Tasting the Pain, Singing the Blues

I listened to almost nothing but Pink Floyd for an entire summer. Every album. Then I realized why I was so depressed. I was 16. Musically innovative, expansive, deep, but fu**ing depressing. So I stopped listening.

I have never seen "Old Yeller." I have no desire to see it. If you know the dog gets shot in the end and everyone cries their eyes out, why subject yourself to it? Why make yourself sad when you don't have to be? Who does that? There is enough sad in life anyway, without looking for extra.

And that has mostly been my life aesthetic. I want art, music, film. literature, poetry that inspire; that elevates my soul; that makes me wonder; that turns me on and gets me riled up; that makes my heart race; that sends me off to contemplate the Cosmos.

But then I found a different kind of sad. Blue sad. Blues sad. I don't remember when I started listening to Delta Blues music, but it has been a while.

The lone blues man, with his guitar and his loneliness, sometimes without even a guitar; with his suffering, sitting on a porch step or a curb. Hungry. Feet hurt. He knows the kind of sad that has always haunted me.

He wails of our ultimate alone-ness in the world. He cries out about Love's impermanence. He frees his blues soul through his fingers, his tapping foot, his raspy voice. If you don't believe me, listen to Son House.

There is no emotion, no music, more primal than a blues howl. And yet, sometimes when I hear it, it doesn't sound exactly sad. It's cathartic. It can be transformative. Like somehow turning his heartbreak, his alone loose into the Universe, changes it.

But I don't know that. And neither does he. And that's where the blues plumbs the depths and the heights. The blues man sings his song out into the Universe; he wonders if the Universe or anyone else in it hears him at all, or gives a shit.

And then, hearing no reply, hearing nothing back, he knows it doesn't fu**ing matter;

He's going to sing anyway. Because he has to.

Fishing with Son House

Sunday morning. Feet in the dirt. Light breeze on the skin. Sun on the face. Raking garden beds, rolling the wheelbarrow across the yard. It was meditative. And then Son House does this:



And I ask you, on Sunday morning, what can church do that that experience, in God's house, nature, working, with a transcendent song and voice hasn't opened up on the spot?

My most revealing (we are talking John the Revelator, after all) Sunday spiritual experiences have come this way. On a long sunrise run. At a state park. Working in the yard. Writing and reading and drinking coffee on the back deck. They are the moments I am most open. The moments that are most personal and most universal.

For me, a spiritual journey is a personal one. My path, whatever it may look like, has included a lot of different forks, turns, twists, traditions, overarchingly led by soul. It's been hard to find in just one book or just one church. Bodhidharma would say it isn't in any book or church. True zen (whatever that is) would probably say these experiences are available in any book or church, as long as the mind and spirit are open to it. Everything is available everywhere, infinitely.

Maybe a spiritual journey is like going fishing. You go where you are most likely to find fish. You base this on where you've caught them before, where others are catching them. You go on intuition and past experience.

I catch fish outside, early in the morning. I catch them running. I catch them in the spring. I catch them listening to Son House and the Delta blues. John the Revelator was a fisherman, apparently.

"Saying what I mean to say"

Friend, sometimes the wind's scuttle makes the reeds
In the body vibrate. Sometimes the noise gives up its code
And the music is better at saying what I mean to say.
--Terrance Hayes

And how. How many times have I wished for the right note to convey what I am after. Or the right brushstroke. Writing, stepchild of the arts, is what you have left if you can't draw or sing or play music or dance. It takes home the least primal award.

I've been listening to Robert Johnson and Son House and Blind Willie Johnson of late. Those cats could sing and play nursery rhymes and still move you to tears or reverie.

Language must have been born out of frustration. Why can't he/she understand? How come they don't get it? How can I make them know? How can I make them see me? And words grew and attached themselves to things and concepts and actions through consent and a hope that we were speaking their true names.

Maybe I am glad for this frustration after all. This need for language and to find the right words--to invent them if need be. The struggle to say it precisely.

Maybe. But sometimes I'd still give music the nod.