Ghost of the Circle (Pt 1)

Ghost of the Circle - Jeremy Whitfield
With Annotations by Roger Lieberman

The now infamous "Page 0" of this book has been expertly verified as having been written the night Jeremy was declared dead (though his body was technically never recovered); we will all remember the explosion of his plane the night following his fiery and controversial final performance at the Nevada Sonic Spirit Festival in 1996. The text on Page 0 has proven the most difficult of the book's poetry to decipher. While most of the lines seem to reference themes in Jeremy's poems as well as his EOAS lyrics, no widely agreed upon theory over their arrangement in pg 0 has ever been established. Most authorities and journalists believe it to be a crazed or drug-influenced suicide letter of some kind. Those who believe Jeremy to still be alive (these people often cling to the belief he somehow knew his plane was doomed) view the first/last line of the page - along with its placement on page 0 - to represent his metaphorical rebirth into a new life.



***



pg. 0

Half past death is my birthday

Only bronze fire cuts all nightmares, wreathed in star bullets
Warm decaf truth tumbles from her earthy lips
He's coming, eyes shaded by my echo
Our boys are made of chrome on Martian sands
A divided man sweats and dances between dust and lightning
Time walks here sometimes, I can see her footprints, smell her mirage
The American Night asks dark questions in the dungeon
The sprites dance like the Banshee, barely singing anymore


My eye bleeds distortion scratch under a crescent moon spotlight
Coyote laughs at me, offers the same deal

Read this

Half past death is my birthday




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Ghost of the Circle: Notes on Me, for what they're worth

by Jeremy Whitfield


For the record: this is part of my rehab, writing this, no personal motivation whatsoever. I haven't written a journal, or anything like one, in a long time. But I guess addicts surrender their control as a matter of course, i.e. the choice to abuse substances and become an addict is basically choosing to no longer make real choices. So as a card-carrying addict, I am no longer granted the choice to not write this.

I've been commanded to find myself again. Seriously. The irony does not escape me, that these fucks honestly think I ever had myself to begin with. What the hell do they think turned me to pills and pipes in the first place?

But I guess I have to give some credit where it's due. Dr. Landon/Janice, my therapist/new best friend told me: "Just write. Write about yourself, about your life, but write it how you want to. As long as you add something each day, I don't care how you go about it. Try starting at the beginning of yourself, and go from there. It should make sense to you."

Choice within the non-choice. The irony thickens.

So where does a life begin? With two people fucking, of course. So everyone's story always begins with the stories of two other people, or at least what their kids can say about those people.

The Broken Gun and The Banshee
One was for the bullet, One was for the dance
He was missing every shot
She never had a chance
I see him in the broken mirror
I saw her in a glance

I was about seven years old the first time I saw her, my mother. At least, that's the first time I remember. Even in that eerie photo-negative smoky haze that most ghosts I've seen usually give off, I could tell her hair had been dark and silky, her skin smooth, the oval shape of her face perfectly symmetrical. She was Asian, but Dad was an unreliable narrator when it came to what specific country. I thought she was just a phantom, I didn't realize she was technically a banshee until a few years later. Even back then, I didn't care much for literal bullshit. I've always felt instinctively like the mind grabs and examines more than people realize, even if only somewhere in the basement of their brains (therapist reading this: you tell me). My dad - intentionally or not - showed me that.

{Recorded here is the first time Jeremy is known to openly discuss his mother and her effect on his life in any kind of manner; he famously and deliberately shunned the subject in every interview. Music journalists theorized heavily that the Banshee figuring in his poems and lyrics - specifically Banshee Care - was a metaphor for his late mother. Here lies the confirmation, though it seems Jeremy meant the symbolism far more literally than most knew. Curiously, no other witness has ever verified the presence of a banshee at Jeremy's childhood home.}

I knew from dad that she was a dancer, not professionally or anything, but she liked to dance. He first met her when he saw her twirling in the sun beside a river; not sure where, but it was while he was in the service, the 'Nam days you could never get him to talk about much. He said she was good at it, too, not that he knew much about it.

And when I saw her in the backyard, she proved dad right. So he did have some kind of clue (smarter than he looked; I rest my case). She spun around and moved translucent feet in the grass, and the whole neighborhood - even the neighbor's fence-fucking annoying dog - would fall quiet. It was as if her movements commanded the audience of the world. They commanded my world.

Until the screaming.

Of course, six-year-old me had no clue this was one of the familiar symptoms of a banshee. All I knew was that something beautiful and untouchable had suddenly turned horrible, the moment she locked eyes with me. This was just about every night, like a bad rerun playing the same episode of a crappy sitcom over and over.

But even that young, even as terrified as I was the first fifty times she did it, it didn't surprise me. She died when I was two, and I suppose somewhere in my infantile logic, deep in the basement, I rationalized her passing as not seeing me worth living for.

Dad certainly wasn't worth living for, as far as he was concerned. He never stopped loving her, I don't think, but he loved his bottles even more. This also made a sad sort of sense to me: when you lose someone you love completely and you find something that makes you okay again, even if only for moments at a time, you fall in love with that too.

I suppose these were the first few seeds of my own sordid and steamy affairs with bottles, grasses and powders. See, Dr. Janice? We're getting somewhere.

Dad never saw her out there; he insisted I was making it up, especially when I had my friends over to look for her with me and she wouldn't show. That's about when she became the Banshee. Not mom, just the Banshee. My Banshee, anyway.

Reading back over what I have so far, my ego is well stroked: I can still write after all. Thank you, Miss Griggs.

(Miss Claudia Griggs, Meyer Elementary, 3rd grade. Silver hair pulled into a bun, like a pioneer woman, with bright eyes and a tiny smile she was probably born with. Think the Mona Lisa meets Mrs. Butterworth.)

I'd been equally enchanted and terrorized by the Banshee every night for about three years when I arrived in Miss Griggs' class. Day 4, she noticed I "explained myself well" in the journal entries she had us write every morning (and now history repeats itself). Apparently, I was a decent writer.

I thought she was full of shit.

I didn't think I was good at anything except reading books and eating (ironically enough I was a bit of a fat ass as a kid. "My blood, my fault," dad would say). But she was a nice lady who liked to look for potential. Imagine that: a teacher actually giving a shit about the point of her job. I was impressed.

Dad wasn't. True to my initial reaction, he thought my nice teacher was just trying too hard to keep hope alive. "I can barely write a Christmas card," he said when I first told him what Miss Griggs had me practicing. "Neither could your grandfather. Sorry, bud, it's just not in your blood."

Poetic ending of that story: my uncle Jeff told me at dad's funeral that Dad used to write all kinds of stories as a kid. Apparently Dad was really into World War II and wrote a lot of victory-over-nazis tales. Vietnam fucked that up for him, too, it seems.

So I kept practicing writing in the kitchen with my dad grumbling in the background over his third or fourth beer in the living room recliner, one sport or another blaring too loud on the TV. All the rabbit-ear noise and the patter of Washington State Raindrops on the roof became a beat to follow as my journals slowly began rhyming. Somewhere in the middle of this, I got my hands on some Robert Frost and Walt Whitman and started playing with rhymes. A few years later, my older cousin Chucky (and I mean Chucky; birth certificate and everything) gave me a book called The Lords and the New Creatures by some nobody named Jim Morrison. The poems in that book were well beyond anything a 5th grader had any business reading on a number of levels, but it opened wide the cave mouth leading out of my own head. And I didn't walk so much as trip and stumble right on through that cave mouth.

Ideas and visions swirled acid-trip fast through my head, carving their faces into my dreams, and I wrote as much as I could about all of it, throwing words together to describe it all in ways that made sense to me alone. And all the while, the rain and the Banshee and the television and Miss Griggs' voice and the various heathen rock albums Chucky was introducing me to gave me beats to follow as I wrote the endless poems my journal had become. The likes of Morrison Hotel and The Dark Side of the Moon became my choir of angels.

It wasn't until, at age 12, my best friend Pete Lyons (a mischief maker who was already sweating rock n' roll sex appeal before he'd even hit junior high) showed up at my house one day with his dad's beaten up acoustic guitar...that was when the truth snapped alive for me. He'd been skimming through my work whenever he was over, or at school because I brought the damn journal everywhere. He grabbed the thing and started flipping through it, mumbling "I've got a theory about this stuff."

He found the page he was after, tuned his guitar, and started strumming chords.

I liked the sound of what he was playing...it unsettled me because it was new to me, and yet sounded like I had heard this before. There was a sharp, chemical mix of delight and foreboding churning around in my stomach like a hurricane in the sea of fate.

And then my words were coming out of his mouth weirdly.

He was singing them.

"Be still...

The lightning chases toward
the fearful sprinting forward
Away
From the homespun whip and cane

Be still...

The midnight winds rip into
The hells that you have been to
Inside
The last place you can hide..."

It was a softer, folksier sound then, vastly different from the radio hit it would become in about fifteen years. But the damage had been done.

That son of a bitch gave me the biggest grin I'd ever seen. He had cracked the code.

"You've been writing songs, my friend," he said, handing me the book. "I guess the only thing left to do now is make a band."

{This walk-through of where Jeremy and Pete Lyons first talked of starting their band is obviously significant in the overall origins of EOAS. But what is particularly poignant here: while Pete has been quoted in several interviews stating that "The Calm Between the Storms" was a song inspired and developed entirely in the studio, here Jeremy indicates that he wrote at least pieces of the famous lyrics as early as his eleventh year, with Pete composing rudimentary music to it soon after. This has led to quite a few fervent debates among rock music experts.}

In the moment, I rolled my eyes and told him he was full of it. I explained that I didn't play an instrument, couldn't sing to save my life.

Pete kept smiling. As usual, he knew something I didn't about where our lives were going.

And the rest is an echo of history.

There was creativity in my blood, despite what dad said. It simply took a screaming spirit and a drunken provider to wrench it out, kicking and screaming.

Mom and Dad, the Broken Gun and the Banshee, gave me a gift that would bring me fame, money, travel and opportunities.

And these days, I couldn't hate them more for it.

Fuck them both.