A Rare Passion

Image and story by Alan McKee Copyright 2021 All rights reserved May not be reproduced or re-published without permission of the creator and owner

A Rare Passion

I

t was back in the days when I was fascinated with words rather than images. I did not really understand the true nature of words and so I over valued them. Images had not yet taken hold of my mind in the way they, or should I say, “She,” finally did.

At any rate, I had just started working at the New York Public Library. In those days, I wanted to be as close as possible to what I conceived of as the fountainhead of words. Of course, I wanted to be a writer, and what better place for a writer to get a job to pay rent with than the library on forty-second street, the main branch of one of the greatest library systems in the world. Eventually, the work I was assigned was moved to the Lincoln Center Library uptown. But I never went there. I was permitted to remain in the cellars on forty-second street. I know, I know others have written about libraries. Borges worked in a library, too. But I promise, my story is different.

I was given the job of cataloguing nineteenth century sheet music, not copies, mind you, but real original sheet music from the time of the American Civil War and later. I told myself it was the titles that fascinated me, which showed so clearly the prejudices and beliefs of society in the eras they were written and performed. I was working with original publications, music hall and saloon favourites like “You’ve got to put a Nighty on Aphrodite to Keep All the Married Men Home.”But all the while I told myself it was really the period titles and lyrics that had me in what I can only call a ‘spell’. But one day, a very particular sheet came across my desk. It depicted a woman, a sort of a woman, a fairy, really, or some sort of lusciously attractive female spirit the artist had somehow managed to capture in the watery tones of faded early, slightly off-register inks.

The moment I saw her, I was captivated.

She wore a luminous sort of gown which swept the wheels of her chariot and her hair flew behind her in a spray of golden light. Two great eagles escorted her, paying tribute to her fascinating beauty. To this day, I don’t know how a faded piece of sheet music could be so alive. But she was. I have never seen anything or anyone so beautiful. I developed a compulsion to see and experience more and more of these often badly printed illustrations of angels riding in chariots, or handle-barred moustachioed robber barons in white tie and tails beating someone or something with a whip. The song sheet illustrations could be quite surreal and symbolic—not unlike Rousseau’s painting titled: Liberty Inviting Artists to

Take Part in the 22nd Exhibition in the Society of Independent Artists.

But there was nothing like my Lillith, the beautiful woman on a piece of hundred year old sheet music with whom I feel in love.

There, I have confessed my passion for the fascinating, exquisitely beautiful Lillith, who materialized out of the dusty darkness of my cataloguing table one perfectly ordinary afternoon. For it was the Lillith, first wife of Adam, (though I know she never really loved him), the words of the song even said so. And even after all these years of reading about her, my obsession has not been quelled or diminished. From the first glimpse, I was swept away into a realm of such beauty and passion, I wanted nothing more than to stay in my dark cellar and commune with her. It is easy to admit all of this to you, a stranger, but it would be impossible to even hint at it to anyone I might actually meet.

Of course, in the years that have passed since I first found my Lillith, I have made every attempt to learn more about her. I have traced the history of the name that is scrawled into the cover illustration, so small and cramped it was almost impossible to read, even after I had the page examined by a restoration expert with special equipment. I have spent, what to me, were vast sums in these exercises, and have only been able to learn the signature was of an unknown John Turner who was born in Brooklyn Heights near the beginning of the nineteenth

century and grew up to be an ‘engraver’ of cheap popular publications. This was the man who had made my Lillith visible. For I have also learned that she is much more than an image on paper. She is an ideal, as Byron said, “all that’s best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eye.” She has become my sun, a brilliance of experience that has blotted out all secondary light. She has illuminated my lifetime, which I have spent in the changeless cellars at forty-second street. No ordinary woman could ever be what she has been and will always be in my life. And afterwards?

Yes, Lillith has now convinced me that there is, indeed, an Afterwards, that I will know her and love her in even more sublime ways when my physical body is no more. Does it matter to me that my all consuming love has been the grave of every other love, of anything else I might have done or been? That because of Her I am still cataloguing sheet music in the murk and semi-darkness?

That my hair, which is now grey and dusty grows thinner each year? Not at all.

I have lived more intensely and with greater fulfillment than most. I have lived in the universe of perfect invention, timelessly created by writers and illustrators across the ages and shared it all with my perfect Lillith. What more could an ordinary lifetime have given me? What companionship would an ordinary wife have given me? I have lived and will die in a perfect universe curated by my exquisite Lillith.