The Venus Flytrap: The Immortal Fallout

When Eric Maschwitz wrote “These Foolish Things” in 1935, he did so after parting with the actress Anna May Wong – she whose ghost it is that clings in the song’s most affecting lyric. In the dozens of times it has been covered by various artists since, and the millions of lingering memories it’s been on the soundtrack to, the phantoms it invokes have surely multiplied. Still, each time I listen to it (my preference is for Nat King Cole’s crisp cadence), I also remember Maschwitz and Wong, though mostly Maschwitz, possessed by a yearning so consuming it had to be written down. Oh how the ghost of you clings.

Love and heartbreak are the Siamese twin muses for much artistic work, inextricably linked, but even at their most shattering, the works are only byproducts to the fact. The immortal fallout, if you will. If the power of their own work could save them, artists might not have, or obey, such self-destructive impulses (ah, but would they create what they do if they didn’t follow those impulses? A question for another time).

Something about the stories behind songs beguiles me. Pop music doesn’t do anything for me because its lyrics are impersonal, written for mass consumption and therefore with the lowest common denominator in mind. I like music steeped in narcissistic soul-searching and that actually completely universal belief that one’s pain is of a magnitude previously unknown to humankind (I also, if it isn’t obvious, like pain). When the rare pop song does attract my attention, I look up its writer. It was little surprise, for instance, to discover that the aching “Beautiful Disaster”, sung by American Idol Kelly Clarkson, was penned by the singer-songwriter Rebekah, who was briefly notable in the mid-90s.

It has to ring true. When Lhasa de Sela belts out he venido al desierto pa’reirme de tu amor – that she’s gone to the desert to laugh at your love – I believe her. It’s important to me that she can be believed. Experience counts. You can fatten up your work to sound like you know what you’re talking about, but experience is the spine.

Reading Leonard Cohen’s 1966 novel, Beautiful Losers, I kept thinking about that most haunting of his songs, “Famous Blue Raincoat”. Like the song’s sleepless letter-writer, its protagonist is tortured by a triangle involving himself, his woman, and a man beloved enough to call brother. The book draped a new layer over my history with the song, and this was both illuminating and unsettling, because it fragmented and realigned some understanding I must have had in my head of what it was about. It changed its pathos, neither for better nor worse. I myself read Cohen because it is his songs that punctuate the landscape of my life; Leonard Cohen is my downfall, or at least, I hold him personally responsible for several of mine.

It’s these downfalls, of course, that inspire my own work. And like the vast majority of artists I fill my life with, the confessional is my instrument. Still, my writing is incidental, not fundamental. Life is more important than its recording. But caught in the act of creating, neither what happens to me nor to the work afterwards are of any consequence. Though sometimes, I’ll grant you this, there are.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express. “The Venus Flytrap” is my column in the Zeitgeist supplement. Previous columns can be found here.

“Legend Of A Cowgirl”

I love this song. Thought of it today. Lyrics here.

Mr. Cohen, I Hope You Live Forever

Please don’t bother reading this if you are irritated by mad self-indulgence. Actually, you shouldn’t be at this blog at all in that case, so goodbye!

When I was 19, someone I was furious at played me Leonard Cohen’s “I’m Your Man”, and said, “This song is for you.” That was how it began, this blessed affair with the man who was born like that, he had no choice, he was the man who was born with the gift of that golden voice.

Years later, all I remember of that first listen is of being in a room lit in yellow, suddenly aware of something profound lighting up within myself. And then I heard the Cohen Live version of “Hallelujah”. The rest — the poems, the other songs — I didn’t need anyone to introduce to me. I was already initiated. I would find them myself.

I was supposed to have a book published by the end of this month. Like Cohen, I think now, it would have been my first book, released when I was 22.

Some of you know that a crisis that I described as one to do with funding affected this intention. Well, it was funding. But it hit deeper, too. To have the carpet pulled from beneath my feet by a person who seemed to have more vision than I did hit my own vision, hard. A multitude of questions emerged, everything from my ambivalence about the project to its fate. Questions difficult to answer, questions I tried to mollify with statements like “I am just more interested in the process than the project, I suppose.”

I spent some weeks wandering in an existential angst I had never, ever known — a lack of passion. I’m still there, still finding my way out as I try to ascertain how I found my way in in the first place. I began to wonder if I even deserve a book (deserve with all the dramatics). I watched Schnabel’s Basquiat and Before Night Falls back to back, films about extraordinary men, their eternal art, and their short lives. The second one devastated me so much I haven’t been able to watch anything else properly since. Would I, like Reinaldo Arenas, go to prison for my writing, go into exile for it, die for it, I asked myself? Before anyone pipes up and invokes any political scandals I’ve found myself in in the past, let me just say my answer was NO. Then I read this. And realised that also NO — I have no pig in my panties. Not anymore. And then, I heard from the editor of an anthology an essay of mine had been accepted to five years ago, but had never seen the light of day. A new publisher had expressed interest. I re-read that piece, and knew immediately that I had to withdraw it from the collection. I could no longer stand by it. Is that how I will feel about Witchcraft, later? I wondered. Already, I can’t look at some of the poems anymore. Already, I know they are in there because other people love them, because I have a career because of them. But I am a million miles away.

I was no longer on speaking terms with the most passionate person I had ever met — myself.

There’s something I didn’t tell you — I am a very lucky girl.

The funding got sorted out. With the exception of one person, everyone who was behind me has stayed behind me. I have more creative freedom than most people have. I can have a book. A book. Something I’ve wanted, worked toward, assumed would always be mine, since I was seven years old. But only If I want it.

So the only reasons there is no book are purely internal circumstances.

As I write this now, I wonder if I should publish this post at all. Or if I will publish it, then delete it. If I should just email confidantes instead. I am so uncertain about a blog post — can you imagine how much trepidation I feel about my book?

But back to Cohen.

Inspired by recent discussions, I went looking up his poems again. This one I had first heard as a recording, in his own voice, that was inexplicably tacked on to a Tori Amos song I was downloading. I share it only because it is beautiful.

I heard of a man
who says words so beautifully
that if he only speaks their name
women give themselves to him.

If I am dumb beside your body
while silence blossoms like tumors on our lips.
it is because I hear a man climb stairs and clear his throat outside the door.

I kept surfing links, looking over lyrics I already knew, reading anecdotes about the songs. Comparing two versions of “Hallelujah” made me realise, amazedly, that the writer behind the greatest English song in the world was never really happy with it.

If Leonard Cohen has second thoughts, I am perfectly, perfectly entitled to mine.

And then I read this. I’m sorry to look at this so materialistically, but if Leonard Cohen had an evil manager cheat him financially, well into the late stages of his universally-acclaimed career, then the fact that it had happened to me isn’t really that big a deal.

Thank you, Leo. You may not be God, but you are surely a member of the pantheon.

All this while I have been waiting for the voodoo, knowing very well by now that the voodoo is always there, it’s just that I’m not letting myself feel it. I’m not saying I own it yet. I’m just saying that, like the fog-basking Namibian beetle (look, I am not stoned, I’m just short on metaphors, and I had to edit something about this amazing creature at work recently), I’m going to start aligning to the wind.