Angry Young Men

I was watching an interview with David Bowie (he's surprisingly articulate) he mentioned that when he was first starting out, he would have done most anything to get his message heard. He talks about how, when one is young, there is no future and that the message is everything, that you have something to say and you must say it.

It got me thinking about passion and a young man's right to be outraged at what he sees in the world. (Young woman's right, too!) As a teen, I was very outraged, political, idealistic and determined to talk about it. Most of the intelligent people that I have known go through a period of intense anger about the state of the world and strive to voice this outrage. Most of them try politics, which quickly deflates their passion into helpless, silent, frustration.

I grew up in the "cynical" seventies and my first political memory was of Nixon's resignation. It is hard for some people to understand what it was to be angry and outraged in those times. The movement to change anything was over and most of the kids I knew only wanted to party. Disco was replacing interesting rock, folk was for old fogies and anger was for people who couldn't get their coke connection. It was a desert time, a time when speaking up made you a freak. Well, most of my friends were freaks, but the new rage then was gay rights. Most of the political kids were fighting desperately for gay rights; one of my best friends had been dismissed as head boy when they found out he was gay. Some people assumed that I was gay because I was interested in people who were fighting for something--anything. To stand up and speak out was, to me, the reason to be there. To find solutions was a reason to read. To fight to the death was a reason to group together. But it was fighting a great gray cloud where our teachers told us that if we were not cynical we were fools.

How sad to ask a young person to be cynical. That is like asking a healthy person to act like they are sick. When I found myself growing cynical a few years later, I realized that I hated myself for it and accepted the consequences of refusing to "grow up" in that way. But David Bowie also said that it's too easy to be nihilistic. It's much more difficult to promote the good than it is to dismiss all the bad. I have always believed in finding solutions, not in wailing about the failure of mankind to overcome its self-destructive nature.

In the midst of the bleak party-party atmosphere, I found U2. At that point, they were a Christian band, and their fans were religious. I tried to be Christian, seriously Christian: carrying a bible, trying to believe, going to lay witness meetings, going to different churches. That died when I was fourteen. Although I knew that I could not believe as much as I might like to, I could not dismiss the religious, for I had known them to catch fire.

When I was down and out in LA and working two jobs, I used to take a week off every six months and make all my clothes. I find sewing boring as all get out, so I used to watch TV while running the sewing machine. At that time MTV had just come out and I found that watching music videos was about the right speed. In the midst of all the slick videos this band appeared on this video. I can still remember being absolutely awestruck. I remember the one thought I had, that someone had captured, on film, religious rapture. I realized that the boys in this band were so different from anyone else out there singing, that this was a band that could speak to me. I want to set the stage for this video because this is one of the only images I have seen in rock where a young man loses himself completely and remembers that he is a servant of god. I use religious terms here because it is appropriate. There are so few images of people who are overcome by joy, this is one of the best.



U2's Gloria

To my dismay, when I tried to show this to other people, they completely missed it. All they saw was a dorky group of rock musicians. I talked with a few who loved U2 and they were usually Christians.

It is hard to find words of what this band MEANT. They were down and out in Dublin, one of the worst cities in Europe, two of the boys had lost their mothers when teens, Ireland was still depressed and no one with any talent stayed there, and they had a long history of oppression and war. But this band was totally against war of any kind. They resented it when they came to the US and IRA sympathizers wanted to talk to them. They knew what it was to be in the middle of a war and they were fighting for peace as well as revealing their souls.

In this next video, the very first part of it, shows what I would enshrine as the "angry young men" or the heart of a youth who is trying to understand and protest what they see around them. This rallying cry I think is one of the best of any generation. There are many videos of this opening for Electric Co and most of the time Bono changes the lyrics slightly. But I think this video shows what I mean when Bono cries: "well I can't see why or what for! What for! What for!"

Cry/Electric Co

I am not a good fan. I don't fall in love with rock idols or movie stars. That's just stupid. Well, I think it is. So, you must excuse my going on about U2. I hate what they became later. I think their politics took a wrong turn, but I'm glad that they continued to try to fight. I like what they say later about being a band and how it was about the band and about the music. They are also articulate men. But I feel that I owe them a dept for being a voice in the desert of my own youth.

This last video I believe expresses the very best there is in a young man. It was made when U2 got popular and was on the verge of super-stardom. They still retain the edge that they had (pardon the pun) but the juxtaposition of the young boy's awe over the circus performers and Bono's desperate outrage is just wonderful. What I love most about this video is that they did not make it into a love song, but continued to show a greater love, a love of life.



Two Hearts Beat as One

U2's first three albums are amazing. The October album continues to make me shudder with the feeling of standing up and fighting. The War album was already patchy and later albums would grow in different directions, different feelings.

In the 60's most of the rock stars and folk singers were protesting generations of abuse and cruelty. But what I continue to find amazing about U2 is that film was able to capture, in Bono, no matter how dorky they all were, his shining fire. Sometimes he was just crazy, but in some films, he is sublime. Contrasted with the Edge concentrating so fiercely on his music, the band comes across as HUMAN, or with soul, with mind, with spirit as well as the body. They show us in some of these videos, what it looks like to be human, to be on fire, to be outraged. While the earlier singers sang about it, this band often looks as well as sounds that force.

What this band also showed, which is seen so very rarely, is that there is a force in the three great mono-theist religions that is so often abused. What U2 demonstrates here is "jihad" a word often very abused, but simply means "enthusiastic love of god" that goes out in this force for good, to try to DO something about the world. The force of the young, the voice, the light, the spirit of outrage, but also of exuberant wonder. Later, we learn compassion and tolerance. But let us celebrate, let us stand up with the spirit of Bono and U2, let us get up and find that the door to god stands open!

blessed be

Trying to Reach the Heart

When I was young I was extremely shy. I was also very private. My mother, who was not only a performer, but a teacher, wanted to draw us out into the world, to nurture our talents, and to have us be fulfilled as creative people. This rather backfired in some ways in that, while I loved being creative, I was way too shy to show off. I got to the point that I wanted to hide what I loved from my mother so that she would not want me to turn it into a performance. Competition made it worse. My mother enjoyed and thrived on competition and I found it shameful and somehow sick, as if my work became sullied by the act of comparison. I was too young to understand this.

But the young learn to protect themselves. I ended up hiding my heart, or the heart of my work. I found that she was baffled by intellect, so I found safety in engaging my mind and trying to get more and more obscure in order to turn her off of what I was doing. This had several unfortunate consequences, but the worst was that I got to the point where I could not longer enjoy doing my own work, inspired from within, without feeling guilty. Creative work was for money, competition, and admiration, all of which I despised. But one had to do it in order to do what was expected. I never questioned that I had to perform, only that it was shameful and bad to do things in secret that might not appeal to other people.

I buried my heart and did some of my work on my worlds in secret. I was also an avid journal writer, in secret. Artwork could not be secret, but writing could. However, because I was talented as an artist, that was the pressure point. I might have wanted to be a doctor or a writer, but the expectation was that I would be an artist. I never felt I had a choice. I'm sure now that I did, but I never had to courage to face down enthusiastic people. I was a child who wanted to please others and to make them proud of me.

I found later that all of this agony over the arts messed up my ability to contact the heart through art. For art to be art, it must be from the heart as well as the body and the head. You can see art that is head art: protest art, style art, art that is interesting but not spiritually appealing. Luckily, I loved music. In music I found all the heart that I could not find in the graphic arts, or even in writing. Although I do not have the ability to believe in god, I found that, though music, singing in particular, I was able to access a spiritual dimension in myself that is essentially worship, or rapture. After being criticized, singing for me became an intensely private affair.

A little while ago, I found an interview with Lisa Gerrard of Dead Can Dance, who expresses exactly what I feel about music. I have never seen or heard anyone else who came close to expressing what I feel about god, if I can feel that way without belief. This interview is profoundly moving, so much so, that I have to share it with you. She sings in the same range as I do and I feel very close to her pitch and tone.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRsptfVAwmw&feature=related

Although I cannot bear to sing around other people, I sing when I walk places by myself, or sing in acoustically interesting places like garages and underpasses and stairwells. I love the way the tone vibrates all through the head, almost as if you were becoming tone. I always feel an immediate connection to the godspace, if you want to call it that, and an immediate rapture, that I know takes people years to achieve in meditation. For me, it is a necessary part of my emotional life to express myself though singing. It has remained private, and it would take an enormous effort for me to perform. But watching Lisa Gerrard, I know that it is possible to achieve the space without doing the competition/performance/"look at me" thing. She is singing as a dedication, as a service to the spiritual, which is what art is, or can be.

A few months ago, I gave myself permission to abandon all attempts to make money doing writing or art. At first I was lost. I still am a bit. I had been driven for thirty years to publish and make money through publication. So much so that I was torn between what the market wanted and what I wanted, always. I could force myself to do things that would sell; the artwork I liked the least was always the most popular; and I hated myself through the whole process. I hated the process of drawing and painting when I knew that it was what other people wanted. I loved giving art away; it was a justification of it all if someone liked the art and I could be rid of it. I could not even see if the art was good or bad because the market does not care that much. Styles come and go and good and bad becomes popular or unpopular.

What a snarl! I realized when I went back to bookkeeping for money and freed myself from the quest for publication that I had little idea of what I wanted to do. I kind of knew, but I had no confidence, no compass. I was faced with the fear of exposing my soul only to find out that no one liked it. So what? I asked. So what. So what.

When one has done art since one was a pre-schooler to appease people and do what they want, that so what? is a powerful phrase. I realized that I had no ability to defend myself and my art from criticism. Rarely do artists have this ability. If they did, we would see better art out there. I had seen, over and over, art that was on the right track get messed up by well-meaning publishers, editors and teachers that feared that it would not be popular enough to justify publication. This happens even more in writing and music. I knew that it was wrong to judge any art by the one criterion of "will it sell?" but knowing that and feeling it are two very different things.

I started looking at art to see what I liked, not what I thought was good. You may wonder at this, but it is one thing to judge art by how many hours you know went into it and how skilled the artist is. I had to see what appealed to me on a deeper level--what art appealed to me as art I would want to do.

I wanted to do art that would cross boundaries. I have never felt that I was separate from reality. I felt that when I touched a tree, I was that tree. Outside, I feel that I am outside. There is no "me" to speak of, but only the action of living. In my mind there is no way to separate out things and say, "that goes over here and is called this, and that goes over there and is called that." When Lisa Gerrard stands under a highway and listens to the cars and starts singing with them, she IS those sounds. You can tell immediately by the way she can harmonize into them. I wanted that feeling in the visual art that I did, the feeling of overlapping.

The music that I find appealing is this same sort of overlapping, music like rounds. I love the Celtic knot art where they see the world as interwoven and overlapping. Things float to the surface of awareness but are quickly buried again and overlapped by something else. But I also wanted to animate this feeling, not to abstract it, but to show it with living images.

This is the result.



This is a photo of a painting (did not photo well) from my world of Anieth. It shows the Raven Dance done at midsummer for the Alder people. The man in the picture is a shapeshifter. I have tried to interweave the ravens, the alder tree, the raven skulls and the alder cones with the dancer. The picture also is very symbolic with my layers of meaning that I like to do in writing. The number thirteen is balanced with the number three, the colors are that of the Alder people, and so on. But mostly I wanted to show that Bleid here is not separate from the ravens or his world.

I'm hoping that I can continue to find the heart. I'm writing a new novel in the Anieth series struggling toward that goal. I can achieve it in poetry, which I will write about, and maybe in painting/drawing, but to achieve heart in fiction is also a challenge after years and years of writing groups and publishers and trying to market writing.

Wish me luck!