if you're wondering why so much blogging: well, i decided to quit pitching to publications and just recommit to the blog. and then it just started flowing and i was writing again like i once did: a lot, with great pleasure. as zora put it: polishing my sentences with a soft cloth.
alright, even though i love lucinda inordinately, i hated the last album. let me give you my first impression of the ghosts of highway 20. it is incredibly beautiful and wonderful. right she is still sounding pretty depressed (well, the theme is death), but now that is deepening everything. i still want her joy very much, but maybe that's a quality of my fantasy marriage to lucinda williams (sorry, john rawls). (i was always going to heal her; let's say i tried that approach here and there and it wouldn't have worked out.)
on the other hand, speaking of zora neale hurston as well as people whose bodies have actually been in my proximity [let's make it five times altogether counting those two; those are my big loves] i have fallen in love with women because of their art, or partly, or inseparably. sometimes experiencing her music, or her prose style, or her painting, is looking deep into her eyes, but at the same time from her eyes into yourself, for a long time, seeing all the way in, and then you really might fall in love, you know, and it can change the way you hear or see or read things; that's when i've had the biggest changes of perception, as well as the most intense experiences of beauty. there has to be an opening in her art into her. she has to be there, be findable, all of her, in her art, and not even all good artists are, and then you have to be moved by what you find, what is emerging from her and into you, and then you have to somehow pour it back into the world too, toward her if she's really there and right around you both until you are embedded together in the same sweet and bittersweet life. that's when the loss begins.
good heavens lucinda, thank you so much for teaching me that. thank you for expressing it so completely.:
[among other things, that is a perfect country song, and the guitar just kills.]
you can't bring someone joy at a distance, or insist that she be joyful. but maybe being here will make joy possible again. oh my god this is so intensely lovely and sad. and i think she has made the decisive turn: she's pretty ok with the age she is now; she's inhabiting her body as it is now, and thinking about her life elegiacally. (i am a little worried though, because she keeps saying how ready she is to die. maybe those are personae, though. um, i want 16 more albums, so go right on.) man she is writing good poetry in her distinctive way too. i am so happy to be able to say this. maybe this is her best album, though that seems impossible considering what she has done before. she is making me cry again. harder.
i've had a lot of death. and now i can explore its implications for the mandolin. at the moment i first heard 'sweet old world,' my brother had just committed suicide. also i was really in love for the first time, and early in recovery. i was trying to change everything in my life so i wouldn't want to die. i listened to that song hundreds of times. i still love it so much and i can't stand it. i don't know whether to let it play. i might shatter. it is my favorite song. and it is my candidate for 'most beautiful thing in the world.' so when something like that happens it's hard not to start thinking about what the person who wrote that song knows that made it possible for her to write it, and the guts and self-knowledge it took to just write it and record it and let everyone hear it. she didn't make any big show about it, but in that song she just let people see who she was, kind of all the way down. i started thinking about her life, and how if she can say that she must have really been through the shit, something like the same shit, but she understood what it meant and i didn't. and it's not just a piece of writing; it is her actual voice embodying and conveying the life and my life. and it is a beautiful woman's voice, knowing you, healing you by tearing you to shreds. how do you not fall in love? when she is in despair on her next album, you just want to heal her back, with the very things she gave you. you want to teach her the melancholy but total affirmation of life she taught you, because now you can't live without it. plus the whole thing yielded the professional benefit of refuting kant's aesthetics once and for all forever; i got a theory of beauty from it. amazingly, there is a song about her little brother on that album that i swear could be a description of mine.
also, it says that love redeems. you could have said that to me all day every day at that point and i wouldn't have believed it. when she sang it, i started trying to believe it; i knew what i needed to believe if i was ever going to wend my way back to joy. and i did actually fall in love with the person who showed it to me. she could play it on the guitar and sing it ok, and i could do something with it on the harmonica. we played it in the subway one time. then it was really mine and ours. it's the acoustics in there; it's like you're vibrating the whole planet. people threw money, and she paid her rent. at the time, her father was dying. the presents she gave me were clothes she made with her own hands, some of the few things i could never throw away. i don't know where she is.
i can't seem to get exactly what i want on youtube right now, so go stream/download etc 'death came'. ok? 'if my love could kill.' "can't close the door on love.' then go watch the videos on that first post.
[don't worry, i'm clear on the difference between really digging someone's novels and, like, dating her etc. i've never needed to talk to luci, but also have never not been. i've gotten quite a bit of writing out our relationship, though. i remember when i really couldn't stop writing about zora neale hurston; i had to swear off. well, sadly, you do sometimes! one good thing about loving the dead or distant star is that if you fuck around on her, or get a sudden crush, she doesn't even notice. dead women, or distant women you've never met, are polyamorous, which is good because you can't actually cuddle up with them anyway, and you might want that. so, every few years luci might put out a bad album and i might get pretty pissed off and turn to edna st. vincent millay or chrissie hynde for solace, or just to feel like a man. taylor swift would be wrong for an old man like me. i had my mid-life crisis long ago with one of the 5 - but still. dude, have you ever had daughters? that's pretty romantic too, and then you watch them begin to fill the space, and read and sing and write and play and paint and you do those things with them, loving them so much and losing them too as you do, and loving even that you are losing them; that's the job. i'm afraid i'm not going to be able entirely to avoid the cliches on this; sometimes that is what is most particularly true. maybe you don't think so, but i've noticed that all of taylor is in fact in her art. it's a different kind of art, but it has to be.]
i don't know whether i would think lucinda williams was beautiful if i just happened to run into her perched on a barstool somewhere. i have forgotten to think about that at all for the last 20-some years. i know she is beautiful. that is a completely unaffected and unguarded performance. and it is also masterful.
i think that art is one of the best ways we show that the human self is not contained in the skin, that it is assembled bits of other people and broken pieces of the world. maybe as you gather it, you haphazarardly or systematically try to mend. that's what zora kept trying to show us. it's notorious that you can't know what someone is really thinking or feeling; i feel that is false. right, there is no such thing as telepathy; but you're picturing the human mind as this mysterious little box inside the body. when you love a real artist, you see how her mind extends and is available, because it is reshaping and inhabiting the environment you share. sometimes someone's selfhood is remaking your visual environment or filling your house and head with sound. sometimes her words are running through your head, merging with your internal monologue in a kind of counterpoint. also it isn't just mind, is it? it's the physical activity, skill, craft; it's her body too. lucinda's body is singing. i think that's why i've found artists especially compelling and transforming, sexually and lovily and aesthetically and stuff. it's better than telepathy.
yes i'm sorry it is important to me that it is a woman and i think there's something a little different about the way women typically do art; maybe something a little more generous or true or sincere, or a little less filled with preening and ego and armor: those things are isolating rather than enveloping. i want to be enveloped. with the right person, that doesn't make you disappear, it makes you more. or, well, i'm fascinated by women, ok, irritated with men. picasso might be trying to blow you away, control you, or bludgeon you or something. not georgia o'keeffe. richard wright, but not hurston. i believe i know who were the better artists. obviously these are waytoobig generalizations. but i don't actually think anyone's aesthetics are entirely separate from their sexuality, and i think that's good as long as it isn't too oppressive or something. i just don't think it is that surprising that someone like me keeps gravitating back to the art of women - certain women, and i'm definitely not trying to establish a norm or something. i'm just trying to say what this heterosexual love thing is like for me.
[i just watched that 17 times.]
i want to tell you why i am able to do this now. it's because i am loving and being loved by jane irish. she is a painter. we met here and there a couple of times; i liked her vaguely but didn't form that much of an impression. she's kind of a quiet person. then i went to her place. it was filled with art, a whole life, +minimalist sculpture by her lover, the late bill walton, and other stuff. a whole lifetime was in there, like i was surrounded by it, inside it, and it is so beautiful, but so pointed and smart too. then we made love. since then, my taste in visual arts - which i love - has broken wide open. she is taking me to museums and helping me see. for forty years my approach was "if it doesn't look like a vermeer, it sucks.' even i was getting tired of myself.
i'm writing this at a rest stop on pa turnpike, on my way to see her. i don't know what it will be like, because i have spent the last 48 hours crying, listening, yearning. like this is where i always thought i might get, but now that i'm here at the rest stop i don't know whether i'm having a breakdown or reaching the peace i never could have. i could feel this bit by bit. but i could not let myself feel all of it at once. then suddenly after 57 years i couldn't not feel it all: the adam part (fuck, two other brothers too). the judith part. the marion part. the jane and emma part, and the jane part. here it all is in the truest thing i ever wrote, ok? now what?
i really did just set out to write a record review, but every time i have had a new idea, and many times i have had a new feeling, i was actually at that moment typing. writing and thinking and feeling are sort of the same thing for me. the most genuine, most sustained, most various example i can think of like that - the person in all of history who i think thought and felt about writing the most like i do - is zora neale hurston.
they are playing 'passionate kisses' here at the rest stop. i am not kidding. oh dang now they're on steely dan. on the way here my random ipod was hitting everything i couldn't take in just the order i was imagining, like emmylou's version of 'sweet old world' or lucinda and emmylou on 'greenville.'
[update: the second i got down there i knew it was more of a breakthrough than a breakdown. i am in an excellent mood. love redeems, bro! ok i can listen to it now,]
[this entry, really quite the swoon, might be yinyanged with this one.]
i feel the link should be forwarded to all female artists and writers. love.
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addendum. text exchange with my daughter jane, still in process:
[picture of her 15-year-old self in a formal gown]
j: semi-formal tonight!
c: aww baby, got a date?
j: kinda
c: i added a bit about daughter love to that piece.
j: he's more my friend than a real date
aww good.
c: givin' up a name?
j: [actual name here, first time ever!] BUT WE'RE JUST FRIENDS
c: he better not be. christ.
j: hillary clinton won in nevada
c: believe me i saw it. i am coming off my lovefest for all women.
[after that she wasn't responding.]
c: trump wins sc
dance while you can
jeb dropping out
i was sick of him before he began.
baby?
