so many of Baldwin’s narrators, it’s he, the older brother who narrates the story through the lens of his worry for his loved one. Just as you see him trembling in the prose of “A Letter to My Nephew,” so does Jimmy tremble for his brother’s life when he sees that Sonny’s going down that road, that he’ll hit all its well-documented dances with death.
The threat of lynching hangs over his every thought for Sonny. Sonny wants to be free, but Jimmy carries memory of the ticket’s price. He carries the promise he made to his mother, to himself. After sharing with him the story of his uncle’s death in the hands of a white mob, his mother admonishes him never to forget:
“I ain’t telling you all this… to make you scared or bitter or to make you hate nobody. I’m telling you this because you got a brother. And the world ain’t changed.”
“I made a promise to myself,” Jimmy confides to us, “and I prayed that I would keep it.”
Prayers to the God who was lynched by a Roman mob. Prayers keep at bay the ghosts, still ghosts manifest as fear, ice in the narrator’s belly. Yet, Jimmy listens to his brother’s testimony of addiction. He’s moved to watch his brother perform, to witness the total freedom of Sonny’s musical expression, getting carried, fearlessly, into his brother’s distant cloud. The consequence of listening to the Blues.
The Bird’s shadow plays above the writing hand, evading direct description. They wrote him elliptically, Cortázar through Johnny, Baldwin through Sonny.
Jon Batiste says he named his most recent album Anatomy of Angels because, after one of the nighttime performances at the Village Vanguard, an audience member gifted him a vision: that as the band played one of Jon's original compositions and he sat rapt in awe watching them play, an angel arrived to poise itself over the stage to bless the occasion.
In Rainer Maria Rilke’s personal imaginarium, angels are the solitary bearers of the infinite’s abyss: “angels (they say),” he writes in Duino Elegies:
…don’t know whether it is the living
they are moving among, or the dead…
their voices are drowned out in a thunderous roar.
Rilke’s angels live in the torture of an “eternal torrent” drowning all seasons in one cosmic blur.
Rilke also imagines that angels disguise themselves in familiar bodies to make themselves “no longer appalling” to human sight, much like the three strangers Abraham greeted and welcomed into his cabin who gave Sarah the news that made her mock the angels. In Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire, a film inspired by Rilke’s elegies, the angels look like two gaunt German men wearing heavy coats in the Berlin winter. They move invisibly among the people, though when they stand close to someone, that person, if sensitive enough, might sense a breath on their neck and look in that direction, only to find the angel had moved on in eternal space already. While they amble as aimlessly as the mortals around them through libraries, graffitied walls, parking lots, and parks and abandoned roofs, the angels wax poetic about the experience of time within immortality, longing for flesh and joy of mortals, for the possibility of tragedy. The angel played by Bruno Ganz descends from the black and white of distant immortality into the color of living, into the shock of one second happening right after the last. The first thing he shouts for joy upon realizing he has become human, with eyes open like a child’s looking at the sky, at the people, at the colors:
“Time!”
Time!
“I already played this tomorrow, it’s horrible, Miles, I already played this tomorrow,” says Johnny Carter in “The Pursuer,” and Bruno cannot decide how he perceives Johnny, lives between dualities: man/beast, angel/schizoid. He calls them, the genius musicians, “sick angels.” And Cortázar’s Johnny speaks with wonder of drug-induced epiphanies:
“The only thing I do is notice there is something. Like those dreams, I’m not sure, where you begin to figure that everything is going to smash up now, and you’re a little afraid just to be ready for it; but at the same time nothing’s certain, and maybe it’ll flip over like a pancake and all of a sudden, there you are, sleeping with a beautiful chick and it’s very cool. ”
In the intimacy of a hotel room where Johnny stays with his Dédée, Bruno entertains Johnny’s flights of schizophrenic ecstasy with relative sympathy. He listens, he yeses, he asks questions, and Johnny sees him as his friend.
When Bruno leaves, ironic distance turns him to stone, and Johnny’s words become like wind that flies off the stone’s skin, having barely touched it much less moved it. He has to return to time, where one has to walk one step after the other without music to conduct business, to write the book “that sells like Coca-Cola” of how Johnny
“is always blowing tomorrow, and the rest of them are chasing his tail, in this today he jumps over, effortlessly, with the first notes of his music.”
The time of sick angels, not the time of busy people.
Jimmy in “Sonny’s Blues” is also a busy person who needs to “get by,” but getting by is exactly what Sonny does not want to do in a world dominated by the dogmas and norms of white supremacy. Cortázar’s Johnny Carter doesn’t want to live in that plane of time either: he wants to be out of time, like when you’re in an elevator as it rises, which means, if the elevator is fast enough, that you can communicate a sentence in the elevator that is as long as the distance between three floors, so that the doors open and you are at your destination, but you’ve barely had a conversation with the person you’re talking to before you leave: one sentence can be as long as all the storeys in a building—and that’s it, it’s about taking you to the peak in one musical sentence, that’s what Johnny Carter says the thing is before he recoils from himself and says, no, that’s not what it is; later in the story he tries it out again, says this time it’s like when you’re in the metro, the subway, and it’s going really fast, and then the place changes, and while there you remember an entire quarter-hour of your childhood, and that quarter-hour describes itself to you in your mind with Proustian vividness while the subway takes three minutes to get to the next stop. Johnny asks Bruno, “How can you think a quarter of an hour in a minute and a half?” Bruno does not answer.
And Sonny? All he wants is this: to live, to nurture that privacy that makes him to his loved ones such an alien presence, and to music lovers such a god. He wants to “leave the shoreline and strike out for the deep water.” Like the God of the Oppressed, he wants to make beauty from chaos.
“I don’t want your God,” says Johnny to Bruno in “The Pursuer,” after telling him that nothing in the book that Bruno wrote of Johnny’s music truly resonates with his deepest self: “what you forgot to put in was me,” Johnny tells Bruno. “And it’s not your fault that you can’t write what I myself can’t blow.” When Johnny manifests during a schizophrenic episode, when he says things like “you forgot to put in me,” when he loses himself in half-remembrances of his childhood, Bruno compares him to a monkey, revealing how far the distance is between them, and how entrenched racism in Bruno’s personal imaginary.
Baldwin’s narrator compares the mannerisms of heroin addicts to dogs, but never compares his own brother to an animal; he wouldn’t dream of it. He’s trying to put it away, the image of his brother lost to himself and the world, with strange white-men hangers-on who feed his post-war hunger so they can sell their tickets and write their books.
Cortázar’s Bruno knows he makes money from the mystique surrounding Johnny, that the allure of the tortured genius impels the (white) people who buy the book he wrote on him, now heading into its second edition. “I see them as sick angels,” Bruno says of musicians,
“irritating in their irresponsibility, but ultimately valuable to the community because of, say, Johnny’s records… But I’m not telling it all and I’m forcing myself to say it out: I envy them, I envy Johnny, that Johnny on the other side…”
…which Baldwin calls “the deep waters” in the sea of creation, the other side where chaos is put to order. Bruno knows Johnny believes the drugs give it to him. He knows his books about Johnny sell like Coca-Cola. Yet he doesn’t write the books about the heroin addiction and where it comes from. Nor does he write of the schizophrenic episodes. He writes about the music.
Haji Ahkba, French Quarter, New Orleans, May 2020. Photograph by Kevin Rabalais.
He does not write of his envy. He only confesses it to the reader—of “The Pursuer,” his confession. Ironic distance, a game of masks: Cortázar’s Johnny dies in the darkness, and Baldwin’s story leaves Sonny in a moment of true, trembling life, but where did Charlie Parker die? Laughing in the dark, in his underwear, in front of a TV set.
From the first page of “Sonny’s Blues”:
“I was scared, scared for Sonny. He became real to me again. A great block of ice got settled in my belly and kept melting there slowly all day long, while I taught my classes algebra.”
This is what happens when the people we put away to get on with the day make their destined return. And the world ain’t changed. They had tried tolerating him before, but he was too consumed in the music, in the habit. They came to no longer have a relationship with a person named Sonny, just “a relationship with sound,” sonic cities in Sonny’s mind trickling out in endless hours of practice. He became a stranger to the family. Time and a war and deployments and even more deaths to the ones already in the family past completed the distance between the brothers. And now the newspaper brought them back together with its awful headline about a great pianist who got arrested for possession of heroin. That pianist is my brother. By this point, Jimmy has lost a daughter.
They begin to write to each other. When Sonny leaves jail, they meet, they talk, and Sonny confesses himself. Jimmy listens, asks questions, takes in Sonny as he processes his trauma, and then takes that listening to the next level, visiting the local jazz club, watching Sonny perform “Am I Blue?” with the club band.
This is it again for Sonny and his bandleader, Creole, and all the folks in the scene, but for Jimmy the narrator, it’s the first time, which in time will become an allusion, the reference from which all other times spring: this is it, what it is “to move in this world of hatred and misery and love about to blow the avenue apart at any moment,” with a moment of bliss in the mix, a moment wrought: drinking the cup of trembling. A moment of pura vida.
St. Kilda Beach, Melbourne, 2016. Photograph by Kevin Rabalais.
A show, an illusion dreamed up by James Baldwin, the writer who may fit the description made by Jimmy the narrator:
“All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air.”
Jimmy sees the conversation beginning, developing, interprets the men’s movements on stage: how Creole the bandleader navigates the expedition, how he’s guiding slowly Sonny towards the greater depths, eventually letting Sonny go further on his own, supporting his flight into the deep waters as Sonny roars from the darkness, creating a flash of light in the heart: to Jimmy, a vanishing evocation of his daughter; to Sonny, the drowning roar of the abyss where death and life are one and the same; to Billie Holiday, roast duck.
The story ends after the show has ended. Jimmy observes Sonny’s cocktail glass trembling upon the piano, and the reference to the verse from the Book of Isaiah is clear:
“Awake, awake, stand up, O Jerusalem, which hast drunk at the hand of the LORD the cup of his fury; thou hast drunken the dregs of the cup of trembling, and wrung them out.”
Sonny is himself the cup of trembling, and hearing what Sonny had to say awoke the narrator to the flash of light.
James Baldwin and his shepherd’s heart.
Cortázar doesn’t preach nor has any business with that, but his Johnny cannot stop giving half-remembered testimonies. Bruno listens to Johnny without hesitation, but he can afford to go on with his day after the listening’s done. He is an interested listener. Johnny is to Bruno a distant other crying to be known in a story that dances with fact through irony and meta-game—that is, a story that leaves Johnny in the cry to be known without ever knowing what he himself can’t blow; and while Baldwin’s Sonny is feared-for, he is ultimately the be-loved brother who mediates for Jimmy an encounter with God.
It wasn’t thinking,
Johnny Carter says to Bruno,
“it seems to me I told you a lot of times, I never think; I’m like standing on a corner watching what I think go by, but I’m not thinking what I see.”
What, exactly, is the Anatomy of Angels? Rilke: to see them “would beat us to death.” A game of masks, then a blues, and Rilke ends a eulogy:
…Ah, whom can we ever turn to
in our need? Not angels, not humans,
and already the knowing animals are aware
that we are not really at home in
our interpreted world.
Rolando André López Torres is a writer, artist and educator based in Boston, MA, and San Juan, PR. A co-steward at New Roots AME Church, he leads meditations and plays piano for worship every Sunday for services at Epiphany School in Dorchester, MA. His writing centers on the Afro-Caribbean experience in the diaspora. You can follow him on Instagram: @nocolornocontrast
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