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Has music played a role in your
survival? It certainly has in mine.
Some people give their surgeon an
MP3 player and headphones to attach them to during the operation. (The surgeon,
of course, is likely to be piping in his own preferred music as he operates.)
Some years ago, while I was still
wading through the long recovery period following spinal revision surgery, I
wrote the following commentary on the power and importance of music in my
healing process.
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I am watching an indie
documentary called Be Here to Love Me: Van Zandt. I never heard of this
musician before, but he is/was so good. So good.
Someone talked about
being at a folk concert with him when a young woman tore off her blouse. I
understood this. I think everyone seeks some kind of spiritual ecstasy. It is
not really sex, you know. It has to do with the spirit.
I was lucky enough to
catch another documentary last night on one of the HBO channels, having to do
with that famous early concert at Big Sur. I remember when Joan Baez cut her hair like
that. At the time she seemed so OLD to me. But in this movie she seemed so very
young, so poignantly young. I am really old now. I am not dealing with it very
well. But music keeps me alive sometimes.
[I am not terribly
educated about music, but the many musicians and singers I love are deeply
sustaining to me. Music is medicine, and music is nourishment, and music is
prayer. Music is in us and of us and also from far beyond us.] Sometimes I
think there is no other God. Sometimes I think music is the way God speaks to
us.
I also saw “Walk the
Line”last night and again this morning and again this afternoon. I felt so
profoundly thankful that those two people lived on this earth. I remember how
Lars [not his real name; the Swedish MBA candidate who lived across the hall in college] used to
come over to watch Johnny Cash on my roommate's TV while he downed a fifth of
Scotch. He was a lousy guy, a real womanizer with no conscience, but everything
that was nonetheless fine and good in him came out as he got drunk and wept
over Johnny Cash, and how Johnny Cash went to Folsom and San Quentin, and how
Johnny Cash suffered in jail himself.
And I am so spiritually
engaged with June as well. All her music came from the hymnal. I have one of
her disks, and it is raw and in some ways hard to listen to, straight from the
backwoods and the little church -- both dimly present yet somehow softening and
receding behind the power and singularity of her voice. [To quote from the
hymnal, "And the things of earth will grow strangely dim/In the light of (Her)
glory and grace."] I can see her long, Southern-backwoods-girl hair,
and her lined and wise face which had known so much pain. She wrote a
book once
-- if only I had saved it. I think it is long out of print. It was
poetry that grew from her own deep suffering and transcendence. Maybe it
was lyrics. It was
Something, I would love to have that book now. Maybe I will try to find
it
online at some out-of-print-books place.
Do you know what else
came from the hymnal? Some of the most powerful of the songs at the
countercultural Big Sur concert -- the African American music. It was
astounding, seeing these grand, deep black women full of conviction, belting
out their songs about Jesus while "little Joan Cisneros" tried in her
way to keep up, with some uncharacteristic hesitance and awkwardness. And
seeing that whole assembly of out-of-their-heads acidheads moving to the
music about Jesus. Watching the concert at Big Sur, I began to wonder if the
whole hippie movement might really have been about deep, deep spirit and Jesus
and God, even though all those unwashed beards repulsed me when I was a student
on the periphery of that movement.. There was something awesome and profoundly
good about that whole counterculture, even though it landed people in ERs and
psych units and morgues, their brains fried forever. They were trying so hard,
they were straining in their laid back way to get home to whoever or whatever
was their Jesus. They -- we -- could have healed the world. But we were not
young enough for long enough to do that. We changed the world a little. We set
the healing process in motion before moving on, growing up.
Life may sometimes suck now, but that is not wholly our fault. And I think we need
not despair. Is this the Pollyanna in me? I simply refuse to despair. I
totally, absolutely, forever refuse. That is not what life is about. That is
not why someone put us on this tiny planet in this miniature galaxy, that is
not why we were borne out of the black hole. There has to be some reason we
seek God and make music. There has to be something better and finer than we
usually manage to be.
This
Towne was nurturing, generous, tortured, all at the same time, in the
same person. It is said that people wrote to him to thank him for
saving their lives, for bringing them back from the brink.
Visual art can be
tremendously moving. And the written word can be fine and powerful and
healing. But this drunken man, so eaten with his own destruction, hanging on to
his dear (male) friend physically, in his arms (his buddy was not gay, apparently,
just emotionally devastated) night after night -- he saved lives. I believe it.
Judaism, or at least mystical Judaism, teaches that a
person may be put on this earth for only one minuscule purpose: -- a single word
he is meant to say to a specific other person maybe sixty years down the road.
I don't pretend to know
why some are put on this earth to write music that saves many lives.
But I think just maybe they are God's true angels. Her lost, drunken, drugged, tormented, soulful, salvific angels, leading us all toward Light after all.
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