Tom Verlaine Is Dead
& You've Started Watching Star Trek: The Next Generation
by Travis D. Roberson
His name is Verlaine, but on the album cover he looks like Christ. Apostles (bandmates) gathered behind him. Hands articulated in such a way to suggest the gestures of an icon painting. No egg yolk halo sprouts from his head, but the album is called Marquee Moon, and what can a marquee moon be other than a halo?
There's something strangely non-human about this man. Gaunt, sunken cheeks. Eyes ringed in black. Veins protrude from his flesh. Look close enough and you can count his bones. A visitor from another world. Extraterrestrial.
Who was Christ but a visitor from elsewhere?
And where Christ visited Earth with profound teachings, Verlaine seems to hold that same wisdom in his satellite dish eyes. He stares at you from the album cover—interrogating, all knowing. Transmitting. Can you decode the message?
(& we're talking the sixth episode of the first season, but everybody says the show doesn't really start popping off and finding its groove til season 3, and they're kinda right, but there's still some gems to uncover in the early run like this episode where a being simply called The Traveler joins the crew of the Starship Enterprise
& The Traveler feels a bit like a prophet, right down to his flowing robes—towering in stature, quiet, resolved, different enough from humans to not be human, and you're wondering if Verlaine was human or possibly something else, those needle-like fingers of his traveling down the neck of a guitar under the lights at CBGB—this would have been the early days—talking '75 or '76—and it was the youth Verlaine captured, young folks ready for music and the world to change)
It's the album's namesake—track four—and it's ten minutes long. “Marquee Moon.” You will never hear guitar playing like this anywhere else. Staccato yet focused. Immediacy with an ability to hold you captive. This is more than six-string virtuosity. What you hear is not of our planet or of our time. This song is light years ahead of the current moment, and you're saying that in 2023. Television recorded this song 47 years ago.
Television. Meaning a signal. Electromagnetic waves percolating the air. It must be intentional, you think, to christen your band with such a name and to create a piece of music that sounds like an alien transmission. Ethereal. Mechanical. Electricity piercing water. Within it, Verlaine speaks. These aren't the simple melodies of The Ramones or Blondie's tongue-in-cheek pop mockery. This is a poet's reservoir of consciousness.
You didn't know what life in the hive puckered up my night meant when you first heard it at 13 years old, and now, you're 30 and you still don't. Perhaps it's better to leave some mysteries in the fog they generate. Verlaine opens the song with a line about lightning striking itself. This must be what it’s like to listen to a prophet speak, to have been there on the Mount of Beatitudes the day Christ gave his sermon. This must be the sound of lightning striking you.
(& it's safe to say The Traveler is something of a prophet himself in the way he comes to the Enterprise with tremendous knowledge
& it's to Wesley Crusher, the Enterprise's resident teenage annoyance, who The Traveler helps reach the revelation: “space and time and thought are not the separate things they appear to be,” but The Traveler silences Wesley, tells him the world isn't prepared for such theories—even here in the 24th century
& it's The Traveler, through his unexplained abilities, who accidentally sends the Enterprise rocketing through space and time, to the very edge of the universe itself
& isn't this what Verlaine did with his music—isn't this what Christ did that day on the mountain?)
Bowie said he was from Mars, and Sun Ra claimed he came
from the planet Saturn. It makes you wonder if music really is a gift
from elsewhere, beamed down the way folks travel in Star Trek. Transmissions from extraterrestrial conduits. Does that mean Mozart was an alien? Even Frank Zappa had a song about alien orifices. Perhaps he knew from experience.
You never thought Bowie would die, but then, he went and proved himself mortal. Three months later, Prince, who once changed his name to an alien symbol, drove the point home by departing Earth as well. Aliens are not gods, it seems, and even they must give their bodies to the stardust threaded in us all.
Christ, too, traveled back to his home beyond the stars.
The being named Verlaine is dead, and he leaves behind this song that is more than a song—space, time, and thought congealed into a force we humans call music
(& Captain Picard demands answers from The Traveler, and The Traveler says, I'll do my best to provide, and when Picard asks The Traveler who—or what—he is, The Traveler tells Picard he is simply that—a traveler and nothing more
& Picard goes on to query The Traveler's destination, which brings a smile to The Traveler's face as he tells the starship captain there's no specific place he wishes to go
& Picard asks, then what is the purpose of your journey
& The Traveler says, curiosity)
So yes, this song is a mystery, and it will remain as such, but it's possible Verlaine never designed it to be so opaque. Perhaps he was speaking in the only language he was capable. An alien tongue of sound and poetry, pushing all who hear it to the furthest reaches of existence.
“I have the ability to act like a lens, which focuses thought,” says the being known as The Traveler on the sixth episode of the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
There was always going to be a world without Verlaine. That world existed once before and we've arrived in that place again, though it sounds different because of the change he brought with him. More interstellar vagabonds will leave us should we allow time to go on passing. Patti Smith will go one day, as will Andre 3000. We cannot keep George Clinton tethered here. But what we can hold onto is the transmissions they've left us, listening again and again until one day we have the tools to decipher them completely.
(& like all episodes of this show, the crew ends up unscathed in the end, ready for the next adventure, meaning they don't stay at the edge
of the universe forever, and of course, it's The Traveler that works to take them back to the regions of outer space they're familiar, right before
he vanishes in front of their eyes as if he had never been there at all,
but the crew of the Enterprise knows the truth—The Traveler changed them forever
& the episode ends with one final speech from the great Captain Picard, sitting in his captain's chair upon the Enterprise's storied bridge, speaking to the entire starship via the intercom system
& he says, “Attention all decks: this is to inform you that with your support The Traveler has returned us to our own galaxy
However, he has now left us
Wherever he has gone, we wish him well”)
​
Bio
Travis D. Roberson is a New York based writer and artist originally from central Florida. His work appears in The Iowa Review, Cutleaf, Pithead Chapel, Juked, and many other publications. He is both a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. More of his work is available at