Starting a new thing this morning: I’m calling it Audiobiography Song Cycle. Every so often, I’ll pull a song out of my Spotify “Audiobiography” playlist, start there and run with the ideas. Here’s the first installment.
One of my favorite assignments as a prof is one I’ve called “Song Memory.” I have my students think of a song that they can’t hear without it bringing up a strong memory, and write about it –both the memory itself and how the song connects. John Warner, in his book The Writer’s Practice, which I now use as a text for my online writing course, has a version of this assignment that’s more focused on learning to write with sensory detail. At any rate, I’ve played with this idea of a sort of musical ekphrasis for a while, so here goes.
The first time I’d heard of Bruce Cockburn was in our time in California. Sam’s principal was a huge Bruce Cockburn fan and, bringing his guitar out once while we were visiting his family, introduced us to some of his music. I don’t remember it making much of a lasting impact on me at the time. But in my early blogging days, I followed a writer who quoted a Bruce Cockburn song in a post, and that image of “kicking at the darkness until it bleeds daylight” resonated. It’s such a clear image of the struggle we, particularly people who write, go through to reveal meaning in the stories we share.
When I returned to school in my early 40’s, figuring out not just how to use this gift I’d kicked around for years as a means to untangle my days but also figuring out the why of it all, why it was worth putting some of this stuff I’d been untangling, that lyric came back to me, at the end of an essay. I started with Sylvia Plath and ended up with Bruce Cockburn.
Most first drafts of my essays take a wild, strange journey from A to B. It’s one reason why revision, for me, isn’t ever an option. It’s a requirement, if I have any hope of a reader following the rabbit trails that go from my brain to the paper (or screen). I quite often start with a flash of an idea –a song, in this case, this morning– and usually don’t wind up figuring out the “what it’s about” until about page two or three.
With the essay I mentioned, I started with some of my original memories of college, back “when I was supposed to be there,” and wound through some of my experiences in returning to the place I’d abandoned two years in (I’d dropped out after my sophomore year), some of the memories that came back and how I interpreted them differently, having aged 25 years and gained some wisdom. The story of a non-traditional student mom probably isn’t all that unique, but since I’d returned to the same college where I started, I figured it was worth exploring some of the things I’d learned in the process of tying together a quarter-century gap in my educational adventure.
From there, my Page Two Revelation was that this was really about examining the work of writing. Figuring out why this long-practiced, newly-taken-seriously vocation of mine was worth so much time, risk, and finances to pursue in closing that 25-year gap. Why I’d returned in the first place to finish my degree. As a reader, I’d already discovered that one of the best reasons why stories are so important is that they make us feel less alone in the world. Much of why I wanted to write, and to share that writing in the world, was to take that chance to say “Have you ever felt this? Experienced this? Survived this? Here, I’ll go first…” in my writing. That “I’ll go first” was a huge reason I took the leap into putting my writing out into the world in the form of a blog in an obscure corner of the internet back in 2006 when I started. But in this particular essay, I was wandering back into some of the larger reasons I’d left college in the first place, reasons I hadn’t wanted to deal with. Reasons that had to do with failed dreams and failed hopes of relationships that never materialized. And that’s why I started with Plath.
Somewhere in my sophomore year on a grey, sad day, I’d wandered into the college library, over to the poetry section, and pulled Plath off the shelf. I flipped through the pages and found “Mad Girl’s Love Song,” which met me right where I was at the time. Not all of it, to be clear, but particularly that line, “(I think I made you up inside my head).” I’d just abandoned the education half of my major, and wasn’t entirely sure where my life or my education was going. Every decision I made in that week and those that followed seemed so real, so urgent, so life-shattering, …and yet, all of it was in my head. That memory was the thing that sparked the essay, when I realized that the very place where I’d stumbled up on that book as a disillusioned former education major was the exact place where my poetry class met, a quarter-century later. Writing it was an attempt to explore just one of the occasional discoveries I had, stringing together that 25-year gap.
As I kept writing, in the essay I left the college library and traveled into that quarter-century liminal space, empathizing with Plath’s feelings of shock and disorientation at finding herself a mother in “Morning Song.” Looking at “Lady Lazarus,” I leaned her experience of burning her writing against my own recent shredding of my old diaries and journals. For Plath, the burning was an act of destruction, but for me, shredding my old writing was a way of freeing myself to start something new. I found that in the ensuing 25 years after I put Plath back on the shelf, I no longer identified with her as much as I contrasted her experiences against my own.
But the essay wasn’t quite complete. I did then what I typically do, letting it rest for a few days, returning later to hear that line from Cockburn’s song again in my head, and it wound up the whole journey perfectly.
Writing is my act of kicking against the darkness, waiting for the daylight to spread. That was why all this work and risk and time and struggle was worth it. Worth it for the act of putting my words out there as an invitation to no longer be alone, Worth it for the fact that all this stuff in my head needed a place to go, Worth it because I realized what seemed to be almost too late that this was the thing I was meant to do all along –I’d just missed all the signs. And in that wander from Plath to Cockburn, I think I started to see the daylight bleeding through.
