As I've said many a time, I discovered Henry David Thoreau when I was a callow 17 year old, in August of 1970. It would not be an overstatement to say that my real life began then, with that discovery, which came through a borrowed volume of "Walden," the book Thoreau eventually penned about his reflective time of solitude spent at the pond.
Apparently PBS is doing a special about my old friend Henry. Here's a small installment of it.
I find this a difficult video to watch. Perhaps it is the utter vulnerability of an artist who has stripped herself bare of artifice. Maybe it's the emphasis on the ephemeral nature of identity itself. I'm not sure I would be willing to pare away this much of who and what I am.
A quote from Molly regarding this song:
"'Sleepwalking' is one of the more personal songs on the album," says Tuttle. "I wrote it by myself, digging into the anxiety I have felt for many years about the effects of climate change and the ever-rising cost of living in the San Francisco Bay Area (where I grew up). I wanted to symbolically incorporate my experience as a woman with total hair loss (Alopecia Totalis) into the video for the song, because that part of who I am also informed the lyrics, in a subtler way. I lost my hair early on in life, and at times that experience has made me fear change and hold onto the past. With the visual, I wanted to raise the question of what it means to 'be yourself' again after a part of who you are disappears. What do we cling to in times of change? Hopefully each person who watches what we made will find a personal meaning in it."The first iteration of this song was very soft, quiet, almost muted. It was difficult for me to make out Molly's lyrics. This is a second live version with a clearer articulation of those lyrics and a different, broader instrumentation.
I still find the song mysterious. I don't think she's talking about a person in the lyrics. Sounds more like she's referring to spirit. Hard to say. Have a listen and decide for yourself.
Last night I awoke some time between 2 and 3 am and couldn't get back to sleep. I was in a state of psychological turmoil, not due to any external circumstance of life, but of an entirely internal and personal nature. I stumbled upon this song online; in fact, I discovered in sequence four consecutive versions of this song. I intend to post them in the order in which I heard them over the next four days.
I can't say the song assuaged my pain. In some way it deepened it, but it did give it voice. It left me feeling somehow more vulnerable. I can still feel that now, here at the end of my busy day. Such are our interior lives.
Here's the first version I heard.
If you woke up in the morning profoundly disturbed, this may help. We need all the help we can get.
An old song by the late Gram Parsons, performed here by Demi Knight and Ryan Joseph. Spent a little time in South Carolina but haven't been there in more than thirty years.
Translated as "the Eternal Date," it was on this day 57 years ago that Meher Baba passed away, after working in silence for 44 years. Baba once said, "Things that are real are given and received in silence."
