The other day my seven-year-old daughter declared that Lyle Lovett was her third-favorite musician. At the time we were listening to “This Old Porch,” and I had been talking to Sammie about the details of the song, the metaphor of the porch (though I certainly didn’t use that term), and also how that song had been my introduction to Lovett’s music what seemed like lifetimes ago.
There was much more I could have told her, feeling myself drift back perhaps fifteen years to New Mexico’s lonely landscape, where I first heard it, to a one-room shack so arid and dusty I quickly gave up all attempts at trying to clean it. I could have told her how desperate I was at that time, yet didn’t even know it. That I was barely able to make it through panic-riddled nights under that endless sky, that my Kerouac-inspired solitude had taken me to an edge more terrifying than any I’d ever imagined. I could have told her about the attractive woman who gave me that Lyle Lovett album, and of our infrequent yet ongoing “fling” that was hastily scheduled around her live-in fiancé’s business trips, about how that fling was supposed to be all about having fun, but wasn’t. I could have told her about my fantasy of becoming an angst-oozing world-class poet, drifting from one starry-eyed student beauty to the next.
I could have told her that what I felt most then was lost and alone, shame-ridden and numb. In retrospect, I can see how that numbness protected me. Because, had I been able to feel any measure of the pain that numbness concealed…well, who knows what might have happened. I remember reading John Berryman’s Dream Songs and fixating on what seemed to me to be a genuine acknowledgement of his—“I confess I have no inner resources.” At the time I glommed right onto that statement, the bold-faced integrity of it all. I heard it as a welcome confirmation, an indictment of all things ethereal and Godlike, a tip of the hat to Freud’s Future of an Illusion and my own well constructed garrison of atheist ideology. It gave credence to my loneliness, though it certainly didn’t make it any less miserable.
Berryman ended his resource-less misery by jumping from an interstate bridge in Minneapolis at the age of forty-something. I had no idea I was even suicidal.
I can see now how those were the worst times of my life. Certainly there have been difficult stretches since—most notably, two winters ago during my self-imposed exile in central Maine (five hours away from my darling daughter)—but I had the benefit then of this amazing work, Archetypal Dreamwork, to guide me, to anchor me. The Bob Murray of those insufferable New Mexico nights years before had nothing to cling to, absolutely nothing.
In Lovett’s song he says, “This old porch is just a long time of waiting and forgetting.” No wonder I liked the song so much. That was my life—idling on some faded grey porch, watching others from a safe distance in the act of living their lives, waiting impatiently for my life to start, forgetting or, even worse, barely taking in the years that were quietly disappearing right in front of my eyes.
So it was a meager and solitary existence, at best. I loved no one, certainly not myself. I loved no thing—couldn’t feel the beauty in anything. Of course, some things I did like better than others. Music I liked, and from a very young age. As a pre-teen I could barely wait for the next Beatles or Dylan tune to come wafting out of my scuffed red mini transistor radio, static and all. I marveled at those with the ability to both write and perform music in public, to expose themselves in that way.
That was way beyond my own capabilities, or so my armchair judge had decreed. My younger brother, John, was the creative child in our family—learned to play trumpet at an early age, no real formal training but could play almost anything by ear. I, on the other hand, had cast myself on the role of plodder, linear thinker, couldn’t draw a stick man if my life depended on it. An early dream I had spoke to this:
Hank Williams arrives at the place where my brother and I are living. He sits down in the living room as my brother takes out a left-handed guitar and starts to play. I’m shocked and amazed—didn’t even know that he could play guitar. The music is beautiful. I wish I could play like that.
The notion of me playing like that would have been absurd, laughable. And in my mind’s eye, that laughter would be coming from an audience while I stood frozen on stage, the voice in my head cackling—“What are you doing? Who are you kidding? You don’t have a creative bone in your body. Get out of here before you completely humiliate yourself…”
The oldest of three children, I was my mother’s favorite. So that voice in my head wasn’t hers. In contrast, she told me frequently how great I was, but I didn’t believe it—discounted entirely as “a mother’s love.” My father, on the other hand, was just the other parent, and I never held much stock in anything he said or did. So there it is in a nutshell—I didn’t trust my mother’s love and dismissed my father’s as irrelevant. The story of the first fifty or so years of my life is no more complicated than that—a kind of interminable flailing about, searching for something, love I suppose, yet entirely without the capacity to recognize or feel it. Truth is, I didn’t believe in its existence (though I never articulated it that way to myself)—human-to-human or otherwise. God was just this church-contrived notion that gullible people bought into as a means of “feeling good about themselves.”
Unable to fake the feel-good thing, I willfully chose misery—much more integrity in that, or so I rationalized. It was for all the wrong reasons, of course, in the same way that I romanticized down-and-out blues. But looking back on it now, I’m actually grateful for that choice. Yes, it was horrible stagnating in a numbed-out misery for decades, but if misery has a direction, it’s down rather than up. And if misery has a progression, it’s toward desperation. And if in desperation there are pleas for help (my personal experience), then there is a way out.
That progression, however, would not have been possible without my committed immersion in the Dreamwork. Without it, I would never have found my way out of the Southwestern desert of my mind and into the waterfall of my heart. It’s not a journey that can be navigated alone. My dreams have been my guide, God’s navigational messages.
Following these messages has led to innumerable gifts—perhaps the greatest of all, the gift of feeling, my own capacity to feel. Fifteen years ago in New Mexico, I knew I was miserable but couldn’t feel it. But after awhile in this work, dreams such as this began to surface:
I’m in a downstairs Harlem tavern. There’s a piano in the corner, people taking turns playing and singing a couple of songs each. It’s my turn now, so, albeit reluctantly and tentatively, I start to play and sing. At that point a woman comes down the stairs from outside and says to me—“Stop, you shouldn’t be doing this. This is a scary neighborhood, and people may be offended that you’re singing the blues…” I stop, even though I don’t want to, feeling a deep sadness.
So there I was, turning away from what I love out of fear, guilt, shame—the voice of the dark-mother demon in my ear—“It’s not safe here, too dangerous…” The broken-record story of my life again, but with one exception—the feeling. It was there, not just to be considered, but felt. And as I felt my way into that sadness, it seemed to get larger and larger. Regrets, yes, specifics, yes, but also what seemed to be a kind of unquantifiable sadness—a deep loss, a grieving. A yearning, even, for love, of course. The love I lost as a child—my innocence, my grace, my connection to the Creator that we all feel as children, that we all lose at some point and might never regain.
I turned fifty-seven years old last week and I’m pleased to announce that, though Lyle Lovett may be my daughter’s third-favorite musician, I am her first. After roughly twenty years of abstinence, I’m playing music again—writing songs, performing. We’ve recorded two albums in as many years and I’m working on songs for a third. That third album will include the following lyrics, a song that considers my Southwestern desert landscape in light of where I am today, who I am today.
THE RUSTLER, THE RATTLERS, AND YOU
1987, or was it eight or nine
Holed up south of Santa Fe with nothing but the time
To let the rustler in my head loose
And he loved to spread the blues
He said, Loneliness can kill a man and…
Ain’t no one way out here but you
Well thanks for that wisdom, but I was better off alone
Yet though I couldn’t stand that voice
I’d rather a heard his moan than all that howling of the coyotes
Like they were spoiling for a fight
Like they were calling out the rattlers of my mind
To slither out and stalk the night
Snakes outside that tin shack, snakes inside my head
I’d dream and wake in cold sweats, shivering, half dead
I’d come home late at night, another rattler at my door
Yet seemed for every snake I tried to kill
It spawned the birth of seven more
I was stuck there in the desert
All of forty miles from town
I was so far gone, so lost, and all alone
But for the voice inside my head to hold me down
I did my penance in the desert
My forty days and nights
I was so far gone, so lost, and all alone
But now I wake up in the darkness to this light
Cause 2007, and into eight and nine
Way up north New England
And man I got the time
To feel the difference in my life now
And I still love the sing the blues
But these blues are not the rambling of that rustler
This is me when I’m with you
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So yes, it’s true—I do still love to sing the blues. A different kind of blues, though. Because there is nothing down-and-out about my life these days. I’ve done my penance in the desert, and I’m feeling the difference in my life—today and every day. It’s that palpable, that real. So, unlike John Berryman, I readily confess to having and feeling “inner resources.” Dreamwork has been the path that led me to this place inside myself, and from this place I get to live, truly live. I get to feel pain, and sadness, regret, the loss of all my years of unlived life. But I also get to feel joy, and genuine love—love for my daughter, for my friends, for myself. And loving myself, well, that’s about as big as it gets. Because then I get to be me, the real me, the one who loves to play music, the one who loves to live. So I’m the luckiest man on earth these days—at least that’s how it feels to me. Lyle Lovett, eat your heart out!!!!