CW133
All writing, for me anyway, is automatic writing. Especially songwriting and poetry I guess, but even this. Even now, when I have something I intend to say, finding the way to say it is essentially a form of dowsing. Or maybe I have a little pewter hammer I tap on things with to listen for the right ring.
The Surrealists and Spirituals were using the automatic writing technique to access deep parts of themselves that they weren’t consciously aware of, or discarnate voices speaking through them. I’m open to either, but the distinction between them is not very important to me. Once you tap the deep springs, whether they’re technically “you” or not—maybe I just have no idea and suspect the answer is complicated.
But what comes through, wherever it’s from, does matter to me. (Maybe this is obvious.) If I was somehow channeling some voice that was, say, politically abhorrent to me, then I wouldn’t be setting it to music and putting it out on a record. Mercifully that’s not an issue, but I bring it up to say: I’m not neutral. I am friendly to complex imagery I don’t understand, but I don’t want to be a vehicle for evil, whether it arises from within me or without.
I count myself lucky not to hear demons and trolls, but I do hear a lot of “nonsense”: language that can sound self-consciously weird and opaque (or maybe it’s translucent, maybe it’s stained glass cartoons). (When I was a kid I wanted to be a cartoonist when I grew up, and in the last few years I’ve been considering that maybe I am. I’ll write about “Cupcake Minimalism” another time.)
In high school in the early 90s, under the sway of Robyn Hitchcock and Tom Robbins (but not drugs), I wrote something for a student publication. My friend was the editor and he was looking over what I’d submitted. He liked the argument of the essay, but suggested I take out some of the “cute” stuff, the garish lapsing into wacky language and over-the-top metaphor. (I refused the changes and my friend just published it anyway.)
I still hear that stuff, but I can choose to let it in or filter it out, depending on what feels right. The writing where I really let that flume gush does not feel more true than the more controlled flow. Both states, and the whole spectrum in between—it’s all equally expressive. Where that filter is set is lollipop Düsseldorf arpeggio. Just kidding. I wanted to give you a fully bright taste. Where that filter is set is just another factor in the music of the moment. More buttoned up is sometimes the weather.
All this to say, today’s song is from a flume-gush time: Maya Properties (2012). I was finally, at age 36, on an SSRI for OCD, after white knuckling it since childhood. It was bliss, just the trust fall of surrender alone. (Also the drug helped (it still does).) It was also my last great marijuana phase. (I started smoking in 2005, age 29, two years (and some months) before I quit drinking.) After Maya Properties, my relationship with cannabis went downhill. I mean: I was already totally addicted in 2012, never a day without (or if there was a day without, it was excruciating), but at least I could still get properly blasted. But after making that album, it started to get really dark. I finally stopped in 2016. (That was bliss* (it still is).)
*It took months of being stripped of almost all access to pleasure and wonder, but on the other side of that was way more pleasure and wonder than fit through the ever-shrinking breathing straw pot was allotting me. And that pleasure and wonder continues to expand, which itself begets pleasure and wonder, which creates a kind of pleasure-and-wonder feedback loop. But it doesn’t hurt my ears. It’s just really, really nice.
Every night I would smoke my pipe and write, right where I’m sitting now (looking at Ruth’s painting, which was there then), usually three songs. My filter was on the wide setting. Often I was lost in what I was writing, losing my place and letting it happen. It worked while it worked. I would write… whatever.
I don’t know what this song means, but I like the way it does it. (To paraphrase Donald Fagen in a Steely Dan interview I read in American Songwriter in a big-box bookstore in ~2000: We don’t know what the song means, but we know what it’s doing.)
It, “you marvel at things,” is certainly not the most reckless case of the extravagant faith of the Maya songs. But hearing that nothingness whistle through the frame of this delicate balsa-wood ballad, as opposed to an obvious joke song, heightens that absence for me. The smiling empty of that friendly void: the brief overlap honeymoon between a new prescription and a self-medication I was running out of luck with.
“you marvel at things” You marvel at things I don’t think you should You charm in bat wings Back behind the good Fools run around And they always publish silver Schools run aground When they only hunt for gold You wander, mistress Minstrel of the fire You know my business: Master of desire Fools run around But they only garnish lightly Cool is the mound Where you pitch to publish old You marvel at things You marvel at things You marvel at things You marvel at things You marvel at things You marvel at things You marvel at things You marvel at things You marvel at things You marvel at things You marvel at things You marvel at things You marvel at things You marvel at things You marvel at things You marvel at things
Correction:
My CW107 post centers in on something weird I experienced in 1995 when looking at wainscoting (noun), and I call that weird something “wainscoting” (verb). The thing is, I learned this week that… that part of the lower wall that meets the floor that I was talking about isn’t wainscoting. It’s just a baseboard. I’ve never rented an apartment with wainscoting. Wainscoting is tall. I don’t know how I messed this up when writing the post because I’m sure I looked it up. Whatever. I was in error, but I feel like I got the right name for the phenomenon. “Wainscoting” is scary in the right way. “Baseboarding” is scary in the wrong way (an extreme sport? something worse?). (I like the way my mistake conjures up someone living in cheap apartments who talks like they’re a rich British person. Or maybe it’s a person in an insane asylum who thinks they’re still in their country estate managing a large staff, putting on grand parties, redecorating, &c.)