mills

Birthdays and Joy

Today is my wonderful father’s birthday; it is also Paul’s; it is also the anniversary of Kristallnacht and of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Does anyone know how precisely –if at all- the Earth is in the same position relative to the sun in successive years on a given date?

My father has given me a great deal, and I’ve taken even more from him, particularly materially. One of my favorite gifts from him was C.S. Lewis’ marvelous autobiography of youth, Surprised by Joy, which explores a sensation the pursuit of which was to guide Lewis’ life.

By Joy, Lewis means a precise phenomenon which is by its nature indescribable directly; I often think of it as a kind of profoundly asymptotic experience, profound because all reality, all contact, all intellection is in some senses asymptotic; the asymptote is a metaphor I think of often. Lewis says Joy is “an unsatisfied desire which itself is more desirable than any other satisfaction.” He continues:

“Joy…is here a technical term and must be distinguished from both happiness and pleasure. Joy has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that…it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever…exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is.”

Joy is, for Lewis, most often brought about in contemplation of certain worlds, particularly in childhood, and I think it is most universally understood in that way: think of those worlds, those spaces you adored or considered magical in your youth. Perhaps it was a shed in which you played with a friend in which the sun though a small window illuminated the suspension of dust and made it appear that there was a wall of light. Perhaps it was the universe of a favorite children’s book, the illustrated rooms of which seemed rich in depth, every detail en enormity.

Perhaps it was even more vague; Lewis recalls the stirring of Joy when reading a poem:“I desired, with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale, and remote,” and later relates the development of his interest in Norse mythology to this resonance.

The frequency with which I’ve felt Joy has varied greatly; I anxiously worry that my medicines stifle it, but I have come to feel that it is actually ineluctable if one has any life of imagination at all. I feel that it is, in fact, a kind of barometer of my internal world. But it is rare, rarer than anything else I experience.

Lewis writes that “All Joy reminds. It is never a possession, always a desire for something longer ago or further away or still ‘about to be.’” In his life, the catalyst for Joy changed greatly over time and eventually became religious; indeed, there is much in the perpetually anticipatory, asymptotic, ungraspable, unspeakable quality of Joy that reminds one of various mysticisms, particularly of the East. But it is universal, I think; it is what sets us wandering in childhood, searching for beauty less of a formal than an emotional sort.

I’d never known that anyone else felt it before I read Surprised by Joy, and I can thank my dad for bringing awareness of it to me; he has done so with so many things I treasure over the course of my life that I could never repay him. Neither could I repay him all the money I’ve taken, but I think the former debt is the more significant.

Fourth

It is a summer night, with all that meant in the best times of our earlier and still-unfinished youth. There are people at our house, and some will sleep here: they have changed into the clothes they will wear while they dream. The spirits and beer and cigarettes might be candy: though they seemed once to be accoutrements of adulthood, they now have the mildest effects, as though they are gummy taffies or Pixie-Stix.

After the fireworks we came home. We have aged now back into childhood: we want the simplest things and laugh easily. Our domestic affairs are as settled as they were when they belonged to tall and deep-voiced adults talking in low tones in another room. We want nothing but to laugh, so we play games and feel the breeze in the air: it is like a gift from an Earth momentarily without catastrophe, at least so far as we know. Like children now, we read no news.

In the searing intensity of our early twenties sleep never came, or when it did it did so after some bender or in the early morning. Now we feel again like boys and girls who want to see the late television shows but cannot keep our eyes open: we fight yawning slumber as it moves over our minds, making everything seem dreamy and open and resonant; every sound has an echo, ever light a haloed glow.

It is so hard to stay awake in this beautiful summer night, but we fight to; and the fight feels good because we know that sleep will be a gift like the breeze: cool, soft, carefree.

Music and Memory and Graceland

I was in love and purchased my first CD, Paul Simon’s Graceland.  Ever since then, my music collection has grown to become a huge part of my life, mentally AND physically.

From Katydid’s post.

My mother, my sister, and I evacuated New Orleans for a hurricane in the early 1990s; it must have been Andrew. My dad’s decision to stay wasn’t something I interrogated at the time; back then, no one had yet realized what would happen to New Orleans if a major hurricane cut through it.

My mother is a deeply creative person, not simply in her various hobbies and crafts but also in an existential sense: she creates experiences where most see void. As an example: it is from her that I learned how wonderful a road trip can be, whereas for many driving is radically devalued time spent crossing radically devalued space, the stark highways connecting implicitly significant As and Bs. Not for her. Road trips with her are richly experiential.

Even in daily life, she doesn’t wait in lines; she makes friends in lines.

And she didn’t just leave New Orleans; she took us somewhere. As with much of what she does, she undertook our evacuation in a tongue-in-cheek way, deciding to turn it into a vacation of sorts; we didn’t fly to Cannes while Rome burned, though: we drove to Graceland, in Memphis.

By that age, I was already obsessed with Paul Simon. While I was still in the womb, my mother sang “Loves Me Like a Rock“ to me, and I’d taken very strongly to his music at my first conscious exposure; my parents were kind enough to immerse me in excellent music at a young age, my dad sharing with me Coltrane, Davis, and what classical I could handle. But it was Simon’s music, so percussive and complex, that sent me down the path to being a musician.

We listened to our little tape of Graceland on that trip so much that I am startled my mother didn’t go insane; we listened to it the way you listen to albums when you’re a teenager and can hear the same record twenty times in a night, the repetition making the music deeper, not shallower, more resonant, not less.

I’m going to Graceland, Graceland,
Memphis, Tennessee
I’m going to Graceland.
Poor-boys and pilgrims with families
And we are going to Graceland
And my traveling companions
Are ghosts and empty sockets:
I’m looking at ghosts and empties.
But I’ve reason to believe
We all will be received
In Graceland.

Naturally, the metaphor has grown more and more significant to me as I’ve aged, and I think the song is one of the most beautiful I know. I live in what Simon calls “the national guitar,” the Mississippi delta, and whenever someone slanders New Orleans and asks why we should bother rebuilding I think again of what we’ve given: of the birth of jazz and its fusion with blues and the Afro-Caribbean music of Congo Square, and I think of how Simon is a quintessential American, synthesizing so much of our national musical experience in such a simple way.

Andrew missed us and devastated parts Florida, although we certainly got our due thirteen years later. I can barely remember what the real Graceland looked like on the inside, only that I thought it was rather ugly. But I think Simon is right: we are all received there, in Graceland, the silly sprawling symbol of rock music, that nexus of mass consumption and obscure historical happenstance which came from slaves and jazz musicians as surely as from Berry and Presley; indeed, that music contains all the wandering poor-boys and pilgrims of America’s history.

That’s what’s so beautiful about great popular art: it isn’t elitist, and it receives us all.