In the Heartland, an Autumn Night

Sometimes it's hard to know what to write about when the time for doing the blog comes around. It's been an adventurous week. I've had home maintenance, a stuffy nose, a change of coffeehouse scenes, walks in the sun, and earlier this evening, a talk with two underemployed twenty-somethings who are just as frustrated with the economy as the rest of us. The perception about all the jobs going to the newly graduated? That's not really true, it seems. It's equal parts enlightening and sad to hear young people sound so disillusioned that early in their careers, though I remember being in a similar position once. Plus ça change.

So I was trying to decide on my topic and have been thinking about the events of the week. But having just had a long political discussion, my energy for current events is spent for now. You can only talk about the same thing for so long without getting bored, and I write the blog to have fun, after all.

What to do, what to do. Rather than write about anything tiresome, I find myself seeking a place of tranquillity. I know exactly where it is. I am thinking now about something that happened years ago, quite unexpectedly, at the end of what had been a very frustrating period, and it's there that I'll come to rest for the evening.

I was in a small midwestern town for a festival of world music. It was one of those events where you move around from place to place, hearing a Celtic band from the north of Spain in a church, a Cuban ensemble in a meadow, French cabaret in a theater, and an Afro-pop sensation in a bar. I was sitting in a small arts center somewhere off the main drag, having just been entertained by a flamenco performance (I can still see the dancer's flaming red dress and remember the drama of the singer's delivery). I took out my contacts between acts and had just put on some lipstick, who knows why, because we were all sitting in semidarkness. Reflex, I suppose.

There followed an Americana songwriter with whom I was not familiar at all. I had read the description of his music in the program, and he sounded interesting. When he took the stage, he did so with authority. During his opening banter, my anticipation was piqued even more. Something in his voice made you take notice.

His first number was a folk tune about love and betrayal, a grim traditional song, arranged by the artist, that I had never heard before. If you had been there, you would have seen my jaw drop and continue dropping until it hit the floor. Literally, I believe, my mouth was hanging open. My previous taste in music, while eclectic, had definitely tended toward the safer end of the pool. I had discovered a liking for the blues after a breakup with my first serious boyfriend years previously, but many blues songs seemed to deflect the harsh realities they revealed with humor. This was something else entirely, something so raw and honest it was almost painful to hear.

Song after song that night spoke of heartache, irretrievable loss, dreams that never came true, dangerous attractions, and loneliness. It sounds bleak, but strangely it wasn't. It was so human. Where you might have feared to wade into such waters with someone less capable, in this case you felt that you could go in there with him and come back out again and somehow be glad you had done it. I'm not going to get fancy with Aristotle on catharsis or anything because I'm not sure that's what it was. But talk about transformative! I could almost hear the people around me holding their breath. I have rarely, if ever, felt the same kind of hush take over a room. An unexpected thought came into my head: I seemed to sense angels hanging about. I now understand that something sacred actually was occurring, and that that was what I and no doubt everyone else was experiencing.

Amid all the seriousness, there were humorous songs (one of which might even have offended me fifteen minutes earlier), more banter, and a sense of direct connection between performer and audience. It was as if we were sitting around in someone's living room. The artist had blue eyes and a very direct gaze; if you happened to find it trained on you it was rather electrifying. I knew from past experience with this festival that the people around me were undoubtedly well-versed in not only the genre but the artist's entire repertoire, but it was all new to me. I couldn't believe I had never heard of him before. I guess the answer to that is that some things only come to you when you're able to hear them.

I read a review of the performance afterwards in which someone noted the rapt attention in the crowd that I had noticed, mentioning that a few silly people actually chose to leave early. I was one of the people who left, though as the performance was so truly remarkable, that may sound surprising. I did, however, have a plan to catch as many acts as possible during the festival, and at a certain juncture, listened to an internal imperative to get up and move. I slipped out and made my way to Main Street, thinking distractedly of the other acts I intended to hear and where I might find dinner. And so it was, fifteen minutes later, that I was standing in the middle of a crowded festival street, munching on something spicy, and realizing that whatever else the festival held in store, for me, at least, it had peaked. I was also wondering just what in the hell had happened in there, a question that has never been answered to my satisfaction.

As a mythologist, I can venture some good explanations, but as I said before, I'm not doing that. I sometimes think back to that night, though, and can feel myself once again in that room. I recall the sensation of thinking, wow, we're getting in pretty deep here, but somehow it only seems right. It was the experience of seeing sadness and pain turned into art that then had the power to change you. It was artistic honesty, not someone trying to sanitize messy things or make them seem better than they are. And yet, at the end of it, you felt more hopeful. I felt more hopeful. It was such a paradox, and so it remains. And I think about it still.