Some of us, a very few of us, are what the omnipresent "they" refer to as gifted. Whether an accident of nature, primed DNA waiting for an itchy trigger finger, a red flare in the frontal lobe, or a bestowal from an unknowableother, some of us are touched, some are the fire-bearers. It doesn't matter what you call it or where you think it comes from, when you brush up against it you see it for what it is, and if you're at all like me, you still carry a hope that some of it will cling to you as it passes.
Do the gifted know themselves to be so? This is a foolish question. Whatever it is that inhabits them, whatever they embody, doesn't have patience for questions. It knows that beauty is worthy of expression, and it also knows that going beyond beauty, putting beauty on the rack to see how much it can take, is a far better use of time. A supernal voice, scraping itself against the infernal, and in the tracks and grooves left behind by that abrasion a bit of shining debris, the glitter of grit, the imprint of an edge.
Imagine being possessed of a voice like that, and pressing yourself up against the ecstatic. How far would you take it? And having gone there, what would you see?
Sometimes during the course of my wanderings I stumble across a piece of video, a song, or an image that resonates with me for no reason at all. I'm always looking for a bit of meaning, I expect to find it, and sometimes meaning can be found in the view from the back of a cab driving through London, fingerprints on the glass, the screak of a fiddle, and a honest voice.
The blues is the closest thing we have to an Ur-music. Captured on shellac discs etched in the back-rooms of general stores in prewar Texas, on a prison-farm in the swamps of Louisiana, in makeshift studios all over the Delta was the sound of man in extremis--supreme joy, crushing sorrow, mortal terror, spiritual loss and abandonment, bodily deprivation, the authoritative voice of one who has lived through all these and much worse, and the clear vision afforded those who remain always on the outside. What was captured on those discs in a place of fertile soil, grinding poverty, and not much else, was the spirit that urged the first men to stomp a foot on the ground to the rhythm of their hearts, to clap their hands in counterpoint, and to give voice to the experiences of that heart. The blues is a taproot plunging straight back to what is most alive in all of us; remembrance, forgetting, remembering why we so often choose to forget.
What we must forget now when we listen to the blues is the tired idea that the musicians who created it were noble savages, primitives, or illiterate sharecroppers artlessly plucking tunes on battered guitars they bartered for with their souls in the dead of night. This robs them of their art, their craft, and the genius they used to manipulate it--taking the tight form of the eight-, twelve-, or sixteen-bar blues and spinning out endless variations, expanding and contracting the rhythm and chord progressions, calling and responding to their fellow musicians with homages and outright thefts of language, and bringing to music a revolution in subject matter that resounds to this day. A blues song can be about anything, and is often about everything; two or three verses, a bridge and a turnaround that summarize an entire life, or the moment that completely changes it.
Just as Rimbaud stuffed his petrol bombs, street urchins, sheets of blood and priests in rotting cassocks into the corset of the alexandrine, working within the tradition on his way to undermining it, blues musicians took the events and fears and sorrows of their lives, so foreign to many of us now, and raised them to the level of universal truths. The bare facts of their everyday existences may be thin on the ground or altogether lost to history, but we can know them, and ourselves, through their work and the truth that work exposes to us; a truth beautiful yet unvarnished, beautiful because it is unvarnished.
Many of the recordings they left, despite the passage of time and their inevitable deterioration, retain an immediacy and intimacy that is almost shocking. Under the crackles, pops and hums that flaw even the best digital restorations we can hear the knock of the slide against the neck, the rattle of strings against steel. We can hear Robert Johnson turn his head away from the mic as he tells us about the mean things he's got on his mind, as if he looks over his shoulder and sees the end we know he'll meet approaching. He asks us to come into his kitchen, he asks us if we can hear the wind howling, he leans in close and makes it howl as he whispers in our ears.
Come On In My Kitchen--Robert Johnson
Other times his voice strains to the breaking point as the descending bassline dogs him, urging him on through a storm we can imagine so vividly, leaves littering the road and a woman his mind circles back to again and again.
Hellhound On My Trail--Robert Johnson
Some of these musicians lived long enough to be captured on film. Robert Johnson learned much of what he knew from Son House, part-time preacher, one-time inmate of Parchman Farm, full-time disjointed soul, a man whose music "is the centre of the blues experience and when he performs it is a corporeal thing, audience and singer become as one" according to Bob Groom; a man whose power never waned, even in old age, even in the moment when awareness and loss become one.
And in the end, the blues doesn't have to lean on the crutch of words to get the message across. Formless, and released from the possessive need to analyze and compartmentalize, to separate ourselves from what we feel and experience, it floats free. It, simply, is.
Dark Was The Night-Cold Was The Ground--Blind Willie Johnson
As Ralph Ellison said, "The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one's own human failing.". All men are fallen. Only a few can see beyond that to what lies on the other side, choose to walk through it with grace, and bring back to us what is found there.
I love words. I love what they do to me, and sometimes I love what I do to them. The pursuit of them, mine and those written by others, has been the defining feature of my life. Feeding on them, and being fed by them. Hunting, and being the prey. They remain the only tools at my disposal, even as I begin this work of going beyond them. This idea I've decided to implement, the beginning of a need to lift off of the page, or to turn it over the way one opens a door, to see what is behind words and to get rid of them as the middleman, requires me to use them. This is a complete contradiction that must be resolved. Ask anyone who knows me, they'll tell you I'm a contradictory person, and here is the point where I begin to resolve both of these problems--the personal and the artistic, the word needing to be freed from the page and the self needing to be freed from the net of words.
The idea, simply, is to live the poem. To remove the artificial construct that we rely on to explain ourselves, to understand what is around us, to experience our feelings, to live in a world that seems senseless at best and insane more often than senseless, this construct that does nothing but place a veil between us and the truth. Words have been the best vehicle we've built to drive us to the truth up to this moment, and the poem has been the sleekest and most powerful of those vehicles--built for economy and speed, aerodynamic, an engine thrumming as we race to an encounter we hope will be more intense, more real, closer to the bone than those we experience in everyday life. We hope to meet, and be met, and as Miller Williams said, "The poem in print is the ground on which the meeting takes place."
This is true, and yet it isn't true enough. The poem as meeting-ground, as vehicle, places us at one remove from the impulse that brought us to poetry in the first place. There must be a way to go beyond that, to a place where we are united with truth, where we don't need the machine of poetry to cross that distance, where there is no distance at all and we are the locus of energy, no longer struggling to express who we are, but embodying that expression ourselves.
Many others have come to the meeting-ground. I have met them there, I meet them there still, in the open square, at the fork in the road, alleys, churches, the crossroads. Some have reached out a hand in greeting, asking us to join. Some have torn a few holes in the veil. I'll begin with a few of them, because there must be a beginning, and we could do worse than listen to the voices of those who have gotten close to completing the work I'm starting.
A conversation I keep having--the basic premise and the speakers remain the same, though the circumstances and the time of day and the level of inebriation keep changing-- goes something like this:
Poetry is dead, you know.
Yes. That is true.
It's not even dying. It's dead.
Yes.
Does it need to be said again? Others have done so for a long time. W.H. Auden, a dead man in a flannel suit if ever there was one, said in his elegy to Yeats, "For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives/In the valley of its making...".
This is that valley. There's a hell of a lot of stone around here that needs moving. There's a hell of a lot of cracks in the mountains on either side, just begging to be packed with explosives. Do you think we can rip a big enough hole to walk through? Or will it be just enough to crawl, will we be able to stand up on the other side? Once more unto the breach, dear friends?
I think that time might be coming. Meanwhile, I'll be here, peeling off the battered covers, looking between the lines, and rolling the scrolls up into fuses.
