songs put together (for the broken)
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Artist:
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Album:Songs Put Together For (The Broken Giant)
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Track:
"We won't confess what we've done", begins Will Oldham, and suddenly my room is staring at me. The unmade bed, the spoiled food, the mess on the floor are all eyes on me like they know my secrets. Between us, one of those secrets is an answer to the question - what would you give for some profoundness in life?
In the summer before I turned eighteen, I told my folks a huge lie. I said I was being sent to a sister university for extra writing courses. That it was all paid for, they only had to say yes, and the dean would be very disappointed if I didn't go.
None true. I just wanted to get the fuck out of there, venture into the unknown. My head reeled at these. It was the thrill of a lifetime.
Four weeks I roamed the streets of a faraway, foreign city broke, hungry, on foot. Mornings I bought some crackers in singles and two packs of cigarettes to last me a day. Noons I joined this guy and girl boozing down the street from the university. Free cheap alcohol, the stomach-burning kind, for stories. When the hunger pangs got to be too much, I lit up. It was easier to bum a cig than to ask for food.
So. Broke, starving, worn, sleepless, chain-smoking, drunk. I spat out some of the best poetry and art I ever created in those weeks. Long story short, I had a whole city convinced, with proof too boring to tell, that I was this poet writer artist chick. (As an aside, a major earthquake destroyed the city the month after I left. Poetic? Or just dumb luck on my part.)
You might say the tortured artist schtick is psychological, it's all in the head. You would not be far from the truth. Some texts offer that deprivation (chemicals, alternatively) causes the brain to enter a state of delirium in which it charters territories otherwise unreached by the daily preoccupied mind. The story I just told would happen again when I was 26 - same shit, different year, more good poetry.
At what cost would you allow some profoundness in life? I think some days we lose an extra hour of sleep or skip a meal or pour a glass of vodka or do something foolish because we know, deep inside us, music sounds different; words we're reading, that unfinished something, the life we lead, it all feels different, perhaps more tolerable and hopeful. Secretly you know this.
"We won't give back what we're holding."
Comments (26)
Guitar: Do What You Will Do
The Risen Lord
At times I wish I would have done something like that. I never did. Profoundness in life? I'm not sure I would realize it was there even if it came up and slapped me in the face. Okay, maybe I would. Usually those few things I write come out better when I'm on some emotional highpoint, either in depression or joy. However, those three or four times in my life are obviously relatively rare. The monotone hum? That's my life. Again, I enjoy your writing, your questions, your music. I like Will Oldham too.
Weird, over here, my room started staring at me after I read your post.
I wrote lyrics when my personal life was a mess. To be more accurate, when I made a mess of it. When it got/I got it straightened out, no more lyrics. I haven't written a word ever since.
During the last three years of my life, many family difficulties got shoveled towards me. Those 3 years, and the years of personal mess 16-20, is the time when I was connected to music the most.
I don't have any answers, only my short life experience to share.
Every now and then, there is a nerve tickling in my head, telling me that I will make a mess again, because I like it. I don't like hurting others, but the mess & how profound things seem when you're into it is an urge, which I don't always have the strength to avoid.
I didn't have to create the profoundness we speak of for the last 3 years, because life's twists and turns brought it to me, but I can't help but wonder what I will do when it's gone. Will I seek it out? Remains to be seen.
Anyway, sorry for rambling, it's just that you hit a nerve, 'cause I was pondering similar things myself lately.
oh, wait, before anything, let me clarify that my life is fine. i just like to write sad stuff but really i quit smoking last year and hardly ever drink now. no, really.
G, you're right, too - a lot of that profundity could stare us right in the face and we'd never know it. but sometimes, we see it coming. and we know we'll need to edge some things out to let it in and make room for it. and thus begins my questioning. as a believer in creativity, i am also haunted by the thought that the real deal work of creativity will come upon us so rarely - 3 or 4x in a lifetime, as you say - and i may have missed or turned away half of those already.
(Anna, your comment next, but omigod i'll need a whole afternoon...)
And to add to my rambling (because you got me thinking deeper and listening to Interpol...)... from the age of 20 to 25, I had two long term relationships that were very hard to deal with, for various reasons. Interestingly enough, these two relationships have been my longest ones (2 years and 2,5 years), and they were with people that carried the mess with them. All the short relationships I had, were with people that did not have the mess within them, and so I had to bring mine into the light, and shower them in it.
I don't think I've ever realized this before. Whoah.
girl, are you sure you're not 55 years old? because i could swear...
seriously now, i can relate to most if not all that you wrote. i worry that i like the mess, and miss it when it's gone, and possibly seek it out. although i don't create it or force it, i'm afraid i let it happen.
btw, i'll just assume your "mess" and my "profoundness" is kind of the same thing.
"When it got/I got it straightened out, no more lyrics. I haven't written a word ever since." - so true. do you miss the writing though? i am already aware that i invite the profoundness because it lets me be creative. just the surge of epinephrine, the feeling of being on the edge of my seat all the time gets me going. it's not unlike being an adrenaline junkie, i suppose, but i wish it weren't so.
about relationships, coincidentally, i've also had two long-term ones that were very hard to deal with. the short ones, well, they came and went except for the one who truly broke my heart. they all seem to not have ended up well and i am not friends with any of these people. i have the same reaction thinking this - whoah.
other than these, i have no answers either, just more questions and ramblings.
Yes, it's kinda the same thing.
Weirdly enough, I don't miss the writing. I guess that when the mess comes to me, I don't feel the need to put anything into words. But back then, when the mess was coming due to actions of my own, words kept flowing. I am trying not to realize that I need to set things on fire in order to be creative, although it's obvious that I do, sorta like you. Reckon that makes us energetic masochists or passive sadists? :) Let's stick to profoundness junkies, we'll be on safer territory that way.
Who knows, one day or night, we might be able to exchange ramblings in person, whoah one another, and try to spell the word "absinth".
I think if you had the answers, the writing wouldn't be as good. Maybe when you are able to find the questions that's when the action starts and the brain begins clunking along. Well, mine clunks, I think yours hums and crackles. Good stuff, poe(B)t.
You have made my day. What a delightful piece of writing & a great soundtrack thrown in....priceless
"The solution of every problem is another problem" - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
creativity through adversity. makes sense.
Anna, i like it. profoundness junkies. i'll have to say, it's been easier for me to get to Europe than the US in the past. i will have a whole list ready of fun words to spell while innebreeat... what were we talking about again?
(i left one detail out of the above story. the profoundness otherwise known as a summer fling. oof, another post all its own, or when we have that rambling night.)
oh, but here's a beautiful mess we both want... (;
excellent, intense live version, i promise.
Cody B and Poe B? i knew it! we're related. although you seem to have hogged all the good music genes, dammit. well, mine hums and crackles when fed with something soulful, to be sure.
Jeff, thanks for Goethe and you have made mine because i made yours. ;p i love the whole album, actually. very sparsely introspective and, well, profound.
okay, another Jeff, how confusing. adversity, i like that. i didn't think to use that word but yeah. especially a raging battle you're having inside yourself. cool.
WOW, just WOW ilay . . . I totally hear what you're saying since I've experienced it myself(although, not in the manner in which you went through). I too have created poetry/lyrics during times of adversity in my life, not to do it again for years. First time was when I went away to college not knowing a soul. Second time was when I went through a divorce. Third time was when I moved from Oregon to California. Each time I've felt very isolated & lonely, so yes intense, stressful life changing experiences bring out creativeness in me too. Wish I could bring it all the time, I probably wouldn't be sitting here mogging if I could, I'd be making music/songs! Thanks for sharing this.
I skipped out a few times myself, and never really came back.
Great post, wonderful commentary...we're all here because we're not all there
☮
When I was 19 I got a cheap charter flight to Amsterdam and spent the summer biking around Europe with my best friend. Sounds idyllic, right? Not hardly. The trip was, as much as anything, an attempt to get my friend out of his five-trip-a-week routine, while at the same time I was still trying to snap out of a two-year low-level depression (not enough to make you want to off yourself, just enough to keep you functional but numb) tha began when my dad died. Turned out that the absence of psychedelics triggered in my friend what was later diagnosed as schizophrenia - he started talking in code and insisting that I was the only one who knew what he was saying. I had to play his psychic babysitter every night and every morning for two months. Meanwhile, between breakfast and dinner we biked 60 miles every day, I heard nothing during the actual journey but all the voices inside me that I had spent the previous two years successfully stifling. Eventually reached a sort of peace - partially by realizing that the wounds never close - with the idea of my father's death. Found a way forward. And wrote some of the best, truest words I ever have or will. But I wouldn't relive that summer for anything....
Aug, you and i, we also have a rambling night ahead of us. you know, as i was reading your comment, i realized my "story" first happened at 18, culminating with getting lost in a foreign city for a month, then again at 26, more long-drawn and culminating with getting lost in a foreign country for a month ... and then i realized it is happening again ... all the surrounding stories (you know some of them) that led me to getting lost again, this time in Cambodia for a year and counting. what a creepy pattern-like thing.
i loved my university years. some of my most liberating and carefree. i deliberately picked the one farthest from home, where i didn't know a soul, and made sure it was the one i entered by _not_ taking an entrance exam anywhere else.
Bruce, 'skipped out and never really came back' is a nice way of putting it. and thank you for this - "we're all here because we're not all there" - it's killer, i loved reading it today.
Bill, my god, your story touched me more than you can imagine. fitting your words into my own experiences, i was almost there. i lopped off the bittersweet, sweet, and just plain bitter parts of the story i posted above, for the sake of brevity, but let me tell ya i can relate with a lot of what you wrote.
coincidentally, the second time ended also with a trip to Europe for the summer with just one other friend. (are we sure i was not your schizophrenic friend? ;d) you did Amsterdam, i did Paris and Belgium (and Ghent is still one of my favorite cities today). oh, this was in 2000 and i had 10 US dollars in my pocket the whole time i was there. sigh, i always did go for broke. completely unrelated but i remember Ethan Hawke's character in the film Gattaca by Andrew Niccol said, "I never save anything for the swim back." anyway, no, i do not wish to relive any of all that.
Wow, I thought I was poop but I was a tycoon compared to you. I had $800 to last 11 weeks and I spent $100 of it the first day. (That comment above about "between breakfast and dinner"? That's because there was no lunch. And breakfast was however much we could stuff into ourselves for free at the hostel.) For the last three days in Amsterdam I managed to hang on to $50, which felt like a fortune. It was a welcome lesson in how little one really needs to be, if not happy, then miserable in an interesting way.
And yes, Ghent does rock, a lot. Did you know that the best mustard store in the world is there?
I am with Cody - it's made you the girl I love and call my sister - it's all good - I carry my own demons - we all do - but we can't keep holding onto them or they will eat us alive - I speak from experience !!!
Uh, that should've been "poor" instead of "poop." That may be the most breathtakingly stupid typo ever....
Bill - "Uh, that should've been "poor" instead of "poop." That may be the most breathtakingly stupid typo ever...." - i say this occasionally without meaning it, but i do this time - ROTFLMAO.
mustard? whaa, no one ever said. i had the waffles, the fries with beefy sauce (my favorite), as many kinds of beer as i could stuff in my belly for a month. i was brought to a doily making street, monasteries ... no one said nothing about no mustard. hmph.
to be fair, i was freeloading off of a number of very good-hearted people and it was almost as an afterthought that i finally spent my $10 a few days before leaving - on a journal. (;
Lizzie - no more demon carrying for the week, i think. my back hurts already. those are some well-fed, overweight demons i bear. pffft.
nice nice post
Master DH, as the Vlaanderen like to say, dank u wel for the kind words and for stopping by.
ik spreak nederlands. i lived in amserdam for 3 years. going back next week!!!!
dooi,
d
you do, you did, you will? infinitely cool, d. truth be known, all i remember are ja, nee, graag, bier and friet.
tot ziens!