{"id":274659,"date":"2024-09-23T12:00:51","date_gmt":"2024-09-23T11:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=274659"},"modified":"2024-09-22T05:23:57","modified_gmt":"2024-09-22T04:23:57","slug":"the-free-soul-of-a-genius-kris-kristofferson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/09\/the-free-soul-of-a-genius-kris-kristofferson\/","title":{"rendered":"The Free Soul of a Genius: Kris Kristofferson"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cHe who binds to himself a joy<\/em>
\nDoes the winged life destroy;<\/em>
\nBut he who kisses the joy as it flies<\/em>
\nLives in eternity\u2019s sun rise.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2013 William Blake, Eternity<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cBut dreamin\u2019 was as easy as believin\u2019 it was never gonna end<\/em>
\nAnd lovin\u2019 her was easier than anything I\u2019ll ever do again.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2013 Kris Kristofferson, Loving Her Was Easier (Than Anything I\u2019ll Ever Do Again)<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

21 Sep 2024 <\/em>– Kris Kristofferson, a man of deep soul and poetic genius, is eighty-eight years-old, an elderly man who has come a long way down life\u2019s road, now \u201cLooking at a looking glass\/ Running out of time\/ On a face you used to know.\u201d<\/p>\n

His songs keep echoing in my mind, and I am sure in the minds of millions of others.<\/p>\n

Great songwriter-singers, like great poets, are possessed by a passionate melancholic sensibility that gives them joy in the telling.\u00a0 They seem always to be homesick for a home they can\u2019t define or find.\u00a0 At the heart of their songs is a presence of an absence that is unnamable. That is what draws listeners in.<\/p>\n

While great songs usually take but a few minutes to travel from the singer\u2019s mouth to the listener\u2019s ears, they keep echoing for a long time, as if they had taken both singer and listener on a circular journey out and back, and then, in true Odyssean fashion, replay the cyclic song of the shared poetic mystery that is life and death, love and loss, the going up and coming down, the abiding nostalgia for a future home and a past that was a fleeting moment in time.<\/p>\n

Time is the core theme of all great writers.\u00a0 Its mystery, its intimacy, how it holds us as we try to tell it, as if we could, knowing that we can\u2019t as it mocks all our pretensions.<\/p>\n

My 100 year-old \u00a0mother, as she neared death, would often plead with me, \u201cDon\u2019t let me go, Eddy.\u201d\u00a0 I would tell her I was trying, knowing my efforts were a temporary stay and that through our conversations we were building what D. H. Lawrence called her \u201cship of death\u201d:<\/p>\n

Build then the ship of death, for you must take
\nthe longest journey, to oblivion.
\nAnd die the death, the long and painful death
\nthat lies between the old self and the new.
\n***
\nWe are dying, we are dying, so all we can do
\nis now to be willing to die, and to build the ship
\nof death to carry the soul on the longest journey.
\n***
\nAnd the little ship wings home, faltering and lapsing
\non the pink flood,
\nand the frail soul steps out, into her house again
\nfilling the heart with peace.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In those days she also used to ask me: \u201cNow that you have lived more of your life in Massachusetts than in New York City, where do you say you are from and which do you consider your home?\u201d\u00a0 I didn\u2019t know what to say but would wonder where I would like to be buried, as if it mattered.\u00a0 I would be dead.\u00a0 Home.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think so.\u00a0 Not underground, so why does it matter where.<\/p>\n

Home isn\u2019t a place for permanently sleeping.\u00a0 It\u2019s the place from which we launch our ships out into the world.\u00a0 And the place that we discover when all our sailing is done and we enter the harbor of the ultimate unknown.<\/p>\n

Where was the lightning before it flashed?<\/p>\n

Kris Kristofferson is an astonishing songwriter and bard, a man of faith and conscience, and a humorously devilish performer with an on-stage persona of a spiritual satyr.\u00a0 Although he retired from performing a few years ago, he wrote and performed some of the finest songs in the American songbook.\u00a0 A man\u2019s and a woman\u2019s man, he wrote songs of exquisite passion and sensitivity and rough rollicking freedom that only an emotionless zombie would fail to be moved by.\u00a0 And in the last 15 or so \u00a0years, he has fearlessly confronted his mortality, writing many brave tunes that bookend his earliest hits, such as Help Me Make It Through the Night<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

I have loved and listened to his music for a long time and wish to honor him.<\/p>\n

This is my small tribute to a great artist, a poetic genius whose songs manifest the fact that he studied the Romantic poets.<\/p>\n

Counterpose what is perhaps his most well-known song, Me and Bobby McGee<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>first made famous by the rocking swirling twirling wild dervish Janis Joplin, a former lover so I\u2019ve heard, confirming William Blake\u2019s dictum that \u201cExuberance is Beauty\u201d with his lilting poem that is little known but whose gorgeous melody confirms in turn the saying of that other Romantic poet, John Keats, that \u201cBeauty is truth, truth beauty\u201d: Shadows of Her Mind. <\/em><\/a>\u00a0Two meditations in very different song styles on love, loneliness, searching, loss, and the secrets of one\u2019s soul \u2013 a magician at work. Whether partly truth or partly fiction doesn\u2019t matter. Secrets are secrets, sung or spun like memories in the mind, webs of wonder.<\/p>\n

Kristofferson broke barriers when he found success in Nashville\u2019s country and western scene in the early 1970s. \u00a0He made explicit the sexuality and the yearning for love that underlay traditional country music. The endless yearning that never ends.\u00a0 Its secret. \u00a0Not just sex in the back room of a honky-tonk, but the \u201cAchin\u2019 with the feelin\u2019 of the freedom of an eagle when she flies,\u201d as he sings in Loving Her Was Easier<\/em><\/a>.<\/em> \u00a0Something intangible. \u00a0True passion for love and life.<\/p>\n

He was an oddball. \u00a0Here was a man whose inspiration for Me and Bobby McGee<\/em> was a foreign film, La Strada <\/em>(The Road), made by the extraordinary Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini. \u00a0Not the stuff of movie theaters in small Texas towns. \u00a0In the film Anthony Quinn is driving around on a motorcycle with a feeble-minded girl whose playing of a trombone gets on his nerves, so while she is sleeping, he abandons her by the side of the road. \u00a0He later hears a woman singing the melody the girl was always playing and learns the girl has died. \u00a0Kris explains:<\/p>\n

To me, that was the feeling at the end of \u2018Bobby McGee.\u2019 The two-edged sword that freedom is. He was free when he left the girl, but it destroyed him. That\u2019s where the line \u2018Freedom\u2019s just another name for nothing left to lose\u2019 came from.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Not exactly country, yet a traditional storyteller, a Rhodes scholar and a former Army Captain, an Oxford \u201cegghead\u201d in love with romantic poetry, a sensitive athlete, a risk-taker who gave up a teaching position at West Point for a janitor\u2019s job in Nashville to try his hand at songwriting, a patriot with a dissenter\u2019s heart, he is an unusual man, to put it mildly. \u00a0A gambler. \u00a0A man who knows that heaven and hell are born together and that the body and soul cannot be divorced, that all art is incarnational and meant to be about ecstasy and misery, not the middle normal ground where people measure out their lives in coffee spoons. \u00a0He always wanted to tell what he knew, come what may, as he sings in To Beat the Devil<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n

I was born a lonely singer, and I\u2019m bound to die the same,
\nBut I\u2019ve got to feed the hunger in my soul.
\nAnd if I never have a nickel, I won\u2019t ever die ashamed.
\n\u2018Cos I don\u2019t believe that no-one wants to know.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What do people want to know?\u00a0 <\/em>A bit here and there, I guess, but not too much, not the secrets of our souls. Not the truth about their government\u2019s killers, the lies that drive a Billy Dee<\/a> to drugs and death, and the hypocritical fears of cops and people who wish to squelch the truths of the desperate ones for fear that they might reveal secrets best buried with the bodies.\u00a0 Secrets not about the dead but the living \u2013 or more appropriately put, the living dead.\u00a0 Kris has always had that wild man\u2019s frenzy to never let the living dead eat him up, as D. H. Lawrence put it.<\/p>\n

There are only a handful of songwriters with the artistic gift of soul-sympathy to write verses like the following, and Kris did it again and again over fifty years:<\/p>\n

Billy Dee was seventeen when he turned twenty-one
\nFooling with some foolish things he could\u2019ve left alone
\nBut he had to try to satisfy a thirst he couldn\u2019t name
\nDriven toward the darkness by the devils in his veins<\/p>\n

All around the honky-tonks, searching for a sign
\nGettin\u2019 by on gettin\u2019 high on women, words and wine
\nSome folks called him crazy, Lord, and others called him free
\nBut we just called us lucky for the love of Billy Dee<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Like William Blake \u2013 \u201cCan I see another\u2019s woe\/And not be in sorrow too?\/Can I see another\u2019s grief\/And not seek for kind relief?\u201d \u2013 Billy Dee captures in rollicking sound more truth about addiction than a thousand self-important editorials about drugs.<\/p>\n

Kristofferson joins with Dylan Thomas, the Welsh bard, another wild man with an exquisite sense for the music of language and the married themes of youth and age, sex and death, love and loss, home and the search, always the search:<\/p>\n

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
\nDrives my green age; that blasts\u00a0the roots of trees
\nIs my destroyer.
\nAnd I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
\nMy youth is bent by the same wintry fever.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Although most of his songs lack overt political content, such concerns are scattered throughout his massive oeuvre (nearly 400 songs) where his passion for the victims of America\u2019s war machine and his respect for great spiritual heroes like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and John and Robert Kennedy ring out in very powerful songs that are not well known.\u00a0 Note his use of the word they<\/strong> in They Killed Him<\/em><\/a>, surely not a mistake for such a careful songwriter.\u00a0 Sounds like Dylan about the assassination of President Kennedy in Murder Most Foul<\/a>: \u201cThey<\/strong> killed him once and they killed him twice\/Killed him like a human sacrifice.\u201d<\/p>\n

And in The Circle<\/em><\/a>,<\/em> a song about Bill\u00a0 Clinton killing with a missile an Iraqi artist and her husband and the wounding of her children, his condemnation is powerful as he links it to the disappeared of Argentina in a circle of sorrow.\u00a0 Of course, no one is responsible.<\/p>\n

\u201cNot I\u201d said the soldier
\n\u201cI just follow orders and it was my duty to do my job well\u201d
\n\u201cNot I\u201d said the leader who ordered the slaughter
\n\u201cI\u2019m saddened it happened, but then, war is hell\u201d
\n\u201cNot us\u201d said the others who heard of the horror
\nTurned a cold shoulder on all that was done
\nIn all the confusion a single conclusion
\nThe circle of sorrow has only begun<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As everyone knows, songs have a powerful hold on our memories, and sometimes we learn ironic truths about them only years later.<\/p>\n

When I was young, my large family, consisting of my parents and seven sisters and me \u2013 Bronx kids \u2013 would go on vacation for a week in the late summer to a farm called Edgewater.\u00a0 We would pack our clothes in cartons weeks in advance and would load into the car like sardines layered in a can.\u00a0 On the trip north to the Catskill mountains, in our wild excitement, we would sing all sorts of happy songs, many from Broadway shows.\u00a0 As we approached the farm, we would go crazy with excitement and sing over and over the repetitive song we had learned somewhere: We\u2019re Here Because We\u2019re Here Because We\u2019re Here. <\/em>\u00a0To us it was a song of joy; we had arrived at our Shangri-La, our ideal home, paradise regained.\u00a0 To this day, the name Edgewater is like Proust\u2019s madeleine dipped in tea for many of us.<\/p>\n

What we didn\u2019t know was that the song we were singing was the sardonic song that WWI soldiers sang as they awaited absurd and senseless death in the mud and rat-filled trenches of the war to end all wars.\u00a0 Sardonic words to them and joy to us. They were there because they were there and it was meaningless.\u00a0 We sang it out of joy.\u00a0 So Blakean:<\/p>\n

Man was made for joy and woe
\nThen when this we rightly know
\nThrough the world we safely go.
\nJoy and woe are woven fine
\nA clothing for the soul to bind.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To listen to Kris Kristofferson\u2019s vast oeuvre is a confirmation of that Blakean truth.\u00a0 It is to realize that all those songs he has written and sung have been his way of fulfilling the words of another Romantic poet who was Blake\u2019s contemporary, John Keats.\u00a0 Keats called life \u201ca vale of soul-making,\u201d meaning that people are not souls until they make themselves by developing an individual identity by doing what they were meant to do, by listening to the voice within, not the cacophony without.\u00a0 Kris did exactly that to the consternation of his family.\u00a0 He answered the hero\u2019s spiritual call that asked him to follow his true self.\u00a0 The call that Joseph Campbell, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces<\/em>, says, when refused, results in sterility:<\/p>\n

Often in actual life, and not infrequently in the myths and popular tales, we encounter the dull case of the call unanswered; for it is always possible to turn the ear to other interests. Refusal of the summons converts the adventure into its negative. Walled in boredom, hard work, or \u201cculture,\u201d the subject loses the power of significant affirmative action and becomes a victim to be saved. His flowering life becomes a wasteland of dry stones and his life feels meaningless. . . . Whatever house he builds, it will be a house of death: a labyrinth of cyclopean walls to hide him from his Minotaur. All he can do is create new problems for himself and await the gradual approach of his disintegration.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

By answering the call, Kris blossomed into his sacred calling with all its unremitting deaths and births, unlike his character, Saul Darby, whose life\u2019s obsessive labor was to build Darby\u2019s Castle<\/a> as a monument to his ego, even as he failed to hear his young wife weeping in the next room.\u00a0 Yet befitting the artist that he is who can grasp two tragic truths at once, perhaps Kris was singing of himself as well.<\/p>\n

In Ken Burns\u2019 fascinating documentary series, Country Music<\/em><\/a>, Kris answers the question of why he took such a radical turn early on and gave up his military road to success for a lowly job as a janitor in Nashville where he hoped to write songs.\u00a0 He said:<\/p>\n

I love William Blake\u2026. William Blake said, \u2018If he who is organized by the divine for spiritual communion, refuse and bury his talent in the earth, even though he should want natural bread, shame and confusion of face will pursue him throughout life to eternity.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When he answered this call of the spirit and took such a dramatic turn away from the conventional road to success, his mother wrote him a letter essentially disowning him (\u201cdis-owning<\/strong>\u201d \u2013 an interesting word!).\u00a0 When Johnny Cash read it, he sardonically said, \u201cIsn\u2019t it nice to get a letter from home?\u201d<\/p>\n

Not devoid of humor, Kristofferson wrote Jessie Younger<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>a catchy tune that no doubt concealed his pain while sharing it, an example of his extraordinary ability to use words in paradoxical ways:<\/p>\n

Jesse Younger\u2019s parents wonder where it all went wrong
\nthat Jesse\u2019s name has turned to ashes on their tongues
\nBut he chose to starve and try to carve a future of his own
\nAnd he got his druthers because now his younger brother
\nIs his father\u2019s and his mother\u2019s only son<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A close examination of so many of his lyrics leaves me aghast at his talent.<\/p>\n

There are just a handful of songwriter\/performers who can match the art of Kris Kristofferson. \u00a0Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Paul Simon particularly come to mind, for their work also contains that deep spiritual questing for \u201chome,\u201d the enigmatic word we use to try to capture life\u2019s deepest yearnings.<\/p>\n

Kris has an attribute that is very beautiful and emanates from a very deep place. Heart. \u00a0Spirit. \u00a0Soul.\u00a0 His songs are permeated with the quality Keats called \u201csoul-making.\u201d\u00a0 Life as a vale of soul-making.\u00a0 One can hear it throughout Sunday Mornin\u2019 Comin\u2019 Down<\/a>, that plaintiff cry from the bottom of a despairing bottle that gripped the great Johnny Cash as well.\u00a0 Like Dylan so often, the tintinnabulation of the bells conjures someone calling a lost soul to return home.\u00a0 \u201cThen I headed back for home\/And somewhere far away a lonely bell was ringin\u2019\/And it echoed through the canyons\/Like the disappearing dreams of yesterday\u201d<\/p>\n

Whatever word we give it, this quality shines through in a beautifully poignant way, especially in a concert he gave<\/a> in the Plaza de la Trinidad, an intimate venue, when he was seventy-four years old.\u00a0 Age has etched its marks on his rueful countenance but has added pathos to his performance.\u00a0 His song selection, while including many of his famous hits, also contains lesser-known songs that add an even greater humanness to his deeply moving performance. \u00a0I am reminded of something the English writer John Berger said of Rembrandt: \u201cThe late Rembrandt self-portraits contain or embody a paradox: they are clearly about old age, yet they address the future. They assume something coming towards them apart from Death.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kris Kristofferson may have been \u201cout of sight and out of mind\u201d in recent years, so I would like to bring him back to your attention and salute him as we remember him.<\/p>\n

Thank you, Kris.\u00a0 You are an inspiration.\u00a0 Blessings as you fall into grace, as you reminded us with Wh<\/em>y Me Lord.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

And here is his encore, \u201cThe Last Thing to Go:\u201d<\/p>\n