—By Rosanne Cash
We need art and music like we need blood and oxygen. The more exploitative, numbing and assaulting popular culture becomes, the more we need the truth of a beautifully phrased song, dredged from a real person’s depth of experience, delivered in an honest voice; the more we need the simplicity of paint on canvas, or the arc of a lonely body in the air, or the photographer’s unflinching and poetic eye. Art, in the larger sense, is the lifeline I cling to in a confusing, unfair and sometimes dehumanizing world.
In May of 1998, I was invited to give the commencement address to the graduating class of the Memphis College of Art. I practically pleaded with them in my speech. I told them: We need the truth like we need oxygen. We cannot survive without the truth, and it is your responsibility as artists to tell us the truth, not the facts. As well as giving us the truth through your art, you must also commit to us that you will learn how to come back from those deep places in yourself where you find the truth. Artists have more than their share of addiction, mental illness and suicide. We cannot afford to lose you. Find your own bridge, learn how to return from the depths, and report back to us.
That theme of finding one’s personal bridge back from the inspirational underworld is one I also emphasize to the students in my songwriting workshop. As songwriters, we are so willing and eager to dive headfirst into that incredibly seductive place where the subtleties of emotion are as available to us as assorted paints on a palette, where we can feel it all and use it all for the song, and where we can get ecstatically lost in the tunnels and curves of our own psyche. It is utterly transcendent when we are fully there. It makes the rest of life seem blunt and gray. There is the profound temptation to toss everything else and stay there, uprooted and buffeted by the winds of feeling and the glamour of disassociation. And there’s the rub. We live in the world, in physical bodies. The disintegration of the body and the mind is inevitable in such an untethered state. We have partners, children, families, other roles and jobs, perhaps even other careers. We have responsibilities that only we can, and should, keep. I have to make my bed every morning. I have to get my children ready for school, and go to their events and meetings and plays. I have to buy groceries and feed my family. I must pay my bills.
I must relate to my husband in ways that he can understand, and that serve our marriage, not in the narcissistic and manipulative terms of the chronically disenfranchised, distracted and obsessed writer. Not only does he not want to relate to me in that way, but eventually I find I cannot relate to my own self under these conditions. We cannot live full-time in the subconscious and have fulfilling earthbound relationships, or appreciate the subtle beauties the material world has to offer. We can only visit that place in the soul, work there and withdraw inspiration for further work, and then come back, gracefully. Most of us, in the beginning, are unconscious of the route, unaware that we may be lingering for dangerously long periods, and oblivious to the possible bridges back into the linear world. And many of us self-destruct, in solitary turmoil, when everything in our lives is in shambles except the art. It’s never worth it.
The course of an artist should never end in self-immolation. It seems to me to be the ultimate sacrilege, that those who plumb the depths of existence, who are acutely attuned to the beauty and the tragedy, and who unmask the truths which reveal the listener or observer to him or herself, should in the end destroy the Life that served as the source of the inspiration. At best, the unlived years are wasted fertile ground for more great art. At worst, you take everyone who loves you down with you. It took me a lot of years to find my personal bridges back from the hidden corners of my own psyche, and years to become aware when I was creating drama in my life to mimic the intensity of the inner exploration so that I could then use the created drama for my work, at the expense of people I love. It took more years to learn how to gracefully go back and forth, sometimes rather quickly. (I have five children, and they have never respected the solitary excursions artists take. The pencil they want is the very one I am using at that moment. They want to play me a song that they have written, on my guitar, the guitar that I am using. They are hungry, wet, bored and want to go out NOW. I had to learn to put my work down, take some quick notes to remind myself where I was, and change quickly and without resentment into the available parent. Ironically, children are naturally connected and have around-the-clock access to the more refined creative realms, and move fluidly through various states of consciousness. Standing in front of us is a small guide, if we would only pay attention.)
The lure of transcendence has obscured our instincts for social sanity, community and emotional responsibility, and the total identification with its pursuit has obliterated our ability to take pleasure in the mundane, small and awkward moments of daily life. We fall into chronic unhappiness, or
outright self-destruction, when we are not enthralled with languishing in our subconscious domain, or possessed by the force that drove us there. We want to be Persephone, and occasionally come up from the abyss to deliver our beautiful little pomegranate, and then return at once to live in our solitary etheric kingdom. But we are not goddesses or gods (no matter what the new-age literature insists), we are not archetypes, though we can be consumed by them, and we are not angels who fly around at will. We may as well roll up our sleeves and relate to the rest of the species and do the work and feel the pleasure.
This is the point in this diatribe where I am supposed to deliver, like the Delphic oracle, my own prescription for building bridges in the psyche, list them one to ten, and have you all run out and follow Rose’s Sure-Fire Remedy to prevent your life from dismantling itself before your very eyes. And I have stared at the empty space where this paragraph should be for a week now, up to the very minute of my deadline. Today I realized why: My infrastructure, though pretty well locked in by DNA and experience, is under constant shift and change of focus, and my own tricks and methods for navigating it and keeping some modicum of grace in my daily life, are subject to revision, and as personal as anything about me; as personal as the way I experience sex, religion, shame, delight, anxiety, triumph, grief and joy. I have revealed quite a few intimate things through my prose and songwriting, but it’s a bit unsettling to think of listing the naked quirks of my inner life here. The other half of my reticence is that it would probably mean nothing to you. Your individual maneuvers in and outside of yourself are also intensely personal, and the course must be plotted by you alone. Only you know what propels you into your inspirational states, and what draws you back into your corporeal life. I can tell you, without squirming, that being in nature, particularly near the ocean, and fully connecting with the senses in that environment, is invaluable to me in realigning the warped and missing parts of my conscious self (and has become even more important in the years I have lived in Manhattan). I can also tell you that part of my stratagem to stay awake and involved in my own life has been learned by necessity (mostly from the demands of motherhood), and part has been hard won and painfully acquired. Perhaps most importantly, I have learned that a cup of strong tea has a deeply civilizing effect on me.
It seems to me that there are three parts to being the messenger, who moves lithely between the source of the message and the point of delivery: research (inside, outside or both), creation (and all the hard work which it entails: revision, editing, weighing and polishing) and delivery. Delivery implies emergence. There have been times I have chosen not to complete the delivery to other people, but kept the creation privately for myself. But the intent of delivery, the action of releasing and appraising, even to just yourself, confirms that you have returned to the world to report back. Stay for awhile. Get a feel for the surface before you decide to go back down. We desperately need the unique and exquisite reports from each other. Like blood and oxygen, we need the Truth, the pearl of great price with millions of different facets. We don’t need the facts.
A great work of art will make me suddenly feel as if I have been asleep up until the moment of encountering it, and the awakening accompanies a fresh rush of passion for my own life. That moment is as precious to me as the moment of my own private discoveries, alone with my pencil and guitar, and the one epiphany inspires the other. It is a beautiful, complete, eternal cycle. As songwriters, we can’t opt out of the cycle by failing to emerge, by letting our lives fall apart, by becoming addicted, by going nuts, by allowing misery to choke off the points of entry and exit, by destroying ourselves. Make your own bridges. Be diligent in their maintenance. Bring us the pomegranate and stay for a visit. I’ll put the kettle on.
From Performing Songwriter Issue 52, March/April 2001
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