A Field Guide to Getting Lost (11 page)

B
lue
was the title I gave a compilation tape I made a dozen years ago, and some of the songs were about sadness, some about the sky, some about both. Every once in a while I made a collection like that, mostly to be listened to on long road trips, and in them I tried to define what it was that moved me in the music I chose. An earlier one had been called
Geography Lessons, Mostly Tragic,
and there too I had tried to get at something about the evocation of place and its emotional resonance in that music. A compilation about rivers and drinking, about drowning from the inside and out, I called
The Entirely Liquid Mr. North,
after the fatally alcoholic composer Abe North in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
Tender Is the Night,
though the songs were southern. In
Blue,
most of the music had some relationship to the blues, as if the music was going back to its origins in longing and the blue of distance.

I had discovered country and western music a few years before—not the modern stuff that is mostly sentimental pop with fiddles and a twang, but the older tunes that plumbed the dark depths of emotional experience. I had grown up in immigrant, coastal, liberal culture far removed from the realm of this music and been taught to despise the stuff as banal, as trashy, as vulgar without ever really heeding it. When the music burst upon me all of a sudden one spring, I was stunned to find out that the most popular songs often were, like the stories of Edgar Allan Poe and Katherine Anne Porter, a kind of southern gothic in love with tragedy and topography. Thinking about it now, I wonder about an era when a wrenching poetics of loss possessed the airwaves and wonder too about how it slid over into the true banality of upbeat contemporary country (though there are still great balladeers around the edges of that genre).

The songs that worked their way into my blood were like short stories compressed into a few stanzas and a refrain; they always spanned and layered time. The music was haunted, was about distant memory, was about the dead and gone or at the very least aimed at a beloved far beyond earshot. Like writing, the music was solitary, talking to itself in that solitude of composition and contemplation, in the free flow of time that is before, after, between, but somehow never quite the now of a thriving romance, and perhaps this was also the time of my long summer drives, of driving six hundred, a thousand miles in a day, of unrolling again and again like movies, like stories, like the stories small children demand for reassurance, the sequences of Highway 40 through Arizona and New Mexico, 80 and 50 through Nevada and Utah, of 58 and 285 through the California desert, of many secondary highways and other roads, roads whose mesas and diners were always the same and whose light and clouds and weather never were.

And this wasn’t the obscure or alternative stuff, necessarily. At a flea market, I picked up a cassette of Tanya Tucker’s early hits for a quarter or fifty cents, back when I was first poking around at what to me was a whole new continent. The cassette was like an anthology of stories. A former beauty walked around town, mad from loss, and stuck in a moment that had evaporated away long ago, carrying a suitcase and waiting for a man who had abandoned her long before. A nameless voice asked her nameless lover, “Would you lay with me (in a field of stone),” summoning up a bizarre picture of lovers in one of those unplowable granitic pastures, and the intensity of need seemed to be all the explanation the strange request required. (“Walking After Midnight,” Patsy Cline’s huge 1957 hit, is unsettlingly peculiar in the same way: she walks—in the words of Don Hecht and Alan Block—along the highway in the middle of the night to say that she loves the “you” of the song, not a very domesticated or reasonable or even straightforward way of saying anything, and the obliqueness of the means is in direct proportion to the impossibility of really saying it to the unnamed, irrecoverable beloved in this landscape of loneliness.) A woman recalled the man who had approached her when she was a child. He asked her her mother’s name and whether she ever spoke of a place called New Orleans and, for bothering a child, was thrown into jail. Near the present in which the song is sung, the questioner died, and on his corpse was the note from her mother announcing her birth, so that the one meeting between father and daughter had been a catastrophe of nonrecognition, of the failure to connect that is so much the material of these songs that layer time like dirt on a grave.

They were always about someone recalling a tragedy that unfolded long ago, generally about someone else, so that a sort of haze of remoteness lay over the once wrenching events, the kind of time that Joseph Conrad invoked when he’d set up a narrator on a docked ship telling a tale of another man in another ocean long before, an unresolved riddle to be revisited. The quintessential song in this vein and the one I love best is “Long Black Veil,” which the protagonist sings from beyond the grave, ten years after he was hanged for a crime he did not commit as his best friend’s wife silently watched him die. They had been together, in bed, but neither would invoke the alibi that would have saved him. And so, as the famous refrain goes, she walks these hills in a long black veil “and visits my grave when the night winds wail.” Even Bobbie Gentry’s 1967 “Ode to Billy Joe,” that megahit in which the girl protagonist may have pushed her lover off the Tallahatchie Bridge (below Choctaw Ridge), has something of that sense of looking at ghosts and wraiths in the rearview mirror of irrecoverable time, irrecoverable loss and error.

The protagonists were often anonymous, nameless, described in only the vaguest terms. A man, a woman, a beloved dead a long time ago, a faithless wife, a cruel husband, a hope abandoned, a dream glimpsed once and lost. But the territory in which these dramas played themselves out were evoked in detail over and over again, and if they were tragic songs about the failure of human love, they were also love songs about places, whose names were recited like incantations and caresses. The names or just the facts of bridges, mountains, valleys, towns, states, rivers (lots of rivers), highways were recalled in reverie, and psychic states themselves became places, “Lost Highway” and “Lonely Street.” So though they were overtly love songs, in most of them the landscape was a deeper anchor for being and the object of another, more enduring love. The grave, the town hall light, the hills, and the gallows are all more vivid than the protagonists of “Long Black Veil.” Perhaps it’s that you can’t go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fatal decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal. They become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some way you too become them. They are what you can possess and what in the end possesses you.

In my old Tanya Tucker cassette, Brownsville, San Antonio, Memphis, New Orleans, and Pecos were the only proper names mentioned, though streets, fields, rivers, stores, jails, ferries, and other locations also showed up. The people were nameless and sometimes the women began to dissolve into places, like those tragic figures the gods would turn into rosebushes or fountains to stabilize their grief. There was, of course, the jilted bride called Delta Dawn, and far more scorchingly, there was the young rape victim who withdrew into herself and became known as No Man’s Land. She grew up to be a beauty, a nurse, and one day found herself called upon to nurse her rapist—the song is vague about the details, but she seems to have watched him die rather than treating him, “and now his soul is walking / In No Man’s Land.” It’s a terrifying song, about the damage people can do to each other and about the way the rapist comes to possess her twice, once as the soul who haunts the limbo she has become.

The places in which any significant event occurred become embedded with some of that emotion, and so to recover the memory of the place is to recover the emotion, and sometimes to revisit the place uncovers the emotion. Every love has its landscape. Thus place, which is always spoken of as though it only counts when you’re present, possesses you in its absence, takes on another life as a sense of place, a summoning in the imagination with all the atmospheric effect and association of a powerful emotion. The places inside matter as much as the ones outside. It is as though in the way places stay with you and that you long for them they become deities—a lot of religions have local deities, presiding spirits, geniuses of the place. You could imagine that in those songs Kentucky or the Red River is a spirit to which the singer prays, that they mourn the dreamtime before banishment, when the singer lived among the gods who were not phantasms but geography, matter, earth itself.

There is a voluptuous pleasure in all that sadness, and I wonder where it comes from, because as we usually construe the world, sadness and pleasure should be far apart. Is it that the joy that comes from other people always risks sadness, because even when love doesn’t fail, mortality enters in; is it that there is a place where sadness and joy are not distinct, where all emotion lies together, a sort of ocean into which the tributary streams of distinct emotions go, a faraway deep inside; is it that such sadness is only the side effect of art that describes the depths of our lives, and to see that described in all its potential for loneliness and pain is beautiful? There are songs of insurgent power; they are essentially what rock and roll, an outgrowth of one strain of the blues, does best, these songs of being young and at the beginning of the world, full of a sense of your own potential. Country, at least the old stuff, has mostly been devoted instead to aftermath, to the hard work it takes to keep going or the awareness that comes after it is no longer possible to go on. If it is deeper than rock it is because failure is deeper than success. Failure is what we learn from, mostly.

All those summer drives, no matter where I was going, to a person, a project, an adventure, or home, alone in the car with my social life all before and behind me, I was suspended in the beautiful solitude of the open road, in a kind of introspection that only outdoor space generates, for inside and outside are more intertwined than the usual distinctions allow. The emotion stirred by the landscape is piercing, a joy close to pain when the blue is deepest on the horizon or the clouds are doing those spectacular fleeting things so much easier to recall than to describe. Sometimes I thought of my apartment in San Francisco as only a winter camp and home as the whole circuit around the West I travel a few times a year and myself as something of a nomad (nomads, contrary to current popular imagination, have fixed circuits and stable relationships to places; they are far from being the drifters and dharma bums that the word
nomad
often connotes nowadays). This meant that it was all home, and certainly the intense emotion that, for example, the sequence of mesas alongside the highway for perhaps fifty miles west of Gallup, N.M., and a hundred miles east has the power even as I write to move me deeply, as do dozens of other places, and I have come to long not to see new places but to return and know the old ones more deeply, to see them again. But if this was home, then I was both possessor of an enchanted vastness and profoundly alienated.

So were the people in those songs, and it seemed that place-names had an evocative power there that they did in my life: I love to hear people say those names. Once when I was living in New Mexico, a student who’d lived in my part of California would charm and mesmerize me by saying, “Sebastopol, Occidental, Free-stone, Gravenstein Highway, Petaluma . . .” Now, it’s the New Mexico names that have the most power over me, Golondrinas, Mora, Chacon, Trampas, Chimayo, Nambe, Rio en Medio, Canyoncito, Stanley, Moriarty, the East Mountains, Cerrillos, Cerro Pelon. There’s a whole genre of song that began in the blues that consists largely of place-names, a recitative of geography, of which the famous “Route 66” is only the most popular. (Perhaps they came from conductors’ cries on the railroads, as does the list in the bluegrass tune “Orange Blossom Special”; perhaps travel and lists are inevitably wed, so that a music of restlessness paces itself in place-names.) An outsider’s insightful approximation of its essence is “Wanted Man,” which Bob Dylan wrote in 1969 and Johnny Cash most famously covered. It’s a boastful list of all the places a criminal is wanted, a recitation that includes Albuquerque and Tallahassee and Baton Rouge and Buffalo, a confusion of being desired with being hunted that has unsettling intimations about the motives for committing a crime.

That life is a journey is a given in these songs whose background after all is the urbanization of rural whites and northern migration of southern blacks, but the intense love of place frames this journey not as an enlightenment narrative of discovery of the unknown but an insular tale of loss of the formative terra cognita that exists in the song only as memory, a map written in the darkness of your guts, readable in a cross section of your autopsied heart. Nobody gets over anything; time doesn’t heal any wounds; if he stopped loving her today, as one of George Jones’s most famous songs has it, it’s because he’s dead. The landscape in which identity is supposed to be grounded is not solid stuff; it’s made out of memory and desire, rather than rock and soil, as are the songs.

 

 

People look into the future and expect that the forces of the present will unfold in a coherent and predictable way, but any examination of the past reveals that the circuitous routes of change are unimaginably strange. No logic and no prophesy could explain the evolution of the whale from an ancient aquatic creature through eons on land and then back in the sea to become something utterly different from anything that could survive on the surface of the earth. The music called the blues is as good an example as any of the unlikely, an evolution of African music in the southeastern American landscape, inflected by slavery and exposure to the English language, European instruments, and, perhaps, Irish, Scottish, and English ballads—the passionate melancholy of murder ballads and songs about abandoned maidens and bloody revenges. The term
blue
comes from an old English word for melancholy or for sadness, blue moods, blue devils, the blues, first tracked to 1555 in my etymological dictionary.