the package contained the mountain tapes. This was how Opel had chosen to mark the day of my birth.

On the tapes were twenty-three songs, all written and sung by me, all played by me (without accompaniment) on an old acoustic guitar, the first I'd ever owned. The songs were the most recent things I'd done. I'd taped them about fourteen months earlier, alone in the mountains, sitting down with the guitar and tape recorder and making up lyrics as I went along. I had just come off a world tour and my voice was weary and scorched, no sound nearer to my mind than the twang of baby murders in patriarchal hamlets. In time a visitor came upon the tapes and played them. Word got out, distorted of course, shaped by rumor and speculation. I refused to discuss the tapes with anyone. I declined to release them, to re-record the songs, to accept any offer concerning this material. I didn't understand the nature of my own labor. The guitar work was recognizable but the voice didn't seem to be mine. It possessed an extraordinary childlike blandness, a bit raw at times in its acknowledgments to pain, but mostly lonesome, homeless and dull, lacking true crudeness as well as any other distinctive quality. Beyond this were the lyrics themselves, strange little autistic ramblings. Perhaps because the words had never been put on paper, or even thought about for the briefest moment, these songs conveyed a special desolation, a kind of abnormal naturalness. In the past there had been a mind behind every babble and moan I'd ever produced. But the mountain tapes were genuinely infantile. I had no idea whether this was good or bad. I didn't know whether the songs were supposed to be redemptive, sardonic or something completely different. Tributes to my own mute following. Cheap plastic tricks. Ironic sonnets to the nation's crazed statesmen. Main Street parade noises. Commercials for baby food. Beseech-ings and calumets. Sequels to the ballads of the dead revolution. Whatever they were, the songs had come oozing out, one after another, over a period of two or three sleepless days. I had no clear memory of that period. The tapes themselves served as confirmation of what had taken place. Every reel was full of repetitions, mistakes and slurred words. There were long incoherent vocal passages interspersed with the sounds of eating, drinking and talking back to the TV. I played the tapes a number of times but their essence continued to elude me and so I simply put them away, preferring to forget what had been, after all, just a few days of unremembered effort — a collection of songs whose release would be sure to cause vast confusion. Aft............