The Best American Essays 2013 (32 page)

“It’s
Joni Mitchell
. What is
wrong
with you? Listen to it—it’s beautiful! Can’t you hear that?”

I started stabbing at the dashboard, trying to find the button that makes things stop.

“No, I can’t hear it. It’s horrible. And that bit’s just ‘Jingle Bells.’”

I hadn’t expected to get anywhere with this line and was surprised to see my husband smile and pause for a moment to listen intently: “Actually, that bit
is
‘Jingle Bells’—I never noticed that before. It’s a song about winter . . . makes sense.”

“Switch it off—I’m begging you.”

“Tintern Abbey, next exit,” he said, closed his jaw tightly, and veered to the left.

We parked; I opened a car door onto the vast silence of a valley. I may not have had ears, but I had eyes. I wandered inside, which is outside, which is inside. I stood at the east window, feet on the green grass, eyes to the green hills, not contained by a nonbuilding that has lost all its carved defenses. Reduced to a Gothic skeleton, the abbey is penetrated by beauty from above and below, open to precisely those elements it had once hoped to frame for pious young men, as an object for their patient contemplation. But that form of holy concentration has now been gone longer than it was ever here. It was already an ancient memory two hundred years ago, when Wordsworth came by. Thistles sprout between the stones. The rain comes in. Roofless, floorless, glassless, “green to the very door”—now Tintern is forced to accept the holiness that is everywhere in everything.

And then what? As I remember it, sun flooded the area; my husband quoted a line from one of the Lucy poems; I began humming a strange piece of music. Something had happened to me. In all the mess of memories we make each day and lose, I knew that this one would not be lost. I had Wordsworth’s sensation exactly: “That in this moment there is life and food/For future years.” Or thought I had it. Digging up the poem now, I see that I am, in some ways, telling the opposite story. What struck the author of “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” (1798) was a memory of ecstasy: “That time is past,/And all its aching joys are now no more,/And all its dizzy raptures.” The Wye had made a deep impression on him when he’d visited five years earlier. Returning, he finds that he still loves the area, but the poem attests to his development, for now he loves it with a mellowed maturity. Gone is the wild adoration: “For nature then/(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,/And their glad animal movements all gone by,)/To me was all in all.—I cannot paint/What then I was.” To be back in Wales was to meet an earlier version of himself; he went there to listen to “the language of my former heart.” And though it’s true that the young man he recalls is in some senses a stranger, the claim that he “cannot paint” him is really a humble brag, because, of course, the poem does exactly that. It’s striking to me that this past self should at all times be loved and appreciated by Wordsworth. He understands that the callow youth was the basis of the greater man he would become. A natural progression: between the boy Wordsworth and the man, between then and now. His mind is not so much changed as deepened.

But when I think of that Joni Mitchell–hating pilgrim, standing at the east window, idly wondering whether she could persuade her beloved to stop for some kind of microwaved service-station snack somewhere between here and the church (British weddings being notorious in their late delivery of lunch), I truly cannot understand the language of my former heart. Who
was
that person? Petulant, hardly aware that she was humming Joni, not yet conscious of the transformation she had already undergone. How is it possible to hate something so completely and then suddenly love it so unreasonably? How does such a change occur?

Sidebar: In 1967, another poet, Allen Ginsberg, stopped at Tintern Abbey. He had gone to Wales with his British publisher, Tom Maschler, to stay in Maschler’s cottage and take acid in the Black Mountains. Those were the glory days of British publishing. Ginsberg wrote a poem about the trip, “Wales Visitation.” The ground he stood on was “brown vagina-moist,” and the thistles he saw had a “satanic . . . horned symmetry.” In other words, he had a typical Ginsberg epiphany. I like the poem best, though, not when he’s describing the things he sees but when he’s examining the manner of the seeing; that is, the structural difference between how he normally sees and how he saw that day, attuned, on acid—
What did I notice? Particulars!

This is the effect that listening to Joni Mitchell has on me these days: uncontrollable tears. An emotional overcoming, disconcertingly distant from happiness, more like joy—if joy is the recognition of an almost intolerable beauty. It’s not a very civilized emotion. I can’t listen to Joni Mitchell in a room with other people, or on an iPod, walking the streets. Too risky. I can never guarantee that I’m going to be able to get through the song without being made transparent—to anybody and everything, to the whole world. A mortifying sense of porousness. Although it’s comforting to learn that the feeling I have listening to these songs is the same feeling the artist had while creating them: “At that period of my life, I had no personal defenses. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes.” That’s Mitchell, speaking of the fruitful years between Ginsberg at the abbey and 1971, when her classic album
Blue
was released.

I should confess at this point that when I’m thinking of Joni Mitchell, it’s
Blue
I’m thinking of, really. I can’t even claim to be writing about that superior type of muso epiphany which would at least have the good taste to settle upon one of the “minor” albums that Joni herself seems to prefer:
Hejira
or
The Hissing of Summer Lawns
. No, I’m thinking of the album pretty much every fool owns, no matter how far from music his life has taken him. And it’s not even really the content of the music that interests me here. It’s the transformation of the listening. I don’t want to confuse this phenomenon with a progressive change in taste. The sensation of progressive change is different in kind: it usually follows a conscious act of will. Like most people, I experience these progressive changes fairly regularly. By forcing myself to reread
Crime and Punishment
, for example, I now admire and appreciate Dostoyevsky, a writer whom, well into my late twenties, I was certain I disliked. During an exploratory season of science fiction, I checked Aldous Huxley out of the library, despite his hideous racial theories. And even a writer as alien to my natural sensibility as Anaïs Nin wormed her way into my sympathies last summer, during a concerted effort to read writers who’ve made sex their primary concern.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that most of my progressive changes in taste tend to have occurred in my sole area of expertise: reading novels. In this one, extremely narrow arena I can call myself more or less a “connoisseur.” Meaning that I can stoop to consider even the supposed lowliest examples of the form while simultaneously rising to admire the obscure and the esoteric—and all without feeling any great change in myself. Novels are what I know, and the novel door in my personality is always wide open. But I didn’t come to love Joni Mitchell by knowing anything more about her, or understanding what an open-tuned guitar is, or even by sitting down and forcing myself to listen and relisten to her songs. I hated Joni Mitchell—and then I loved her. Her voice did nothing for me—until the day it undid me completely. And I wonder whether it is because I am such a perfect fool about music that the paradigm shift in my ability to listen to Joni Mitchell became possible. Maybe a certain kind of ignorance was the condition. Into the pure nothingness of my nonknowledge something sublime (an event?) beyond (beneath?) consciousness was able to occur.

I just called myself a connoisseur of novels, which stretches the definition a little: “An expert judge in matters of taste.” I have a deep interest in my two inches of ivory, but it’s a rare connoisseur who does not seek to be an expert judge of more than one form. By their good taste are they known, and connoisseurs tend to like a wide area in which to exercise it. I have known many true connoisseurs, with excellent tastes that range across the humanities and the culinary arts—and they never fail to have a fatal effect on my self-esteem. When I find myself sitting at dinner next to someone who knows just as much about novels as I do but has somehow also found the mental space to adore and be knowledgeable about the opera, have strong opinions about the relative rankings of Renaissance painters, an encyclopedic knowledge of the English civil war, of French wines—I feel an anxiety that nudges beyond the envious into the existential.
How did she find the time?

“On the Shortness of Life,” a screed by Seneca, is smart about this tension between taste and time (although Seneca sympathizes with my dinner companion, not with me). The essay takes the form of a letter of advice to his friend Paulinus, who must have made the mistake of complaining, within earshot of Seneca, about the briefness of his days. In this lengthy riposte, the philosopher informs Paulinus that “learning how to live takes a whole life,” and the sense most of us have that our lives are cruelly brief is a specious one: “It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.” Heedless luxury, socializing, worldly advancement, fighting, whoring, drinking, and so on. If you want a life that feels long, he advises, fill it with philosophy. That way, not only do you “keep a good watch” over your own lifetime but you “annex every age” to your own: “By the toil of others we are let into the presence of things which have been brought from darkness into light.” So make friends with the “high priests of liberal studies,” no matter how distant they are from you. Zeno, Pythagoras, Democritus, Aristotle, Theophrastus: “None of these will be too busy to see you, none of these will not send his visitor away happier and more devoted to himself, none of these will allow anyone to depart empty-handed. They are at home to all mortals by night and by day.”

Well, sure—but you have also to be open to them. Because you needn’t have had even a whiff of whoring in your life to legitimately find yourself too busy to visit Aristotle. Busy changing diapers. Busy cleaning the sink or going to work. And since, in the contemporary world, we have to place in “liberal studies” not only a handful of canonical philosophers but also two thousand years of culture—plus a bunch of new forms not dreamed of in Seneca’s philosophy (Polish cinema, hip-hop, conceptual art)—you can understand why many people feel rather pushed for time. It’s tempting to give up on our liberal studies before even making the attempt, the better to continue on our merry way, fighting, drinking, and all the rest. At least then we have the satisfaction of a little short-term pleasure instead of a lifetime of feeling inadequate.

Still, I admire Seneca’s idealism, and believe in his central argument, even if I have applied it haphazardly in my own life: “We are in the habit of saying that it was not in our power to choose the parents who were allotted to us, that they were given to us by chance. But we can choose whose children we would like to be.” Early on, for better or worse, I chose whose child I wanted to be: the child of the novel. Almost everything else was subjugated to this ruling passion, reading stories. As a consequence, I can barely add a column of double digits, I have not the slightest idea of how a plane flies, I can’t draw any better than a five-year-old. One of the motivations for writing novels myself is the small window of opportunity it affords for a bit of extracurricular study. I learned a little about genetics writing my first novel, and went quite far with Rembrandt during my third. But these are only little pockets of knowledge, here and there. I think Seneca is right: life feels longer the more you engage with it. (Look how short life felt to the poet Larkin. Look how little he did with it.) I should be loving sculpture! But I have not gone deeply into sculpture. Instead, having been utterly insensitive to sculpture, I fill the time that might have been usefully devoted to sculpture with things like drinking and staring into space.

Nowhere do I have this sensation of loss as acutely as with music. I had it recently while being guided round an underground record shop, in Vancouver, by a young man from my Canadian publisher who wanted to show me this fine example of the local cultural scene (and also to buy tickets for a heavy-metal concert he planned to attend with his wife). I wandered through that shop, as I always do in record shops, depressed by my ignorance and drawn toward the familiar. After fifteen shiftless minutes, I picked up a hip-hop magazine and considered a Billie Holiday album that could not possibly contain any track I did not already own. I was preparing to leave when I spotted an album with a wonderful title:
More Songs About Buildings and Food
. You will probably already know who it was by—I didn’t. Talking Heads. As I stopped to admire it, I was gripped by melancholy, similar perhaps to the feeling a certain kind of man gets while sitting with his wife on a train platform as a beautiful girl—different in all aspects from his wife—walks by.
There goes my other life
. Is it too late to get into Talking Heads? Do I have the time? What kind of person would I be if I knew this album at all, or well? If I’d been shaped not by Al Green and Stevie Wonder but by David Byrne and Kraftwerk? What if I’d been the type of person who had somehow found the time to love and know everything about Al Green, Stevie Wonder, David Byrne, and Kraftwerk? What a delight it would be to have so many “parents”! How long and fruitful life would seem!

I will admit that in the past, when I have met connoisseurs, I’ve found it a bit hard to entirely believe in them. Philistinism often comes with a side order of distrust. How can this person possibly love as many things as she appears to love? Sometimes, in a sour spirit, I am tempted to feel that my connoisseur friends have the time for all this liberal study because they have no children. But that is the easy way out. True connoisseurs were like that back when we were all twenty years old; I was always narrower and more resistant. For some people, the door is wide open, and pretty much everything—on the condition that it’s
good
—gets a hearing. And I am indebted to my friends of this kind who have, after all, managed to effect some difficult and arduous changes in my taste. I’m grateful for the reeducation, while still fearing that my life will never be long enough to give serious consideration to all the different kinds of wine that can be squeezed out of different kinds of grapes.