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E-mailRemembering Danny The Real Jazz
Peter Quinn remembers Daniel Cassidy, the author of "How the Irish Invented Slang," as "a deeply spiritual man of passionate intensity and resonant laughter . . . a social visionary filled with savage indignation against snobbery, pretense, arrogance . . ."
On behalf of myself and Irish-American writers and artists, I'm here to talk about a truly great human being, our dear friend, Danny Cassidy. But let me begin long ago and far away, over forty years ago, when I was a freshman at Manhattan College in the Bronx. (And anyone interested in finding out how a college named Manhattan wound up in the Bronx should see me later.)
Like most of what I learned in kindergarten - and most of what I learned in high school - most of what I learned in college I've forgotten, and more of it goes each day. Besides, I was in college in the 60's and so much of what I learned, I didn't remember even when I learned it.
Among the few things I never forgot was an image I was introduced to in one of those art history survey courses of the If-This-Is-Tuesday-This-Must-Be-The-Renaissance variety.
The professor was going on about ancient Egypt, clicking through slide after slide as we rode the uptown express through 4,000 years of history in the requisite 50 minutes - see the pyramids along the Nile the Valley of the Kings Queen Nefertiti made up to look like Liz Taylor in Cleopatra.
My eyes grew heavy and then up popped this figure holding a scale. It was a god, the professor said. I can't remember the god's name. Horus maybe; or maybe not. He had the body of a man and the head of an ibis; or maybe a jackal.
What I remember clearest - what stayed with me all these years (while so much else has left/is leaving) - are those scales in which the god weighed the souls of the dead.
I'd been hearing about a last judgment since I was a small child, but it had become so rote I'd stopped thinking about it. But the image of this god and his scales made a lasting impression.
Why?
Maybe because of the striking juxtaposition of the human and the animal; maybe because I was entering my atheist phase (which I long ago left) when all religious imagery was dismissed or reduced to pretty lies, and this image didn't fit the traditional categories; or maybe because I'd spent the previous several hours drinking beer at the Pinewood Bar on Broadway.
In any case, whatever my degree of sobriety - or lack thereof - and despite my unbelief, the impression was permanent. that ibis-headed-or jackal-headed-god . . .
the scales . . .
the soul . . .
the notion that there is a weight - a substance to what we do/do not do during our brief stay on this rented planet - and that this weight can touch/does touch the equilibrium of Eternity.
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