"There was a point when I thought, 'Man, I could do this,'" he recalls. "But it takes blowing everything off. Family. Money. Security. Everything. Poof."
interview with his son JT: The way that Townes pursued music, and the way that he kind of instilled in me to pursue it, was to almost abandon all and if you didn't leave your spot with just a guitar and your ambition to be a blues player, then you really didn't have it in you to be preaching as such.
blog post responding to tvz film: What are we more-cautious, more-sensible people to make of these talented, self-destructive artists? How to respect the real-life-practicality we all need to survive while maintaining the openness and receptivity -- and the imaginative/emotional engagement -- that an involvement with the arts requires? Is it possible to keep your head while losing it?
Townes Van Zandt didn't even try. Once he walked off the cliff he just kept right on falling.
well that is exactly how it works, falling off a cliff.
I find the blog post mostly intelligent but then as always am taken aback when the author speaks as "the rest of us" over against "the artists" (and "the crazy" too): I think that Townes and his music represent the Thing Itself, that "It" or "the divine" or whatever it is that artists go in search of and that the rest of us hope they'll come back able to pass along to us.
so his expressions from this point of view grate on me - but perhaps could be used to consider this (?) normal approach to life and this view of the artist as rather categorically different from the rest (the most) of 'us.'
Thursday, January 20, 2005
that old catastrophe
shall our blood fail?
or shall it come to seem the blood of paradise?
Wallace Stevens. Sunday Morning.
or shall it come to seem the blood of paradise?
Wallace Stevens. Sunday Morning.
Wednesday, January 19, 2005
dancer to god
we have no problem nowadays seeing that the God-centered metaphysical universe of the religions suffered not so much an evaporation as a translocation. it was interiorized. we live in the translation, where what had been religious and centered on God is psychological and centered on an idea of the self -- albeit a self that remains a measureless if not infinite question mark.
nothing disrupted the basic arrangements. the translation was first class. an ordinary ego still has to sleep and wake with some other more or less articulate personality hidden inside it, or beneath it, who carries on, just as before, living its own outlandish life, and who turns out, in fact, to be very like the old poetic self: secularized, privatized, maybe only rarely poetic, but recognizably the same, mostly incommunicado, keeper of the dreams.
psychoanalysis redrafted the co-tenancy contract in the new language. it confirmed this other self in always possessing superior knowledge about what is happening and will happen to the creature in which it dwells; and, more important, and reintroducing with the heady higher gyroscope of a sacred creation, this other self represents and even contains in its vital and so to speak genetic nucleus, the true self, the self at the source, that inmost core of the individual which the Upanishads call the divine self, the most inaccessible thing of all.
the most ancient and formerly divine law of psychodynamic states:
any communion with that other personality, especially when it does incorporate some form of the true self, is healing, and redeems the sufferings of life, and releases joy.
one further well-worked law concerns the inevitability with which the true self, once it is awakened, and no matter how deeply and silently buried in the bones it may be, will always try to become the conscious center of the whole being.
nothing disrupted the basic arrangements. the translation was first class. an ordinary ego still has to sleep and wake with some other more or less articulate personality hidden inside it, or beneath it, who carries on, just as before, living its own outlandish life, and who turns out, in fact, to be very like the old poetic self: secularized, privatized, maybe only rarely poetic, but recognizably the same, mostly incommunicado, keeper of the dreams.
psychoanalysis redrafted the co-tenancy contract in the new language. it confirmed this other self in always possessing superior knowledge about what is happening and will happen to the creature in which it dwells; and, more important, and reintroducing with the heady higher gyroscope of a sacred creation, this other self represents and even contains in its vital and so to speak genetic nucleus, the true self, the self at the source, that inmost core of the individual which the Upanishads call the divine self, the most inaccessible thing of all.
the most ancient and formerly divine law of psychodynamic states:
any communion with that other personality, especially when it does incorporate some form of the true self, is healing, and redeems the sufferings of life, and releases joy.
one further well-worked law concerns the inevitability with which the true self, once it is awakened, and no matter how deeply and silently buried in the bones it may be, will always try to become the conscious center of the whole being.
distress
the translation changed things for the poet by removing his susceptibility to the trance condition, the mood in which the poetic self could overpower the whole mind in a more unhindered fashion. that this susceptibility is gone is a fact. there are some obvious psychological reasons for its demise, all connected with the loss of instinctive self-subjection to the greater authority of spirit.
the pervasiveness of secular sceptiscm operates generally.
for any poet, this means acute distress. it means, in effect, that the poetic self's bid to convert the ordinary personality to its own terms, or to supplant it, or to dissolve it within itself, will be more successfully resisted. and this in turn means depression -- the unproductive poet's melancholia.
it may take the form of violent psychological or even physical breakdown, or religious crisis.
the pervasiveness of secular sceptiscm operates generally.
for any poet, this means acute distress. it means, in effect, that the poetic self's bid to convert the ordinary personality to its own terms, or to supplant it, or to dissolve it within itself, will be more successfully resisted. and this in turn means depression -- the unproductive poet's melancholia.
it may take the form of violent psychological or even physical breakdown, or religious crisis.
that is how his poetry comes to stand, as it seems to do, at the center of revelation in this age, and, as poetry, to stand there alone
a stealthier osmosis, in modern times, requires exceptional disciplines of monastic self-surrender (or exceptional need - all the gifts, all the needs bespallof; inconsolable - defiant, belligerent, integrity?) , evidently. Eliot is almost the only example among modern poets to suggest that this might be one possible way to complete the inner process.
he underwent both the depression and the violent collapse of ego. yes. the ordeal of partrurition, from which The Wasteland emerged, marks at least one occasion where his ordinary personality had to be forcibly displaced, before that other speech and that other life, his true speech and life, could be spoken and live,d even temporarily.
he submitted himself, in his private meditation and poetic work - 'humility is endless' - to the slow, gradual change, according to that pattern where the true self remakes the ego in its own image, till the indivual is wholly transformed, and the true self takes over as openly as may be, the activitities and satisfactions of life in the world.
he underwent both the depression and the violent collapse of ego. yes. the ordeal of partrurition, from which The Wasteland emerged, marks at least one occasion where his ordinary personality had to be forcibly displaced, before that other speech and that other life, his true speech and life, could be spoken and live,d even temporarily.
he submitted himself, in his private meditation and poetic work - 'humility is endless' - to the slow, gradual change, according to that pattern where the true self remakes the ego in its own image, till the indivual is wholly transformed, and the true self takes over as openly as may be, the activitities and satisfactions of life in the world.
false self
Prufrock is Eliot's parody of the ego who longs to be that other, even as he excuses himself from the unmanageable confrontation: the self who is, one way and another, no more than a shadow of what he dissociates himself from so regretfully.
he is a diffident John the Baptist, who deplores his own incapacity to acknowledge, let alone evangelize for the god whose death he has already in some way foresuffered.
he is a diffident John the Baptist, who deplores his own incapacity to acknowledge, let alone evangelize for the god whose death he has already in some way foresuffered.
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