Innocent When You Dream

I had been happy for a long time, it seemed, happy and busy commuting to work, raising my credit score, volunteering to help wash the dishes, telling myself in innocent, implicit ways that I was becoming worthy. I didn’t know what I was becoming worthy of, but I imagined it as a soft, protective forcefield. I was, I thought, achieving an invincible summer. An eternal June of loving kindness.

It was meant to be timeless, easy; most crucially, it was meant to block out shame. Block out crow’s feet, dry skin, all threats of aging. Reading the previous two sentences, one after another, makes me feel as though I’m mad, makes me mad, too. It’s maddening, the automatic conflation of an ordinary aging process with shame, an embodied, oceanic emotion that has driven many furious retreats from love. It’s the madness of a collie with an electric collar running against the invisible boundary of her landscaped prison, running into shock, yelping, running back. Melodrama. 

People with the privilege to be free without social consequences tend to view the suffering of others as drama. They say, there they go again. Going off. Going off what, I wonder. What are they going off of? Are they going off a cliff? Or something less literal, the flimsy edge where who we want them to be ends, where the open air of who they are begins?

I had been working hard to be worthy. I had not been dramatic, or needy, or hungry. I hadn’t cried in a year.  For me, this kind of thinking signifies an old trap. It’s the trap of If I make myself small, easy, and pleasing, I will protect myself from upsetting other people. I had first fallen into the trap as a child, then as a teenager, then with stupendous repetition in my 20s. I know the trap well. There’s only one way out: I must be dramatic. Needy. Hungry. 

“People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.” So wrote Ursula K. LeGuin in her collection of craft essays,The Wave in the Mind. The book is about the art of writing ; of course, for LeGuin, this is also the art of living. When I think of my struggle to assert and express myself, I think of LeGuin’s dragons. Expressing oneself is necessarily dramatic. Why shouldn’t it be? There’s much at stake. To express is to risk. But to suppress is a greater risk : the risk of dragons, of internal burning, the Self collapsing in on itself.

Escaping the trap of worthiness, I gave myself permission to write. I started journaling, scribbling in a paperback diary while watching a TV show about a Jungian lecturer who falls in love with a demon. The demon kisses her in an honeysuckle orchard. It is all very sexy. Dramatic. 

Most people yearn for the drama of lust; it’s the drama of grief we can’t stand. So, to be precise, it’s not drama  we find uncomfortable, it’s visible suffering, especially our own. After I gave myself permission to write, I gave myself permission to visibly suffer, to cry. 

It didn’t happen right away. I had numbed myself thoroughly, but finally got through to myself while working on a song. In songs words are embodied. You can’t hide from them, intellectualize them away. Shifting inside the music, you get a feeling for why people used to memorize spirituals, ballads, and blues. Why people still do.

Something I wrote in my journal when I was trying to write again: “lust and grief are entwined, serpentine feelings: one snake is warm and light and glides up out of the body. The other is the color of seawater. It sinks.”

When I entered the world of the song, it was like entering a sea. I was writing again, and it was going well. I felt boundless. 

Then I brushed against a void. It was like pressing against a cold vent. I felt it in my lungs. After the first draft, I stepped away.I left the microphone in its steel hair net. The red preamp sucking wires. I wondered off into myself and cried. The purists would argue that if you’re going to write a sad song, you should be prepared to feel it, that anything else is an attempt to cheat the gift, and when you cheat the gift, you cheat not only yourself but the tradition itself. Perhaps this is true. I would like to not take it so seriously. I do, though. It’s the dragons. 

In the song, I had used my low range. The sinking range. The lyrics had gone where I needed them to go, pulling on personal experience. I had received the music, a violin bow pulling the strings of a bass guitar, weeks ago. When the words came, they came in 10 minutes (What is most accurate is that I wrote them down in ten minutes. They had been living in me, turning themselves over, waiting to oxidize, for years).

I thought of diving back into the song, re-working the lyrics, but decided against it. They were simple, but the images were original enough to seem fresh. Let’s not work the thing to death.  Work is what fucked you up to begin with.

There’s a song I play late at night, when I need to be alone, ”Innocent When You Dream” by Tom Waits. It has the structure of an Irish drinking / lusting / grieving song.  Lyrically, it’s nothing novel–but the singer is a real story teller. He dips his voice into yearning, shame, drama. His yearning, shame, and drama. The piano sounds distant, like it’s playing from inside a box, a western dive bar. 

I listen to the song on Youtube. In the comments section, someone wrote, “I was in a coma for 31 days after an accident and this song kept playing. I have since recovered, yet this song keeps playing…running through the graveyard.”

Some may find this comment dramatic. It is. It’s dramatic, life-affirming testimony. Even when people are lost in the borderlands between life and death, they can hear music. Can follow it home.