Today marks the one-year anniversary of What the Hell is This? and I’m pleased to say that I’ve managed to reach 4000 hits. That may not seem like much to veteran bloggers, but bear in mind that I’ve told hardly anyone I know about this site. (Anonymity has given me ample freedom and license I wouldn’t have had otherwise; maybe someday I’ll clean house and come out of the closet!) Some readers have clicked over from Urban Monk, from Stumbleupon, or from the blogrolls of kind souls I’ve never even met. I’ve heard from people as far away as the UK, Australia, Germany, and India.
Wherever you may hail from, I thank you for joining me on my bumpy journey, and for your (overwhelmingly positive) feedback, both on-site and via email. Who knew that someone besides myself would want to gaze at my navel?
**
This month marks another anniversary as well: three years ago this month I fell madly in love.
I’ll bet you regulars think you know where I’m going with this, and you’re wrong. Yes, it was March 2006 when I took a fateful tumble for a certain someone…but at the same time I was discovering an incomparable young Irish singing/songwriting phenomenon known as Damien Rice.
Only days ago did I return to my beloved after a long absence; I had put away most of my more evocative music about a year ago, in an attempt to banish unnecessary sadness from my life for the purposes of enlightenment. But hearing his good friend from The Frames, Glen Hansard, delivering similarly goosebump-inducing lyrics with equal passion in the movie Once, put him at the forefront of my mind again. I started cruising YouTube for videos of Glen one day, and wound up unearthing this devastating live rendition by Damien of the 9 album song Elephant.
It felt like coming home.
**
Damien delivers a quiver that only the best poets can; he’s like a street Heaney meets Jeff Buckley, strumming the battered guitar he inherited from Nick Drake. His classic, slightly nasal Irish tenor can go from a hearty blast out of the chest to the hoarsest whisper in the space of a second; his anguished falsetto can elicit tears faster than a drunken pub sing-along of Danny Boy. You long to hear him pronounce words like Connemara or Ballyknockan with that lush Irish brogue. But it’s not just his amazing voice, it’s everything: his sense of the harmonics of emotion, the vibrations of naked yearning expressed through chord and melody, the intelligent, melancholy, confrontational poetry of his lyrics. He can howl “horny” or “fuck you” and make the words sound sublime. He reminds me of why I wanted to write, why anyone makes art in the first place.
My faithful reader in Germany accuses me of being too stubbornly stuck on one man, but I will say this: if Mr. Rice showed up on my lawn tomorrow, yelling my name like Stanley Kowalski, I’d be down there in a heartbeat.
The YouTube comments by hetero women about this comely if elfin powerhouse of a man are of course predictable, but I love to read what some of the straight men say: “I think I just went gay for a minute,” jokes one, while another gushes “I am a man and very hetero, and a guitar player myself. But seriously, if I could marry this man, I would, I would turn gay lol (sic) it doesn’t matter life would be complete being around Damien all day anyway.” The comment that makes me laugh out loud reads “I would hump him, he’s so powerful, I’m not gay but seriously, let the dry humping commence.” They don’t know what to do with another dude whose songs arouse shivers so profound and visceral they don’t know whether to cry or to come.
Some artists can cross all boundaries, and touch the raw, pulsating core of a human being. It’s an extraordinary gift.
**
Damien’s first major-release album O was my soundtrack to that spring and summer, and will forever be linked with the events of those warm, heady months. Delicate, its first track, unfailingly evokes for me the image of shoots pushing up through damp ground in early-morning sunlight, while The Blower’s Daughter will always send me back to a beautiful wood-floored studio glowing red in the late afternoon, watching Sonny hold a Warrior pose like a yogic Michelangelo. I can’t take my eyes off of you. (The first dozen or so times I listened to that song, I could not stop crying — I had never heard such a pure and perfect keen of longing.) Cold Water is quiet desolation tinged with faith, an appeal to both God and Other in the face of impossibility, hope against hope (which would turn out, at least momentarily, not to be in vain). I could go on, but suffice it to say that every song on that album is exquisite, and personally meaningful to me.
The only comparable period and soundtrack in my life that I can think of is probably my freshman year of college, falling in love with León accompanied by the heretofore undiscovered magic of Cat Stevens. Appropriately, his music represented youth itself, unbroken idealism charging heedlessly forward. I can’t keep it in, I gotta let it out. Two fine people should love each other.
Damien’s magic, twenty years later, lay in the pathos of broken and wiser experience reaching out to take one more risk, one more time. Love taught me to lie…it’s not hard to fall, when you float like a cannonball. I’m not a miracle and you’re not a saint.
His unflinching, sometimes brutal honesty is part of what makes his songs so compelling and beautiful. They shimmer with ragged authenticity.
**
Whether or not my absentee friend is a miracle, I’m not a saint, and I’ve failed at Damien-grade honesty. I like the image of an iceberg one of my commenters used: all you know about things is the visible tip I’ve shared. There’s a whole lot more underwater, and it doesn’t all make me look like some sterling Victorian heroine tragically seduced by the obligatory dashing cad. (Although I do appreciate your chivalrous impulses.)
No, it actually felt good, a couple of posts ago, to own my own ambivalence, and to point out the tinted filter created by my own insecurities. The things I’ve obsessed about endlessly don’t necessarily have a firm base in reality, other than what happened one summer, and what I, of all people, have no business judging. So don’t go taking all my fears as facts. I feel like I have to come clean about my own barely explicable caprice.
Briefly: only days after a blessed encounter with my beautiful friend, during the first flush of summer, I departed for a preplanned trip to Italy. I had promised to keep him and a small group of close friends abreast of my activities abroad with a weekly email travel diary.
Well, by the second week, my readers were being treated to tales of an attractive young Englishman I’d met in the lakes region. Overnight, I became desperately and fecklessly infatuated with the bloke: he was funny, caustic, and just the sort of ridiculing intellectual who makes me strive so hard to get Daddy’s approval. (He even dated a graduate of my college.) I made no secret of my ardor to anyone on my list, blathering on and on about it endlessly, expecting it to be my grand Foreign Affair. (It wasn’t.)
So, basically, after finally getting close to a gorgeous man with a warm heart and an emotional vocabulary, whom I had summoned out of the ether and then proceeded to coax all spring long, I went right back to chasing my father — publicly — albeit on a different continent.
Who’s the asshole now?
The strange thing was that the whole time I maintained the unshakable, if “irrational,” conviction that our connection was such that it could survive all circumstances and mutations of form…as if he really were, in some spiritual sense, family. I had said as much before, and he may have believed it: he was taken aback and sorry when I reacted violently (and hypocritically) to his own summer misadventures. Here in the States, he had been busy making like Wilt Chamberlain, reliving earlier, wilder days. (A counselor friend of mine observed very counselor-esquely that it seemed as if after touching on intimacy, we both reverted to older, more pathological ways of being.)
Anyway, before you go judging my erstwhile buddy as just another faithless man-slut, bear in mind who else flaked out completely. Yes, women adore the man, and he adores them, but he did commit himself to his last significant other once they got serious. I can’t point to something similarly redeeming in my own recent history.
**
But speaking of irrational convictions…
Last week I started to seriously entertain (for the umpteenth time) every voice, both external and internalized, urging me to get reasonable, to trust outside judges and the dictates of five-sense empiricism, and accept that I’m just another daft female making up all kinds of crazy shit about the way things are. Don’t I know I’ll never be anything but a miserable failure until I train myself to believe only hard facts, and trust other people’s authority and word over my “impressions?”
Like a child I lay on the bed and sobbed from my diaphragm, feeling chills of pain from this negation vibrating through the marrow of my bones, threatening to shatter me. It was as if my brain were trying to kill my entire being from the inside. This was, as Carol Gilligan has said (as did I, in Sing, Goddess), about so much more than one circumscribed situation. This was about my ability to trust myself, or not, to be able to navigate through the world with the “feminine,” intuitive, instinctual, intangible capacities and tools I have always used, and to be able to say that I know what I know, regardless of what the official line is. It’s a struggle I’ve revisited again and again for as long as I can remember.
Sometimes I’ve felt like Angelina Jolie in Changeling, institutionalized and pumped full of dope for saying “That is not my son.”
But it really wasn’t her son.
**
Later, stumbling to the computer, tear-stained and exhausted from trying to vivisect still-living parts of myself, I started searching for music on YouTube by Glen Hansard. I remembered how Falling Slowly and other numbers from the film made me weep gently with the recognition, the reassurance that someone else embraced unsayable emotional realities and could produce almost palpable variations in the rarefied air around a song. I was already getting somewhat soothed by Glen’s music when I saw Damien in the ‘related videos’ column, and clicked on him instead.
Immediately I was flooded with forgotten gratitude for his passion, his acuity, his humming incandescent connection to unseen worlds. I felt myself growing physically stronger, as if the music were transfusing me. Even the most woeful complexities of emotions he brought forth I welcomed like old, formerly estranged friends. Some emboldened voice within me asserted this is who you are. This is where you belong. You don’t have to force yourself to be different…fuck that!!!
It’s something I love in Rilke, too, and numerous other poets: the masterful evocation of what the tools of ordinary perception and reason invariably miss. Somewhere between a trembling note and an original turn of phrase like stones taught me to cry (which makes no logical sense) a delicate universe blooms, populated by whispering existences seen best from the corner of the eye or felt with a sixth sense. As if a portal had suddenly opened up, between the prosaic everyday world that we assume is the only real one and a hidden dimension of limitless beauty that reminds us of how ephemeral our lives truly are.
If that makes no sense, it’s because I’m trying to use words to describe something for which words are almost entirely inadequate. It’s Laurie Anderson’s famous line about trying to dance about architecture.
**
I honed my critical mind to defend myself at the dinner table, but I never got out of fifty books of philosophy what I get out of five lines of Wordsworth. I’m a poet by nature, which makes me by default a madwoman. We’re not journalists; we rely on the messages we get from unconfirmed sources, rumors, the movement of birds. Our bones ache when it’s going to rain. We watch expressions cross faces, the tilt of a head or the placement of an arm, that say the opposite of the words being spoken. We see desire flash in his eyes, and doubt cloud hers. We contemplate the stillness of trees, and listen to see if they speak. There is always more here than meets the eye.
What I really need is what makes me bleed, sings Damien on the haunting track Volcano. It was by pain, after all, that he was driven and enabled to produce works of such deep resonance. If we were all suddenly filled with the nirvanic bliss of oneness, I wonder, would there be any more art, any more reason to confront and grapple with our relationship to the world and other people? Probably not. But what the best artists accomplish through their struggle, ironically enough, is an experience of union for their audience — who get to see or feel or know what the artist sees or feels or knows. In doing so, they no longer feel so separate.
“You do not have to be good,” writes Mary Oliver in Wild Geese. “You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” Defiant words, choosing vulnerable, fallible humanness over the pursuit of perfection. “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.”
I will do just that, by ending with a poem I wrote during a comparable time two years ago when I despaired of everything I thought I knew and everything I knew I wanted. (Another irony: in order to write about my loss of faith in imagination and other vital intangibles, I had to access my imagination and other vital intangibles.)
**
Tie a Knot and Hold On
No place in the world you belong,
and it doesn’t want your gifts,
those labors you laid
at the feet of your wanting
with a pure heart,
your blood offerings.
The sun is too bright
and beauty is nowhere beneath it,
only the tired faces of people
you wouldn’t want to be,
much as you don’t want to be
yourself.
None quicken the heart
or bring the surfaces alive
with gladness.
There is a kind of exhaustion
born of waiting too long
for a star that appears for an hour,
when the darkness is endless
and hard to love.
In this barren landscape,
this exile, beyond faith,
beyond hope,
sit still by the swings
and watch children at play.
Remember that time
before disappointments
and burdens
arrested your skyward arc
and take heart from those
who have not yet lost
that delight, in imagined
heroics, their kingdoms
of sand.
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