April 21, 2007
Lyrics – Snippets of Honesty
I’m sitting here listening to some of my favorite songs, trying to figure out which ones capture me the best. Is it the Indigo Girls‘ “Least Complicated” – “I’m just a mirror of a mirror of myself” – or is it Over the Rhine’s “Latter Days” – “There is a me a you would not recognize, dear?” I seem drawn to songs, to lyrics specifically, that remind me that I am not always who I show myself to be. I wonder what that says about me; I wonder what that says about my writing.
This week, I reread Cassandra Lane’s amazing essay “Skinned” about her hurt, pain, hate (I’m not sure I can capture it -just read it) about white people and the pain we have caused her and her ancestors. I was struck, as was one of my students, with her unbandaged honesty, the way she told how she really felt, as ugly and off-putting as it might be.
I remember David Ulin saying once that he was always impressed by Paul Theroux’s honesty, his unflinching ability to speak the truth about himself even when it was certain that the reader would like him less for it.
I find myself, as I cull through my music collection and note my own predilections, wondering if I do the same. In my best moments, rare as those are, I think I do. But in those first moments, those first drafts, and in those moments when I want to be a bit too cute, a bit too profound, I lose myself and become that “mirror of a mirror,” that “shadow of myself.” But then maybe we all do.
Filed by Andi at 6:12 pm under Written and Wrought
2 Comments
Lately, I’ve been interested in the word “craft” and its many uses. Historically, it belongs to a devious class of adjectives: it is unreliable, dishonest, shifty. The crafty person likes to play games for the sake of playing them, has the joy of simply playing. In its most contemporary form, as verb or noun, its connotation implies an artistic engagement. It is a product rooted from some conscious and styled process. “Trust the process.” This is what we’re taught in grad school.
But words are funny. They come when they want and how they want. They come in pockets of ideas and phrases that you’d forgotten about or, better yet sometimes, didn’t know you had. They come in snippets of honesty. Daily schedules of waking up at 6am or sitting beside the typewriter before bedtime can’t produce the lightning scribbles you make in your sleep, on the train, at the pub.
A fan of idleness, I am more interested in the songwriter’s confession of effortlessness. The lies wrapped in a film of ego that fuel myths lasting generations. I want to hear about their revelations, about their holy transcendent visions, about how the gods snatched them from themselves for a moment. I want to hear about how Paul McCartney dreamed “Yesterday” and about how Neil Young’s guitar can write all by itself. I like to think these songs haven’t changed from their envisioning.
And in reading Theroux and similar writing, I wonder how much truth remains amidst the re-writes, the editing, and the clean lines of black type pressed on the white page. It is in the first drafts, the notes scribbled on restaurant napkins, the ideas written on my arm in the middle of the night that I find the road to the self. I strive for the rawness of the White Stripes rather than the eloquence of Wagner.
Maybe the process creates a mirror, that shadow. But as I proofread this entry, correcting a misspelled word, adding a comma, deleting an “and,” and changing “admittance” to “confession,” I stare at the mirror—which isn’t a mirror—and see a liar.
Hi,good site!