The Kingdom

I wrote this last month. I wanted to share it here for the release of our debut album, The Kingdom Belongs to a Child. 

Every once in awhile at night when I was a kid trying to get to sleep, I would get a strange sensation. I would feel the inner me—my soul? —roll over toward the wall, whereas the outer me—my tangible body—kept facing my sister sleeping in her twin bed. It felt like a pleasant stretch before joining the two back together. After my dad died last year, I thought about this a lot. It was some personal evidence in the possibility of the afterlife, that my dad’s consciousness still existed somewhere, that who he was in the end had little to do with his physical body. 

Yesterday, I read What It Is by Lynda Barry as part of a class I teach. Reading this book felt like listening to the conversation my inner and outer selves have been having since I was born. A conversation that has been increasing in volume little by little, that sometime during the last decade I began to decipher, and that over the past year I heard at full volume while we made our record. This conversation is a reckoning between all that is tangible and logical with all that is indefinable and ethereal.

Austrian writer Robert Musil wrote in The Man Without Qualities that we have given up what is intangible in exchange for what is tangible. A child does not know a chair is red; he looks at it in wonder of what it could be. Nevertheless, we must tell our child that the chair is red. For the child, the red chair transforms from a possibility into an absolute truth. We hammer out in children that possibility of what the chair could be in the interest of what something is, without question. We do this because we’re worried our kid won’t succeed in school, knowing colors, numbers, and all else, which of course is absolutely necessary (Gabriel). As we label things as absolute truths, however, we lose more and more of what is not tangible. Musil questions what it is we are losing. He thinks we must first believe in something before we can understand it. We’ve lost even the belief in our possibilities, this inner elusiveness, trading it for the absolutes we invariably apply to ourselves. We take these on as firmly as we define the chair as red, the labels that define who we are. It is our attempt to have control, giving answers to things that are unanswerable. Life is not worth living “without a spark of that mysterious fire” and that this “truth is something without end” (Musil).

My 3-year old son loves to play with matchbox cars. He speaks to them and speaks for them. He pretends to feed them and he puts them to bed. He hugs them when they’re hurt and he helps them when he gives them broken tires. These cars are his friends. He spends uninterrupted hours in a world he has created that I cannot see. I’ve been able to make out some details. There are roads across the couch. There are train tracks floating in the air down the hallway. It rains in our house, the wood floor is mud sometimes, and the woodgrain on the kitchen table are parking spaces. Train whistles, car horns, and engines fill his ears in our quiet house. Miraculously, when my son is struggling to do something on his own, such as putting on his shoes, he asks his “angry car” or his “screaming train” for help and then my son can do it. His relationships with his car-friends bring out an inner wisdom that doesn’t necessarily come from anything I’ve done as his parent. It is all coming from inside of him, from this slippery, intangible place of knowing.

Barry points out, and studies on stress physiology have proven, that we perceive reality and the imaginary the same way (Patton). Our bodies cannot tell the difference. It’s why turning off the lights downstairs in my childhood home made me bolt up the stairs in a panic. I imagined there was a monster chasing me, so I truly experienced the sensation of being threatened. Conversely, it is why I could experience a joyous autonomy and fearlessness just by pretending to drive or pretending to be my 3rd grade teacher. Our perception tells us that our inner and outer experiences are equal.

Barry says this place inside all of us is “alive in the way thinking is not, but experiencing is.” It’s where we have “conversations with people long dead, where we can enter a room that we haven’t entered in decades and smell it” (Barry). Novelist Graham Greene called it the “compost” containing the fog of all memory, experience, and what we imagine. Writer Robert Olen Butler said that when we enter it, we are walking in the space from where we dream. It is the “wilderness” in which we create, traverse, and get lost and found (Rilke). Poet and Philosopher John O’Donohue referred to it as a “constellation of ideas and feelings that surface from the depths of the distance within,” and that we must “trust this indirect, oblique side of [our]selves”. Hermann Hesse did just that when he said he “ceased to question stars and books” in exchange for the “teaching[s] his blood whisper[ed] to [him].” This inner aliveness is what Lynda Barry says is “at the center of everything we call ‘the arts,’ and children call ‘play’”. She calls this inner aliveness the kingdom. Her use of this word was particularly moving for me since we named our album The Kingdom Belongs to a Child for reasons, among others, this book so aptly illuminates. We’ve given this formless inner place many names: soul, spirit, wilderness, kingdom, intuition, unconscious, gut feeling, memory, imagination, mysterious fire.... It’s elusiveness makes language dissatisfying in the pursuit of defining or explaining it. The kingdom becomes clear, known, and tangible only when we make something from it, that has “grown out of necessity” to acknowledge and make real this obscure place that is constantly moving and shifting (Rilke). I remember a teacher telling me it’s like moving through a dark cave. Poet Rainer Maria Rilke described it as “books written in a very strange tongue.” When I’m writing, even this very essay, it’s like soaking in an ocean of darkness that I both fear and desire, feeling it pull and push me, take me under and toss me out, never knowing what I will find when I reach below the surface. In the darkness and in time, there is a tether to grasp. Barry calls this “staying just behind the line.”

In Western culture, we do not consider dreams or visions as valid sources. In college, I audited a Native American History class where I studied dreams and visions that were considered not only the rich, spiritual histories of the tribes, but were also the important evidentiary documents. I considered then, what were the visions and dreams of Ben Franklin, for instance? How would they enrich or shift what we know of him and the beginnings of our democracy if we considered them legitimate? In my personal life, my dreams have often warned me of unsafe situations. They’ve also led me to tackle what I was afraid to attempt. They’ve helped me make peace of inner conflicts. They have given me understanding of what my rational, logical mind couldn’t reconcile. As in Black Elk Speaks, “sometimes dreams are wiser than waking.” Nighttime is “womb-time” when “our souls come out to play” (O’Donohue). The most important dreams of my life haven’t slipped away. They have stuck around as pivotal moments of clarity, the historical documents of my own personal sense of spirituality.

As Barry sees it, our kingdoms come to us through images and symbols, the universal language of pictures. It is the kingdom of individual perspective. How we experience something is separate from our logical understanding of what happened in reality. For instance, I could tell you I grew up with brothers. I could try to explain what that was like staying true to the tangible, logical sequence of details and events that everyone who was there would agree upon. But my raw, authentic experience of having brothers is more formless and slippery, and comes to me more like what Native Americans consider a vision, through something completely nonjudgmental and unself-conscious, from some inner knowing that I don’t understand and too often have doubted. Through play, what is formless is given form. If I play in my kingdom, I can share something that is more than thinking, more than even I can fully understand logically, but nonetheless I understand experientially. In my kingdom, my brothers appear as balls made of hands and mouths, and at anytime one of them can hurl across the room and shatter glass. If I am in the way, one of them could kill me. When I catch one of them, we bounce onto the ground and we fly into the sky, reaching as gloriously high as the airplanes, where we look down on our childhood home, scoffing at how miniscule it seems, how powerful we are, but how easily we come down and get stuck on the roof.

My kingdom holds the true experience that is mine and no one else’s. I can go to my kingdom and experience my childhood room again, where thousands of faces hidden in the pink flowers of the wallpaper watch me. Eyes hang down like vines, curling around my sister’s neck. Men in tuxedos sit inside my music boxes with their bows on the strings of their violins waiting to play, anxious to play, demanding to be played. Every toy is the last morsel to eat that my sister and I scramble to cram into our mouths. If I really go into the heart of my kingdom, I feel my siblings and I are mismatched socks in the dryer, tumbling together, colliding softly, twirling in turns, one buoyed up by the other. The door opens and Mom and Dad put us on their feet. We’re happy to be so close to them. We feel the weight of their bodies on us. We rip the threads of ourselves trying to climb up to the crowns of their heads.

On this very subject, John O’Donohue wrote, “No one else has access to the world you carry around within yourself; you are its custodian and entrance. No one else can feel your life the way you feel it. Thus it is impossible to ever compare two people because each stands on such different ground.” When I trust the kingdom of my experience, images emerge that I know won’t match up with anyone else’s experience of the same thing. Perhaps this is one reason why Kurt Vonnegut, after two decades of trying to write about his war experience and the Dresden firebombing, was finally able to articulate it through the fictitious character Billy Pilgrim, who gets unstuck in time and kidnapped by the alien Tralfamadorians, among other bends in reality.

According to renowned child psychologist Garry Landreth, “play is intrinsically complete.” There is no reason to say good job to my son for making a world with his cars. He is not seeking approval. There is no aspiration other than to continue playing. There is no need for me to reach in and shape his kingdom. Major depression and psychopathology in young people has risen five-fold since the beginning of the 20th century. Studies, including a recent one by Jean Twenge at San Diego State University, conclude that this is not due to “changed diagnostic criteria”. Dr. Peter Gray attributes this to the decline of free play in children. He states that “by depriving children of opportunities to play on their own, away from direct adult supervision and control, we are depriving them of opportunities to learn how to take control of their own lives.” Gray believes we do this because we think we are helping our children be prepared to succeed in the world, but what we are doing is teaching them to value goals that are extrinsic instead of intrinsic. “Children,” he says, “learn quickly that their own choices of activities and their own judgments of competence don’t count; what matters are their [parent’s and] teacher’s choices and judgments.” If a person’s “emotional sense of satisfaction comes from progress toward intrinsic goals”, such as through more “spiritual or emotional delving,” then he can have control over his emotional well-being. But if a person’s satisfaction is based on the approval and rewards granted by others, something over which we have very little control, then that person has distressingly limited autonomy over his emotional state. Gray warns that, “we may think we are protecting [our children], but in fact we are diminishing their joy, diminishing their sense of self-control, preventing them from discovering and exploring the endeavors they would most love, and increasing the chance that they will suffer from anxiety, depression, and various other mental disorders.” When we deprive our children the freedom to play, we are limiting their possibilities through our unquestioning adherence to absolutes.

Just by acknowledging that these kingdoms exist, within us, surrounding us, helps me understand how to help the kingdoms in my household flourish, including my own. If I reach my hand into my son’s kingdom, it could be a step toward killing a possibility. If I tell him, “No, this is the way to draw a road,” I could be the force that comes between him and his trust in his kingdom. If I unintentionally shame him and his playing, he might turn against his own kingdom, betray it, and start looking to me to tell him what is the right and good way to play, to be. For Barry, her kingdom began to darken when her teacher explained to her class what was good and bad art. Within my son’s kingdom, I cannot be in control or judge it. Since acknowledging his kingdom, I can fully sense it, swirling around him. This morning I walked into his bedroom and he told me that there were bees and butterflies everywhere. Playing produces images that give shape to the shapeless inner self. It makes a space in the physical world for the inner part of ourselves for which we have no other evidence than what comes out through play. In this way, perhaps playing is the most spiritual of spiritual practices. The bees and butterflies help me understand what’s going on within my son. As he gets older, I’m sure those images will get ever more complex and challenging. If I told him, “No, there aren’t really bees and butterflies in here,” I am putting up for debate his right to an experience, to his feelings, to a perspective, an authentic experience. I would be putting his very existence into question.

In her book The Art of Asking, musician Amanda Palmer points out that we have periods of collecting, connecting, and making. The kingdom contains all we have absorbed, but it is also the place where we connect these pieces in a way no one has ever connected them before, whether the pieces are other art, music, numbers, scientific theories, or bricks, etc. Our skills and intellect give us the tools to bring it into the world. Our kingdoms are the incubators that bring all the elements together. The playing and the object produced through play is what is unique—not ourselves, not even our kingdoms. About art, Immanuel Kant said that to make something considered genius, a person needed the skill to promote “internal harmony or the ‘free play’ of our mental faculties” to elicit the pleasure of beauty (Freeland). When we play, as children or adults, we are uniting the internal and external to form an “object” the same way water, dust, and temperature form a six-armed snowflake. The process is what makes it complete. What is made from it—the art-object—is something else entirely, separate from its maker, that continues on a journey with whoever beholds it.

This uniting of the ethereal and physical in my young son is an emotional walk. He’s devastated when the car garage he’s made out of his pants is destroyed when he has to wear those pants. Yet, his kingdom can mostly thrive at the same time that he is noticing the absolutes of the physical world with little encouragements like, “You can make a car garage out of some other pants when we get home.” Through play, he is learning the necessary absolutes of the world, that glass will break, the road is dangerous, and mosquitoes aren’t fun.... I can teach him all he needs to know to be safe, healthy, and gracious, yet at the same time, I am the guardian of his kingdom, “the guardian of someone’s solitude” (Rilke). If he wants to bang the wall as part of his play, I can honor it by saying, “The wall isn’t for banging, but the drum is.” O’Donohue wrote, “In order to keep our balance, we need to hold the interior and exterior, visible and invisible, known and unknown, temporal and eternal, ancient and new, together,” and when we do this we “befriend the worlds that come to balance in you.” The ethereal and physical find a resolution. One doesn’t have to nullify the other.

Barry writes about when her friends started to disappear. The monkey in the painting suddenly stopped blinking. When will my son’s car-friends disappear? When will he replace the possibility of what his toy car could be in his kingdom with the absolute of what his toy car is in reality, a dead metal and plastic object? Does this have to happen? For Barry, her kingdom at some point was no longer alive as she navigated the absolutes of good and bad art, of real and not real, and she began copying other artists rather than making what came organically through free play.

My kingdom and my friends within it disappeared too. As a kid, I had to pile all of my stuffed animals in a mountain on my bed because I couldn’t bear the thought that one of them might feel neglected if he didn’t get to cuddle with me and the others while I slept. As my kingdom darkened, I held onto one stuffed animal. A grey stuffed mouse named Pookie Pumpkin Puddin’. Even though by then I knew Pookie was that tangible thing of cotton, polyester, and plastic eyes, he still kept my kingdom slightly alive. When I held him at night, he truly did comfort me. He was a mirror to the love in my heart. He gave me compassion when I had no other way to show it to myself during those moments of shame, guilt, and loneliness.

As we form our identities and personalities through adolescence and early adulthood, perhaps it is absolutely necessary to allow our kingdoms to darken in exchange for the “sphinx of cement and aluminum”—a belief in the constructions put upon us—in order to survive, gain perspective, and eventually join the conscious and unconscious harmoniously (Ginsberg). Allen Ginsberg would have never been able to write the poem “Howl,” which to me is an unearthing of his kingdom, if he hadn’t devoted himself for a time to living by the expectations and definitions of others. For me, dancing ballet tethered me to my kingdom no matter how far I ventured away or how deadened it seemed. I moved in the safe confines of someone else’s choreography, but through the subtleties of my interpretation, I played the harp of my heart, the kingdom of my experiences expressed without anyone needing any more of an explanation other than, “She’s passionate.” For me, the stage was a thousand feet in the air, another planet, where no one could reach a hand in to influence me. On the stage, it was up to me again, the playful expression of freedom no matter what the steps were. My heart and spirit felt large and resonated with what I came into the world knowing, that had been shaped into obedience off-stage, and that I somewhat agreed was beneath the expertise of the adults. As soon as I would leave the stage, I lost the glimpse of this inner place as expectations of success, prescribed roles, and advice and opinions flooded me. I didn’t know how to merge my two worlds without wreaking havoc.

As I got older and branched farther and farther away from my kingdom, I embraced others’ opinions of me as absolutes. They were either well-intentioned mountains I had to prove I could scale (talented, sweet, good, pure), or they were the oppressive stone that beat me to the ground (flighty, dumb, weak, selfish). When I couldn’t trust my inner aliveness and intuitive kingdom, everyone’s opinion was more important than my own and acted as a bully taunting me. In adolescence, it’s easy to hand over the reigns as we seek more approval and a sense of belonging from others to make up for the denied power and love within us. It’s as if we make everyone a surrogate for our kingdom. At the same time, internalizing these negative voices confuses the authentic voice. At some point, I didn’t need anyone to tell me I was dumb to believe I was dumb. I sensed it even then that when I betrayed my kingdom, a pit of pain was forged within it that felt, at the time, irreversible.

When I was 16 and at an arts boarding school, I didn’t know how to be alone, and I hated that about myself. I decided to participate in a self-hypnosis class that was being held at the school one night. The flyer only said it would help busy students sleep better. I didn’t think much of it and went without agenda. The room was cinder block with thin office carpet. The lady leading the class had turned off the lights and lit candles. She had a boom box playing twinkly music. She asked us to lie down and only listen to her. She led us through the self-hypnosis, and without realizing how, I apparently hypnotized myself. The sensations in my body completely changed as I found myself soaking in the wet warm sand where the ocean touches the beach. I could feel the sun. I could feel the granules of sand on my skin. When I looked around, the land was just sand and ocean as far as I could see in every direction. The sun was setting over the expanse of sand in the distance. I remember writing down afterward that I felt my body as a glass of warm milk. That was my experience of it. It felt like being home for the first time, like I met myself for the first time and really loved her. After the class, I felt a little sad that I had to leave that feeling and wasn’t sure how to get back to it. I quickly returned to the black and white, absolutist world of being a success or failure, confined to labels, seeking approval, and my own internal damning that I wasn’t sure how to shed.

Thomas Merton wrote “when we are truly ourselves we lose most of the futile self-consciousness that keeps us constantly comparing ourselves with others in order to see how big we are." True motivation and joy cannot come from self-consciousness, seeking approval, or while camouflaging our true feelings. Play defies the purpose of a protective and defensive cover for our insecurities. When we play or make art in this state, we may be clouded with the constructions we want to make for ourselves or the labels others have given us that we are trying to prove right or prove wrong. We want to be seen in a certain way, so what we make has an agenda. We aren’t motivated to create while we are hiding. It becomes a painful struggle because we are trying to prove that we matter, but trying to prove such a thing demonstrates that we have put our self-worth up for debate, thus continuing a destructive cycle. But the act of playing in itself eventually leads us out of this, no matter the original intention. In graduate school, I worked on a novel about a girl in a coal company town in West Virginia in 1917. It took a lot of research and I consciously thought that the girl’s story had nothing to do with my own. Although at first it was joyous, writing it became a torturous pursuit toward proving myself a “good writer” and worthy of the opportunities I was fortunate enough to have. The writing sometimes felt cautious, contrived, and mimicked what I’d seen of others’ writing. The more I worked on it, though, the more I found myself getting lost in that dreamlike zone of play. Every week when I went back to read the pages I’d written, I felt like an older, wiser version of myself was speaking to me, reaching up through the pages to guide me. The novel revealed to me glimpses of this inner place. Even though I had an agenda to be “good,” the act of playing brought me back to my kingdom. Innocence is “the spirit’s unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object,” wrote Annie Dillard. My focus and devotion on writing—of playing with words—lifted the veil on all I had shut away. So whether we’re copying or not, lost within seeking adoration, or proving ourselves, there’s still a connection being made to our ability to play, concentrate, and lose ourselves within our inner playgrounds. 

Barry writes about her mother as the monster of her nightmares, the force that terrorized her kingdom into a frozen state. When I was a kid, a monster appeared to me in a recurring dream. It was a shadowed man on the edge of a stage walking heel-to-toe toward me as I sat alone in the front row. It always came with an anxiety flush and a much needed trip to my mother’s bedside. For Barry, her monster was the Gorgon, a depiction of Medusa from a movie she saw, that came out in her playing and her art. The Gorgon helped her love and understand her monster, her mother. For me, the shadowed man came out in everything I did. He was always there, throughout my novel, in every song, lurking in nightmares. The philosopher Schopenhauer said, “Opposites throw light upon each other.” There have been no greater forces in illuminating the hidden parts of myself more than the monsters and bullies of my life. They have helped me acknowledge that the kingdom was really there when I felt so clearly their breach of its walls. Saying no to them was like killing the bear holding my baby. I needed them to consciously reclaim my right to an experience and, in doing so, I was finally able to acknowledge theirs.

Rilke wrote that sadness brings us closer to ourselves, as long as we don’t carry it around “like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly.” My kingdom was at first full of pain because it contains my authentic experience, rather than the picture I might feel safer or more comfortable sharing. This place doesn’t care what I am comfortable with or not. It is the baby in the crib who hasn’t learned to stop crying. It is the opposite of the socialized personality. At first I sat on the couch with a guitar and wailed, not caring at all how I sounded. It didn’t matter. The kingdom was a big, open wound. Feeling sadness doesn’t make us sadder. Rilke asked, “Why do you want to exclude any disturbance, any pain, any melancholy from your life, since you do not know what these conditions are working upon you?” Sadness is the light upon the map that leads us through the wilderness. Nietzsche wrote in The Birth of Tragedy XVI that art’s “beauty triumphs over the suffering inherent in life” and that “pain is obliterated” by art. Through play, and the subsequent art-objects produced through play, we become our own heroes, no matter the tragedy, no matter the loss endured.

Barry said her map and compass were the books and music that made her feel alive again. For me, this was Gillian Welch, pulling me out of bed and throwing a bucket of cold water on me. Then Joanna Newsom took me to a riverside and fed me a picnic of the trout she caught with her hands. When I was 31, I found Patti Smith in my kitchen with a knife. She said she needed to toughen me up. Then there was Jean Ritchie, singing in an abandoned sanctuary, where I felt her arms reach lovingly toward me to pull me in with her. I walked in their kingdoms where they ignited my own. With mine illuminated, I got to witness my husband’s unfold before me like a vast landscape. In the traversing, we found more kingdoms in the friends who told us to keep going and whose kingdoms we had the honor to witness and encourage. The musicians whose canopies we climbed in awe and adoration, in trust and the safest and most empowering of partnerships, became the guardians of our album. Our lives continue in “widening circles that reach out across the world,” (Rilke).

Recently, I witnessed my son hitting a balloon into the air with his matchbox car. He was playing with a much older child who understood the matchbox car was just a dead object, not something real as my son was experiencing it. My son’s face was lit in ecstasy as he spoke for his car, “I’m going to hit it again and it’s going to go high!” He squealed in that wonderful, innocent delight that so rarely leaps from a grown-up. The older child tried to get my son to play at something else. “Your car doesn’t talk, “ the child said. My son didn’t notice, too engrossed in his kingdom. I looked at him, sensing his vulnerability for the first time, feeling deepening tenderness for the fragility of his web between his inner and outer parts. I know he will need to step away from his kingdom sometimes as he grows up, perhaps purposefully break it in the balancing of the inner and outer, the tangible and spiritual. In my awareness of this part of him, though, I can hopefully help him trust it in time, and thrive within it as well as outside of it, consciously.

As a child, I placed the block on the floor and my essence hung in the possibility of the next block. As an adult, the tools might be more complicated, but the experience is the same. I write a line, and it informs the next. I ride it like a wave of possibility and of I-don’t-know. My hand of absolutes cannot reach in to say if it is good or bad, or even to say what it is yet. When it does, I excuse the thought for a time. Tell it to come back later. When I am at play, I am always the beginner. I can’t really know if I will ever write a song that will matter to someone else. All I can do is make it and keep re-making it until my heart is fully resonating. Barry says we have to get lost. Nietzsche said this is our perpetual transcendence. We have never fully arrived. Now that our album is finished, I know that I can only be proud of it the way I am proud of my son. I cannot hold my album as something that completes me. I am complete when I am at play. My relationship with the album was through making it, and now that it is made, it belongs to everyone else. It belongs to everyone the way Joanna Newsom or Patti Smith’s music belongs to me. It is this hovering in possibility, this perpetual transcendence that we have when we are children playing, and that we reclaim as adults, consciously. That’s where I want to be. So here I find myself again, lost...within the thrill of being lost, inside my kingdom that has transformed since the last time I was there, completely uncertain, a baby again taking the first block. What will I find there this time? I literally have no earthly idea.

References:

What It Is by Lynda Barry

The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil

Hans Gabriel, Lecture, September 2015

Anatomy and Physiology, 7th Edition by Kevin Patton and Gary Thibodeau

From Where We Dream by Robert Olen Butler

Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom by John O’Donohue

Damien by Herman Hesse

Black Elk Speaks by John G. Neihardt

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Play Therapy: The Art of the Relationship by Garry Landreth

“The Decline of Play and the Rise of Psychopathology in Children and Adolescents” by Peter Gray

The Art of Asking by Amanda Palmer

But is it Art by Cynthia Freeland

“Howl” by Allen Ginsberg

No Man is an Island by Thomas Merton

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard

The Birth of Tragedy by Frederick Neitzsche

Amy Winehouse’s Last Song is Named Power

A few days ago I saw the documentary film Amy about Amy Winehouse. Other than hearing her song “Rehab” and seeing her image on magazines, I knew nothing about her until I watched the film. I have now heard all of her music, and feel foolish I allowed the tabloid image of her to deter me from seeking it out before. When the film replays her death, it’s nearly impossible to not feel a part of your heart fall away. Mine did.

The film reveals how closely Amy’s songs mirrored what was going on in her life. On her album Back to Black, there’s heartache I’m sure she hoped she’d live long enough to atone. “Love is a losing game” wants love to win. The sting of the line “I died a hundred times” wants so much to be believed. “I told you I was trouble,” asks for a kind, trustworthy soul to see the misguided attempts for love. She was only 27 and she was going through the lessons of her relationships the way any of us do in our twenties, except hers became drenched in the sickeningly oppressive celebrity culture and the hardest drugs money could buy. Amy was loving, loyal, sensitive, kind, witty, but painfully lonely. Her personality was magnetic. There’s a scene of her in the recording booth singing “Back to Black” and at the end she says timidly, “It gets sad there at the end, doesn’t it?” Smiling, with the corners of her mouth turned down, it’s as if she is asking permission: is it okay to be this sad? She proudly trots out of the recording booth, having finished her work—the work of making a space where it is okay to be that sad, knowing full well that she will be heard.

The film trusts its viewer. The filmmaker Asif Kapadia lays out the pieces of Amy’s life, no piece seeming to weigh more than any other, and he leaves it up to the audience how or which pieces might fit together to bring insight into Amy’s life, death, and legacy.

One of the more noticeable pieces in the film is the pivotal age and transition in Amy’s life at 9 years old, when apparently this dark loneliness entered her like a parasite that could never be satiated. That year, her mother and father divorced. That is also the year when she said she realized she could do anything she wanted. In effect, Amy realized she could eat the entire bag of candy and no one would stop her. Amy told her mother eventually, “You need to say no to me.” But her mother was not able to say no to her. Amy was shown at just 9 years old that she controlled the world, and for a child, that is a very scary thing. In so many of her actions, Amy seemed to be trying to hand back this power to her parents, especially to her father. Her friends comment in the film that Amy turned into a child around her father, and that she worshipped the ground he walked on. There is an image of her a few days before she died, leaning on his shoulder and sucking her thumb. This is the man who said that Amy didn’t need rehab, after she had told him she would go if he thought she needed it. She gave the power of that decision to him, the way a child does, and he responded like a child. It’s so easy to confuse permissiveness with loving your child, but as Amy plummets, you want so much for her to have a firm moment of tough love from her father, the person she seems willing to listen to the most. It’s heartbreaking to hear her father’s voice-over in the film regret that moment when he said she didn’t need rehab, and even more heartbreaking for a completely different reason when he continues, explaining that ultimately Amy was the only person who could have saved herself. It becomes more difficult to feel compassionate for Amy’s father when he brings a camera crew to St. Lucia to have his daughter filmed for his own personal gain at a time when Amy was finally unencumbered by paparazzi, sans what became her masquerade of eyeliner and beehive, and on what appeared to be an uphill trend toward wellness. She said to him that she’d give him money if he needed money (rather than have a camera crew film her) and then begs him to be kind to her on camera after he is callous. In that moment, she was the parent cautiously scolding the child—playing his game only to be utterly exploited by it. Her attempts to show she was the child needing structure, safety, guidance, and limitations blew back in her face, but her attempts to be the adult show her she might only be loveable when convenient or profitable. Also at the age of 9, Amy developed bulimia. When she told her parents about it, separately, they each dismissed it and did nothing. Every opportunity she could, in a kind of Alice in Wonderland freefall, Amy acted out, attempting to prove she was the child needing love and care, literally making herself sick in extreme efforts to either self-soothe or self-destruct, looking for someone to take the reigns, someone to guide her in the blackness of her experience. It started with bulimia, then with marijuana, alcohol, reckless sex, harder drugs, and further with the belief that she was nothing but trouble. Near the end of her life, as she walked on the street, hounded by paparazzi, her bones as visible as a concentration camp survivor, and the people close to her feeding on her like rats, Amy seemed to have faded fully into the blackness she sang about.

However, in the midst of it, she was transforming the R&B music scene, opening her mouth in a fearless, expressive wail of her every vulnerability, hope, and darkest disappointment. As her music brought her stardom, she couldn’t really believe the power of her work, of her authentic self shining out and leading others. Amy used a roll of her eyes or a drug-laden performance to diminish it, or dismiss it completely. In her earlier career, before her fame, she found blissful joy in her music and she said it was the only thing she desired. But as her celebrity and drug-use increased, she mocked her work, calling the jazz she initially loved and emulated in her first album “elitist.” More and more it appears she used drugs as a way to escape her power as an artist, even sitting down on stage and refusing to sing in her last performance. It was a full-blown drug-aided tantrum in an effort to hand back the power placed in her by the world, similar to her attempts she made with her parents, but this time it was between herself and 50,000 adoring fans. Before her immense success was obvious, she herself said that fame would do her in, that she wouldn’t be able to handle it. She tried to find an anchor in her parents. Then she tried with her husband, but he was a man as unanchored as she was. Her need for love and safety with him was dangerously distorted when she said to him, “I’ll do anything you do,” referring to his drug-use, and “I’ll cut myself if you cut yourself,” once again handing over her autonomy to someone else. Her relationships, her drug-use, and her bulimia succeeded in making herself smaller and dependent.

Watching the arc of footage of Amy from the fresh-faced, smiling young girl to the emaciated, bloodstained celebrity is enough to make you scream at the screen, “It’s coming! Get out of the there. The killer is right behind you!” It feels like she is committing suicide right in front of everyone, bit by bit, and then in giant leaps. It’s obvious how much her community is aiding and abetting her demise. She becomes unrecognizable not just in consequence of her drug use, but also on purpose in what seems like an intentional effort to create a mask. It seems to start out in play, in fun, the way a child puts on a mask, a dress-up party...let’s pretend. Her beehive and batwing eyeliner free her and give her confidence. As her addictions take a deeper hold, her mask becomes more for protection. Then later, the mask and the authentic self merge. They get slammed together in the confusing, chaotic Pollock painting of paparazzi, tours, money, drugs, and charts. Her beehive gets larger and larger, absurdly big, disturbingly tangled. Her eyeliner gets sloppier, and then completely smears down her face at times. Perhaps it is all because she needed to hide more and more, an effort to feel safe, an effort to disguise the trouble within her. I’m not sure. But it’s hard to ignore the caricature she became. Someone who was pretending to be Amy Winehouse. .

Thankfully, the film shows us that Amy was a hero as much or more than a victim. Amy was an adult and made her choices that lead to her death, no matter the dysfunctional roles she found herself playing. Her father’s remark that she was the only person who could save herself is true. And she was trying—she just didn’t get to finish the work of recovery. Right at the end of her life, she began calling her friends from childhood who truly loved and accepted her, who faded away during her ascent to fame when they said they could not support her behavior and drug use— truly the most loving acts made by anyone presented in the film. Amy was finally looking for the support and love she needed in the people, these friends, who were safe. She had divorced her husband who had been the biggest influence of her harder drug use, and who had taunted her in a video when they went to rehab when she said, “I quite like it here actually.” She was reconnecting with jazz, the roots of her love for music and inspiration. When she sat down on stage in her last performance, perhaps it was actually a redemptive moment. She was making a choice to end what she didn’t believe in anymore, knowing she could rebuild something different, something that reflected the true values she was beginning to realize. When she called her friends about the show and subsequent tour cancellation by her label, she was not worried about it. Rather, Amy was excited because she was going to get to go to her friend’s wedding after all, something the tour was going to prevent. In her refusal to sing, Amy was choosing her close, loving friends over stardom and a moneymaking tour. She was choosing a more ordinary existence rather than the fame and celebrity by which she felt betrayed.  

In the film, Amy’s father and Amy’s husband try to blame Amy’s downfall on her addiction. Just because a person has to find treatment for addiction first, before addressing other issues, doesn’t mean it occurs in a vacuum. We can chock it up to addiction, but what really happened?

The truth is, Amy had power. People think of power as a negative thing. It’s a loaded word because it is often used when we see it being abused. Many times examples of power are people suppressing others. That is a false sense of power. It functions as an optical illusion. It’s like asking everyone standing next to you to sit down and claiming how tall you are. In this world, we call that power, but that is actually powerlessness. Amy had true, authentic power. She invented the world, as every artist does, when she sat down and got to work, making songs. She wrote them, recorded them, and created something that no one can ever take away from her or any of us. Of all the people surrounding her, she had the power. The Dapkings needed her songs to make their music. The recording engineers needed her songs to do their work. The record label needed her songs to sell and make money. The paparazzi needed her image to exploit. Her father needed her to feel worthy. Her husband needed her to feel valid. Everyone needed Amy, and what she may have realized right at the end is that she didn’t need them in the ways they needed her. What I think Amy didn’t know is that she could trust her power. As it is for all of us, power is something we need. Without power, we cannot act. Because of power, we are able to create in all sorts of ways. Power is the bigness of living our authentic selves. It is our claim and choice to live outside what others prefer, and it is what makes us free. Amy made a platform for her authentic self to shine and inspire, and that is something she never needed to diminish. People may have tried to get her to believe that her power was hurtful. But she didn’t need them to do that to believe that power was dangerous. This was her belief. As a child, Amy had to take on power that she was not ready for and it hurt her. It wrought wounds from which she never healed. She couldn’t trust power even when she became an adult and a singer of international acclaim. She was confused between her power—a power that was authentic—and others’ false sense of power. Her father, her husband, and her management team—their power wasn’t really power. It was a powerlessness that fed off of minimizing her power and forming their identities through hers. Amy was not able to say no to these people, nor was she able to say no to the inner beliefs that drove her destructive behavior. With her music, she made a space where her soul was free to play, where she was loved, where she had power. But, in the end, she did not have the time to find trust in it. Nevertheless, her power endures. In time, it will win over the negative interjects of the tabloids and the inner and outer distortions she endured.

Amy, your power, your music, it can never be diminished. It can never be stolen from you, and, thank God, it can never be taken from us. Your power still guides those who hear it—to speak what makes us most vulnerable, to unabashedly be ourselves, to wail the truth of the moment. Thank you, Amy. I’m so sorry, Amy. Rest in peace, Amy. 

Pink Dress

Listen to our new single here: http://lnk.to/PinkDress

I wrote this as a personal sequel to Joyce Carol Oates' story "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been". Violence against one girl has consequences for all girls. 

Holding the Dying Baby of Dylann Roof’s Heart

Inspired by the voices of the victims' families today forgiving Dylann Roof, Ryan and I wrote this today. 

When a person criticizes, blames, or shows contempt for another person, he is destroying trust and safety in the relationship. For some, these wrathful behaviors escalate into violence, domestic abuse, murder, or terrorism. In this relationship, the abused person has to minimize himself and behave in a way to control the behavior of the abuser. This is not compliance or manipulation, but rather it’s self-monitoring to make the environment safer and more predictable in order to survive. In America, Black women, men, and children have always had to monitor themselves to attempt to avoid the repercussions of a collective, abusive white culture. We now know from videos taken by bystanders that Black Americans have not just been abused by law enforcement, they have been murdered, in some cases just for moving in a way that irked an officer. And this week in Charleston, Black people were murdered for merely existing. They were hunted and killed as if their existence threatens the survival of their white counterparts.

Oppressors believe their contempt for the oppressed is a static truth. In Dylann Roof’s case, his contempt gives him a purpose, a reason to feel righteous, and a feeling of significance that he cannot forge through his own merits, but only by degrading or destroying the merits and lives of others. His contempt for Black Americans is what he uses as a distraction or antidote to his own self-hatred. If he can blame these difficult feelings on others, he believes he is safe and invulnerable from all the pain of his wretched reality.

But the contempt he feels is not enough. He believes that the validity of his perceptions—his righteous indignation and contempt—rest upon other people being wrong or invalid in their perceptions that disagree with his. For Dylann Roof, white supremacy cannot exist at the same time as equality for all.  The fact that Black Americans at a church can be free, happy, loving, and kind—something he does not have—is the ultimate threat to his distorted internal world. It weakens the shield masking his self-hatred. He must prove that he is superior and Blacks are inferior. He must make judgments and assumptions about them rather than know them, receive their kindness, and examine his own feelings and behavior.

If he had taken the time to open his heart to one of the 9 souls he murdered, he may have found the deep emotions of feeling hurt, scared, abandoned, and insignificant. He may have made a path of healing rather than a path of death and destruction. But Dylann Roof is a coward. With his racist terrorist attack, he attempted to create what he believes is an ever-lasting, global mask for himself, to avoid the certainty of his cowardice. But we see through it.

The mission of the wounded, masked self is to occupy the space with any number of distractions, be it dramatic conflict with close family or friends, social media, alcohol or drugs, television, porn or sex, video games, or violence. Dylann Roof found the perfect distraction and antidote to his problems. He made himself a part of a dysfunctional group and mindset that offered him identity, significance, and community. Perhaps he feels he is reclaiming familial love by enacting racist terrorism in the name of his ancestors he has aggrandized as victims. People bond over shared experience and familiarity. In a dysfunctional family or group, the shared meaning between group members can be very cynical and strengthen the isolation of the group in that they cannot trust anyone but each other. But the only people doing the oppressing are the group members themselves, keeping one another fearful, aggressive, and presuming powerlessness. They make themselves the heroes of their own falsified persecution when they enact violence on their chosen enemy.

Truth is not static. The concept of “truth” is a perception of the beholder who is mistaking it for a concrete reality. Truth is more of a verb and should be used more like “truthing.” Truthing is the acknowledgement of our ever-changing and moving experience—to pay attention to what we are feeling nonjudgmentally. Truth, on the other hand, is the belief that my truth is dependent on others’ truth agreeing with mine. To enter this kind of conflict is to assume there is a winner of the truth. This is the root of war, extremism, and terrorism. This conflict between “truths” creates a panic because the image of ourselves, the core of our beliefs and identities, is threatened by the other, and so we attack.

The families of the victims of the Charleston shooting voiced forgiveness of Dylann Roof in an emotional bond hearing today. They see the true cowardice, the misery, the vacuous, unloved heart of Dylann Roof, and are not afraid. We must hold their wisdom. We must acknowledge that this is their way of truthing. They are paying attention nonjudgmentally to their grieving, aching hearts and by doing this, they touch the sadness in all of us, even those of us who are cruel, unforgiving, and murderous. They are showing the true compassion of Christ by holding the dying baby of even Dylann Roof’s heart. 

What We Deny Fathers

Before I got pregnant with our son, I had a week or so when I didn’t think I could live another moment without him. I felt there was this little person knocking at my door, and I was on the other side calling to him, “Baby, it’s me. I can’t get to you.” This one month, I just couldn’t take it anymore. I needed my baby or I would die. This was exaggerated perhaps because we had had a miscarriage the year before and I had waited to get pregnant again because I felt too fucking sad to be happy about another baby. I finally was happy for another baby again and wasn’t willing to wait. Each night, I’d lie in bed and my heart would burn for this person I felt was already attached to me. I found myself seducing Ryan in my hormonal drunkenness, saying sexy things like, “The only reason we’re here is to make babies. Now do it!” He said he wasn’t ready. When that ovulation window closed, I curled up in the bed and wailed and wailed the doom of the world.

We were both ticked off with one another, each of us resisting what the other said they wanted. After a few days of talking it over with each other and with our close friend Luke, Ryan said to me, “We will have a baby. Trust that. We will. But I want to want our baby as much as you do.”

And that was an eye-opener. I had assumed he would never come anywhere close to the desire I had for a baby. I had been a sexist punk, staking sole claim of any and all baby-wanting. Here he was, with tears in his eyes, telling me, I want to experience what you’re experiencing. I want the burning heart. I want that knock at the door.

I knew I didn’t want to steal that from Ryan. I hadn’t realized my desire for a baby hadn’t given him the space to realize what the hell he felt about having a baby, or even give him the space to have fun, to enjoy this rite of passage. I also wanted our baby to be given the gift of being desired by both his parents.

I was able to lay off and find patience. I thought about the fact that somehow my baby was already with me, that the burning sensation in my heart truly was the soul of our baby. Each night, I’d be excited to lie in the dark and concentrate on this feeling. A month later, Ryan was the one whose desire for a baby could no longer wait. I surrendered and we got pregnant.

Raising our son has been very much like this early realization. Ryan desires all the rites of passage with our son as much and sometimes more than I do. In the early months, it was very easy for me to want to take control, to tell Ryan to hold the baby this way, not that way...and I would realize I was falling into the belief, whatever cultural belief, that the baby world is a woman’s world, a woman’s place, a woman’s purpose, and not a man’s. There was even a part of me at times that believed I knew more than he did about this (even though I had no clue). In these moments, Ryan would remind me, “This is mine too. I need this.” And I would take off the mommy-crown, collapse in the chair and just be me, the part of me that is not a mother, the part of me that is so thankful I don’t have to know what I’m doing and carry the weight of the world, the part of me that can be an artist, the part of me that can be a daydreamer, and just let my partner relish in his part of parenthood, his part of the despair of not knowing why the baby is crying, and then the joy of soothing him and soaking in that relief of silence and peace. 

We talked about how my urge to micromanage him made him feel as if I believed he was not capable of being a father, of taking care of his very own son. I quickly realized that if I said one thing about actually it’s easier putting the onesie on this way, I was undermining him, disrespecting him, making him want to yield to me and give up. This simple interaction of not trusting a father to put on a onesie the “right” way gives weight to this myth that women know better how to care for children, that mothers are more essential than fathers, that fathers don’t know what the hell they are doing with a baby, and that a woman’s place is in the home with her children. If a new family starts out this way, how is a father ever to catch up with not only his child but with his partner—to be trusted, seen, respected, and loved as a man, as a father, as a capable human being? And how is a mother ever to catch up if she is given this duty as her sole purpose in life, when she has so much more yearning inside of her to say, create, become, change, build...a new world?

I stopped butting in. When he was with the baby, it was his time for trekking the unknowns of baby-land, and it was my time for wow-I-can-just-be-here-and-not-worry-land. Ryan took the reigns of being a father, but he could only take them if I let them go.

Because of Ryan’s desires and his willingness to fight for them, I haven’t had to enter the lineage of women in my ancestry of being the dominant caretaker. It sometimes feels so engrained inside of me to feel guilty or ashamed if I’M not the one with my child all day, or I’m not doing whatever activity with him to develop the such-and-such part of the brain I read in some magazine that mothers (not fathers) should be doing. I am certain that being a mother is not what I am solely here to do no more than being a father is what Ryan is solely here to do.

For years I didn’t think I’d ever want a baby, and then suddenly I did more than I ever expected. The want was voracious and all consuming, so much so that I feared motherhood would erase me completely. Ryan’s desire for a baby was different, but no less important. He was not going to let me or any backward cultural expectation make him miss out on the small, intimate moments of his son’s life. And because of this I haven’t had to miss out on the other things I am here to do, to make music, to write songs, to hopefully make a difference with what I think, what I believe.

If we want an equal world, with equal pay, with equal opportunity to make our mark, with more affordable and accessible childcare, we need to acknowledge fathers’ desire to be with their babies and carve that identity, even among the fathers who seem desireless and those who withdraw. One step forward is honoring that what may look like absence has its origins in cultural shaming of men who express nurturance.   

Aunt Buna Low: a song that didn't make the album

There never was so ugly a girl as Buna Low. / Of six sisters, her face stood alone. / At 14, each danced to the altar to and fro. / Five times a maid poor Buna Low. 

Her sisters gave an army the town / of boys who loved their sweet Buna Low. / One by one the coal mine did crown / the boys new kings of the underground. 

Aunt Buna, grown grey, made pie each day / for the tins her nephews devoured / until the day the methane sparked / and under earth her little boys cowered. 

Buna's sisters wailed at the black mouth / where no man came in or out / and the fire burned for a decade / clearing the town of people and doubts. 

Aunt Buna Low stayed behind / where she sang to her buried sons. / Her skin withered and hung / as the smoke blacked out the sun. 

She cried ten years a tear / so sad God condemned her doom / by churning a storm so cruel / rain made an ocean of the mountain tomb. 

The bodies of her boys surfaced on the water / to each Buna swam and kissed. / They cried, "Sweet Aunt Buna Low, / why did you leave us so alone?" 

by Cashavelly Morrison

Long-Haired Mare: Daughter WRites Down what her mother used to Say

1. Eat. You’re a grey dress of bones.
2. You with that hatchet wound between your legs. I’d sew yours up if I could.
3. Talk about the nice things. Don’t talk about the bad things. Everyone's nice, everyone's happy. Tell them you play tin-can-alley. Well, it ain’t a lie! Tell them about the tree taps for maple syrup. Folks that don’t come from here find that interesting. They think it's a miracle. They don’t know where things come from. They eat eggs, but they never seen a chicken’s ass swell up red. But don’t talk about that. Talk about the great big musky fish we fry up. Or the walleye fish. The gold scales. Talk about that.
4. Remember you ask anyone for anything, you’re asking for shame.
5. He’s so rich, he spends it on silver buttons. 
6. Once you got yourself a fire, most of the day’s battle is over.
7. When I don’t got something is when I want it the most. Even if when I had it, I hated it.
8. You ought to have yourself a good time before you be put to work the rest of your life.
9. Sleep is the only come-easy thing in this whole world.
10. My little doe. Don’t ever leave my lap.