Writing

We spent some time this evening with Ben Folds' Rockin the Suburbs... It's been a long time since we've listened to the album as a whole. (Although, to be fair, we began our album-listening with Still Fighting It rather than Zak and Sara) --
Anyway, this album is (and has long been) on our list of top 5 records; it was so good to be reminded of the myriad reasons why.
Ben Folds is a master of melodies that are incurably catchy but somehow original, interesting, surprising... And in his uniquely Ben-Folds way he communicates these heart-breaking stories and truths, all of them sliding about on music ranging from ridiculous to intensely emotional, and often both at the same time.

So I'm reminded what it is that I love in songwriting, or any writing for that matter, which is the sense that the writer has truly seen something for what it is, for more than what it often lets on to be, or more than we'd like to think it is. Patty Griffin is a master of such a thing, Emily Dickinson certainly, Carl Sandburg, Rilke, Frederick Buechner, Kahlil Gibran, Kathleen Norris, and oh so many others, their words cutting to the heart of something we see only in our best moments.

Not that I would group these writers and authors together, or consider them equal; there's simply no need to; there's no such thing as equal. It's just that what they do coincides for me in this way: this striking element of their writing(s) that speaks so deeply to me every time, that binds these artists together under the heading of "What Tasha Loves."

And so I was particularly struck (yet again) by Ben Folds' Fred Jones Part 2:

There was no party, there were no songs
'Cause today's just a day like the day that he started
No one is left here who knows his first name
And life barrels on like a runaway train
Where the passengers change
but they don't change anything
You get off; someone else can get on
And I'm sorry Mr. Jones; it's time...
He's forgotten but not yet gone...

And then Patty Griffin, whose Impossible Dream we played for a while as we drove into Akron Sunday night:

Something as simple as boys and girls
Gets tossed all around and lost in the world
Something as hard as a prayer on your back
Can wait a long time for an answer...

or

I wished I was smarter
Wished I was stronger
I wished I loved Jesus
The way my wife does
I wished it'd been easier
Instead of any longer
I wished I could've stood
where you would've been proud
That won't happen now; that won't happen now --

And Emily Dickinson:

As old as woe -
How old is that?
Some eighteen thousand years -
As old as Bliss
How old is that
They are of equal years

Together chiefest they are found
But seldom side by side
From neither of them tho' he try
Can Human nature hide

Sandburg (whose Mag I barely get through on some days) --

Mag

I wish to God I never saw you, Mag.
I wish you never quit your job and came along with me.
I wish we never bought a license and a white dress
For you to get married in the day we ran off to a minister
And told him we would love each other and take care of each other
Always and always long as the sun and the rain lasts anywhere.
Yes, I'm wishing now you lived somewhere away from here
And I was a bum on the bumpers a thousand miles away dead
broke.

I wish the kids had never come
And rent and coal and clothes to pay for
And a grocery man calling for cash,
Every day cash for beans and prunes.
I wish to God I never saw you, Mag.
I wish to God the kids had never come.

Kahlil:

People of Orphalese, beauty is life when life unveils her holy face.
But you are life and you are the veil.
Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.
But you are eternity and you are the mirror.

Buechner:

Another time when I was on my knees at night between my cell and Wear, I thought I saw a slender shadow stir. If it was Burcwen, though, she never came. In winter when the snow and ice were fierce, we shook beneath our different roofs alone, and that's what Hell is like, I think. It's cold and shame and shaking. And worst of all, it's loneliness.

-- From Godric

Rilke:

No one lives his life.

Disguised since childhood,
haphazardly assembled
from voices and fears and little pleasures,
we come of age as masks.

Our true face never speaks.

Somewhere there must be storehouses
where all these lives are laid away
like suits of armor or old carriages
or clothes hanging limply on the walls.

Maybe all paths lead there,
to the repository of unlived things.

--From Book of Hours

and finally, Kathleen Norris:

Today, we are baptizing our little nephew. He's seven months old, chubby, thoroughly healthy. Ever since we came here for Christmas, I've listened for him in the morning. Like the birds, he begins to sing at first light, and together, they make the most joyous music - the baby, the birds - cooing and calling, as if life depended on it. We've planned the ceremony for late in the afternoon of Epiphany, at home, after our two ministers - my brother (Disciples of Christ) and his wife (Episcopalian) have returned from their church duties.
The baby's tired and cranky, he has no way of knowing that we are passing through hell. We renounce the forces of evil, and he cries out. As the godmother, I am holding him, and he's fussy, squirming; I have to hold on tight:
Our words wash over you, and you brush them away. The candle catches your eye, your mother's hair and fingers transparent in its light. You want the candle, you want the food your mother has become for you, you want to go down into this night at her breast. Poor little baby, water on your hair, chrism on your forehead, dried milk on your chin. Poor, dear little baby; hold on.

-- From The Cloister Walk