{"id":1975,"date":"2020-12-11T23:47:50","date_gmt":"2020-12-11T23:47:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=138265"},"modified":"2020-12-11T23:47:50","modified_gmt":"2020-12-11T23:47:50","slug":"partly-truth-and-partly-fiction-totally-genius-kris-kristofferson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2020\/12\/11\/partly-truth-and-partly-fiction-totally-genius-kris-kristofferson\/","title":{"rendered":"Partly Truth and Partly Fiction, Totally Genius: Kris Kristofferson"},"content":{"rendered":"
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He who binds to himself a joy
\nDoes the winged life destroy;
\nBut he who kisses the joy as it flies
\nLives in eternity’s sun rise.<\/p>\n

\u2013 William Blake, Eternity<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>Great songwriters, like great poets, are possessed by a passionate melancholic sensibility that gives them joy in the telling.\u00a0 They seem always to be homesick for a home they can\u2019t define or find.\u00a0 At the heart of their songs is a presence of an absence that is unnameable. That is what draws listeners in.<\/p>\n

While great songs usually take but a few minutes to travel from the singer\u2019s mouth to the listener\u2019s ears, they keep echoing for a long time, as if they had taken both singer and listener on a circular journey out and back, and then, in true Odyssean fashion, replay the cyclic song of the shared poetic mystery that is life and death, love and loss, the going up and coming down, the abiding nostalgia for a future home.<\/p>\n

Kris Kristofferson\u2019s songs keep echoing in my mind.<\/p>\n

My very old mother, as she neared death, would often tell me, \u201cDon\u2019t let me go.\u201d\u00a0 I would tell her I was trying, knowing my efforts were a temporary stay and that through our conversations we were building what D. H. Lawrence called her \u201cship of death.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

Build then the ship of death, for you must take
\nthe longest journey, to oblivion.
\nAnd die the death, the long and painful death
\nthat lies between the old self and the new.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

We are dying, we are dying, so all we can do
\nis now to be willing to die, and to build the ship
\nof death to carry the soul on the longest journey.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

And the little ship wings home, faltering and lapsing
\non the pink flood,
\nand the frail soul steps out, into her house again
\nfilling the heart with peace.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In those days she also used to ask me: \u201cNow that you have lived more of your life in Massachusetts than in New York City, where do you say you are from and which do you consider your home?\u201d\u00a0 I didn\u2019t know what to say but would wonder where I would like to be buried, as if it mattered.\u00a0 I would be dead.\u00a0 Home.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think so.\u00a0 Not underground, so why does it matter where.\u00a0 Home isn\u2019t a place for permanently sleeping.\u00a0 It\u2019s the place from which we launch our ships out into the world.\u00a0 The place that we discover when all our sailings are done.<\/p>\n

Where was the lightning before it flashed?<\/p>\n

Kris Kristofferson, who is now an old man in his mid-80s, is an astonishing songwriter, a man of faith and conscience, and a humorously devilish performer with an on-stage persona of a spiritual satyr.\u00a0 He has written and performed some of the finest songs in the American songbook.\u00a0 A man\u2019s and a woman\u2019s man, he has written songs of exquisite passion and sensitivity and rough rollicking freedom that only an emotionless zombie would fail to be moved by.\u00a0 And in the last 10 or so years he has fearlessly confronted his mortality, writing many brave songs that bookend his earliest hits, such as Help Me Make It Through the Night<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

I have loved and listened to his music for a long time and have wished to honor him for years.<\/p>\n

This is my small tribute to a great artist.<\/p>\n

Counterpose what is perhaps his most well-known song, Me and Bobby McGee<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>first made famous by the rocking swirling twirling wild dervish Janice Joplin, a former lover so I\u2019ve heard, with his lilting poem that is little known: Shadows of Her Mind. <\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/em>Two meditations in very different song styles on love, loneliness, searching, loss, and the secrets of one\u2019s soul \u2013 a magician at work. Whether partly truth or partly fiction doesn\u2019t matter. \u00a0Secrets are secrets.<\/p>\n

Kristofferson broke barriers when he found success in Nashville\u2019s country and western scene in the early 1970s. He made explicit the sexuality and the yearning for love that underlay traditional country music. The endless yearning that never ends. Its secret. Not just sex in the back room of a honky-tonk, but the \u201cAchin’ with the feelin’ of the freedom of an eagle when she flies,\u201d as he sings in Loving Her Was Easier<\/em><\/a>.<\/em> Something intangible. True passion for love and life.<\/p>\n

He was an oddball. Here was a man whose inspiration for Me and Bobby McGee<\/em> was a foreign film, La Strada <\/em>(The Road), made by the extraordinary Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini. Not the stuff of movie theaters in small Texas towns. In the film, Anthony Quinn is driving around on a motorcycle with a feeble-minded girl whose playing of a trombone gets on his nerves, so while she is sleeping, he abandons her by the side of the road. He later hears a woman singing the melody the girl was always playing and learns the girl has died. Kris explains:<\/p>\n

\n

To me, that was the feeling at the end of \u2018Bobby McGee.\u2019 The two-edged sword that freedom is. He was free when he left the girl, but it destroyed him. That\u2019s where the line \u2018Freedom\u2019s just another name for nothing left to lose\u2019 came from.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Not exactly country, yet a traditional storyteller, a Rhodes scholar and a former Army Captain, an Oxford \u201cegghead\u201d in love with romantic poetry, a sensitive athlete, a risk-taker who gave up a teaching position at West Point for a janitor\u2019s job in Nashville to try his hand at songwriting, a patriot with a dissenter\u2019s heart, he is an unusual man, to put it mildly. A gambler. A man who knows that heaven and hell are born together and that the body and soul cannot be divorced, that all art is incarnational and meant to be about ecstasy and misery, not the middle normal ground where people measure out their lives in coffee spoons. He\u2019s always wanted to tell what he knew, come what may, as he sings in To Beat the Devil<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

I was born a lonely singer, and I’m bound to die the same,
\nBut I’ve got to feed the hunger in my soul.
\nAnd if I never have a nickel, I won’t ever die ashamed.
\n‘Cos I don’t believe that no-one wants to know.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

What do people want to know?\u00a0 <\/em>A bit here and there, I guess, but not too much, not the secrets of our souls. Not the truth about their government\u2019s killers, the lies that drive a Billy Dee<\/a> to drugs and death and the hypocritical fears of cops and people who wish to squelch the truths of the desperate ones for fear that they might reveal secrets best buried with the bodies.\u00a0 Secrets not about the dead but the living.<\/p>\n

There are only a handful of songwriters with the artistic gift of soul sympathy to write verses like the following, and Kris has done it again and again over fifty years:<\/p>\n

\n

Billy Dee was seventeen when he turned twenty-one
\nFooling with some foolish things he could’ve left alone
\nBut he had to try to satisfy a thirst he couldn’t name
\nDriven toward the darkness by the devils in his veins<\/p>\n

All around the honky-tonks, searching for a sign
\nGettin’ by on gettin’ high on women, words and wine
\nSome folks called him crazy, Lord, and others called him free
\nBut we just called us lucky for the love of Billy Dee<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Like William Blake, one of Kristofferson\u2019s mentors \u2013 \u201cCan I see another\u2019s woe\/And not be in sorrow too?\/Can I see another\u2019s grief\/And not seek for kind relief?\u201d \u2013 Billy Dee captures in rollicking sound more truth about addiction than a thousand self-important editorials about drugs.<\/p>\n

Kristofferson joins with Dylan Thomas, the Welsh bard, another wild man with an exquisite sense for the music of language and the married themes of youth and age, sex and death, love and loss, home and the search, always the search:<\/p>\n

\n

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
\nDrives my green age; that blasts\u00a0the roots of trees
\nIs my destroyer.
\nAnd I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
\nMy youth is bent by the same wintry fever.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Although most of his songs lack overt political content, such concerns are scattered throughout his massive oeuvre (nearly 400 songs) where his passion for the victims of America\u2019s war machine and his respect for great spiritual heroes like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and John and Robert Kennedy ring out in very powerful songs that are not well known.\u00a0 Note his use of the word they<\/strong> in They Killed Him<\/em><\/a>, surely not a mistake for such a careful songwriter.<\/p>\n

And in The Circle<\/em><\/a>,<\/em> a song about Bill Clinton killing with a missile an Iraqi artist and her husband and the wounding of her children, his condemnation is powerful as he links it to the disappeared of Argentina in a circle of sorrow.\u00a0 Of course, no one is responsible.<\/p>\n

\n

“Not I” said the soldier
\n“I just follow orders and it was my duty to do my job well”
\n“Not I” said the leader who ordered the slaughter
\n“Im saddened it happened, but then, war is hell”
\n“Not us” said the others who heard of the horror
\nTurned a cold shoulder on all that was done
\nIn all the confusion a single conclusion
\nThe circle of sorrow has only begun<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

As everyone knows, songs have a powerful hold on our memories, and sometimes we learn ironic truths about them only years later.<\/p>\n

When I was young, my large family, consisting of my parents and seven sisters and me \u2013 Bronx kids \u2013 would go on vacation for a week in the late summer to a farm called Edgewater.\u00a0 We would pack our clothes in cartons weeks in advance and would load into the car like sardines layered in a can.\u00a0 On the trip north to the Catskill mountains, in our wild excitement we would sing all sorts of happy songs, many from Broadway shows.\u00a0 As we approached the farm, we would go crazy with excitement and sing over and over the repetitive song we had learned somewhere: We\u2019re Here Because We\u2019re Here Because We\u2019re Here. <\/em>\u00a0To us it was a song of joy; we had arrived at our Shangri-La, our ideal home, paradise regained.\u00a0 To this day, the name Edgewater is like Proust\u2019s madeleine dipped in tea for many of us.<\/p>\n

What we didn\u2019t know was that the song we were singing was the sardonic song that WW I soldiers sang as they awaited absurd and senseless death in the mud and rat-filled trenches of the war to end all wars.\u00a0 Sardonic words to them and joy to us. They were there because they were there and it was meaningless.\u00a0 We sang it out of joy.\u00a0 So Blakean:<\/p>\n

\n

Man was made for joy and woe
\nThen when this we rightly know
\nThrough the world we safely go.
\nJoy and woe are woven fine
\nA clothing for the soul to bind.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

To listen to Kris Kristofferson\u2019s vast oeuvre is a confirmation of that Blakean truth.\u00a0 It is to realize that all those songs he has written and sung have been his way of fulfilling the words of another Romantic poet who was Blake\u2019s contemporary, John Keats.\u00a0 Keats called life \u201ca vale of soul-making,\u201d meaning that people are not souls until they make themselves by developing an individual identity by doing what they were meant to do.<\/p>\n

In Ken Burns\u2019 fascinating documentary series, Country Music<\/em><\/a>, Kris answers the question of why he took such a radical turn early on and gave up his military road to success for a lowly job as a janitor in Nashville where he hoped to write songs.\u00a0 He said:<\/p>\n

\n

I love William Blake\u2026.\u00a0William Blake said, \u201cIf he who is organized by the divine for spiritual communion, refuse and bury his talent in the earth, even though he should want natural bread, shame and confusion of face will pursue him throughout life to eternity.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

When he answered this call of the spirit and took such a dramatic turn away from the conventional road to success, his mother wrote him a letter essentially disowning him (\u201cdis-owning\u201d \u2013 an interesting word!).\u00a0 When Kris showed it to Johnny Cash, Cash said, \u201cIsn\u2019t it nice to get a letter from home?\u201d<\/p>\n

Not devoid of humor, Kristofferson wrote Jessie Younger<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>a catchy tune that no doubt concealed his pain while sharing it, an example of his extraordinary ability to use words in paradoxical ways.\u00a0 A close examination of so many of his lyrics leaves me aghast at his talent.<\/p>\n

There are just a handful of songwriter\/performers who can match the art of Kris Kristofferson. Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen come to mind, men whose work also contains that deep spiritual questing for home.\u00a0 Both have been greatly celebrated in recent years, Dylan with the Nobel Prize and Cohen with accolades after his death.<\/p>\n

Kris Kristofferson may have been \u201cout of sight and out of mind\u201d in recent days, so I would like to bring him back to your attention and salute him.<\/p>\n

Thank you, Kris.\u00a0 You are an inspiration.\u00a0 Blessings.<\/p>\n

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