You need to know the blues to sing the blues. But the blues are everywhere. They’re that empty and lonely feeling on New Year’s day when you’re the only one out driving around. They’re in those half-moments between phone calls and arguments; what happens before the tumbler gets filled up. They aren’t the tumbler itself. That’s just the end, the end to a derelict sky. The blues are already there, they’re around us all the time, so knowing the blues is just a matter of getting down into the essence of things, into it actually, of tapping into what we already are. Those that can tap into it can sing it. Those that can’t, can’t. There’s no in between. But there are those that don’t realize they already know the blues and spend their lives chasing a phantom of them, all the way down into the pit. To cop the Black Crowes’ line, “Blues is Blood.” A line, used to name a tour—a moving life—that echoes back to Robert Johnson’s “The blues is a low down achin’ heart-disease.” A disease that originates in the heart and spreads outward in blood. It is blood then and blood is life. The blues sustain us, lift us up, are us and can poison us.
The blood migrates outward from the heart, cycles to the vital organs and migrates back. Arcing across the cells, through the vesicular tunnels, it proves a cyclical course. The cycle forms a circle, a circle man projects outward everywhere: look up at the top of the dome on the inside of a mosque or a synagogue and see inevitably the circle represented there. The circle is a representation of the oneness of the universe, the oneness of god. Dig through books on culture, ritual and myth and you will find a picture of the ouroboros, the snake devouring its own tail. What drives our hearts then, what flows through us on a level away from thought and more towards emotive feeling, illuminates our world. We create its essence in symbols to show our cognizance of it, we sing about it in order to confront it. The blues are already there.
Echoes of Rexroth’s words, coming up from The Cellar in 1957 with Ferlinghetti waiting in the wings to go on after him:
All over the world/ The same disembodied hand/ Strikes us down
I tilt the beer towards my lips and think about Rexroth’s lines. It’s my hand that brings the booze to me. It’s my hand that strikes the words across the page. It’s easy to blame the unseen hand, it is everywhere. And it is a bit tougher to blame the disembodied one because it could come from anywhere. Coming, even then, from myself. With so much right here, right around us, it seems to be an act of will to fall, instead of the reception of a blow we did not want.
I open the notebook to the late-August pages, now taped with pictures I took of the big-open Maryland skies, of retreating roads bisecting soy-fields. Telephone poles run down the side of the road, moving out of the foreground and passing infinitely through the focal point in the background. A farmhouse. A single tree in the field. Battleship clouds hang overhead. How small are we walking beneath that sky? Down that infinite road? What would a man sing walking down that road toward the horizon, not knowing what’s next, each moment shifting underfoot? The blues?
And what is this moment now? This moment sitting in a cavern bar drinking, broke and scattered, nearly unable to write, deadlines looming and passed. It may be just another moment in a long series of them, shifting underfoot and aching like a heart-disease.
I flip back to the notes on Old Man Brown. Left an email with Adam. Date: 9/30. Need further information, details. There has been no reply. Since September shows have been cancelled, updates stopped. Emails left unanswered. No new album. Like a cipher of smoke that disappears with the wind, the promise of Old Man Brown seems to have begun the slide into memory. “Return” with each playing takes on a different color, a different tone now. It’s shaded differently than it was when I knew that they were at the end of my own road, just down the street from the gutter Poe died in, at the beginning of the night.
But why do we listen to the blues? Why if they are so close do we draw them closer and let the teeth bite? Is it like what the old man in Poe’s “Descent into the Malestrom” says: ‘You must get over these fancies,’ said the guide, ‘for I have brought you here that you might have the best possible view of the scene of that event I mentioned – and to tell you the whole story with the spot just under your eye.’”
We listen because it is told to us, so that we get the best possible view of it, of the hole, the black vacuum like a collapsed vein. By looking up close, what’s right under our noses, we seek the reminder and a little bit of light. Then choice becomes informed and our steps from that moment on should be ones made knowingly. And yet man keeps making the same mistakes, falling into the same cliches. Is the blues singer warning us that he’s “goin’ down” giving us a frame of reference for our own degradation? A reminder of what lies just beneath the skin. A reminder of what soul is.
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