Barney
Blue, white, red is in the sky
Waiting for inspiration will only ever disappoint you. I sat at my desk, staring at the blank screen for a minute or two before I finally typed a word, deleted it, sat for another minute or two before I finally typed another word, deleted it, remembered a text conversation I had several months ago with a friend, texted my friend to see if they remembered a particular phrase they had used, a phrase that would be perfect to use at the beginning of this post; They didn’t remember the exact phrase and my texts disappear after thirty days. Close, but no cigar.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I actually needed the opposite of the phrase that I couldn’t remember.
And then I saw a spider scurry across my wall and disappear behind my window blinds.
I went to the kitchen to grab the fly-swatter. I returned to my room, fly-cum-spider-swatter in hand, and beat wildly at the blinds.
The spider, curled up into a ball, fell to the window sill. Sorry, spider, I said to myself. I wanted to make sure that it was dead, so I reached for an empty can of Coke Zero I had nearby. I’d grind the spider into paste using the protruding aluminum rim at the can’s bottom.
I moved the can over the spider and said sorry yet again. Before I could thrust the can downward, smiting the spider and sending it back from whence it came, it scurried across the window sill and down the wall.
Fuck, I cried! I threw down the can and reached again for the fly-cum-spider swatter. And I struck and I struck and I struck. In the ensuing silence, I heard the sound of victory. I quoted the Lord, Jesus Christ: It is finished.
Waiting for inspiration will only ever disappoint you, but sometimes, a spider plays dead in front of you and provides a perfect segue into what you want to write about. Sometimes, inspiration strikes.
Thank you, muse.
“Thank you, Barney.”
Whenever I hear the name “Barney,” I think of the above quotation. It’s from Silence of the Lambs, the 1991 film directed by Jonathan Demme and starring Jodi Foster and Anthony Hopkins. After talking I.J. “Multiple” Miggs into killing himself, Hannibal Lecter — imprisoned in the Baltimore Hospital for the Criminally Insane — is subjected to the Evangelical proselytizing of a televised gospel program; the program’s volume, according to Lecter, is turned “way up” when not with company.
But in that scene, Lecter is with company. He’s being visited by Clarice Starling, an FBI Agent-in-training on the trail of Buffalo Bill, a serial killer terrorizing women across several states. At the start of Clarice’s visit, Lecter is in an unlit cell. He and Clarice converse. Eventually, the lights are turned on from down the hall.
“Thank you, Barney” he whispers. The Barney he’s referring to isn’t the big purple dinosaur. It’s Barney Matthews, one of Lecter’s caretakers, who’s standing at the end of the hall watching Lecter and Starling through CCTV cameras.
“Thank you, Barney.” It’s a phrase that floats around my mind a lot, a phrase that I mutter to myself when something good happens for no discernible reason, a phrase that I muttered when a spider played dead, causing a lightbulb to go off inside my head.
***
I don’t remember the first time I saw Silence of the Lambs in its entirety. But I do remember the first time I saw a scene from Silence of the Lambs. I was a little boy, between seven and ten years old, say, and I had come out of my room one night to go talk to my parents in the den. I made it as far as the kitchen. When I stepped into the kitchen, I began to hear the foreboding music characteristic of any good horror movie. So I paused, standing alone in the kitchen, staring at the TV screen in the den through a just-slightly open hand, waiting for the scene to be over. The music began to crescendo. The police officers began to stream into the elevator, into the hallway.
And then the shadow of the figure could be seen through the frosted glass window. It looked angelic, but because of the foreboding music, growing ever louder and more forceful, I knew that there was anything but an angel behind the frosted glass. At this point, I knew that I needed to look away, needed to run back to my room. I knew, too, that I needed to look, needed to stay right where I was, needed to see what was behind the frosted glass window.
The police officers breached the room. There was a pause.
“Oh, God,” says Sgt. Tate.
The camera pans to Lt. Boyle, who has been disemboweled, beaten bloody, and hanged from the top of Lecter’s cell. His arms are spread wide and his eyes are closed. His hands are clutching red, white, and blue cloth streamers. Red and white and blue, strawberry and a styrofoam cup and blue bubblegum, a Barney raspa.
***
When I envisioned the Barney raspa, I thought it would be entirely purple with a streak of green down the middle. I thought it would be grape with a dash of green apple.
But it was blue and red, was blue bubblegum and strawberry. The colors, the flavors, mixed in the middle to make purple, to make blue strawberry bubblegum.
I really liked the strawberry part, but the blue bubblegum flavor was too strong. What I enjoyed most about the Barney raspa was that as it melted, the blue and the red gradually disappeared, while the purple grew and grew. We don’t often get to see metamorphosis occur so quickly. Change so often occurs over days, weeks, months, years, across generations and between centuries. But here was one thing becoming another thing altogether different right before my eyes.
***
After seeing that segment of Silence of the Lambs, I ran out of the kitchen and flung myself onto my bed. The scene had been terrifying. I was terrified. But I still needed to go back to talk to my parents. Really, I think that I needed to go back and see why a man had been hanged from the top of a cell, his entrails hanging from his abdomen like limp noodles drying on a pasta rack. Like every human, I needed to look at the inhuman thing before me.
I went back to the kitchen, staring at the TV screen in the den through two just-slightly open hands this time. Now, the police officers were in an elevator. They were transporting a body. The elevator descended and descended; nothing scary about an elevator, I thought. And then tiny drops of blood began to fall on the body the police were transporting. They all looked up at the elevator’s ceiling. There, a pool of blood was beginning to seep through from the exterior of the elevator. For whatever reason, this scared me more than the hanging disemboweled man. I ran to my room yet again, flung myself onto my bed a second time, and resolved to wait to talk to my parents until the movie was over.
It would be several more years before I could appreciate the true beauty, the true horror of that scene. I’m not going to try and summarize what makes it so great: I highly recommend the movie. But suffice it to say that I was scared to go into elevators for a long time, and to this day, I look up at a given elevator’s ceiling, wondering if I’ll see the beginnings of a blood pool seeping in from the exterior of the elevator. Suffice it to say that Lecter played dead to make it out alive.
The spider played dead to make it out alive. The spider wasn’t as lucky as Lecter. Sorry, spider.
Before the spider appeared on my wall, while I was trying to write the opening to this post, I decided to put on some classical music. I put on Bach’s Goldberg Variations. I put on the Goldberg Variations because I recently took a class with Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You, Cleanness, and all-around badass writer / queer icon. In this class, Greenwell had us read an excerpt from Thomas Bernhard’s novel The Loser, a novel about three friends. One of these friends is the narrator; another is Glenn Gould, one of the best pianists of the 20th century; and the third is Wertheimer, who committs suicide after Gould dies of natural causes. In the excerpt we read for class, the narrator describes how he, Gould, and Wertheimer lost touch with one another after Gould left for Canada. “He was so possessed by his art,” the narrator says, “that we had to assume that he couldn’t continue in that state for very long and would soon die. But two years after we’d studied together under Horowitz Glenn came to the Salzburg festival to play the Goldberg Variations…”
When Hannibal makes his escape, he’s listening to Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations.
Me / Garth Greenwell / Glenn Gould / Goldberg Variations / Hannibal Lecter / Spider / Me.
***
There are two other notable pieces of music in Silence of the Lambs.
One is Tom Petty’s American Girl, the song that plays right before the Senator’s daughter is kidnapped by Buffalo Bill.
The other is Q Lazzarus’s Goodbye Horses, the song that’s playing in the infamous scene of Buffalo Bill dancing around his basement while wearing a suit made out of women’s skin (linking to that video here, but it’s NSFW and quite weird.)
In the Fall of 2017, I used to walk up New Haven’s Hillhouse Avenue to my ConLaw section. I’d make the trek listening to American Girl.
In March of 2020, Yale closed its campus for the remainder of the semester. Because of COVID, I and my classmates lost out on our senior spring. I was still on campus when they announced that campus was closing. In the span of three days, I packed a hundred pounds of books, did about ten loads of laundry, and said goodbye to far too few people. As I walked between the library and the laundry room and the apartments of friends still in New Haven, I listened to Goodbye Horses on repeat.
“You told me, ‘I see the rise’ / But it always falls / I see them come, I see them go / You say, ‘All things pass into the night.’ / And I say, “Oh no, sir, I must say you’re wrong / I must disagree, oh, no, sir, I must say you’re wrong / won’t you listen to me?”
If you like the song, you might want to listen to more of Q Lazzarus. Unfortunately, she disappeared. Where did she go?
William Garvey, the songwriter, said this about Goodbye Horses: “it has a rather grisly association with the serial killer in ‘The Silence of the Lambs,’ but really, the song is about transcendence over those who see the world as only earthy and finite.”
All things pass into the night. Oh no, sir, I must say you’re wrong. I must disagree, oh, no, sir, I must say you’re wrong. Won’t you listen to me?
***
You probably don’t think of Silence of the Lambs when you think of the word Barney. You probably think of Barney, the big purple dinosaur. You probably think of Barney’s closing song I Love You.
“I love you, you love me / We're a happy family / With a great big hug / And a kiss from me to you / Won't you say you love me too? / I love you, you love me / We're best friends like friends should be / With a great big hug / And a kiss from me to you / Won't you say you love me too?”
When I think of that song, I think of the grisly parody version I heard as a kid.
“I Love you, you love me / Let's get together and kill Barney / With a baseball bat and a bullet to the head / Sorry kids but Barneys dead.”
A friend and I talked about the fact that though we grew up miles and miles away from each other, the same song made its way to and through our elementary school years. It, and other horrible versions, even went international.
One such horrible version that a 9-year-old read over a Chicago radio station: “I hate you / You hate me / Barney gave me HIV.” The rest of that song: “So I kicked him in the balls / and shot him in the head / Now the purple bastard’s dead.”
What makes people so averse to sweetness, to kindness, to tenderness? What makes us hate Barney? Why is it that I can watch Silence of the Lambs without blinking an eye but I refuse to watch Coco because I know it’ll make me cry? Is it because we’ve so often asked “Won’t you say you love me too?” and so often been left unanswered, so often rejected? Is it because the fundamental nature of human existence is saying I love you to the world, asking won’t you say you love me too, and not hearing what you want to hear?
There’s a photo I once saw on the internet. It’s a photo of José Vigo (I encourage you to read about him, and so many other beautiful people, through this website, the Yale AIDS Memorial Project.)
I don’t remember the first time I saw this photo; I don’t remember what I was looking for when I stumbled upon it. But I know that when I first saw it, I stared at it for a long time. I stared at it for a long time because it wasn’t until that moment that I knew what it meant to feel like you knew someone
in another life
in another time.
A few things stick out to me about that photo, about José Vigo: the broad shoulders and the thick neck; the gold cross necklace hanging at his chest; the mustache, so distinctly not of my own time. But it’s the eyes — the tender eyes — that make me feel like I might have known him once, in another life, in another time. It’s the eyes, the eyes that make me feel like I might have said, could have said, would have said “I love you. Won’t you say you love me, too?”
I once heard a great poet say that at a certain point, you’ve met everybody you’ll ever meet in life, that every new person you meet is just a slightly different version of somebody you’ve already met.
All things pass into the night. Oh no, sir, I must say you’re wrong. I must disagree, oh, no, sir, I must say you’re wrong. Won’t you listen to me?
***
Buffalo Bill places moth chrysalises into the throats of his victims. “The significance of the moth is change. Caterpillar into chrysalis, or pupa, and from thence into beauty. Our Billy wants to change, too.”
Blue and red and red and blue devolving into a quagmire of purple, changing.
I used to want to get an infinity triangle tattooed onto my left wrist. The triangle would represent change — delta — and the infinite regress of its lines would remind me of eternity. I used to want to get an infinity triangle tattooed onto my left wrist so I could remind myself that change was the only unchanging thing in this life.
Two Propositions
Everything changes. Nothing changes.
All things pass into the night. Oh no, sir, I must say
you’re wrong. I must disagree,
oh, no, sir, I must say you’re wrong.
Won’t you listen to me?
