I Saw the Light: a story about country music

My private hell involves an interminable line to the ladies' room and Kenny Chesney, and the other day I was going to write a whole messy screed on the subject. I was going to talk about Jimmie Rodgers and Garth Brooks and Keith Urban and Conway Twitty and every damn thing. I was going to conclude that the country and western singers of the fifties and sixties lived close to the bone and sang songs about lovin their mamas and their dead babies and the girls they left behind and that these songs represented something viable and authentic about the rural experience during that era. I was going include statistics about mortality and poverty across the south. I was going to talk about Hank Williams dead in the back seat of a big blue Cadillac parked out behind a gas station and about sanitary tales of raising hell and amazing grace sizzling from speakers in an air-conditioned Ford Explorers. It was a neat juxtaposition, the sort of essay that forms itself easily and fully in my mind, so easily that it never quite makes it to paper but just sits around in the back of my mind like a gift from a boy you never liked that well but who always liked you.

There's been a song in my head today, a song I thought perfectly summed up some shady, pastoral corner of my soul. So I found an interview with the band on Pitchfork. The song, it turns out, was meant sarcastically, ironically. A professor I had always mentioned that the word sarcasm means, literally and in it's purest, etymological form "to tear the flesh." I'd carried the song along with me today as I went about my business, something sweeter than myself and something more hopeful. It's sarcastic, isn't it, the interviewer asked. But sincerely meant as well? The question sort of hung there a bit and disappeared in the cloud of vagueries that generally mark interviews. I sat here in front of my borrowed computer and realized that my own sweet little moment was more sarcastic than I realized, that flesh was torn, so to speak.

The thing about me is that I effing hate hippies. One of my favorite musical moments is Kurt Cobain's come on people now/smile on your brothers/everybody get together/try to love one another/right now at the beginnings of Territorial Pissings. It's this bleak, wonderful howl of disappointment at the failure of all that idealism. Smiling on your brother seems this futile ridiculous idea, the playground nonsense of a generation who grew up to be investment bankers and chemical engineers.

Once I got into a fairly stupid argument about postmodernism with a Boomer who clearly had no idea what postmodernism was. It has nothing particular to do with zoos, for the record. I am an enthusiastic postmodernist: I once accused a perfect stranger of being a crypto-oligarch because he discounted wikipedia. That's beside the point, I suppose. Unless the point was don't argue with me unless you'd like to be called a crypto-somethingorother. It's an insult I use all the time with necessary variants. I think it sounds dirty.The simplest definition of postmodernism, the one given by an Intro to Philosophy class in which I was once and woefully involved, is an incredulity to metanarratives. In other words, a simple refusal to believe the big story, the explanations for the stuff of life we can all believe in. Postmodernism is about decentralization, distrust, and decay. Postmodernism is also cheerfully and fatalistically concerned with pop culture. As am I, I suppose.

In 1996, PJ Harvey recorded a splendid cover of an old Peggy Lee song: is that all there is?/if that's all there is, my friends/then let's keep dancing. Or, at the very least, let's keep listening to pop music and buying dvds of all our favorite tv shows from childhood.But pop music is disappointing, isn't it? I've long joked that Britney Spears and I have roughly the same musical talent--practically none--but she has better abs. Or did until she had all those babies and beers. So maybe it's all about promotion: business today consists of controlling crowds. Music is as slick and static as Twinkee wrappers, often the work of engineers and producers more than musicians. Plus, my sister maintains--although not in these precise these terms--that Kenny Chesney's pecs are sho nuff store bought.

Everytime I fight with someone I love, I'm pretty sure all the words we use we've heard on past seasons of the Real World. Or in Reality Bites. Sometimes I wonder what life was like before we had movies and magazines and popular teen dramas and pop music to tell us how to feel and how to say it and what to wear while we do all of it. In college a handful of friends and I designated our Seinfeld identities over lunch and ever after--or was it long before?--we could relate the day-to-day to That Episode Where. At least we weren't the cast of Friends. Cold comfort, perhaps.

Oh there's emo instead of punk and John Mayer instead of Sleepy John and the godawful swill about next to god of course america i love you instead of some bare if sentimental twang about subsistence living. And oh there's my friend with a job in finance who dreams up life as a hobo and my clean-handed friend who dreams of chucking his degrees in favor of farming. And oh there's me with a a coupla chi-chi beers in me singing let the thunder roll and the lightnin flash I'm doing alright for country trash. And oh maybe the Monkees will go down with the Beatles, as shaggy haired lotharios and the handiwork of careful technicians. And oh in the end it's maybe all the same.

Is it the logical end that all the cleanest and brightest bits of ourselves will be little murky, the photocopies of photocopies? Can happiness exist untinged by ironies and a celluloid-born sense of distance? If I ask you whether you were sincere, will you say too many words without enough meaning?

Like the essay I never wrote, this one is stalling. It's stalling because ultimately I don't believe these things. Certainly I believe myself to be a snarky little pessimist in rundown shoes and stupidly oversized sunglasses. I believe that what's on the radio is mostly shit and that I should spend time loftier pursuits than honing indie cred. And I believe that the idealism of our parents' America is ultimately absurd. I believe that Jack Nicholson snarling this ain't reality tv may as well be David Hasselhoff dancing on the Berlin Wall. But none of those things that I believe are the thing I believe.

For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known. And now these things abide...

I believe is separation and in discord, in the tearing of skin and the wrenching of bone and in the silly slow progression of days measured in coffee spoons and the dirty socks that somehow appear uninvited in my hamper and the Netflix envelopes that are so effing slow to come and console my sleepless nights. Call me a crypto-platonist, if you like. It sounds dirty, doesn't it. I told you. But the thing I believe, the thing that is most real is that we would not know the broken without the image of the whole, the copy without the idea of the original. The thing that I believe Godthefather and Thelittlelordjesusnocryinghemakes. The thing I believe in is the faith of people with terrible political convictions and with long black socks over their thick white shanks and of brown-robed students of antiquities with poor social skills and of wild-eyed adventurers picking their wives out of beer barrels. The thing I believe in is nails splintering bones and the damps of early mornings and graveyards. The thing I believe in is slick red birth and feeling of grass on my barefeet when I was very young and the way I can never think up words to describe what the sky looks like on a clear night.

And that's what I've got. A collection of records and skinny jeans, a vocabulary of movie quotes and some modernist poets I steal from shamelessly, and a lot of haircare products. I've got enough undergraduate hours of philosohpy and church history--including a real stemwinder of an apologetics class--I could make a reasoned argument for faith. I've got a thousand unsolicted--and, all things being equal--un-read opinions about the state of the arts and politics and the human condition and a semi-surly attitude about most things. Straw.

So in the end, I come back to a question of country music, I suppose, for that is the point where I began.

I wandered so aimless a life filled with sin

I wouldn't let my dear Savior in

the Jesus came like a stranger in the night

O Praise the Lord I saw the Light.

Hank Williams is not the person to be getting your theology from, nor your tips for daily living. But somehow, I think it pretty much says what needs to be said here.

Summer 2007