A Soothing State Of Mind

I had a dream that I was a newspaper clipping

Every word that I said was true

I wasn’t so smart

I wasn’t so high

I printed black and white pictures

Of the blue sky

Most of your friends will be just a nervous hobby

Picked up just to distract from some greater pain

They’ll laugh at your jokes

They’ll love you with time

You’ll repay their kindness

With a thousand goodbyes

Most of life is flat as the central valley

As broken and easy to walk as those blasted plains

I plant myself down

I plow myself up

I lay down my head

And can't get back up

It’s the easiest way to fall

To say “I just give up on it all man.”

It’s a soothing state of mind...

A soothing state of mind

I awoke carefree as an airplane falling

Silent with grace through the crimson sky

Engines go numb

Passengers quiet

I never saw the ground

Just the crimson sky

Heritage and the lonely rise of Suburban Folk

My unhappiness with the eyes in the blood poem notwithstanding I think the image is of lasting personal value to me. it helps me articulate something that's at the heart of my experiences with Folk music, and perhaps even at the heart of what Folk music is becoming- MAYBE: Folk Music is becoming a music of loneliness, and here I think is why.

TRUTH:

We are never more alone than when we ought to be together, and all the folkway culling of the eyes in my blood sees a ragged and loving history of the passions what came in the blood of others before me feeling very far away from anything I’ve ever known. I’m not going to pretend to know the most lonely lonely but I can say with confidence that I’ve felt the deep ache lonely of amputated heritage. 

I was raised in my house, just like everyone else in my town. I don’t think any of us who grew up in GreaterAmericaVilleSuburbia really grew up in our towns. Our imaginative worlds we supplied by rapid-child-fire commercial games and toys crafting fantasy worlds in a planned obsolescence so that the childhood experiences of my eldest cousins are couched in obsolete brands and are already largely irrelevant to me. There was no continuity with the past and I did not grow up with the folk tales of my culture.

HIGHLY SPECULATIVE:

I can’t help but notice that Folk Music has gone from being primarily communal to primarily lonesome- what began as dance and sing-along participatory music has evolved into the doleful home of singer-songwriters in advanced stages of misanthropy- often of course shot through with feelings of great beauty because, as they say, inside every cynic is a disappointed romantic. Blah blah… blah blah! But the point is, extremely introverted artists like the Fleet Foxes, Iron & Wine, Elliott Smith, Joni Mitchell and certain sides of Bob Dylan were my introduction to the musical form of Folk. I can’t help but wonder with all the above artists which came first- the lonely or the sound? Were they simply lonely people trying to express their feelings through a more traditional form (though the loneliness did away with much of the traditional chord structures) or were they playing the music and feeling the same sort of distance I feel when I listen to folk? And that made the form tragic? All of those artists have non-folk albums with decidedly less lonesome characters than the folk-body of their individual catalogues.

IRRELEVANCE:

All of the above.

THIS WEEK: I was listening to conspiracy podcasts made by people who believe that extra-dimensional demons are communing with our world leaders, resulting in all manner of strange occurrences in celebrity land. While I’m not gonna comment on the truth of their claims, it did get me thinking again about my historic infatuation with demons, which here I decided to take to its furthest logical extent- I.E. fantasy me as Demon Gigolo. This messed nicely with the Appalachian fear of the flesh- fear- demons- flesh- outlaws- taxes. I don’t know. Whatever. 

Redneck Outlaw Fantasy League Nutball

I’m gonna take my family into the hills

We’re gonna live off roots and rocks and dollar bills

Tax collector always tries to take what’s mine

I’m gonna tax him of his skin one of these times-

-got rough when my car fell into the night

Well that was the price I paid for second sight

Yah I can see right through dimensions now

And I can see the demons chasing me down

1-2-3-4-3-5-4 nothing really matters anymore

Up I go

and then back down again you know

I wasn’t meant to be

Sedentary

If the hand of god

Has made my shoulders broad

Then the devil’s hand can make me broad everywhere else

I’d never waste a tax collector’s skin

I'd sow it into all of my favorite garment hems

Wear it out to the dives

They’ll all run for their lives!

The women’ll say “what’s he wearing,

Looks so good, how can he bear it”

And oh I’m gonna dance that evil jive

The devil’s horns’ll grow long and hard when he sees me writhe

Get Devil up against the door

Leave Devil moaning on the floor

"I’ve never been loved like this before"

He’ll whisper in a hellish roar

(Chorus)

1-2-3-4-3-5-4 nothing really matters anymore

Up I go

And then back down again you know

I wasn’t meant to be

Sedentary

If the hand of god

Has made my shoulders broad

Then the devil’s hand can make me broad everywhere else

Blood Poem

So this week I guess I was thinking about the strength and pride many members of the African American community have found in their roots and how I don't have any of that, and how maybe that's because my ancestors were evil bastards. So I tried to look out the eyes in my blood and see what they saw if they were slavers. It was pretty upsetting I think and I was split between trying to be honest and I think a mistaken attempt to try and be righteously against slavery, which is stupid because everybody is already against slavery (I hope) and I actually think distancing myself from the acts of my ancestors is the cowardly thing to do. I may be blameless, but I can still feel it somewhere... Maybe this is all a fiction. I don't know if they were slavers. It still hurts as though they were to read about all this.

Memory Poem

There are eyes in my blood that roll in my sleep

Receipt paper white men’s eyes

And

We all know you want it to quiet sometimes man so you can forget things about your past

But let’s see if I those eyes can’t show me what you already suspect you know…

Go back

                    go back

                                    go back and

laughing with some other Dutch…

Waves in waves cool and sweet as Guava juice

Port nameless to me in a slave world where I am king

Under an Ivory Coast sky that burns me branded red

So that everyone can recognize me for what I am if I run away...

But I won’t run

Why would I run?

When we’ve taken four hundred slaves

That have no names at all

...

They moan belowdeck constant like cicadas inside a living human skull

Except when they wake up screaming because they can still smell the guava in their mother’s hair

...

I’m a navigator

And maybe I I hope that one day we’ll trap and collide with the setting sun 

This whole damned boat will disintegrate

And that's why I steer west so straight and true 

But it seems an unlikely explanation for my actions

When every rape is a matter of course and every lashing is an occasion for applause

...

About two dozen cargo on this journey will leap overboard

Hoping for just one more moment in that sweet guava water of home

Before they drown

In the miles deep of the mid-Atlantic

...

And what a shame, that’s two dozen less to sell

 ...

And these are the words of the eyes in my blood.

But that’s not what I want to see.

Not me, not me.

Because I can see that boat disintegrate into parchment

Memories in a book

That I can burn and breathe

In the smoke out the smoke

Till the blood memory is gone

And I can think of the horrors of the world and see not a mutilation but a rapture of eyes,

So many eyes!

Eyes over the Atlantic,

Choking the sky,

My eyes and theirs

Gaping out from death eternal at stupefying…   

             

                        Denial? Ambivalence? Unity? Forgiveness? What?

I can't figure out how to end this. 

Godsong

This week we've been listening to gospel which is ecstatic, passionate music- it really is- and also awful, life-sucking music. Perhaps I've allowed Nietzschean pessimism about the God business to influence me too deeply. Well, we'll see shortly.

Throughout the country and gospel canon (and the more ancient Christian hymnal canon) there is a preoccupation with the idea that "this world is not our home." This is not merely a motif. It is a powerful longing for the sweet chariot of death to come down and take us away. And this is the sort of theme that as often as not carries the ecstasy of the music. It kind of makes everything about the music bittersweet- is there anything more heartbreaking than that the great religious soul of the American South should be a hatred of this world and a longing for death?

People need to believe in something, but if believing in God makes them reject this world, than I reject God. Don't worry Dubov-sky, you didn't drive me to Atheism. Atheism is a ditch outside of town I drove myself to last summer. Anyway, I wrote a song about how I felt this week. Lyrics, as always, are hard to write and these are the best I could do for now. Check in soon to see if I've got a more permanent solution.

Godsong

I’m not one to pray for rain

Or make the world in seven days

But look out for me

I’ll be hanging around

Dreams they grow they laugh they play

Then they die and they decay

Better not to leave them

Lying round the house

Things might start a-growing

That'd gross you out

God was such a dream for me,

God fit me so beautifully

Sometimes I wish God was still

Hanging around

Sometimes I wish God were

Hanging around

But boundless goodness tied

To a boundless cruelty

Doesn’t make even a little

Sense to me

This world is my mother and my home

The better world’s awaiting 

In your bones

I have seen some awful things

Inconceivable the responsibility

That someone like god

Would have to hold

Such a complex character

I don’t know…

I’ve been so angry

Don’t give me that Book of Job soliloquy

Not everything is part

Of a plan

Sometimes there is really

Not a plan

And I just don’t believe

That a divine intelligence

Would name itself lord

Neither god’s nor master’s anymore

Faithless whether rain or shine

Rich or poor

Alone I’ve coped with all I’ve known

Alone I’ve built shrines out of bones

They’ll stand till I am dust

And then who knows?

The gentleness of dust

Will be my home