YEARNING FOR REPRESENTATIONS
LETTER
FROM THE EDITOR : JIM WHITE : DECEMBER 2006
I'm ashamed to admit that there was a time when I used to listen to Dan Fogelberg
songs and cry. The year was 1979 and my compass was broken; I was a 22 year
old fundamentalist Christian lost in a mysterious cloud of mental entanglements,
a swirling miasma of love and hope and rage that had metastasised into a potent
and utterly misdirected life force.
I saw no conflict whatsoever in the fact that I was daily fervently praying
for the world to end by way of the second coming of Christ, while simultaneously
dreaming of becoming a Zen master of the realm of weepy male romantic love so
keenly represented in Dan Fogelberg's songs. I guess I wanted to be somewhere
else…somewhere important; if not heaven then some devastated emotional
landscape where, showing great presence of mind (as Dan Fogelberg did) I would
take eagle eyed notes of the endemic shapes and forms of that lovely sad terrain,
then turn those notes into heartbreaking musical poetry and relay these creations
from the romantic front lines back to the world of lesser men by way of recordings
that would appear on convenient, consumer friendly cassette tapes.
For a couple of years prior to this I had been utterly devoted to preparing
for the much-anticipated upcoming apocalypse and so seldom entertained my suppressed
romantic inclinations. In church each week I watched with awe and wonder as
my Pastor anxiously paced the length and breadth of the pulpit, working up a
godly froth, vehemently promising the small congregation that the rapture was
nigh upon us. "Hold on tight!" He would instruct us, "'Cause
God's elevator's fixing to go UP!" We held our breath and waited.
After the first year of God's elevator not going up, we began to question our
faith. We were stuck on the ground floor and desired to reside in God's penthouse!
What was wrong? Our prayers were flaccid, the preacher reported. We simply needed
to work our knees harder. We redoubled our prayers, held shut-ins in our church,
pleading ad nauseum with sweet Jesus to return to this sorry earth and in the
blink of an eye spirit us off to heaven. We prostrated ourselves before God
in heaven, and waited, and waited and waited, but weeks stretched to months
and months to years, eyes blinked and blinked and blinked, but our earthly departure
never materialized, our savior remained MIA.
The end of the world never comes. The end of the world never comes. The end
of the world never comes. Forget heaven. Learn how to live on earth. This is
the first lesson they should teach children in school.
I grew weary of waiting for Jesus. My attentions gradually defected from the
notion of a universal apocalypse to one of a more intimate, personal disposition.
I began to find myself increasingly drawn toward a worrisome realm inhabited
by damaged, self-destructive women. I took a job as a lifeguard at a beach that
was popular with strippers. I fooled myself into believing that my purpose there
was Godly--- I was only interested in leading them to Christ, I told concerned
Christian friends. That was the PR campaign my brain was running to cover up
the egregious straying of my heart. Beneath my composed, spirit filled surface,
a deeper part of me pined and hankered to be utterly undone by some doomed love---a
love sufficient to transport me to a magical land where the choking chaff of
the tepid thing I had become would burn away, revealing that shining kernel
of truth buried within.
But in the conflagration, would Jesus burn away too? If so what would be left?
This question had recently been wafting like a small white cloud up there in
the blue sky of my mind around the time I first began to hear of this singer/poet,
this Dan Fogelberg. I bought his cassette at Camelot Records and instantly became
fixated on one song called Stars. I listened to it over and over and over, weeping
gently, making mental notes of the subtle emotional nuances this tender man
so gently nudged into the light of day. I promised myself that one day I too
would chronicle love in such a manner. I just needed the right woman…or
was it the wrong woman…to help me along my way…
It never worked out with the strippers. Nothing fatalistic ever happened. They'd
come sidling up in their risqué bikinis and ask me to rub suntan oil
on them and I would…but that's all I'd do. Once, after I'd carefully applied
a clean, even coat of Panama Jack to the stubbly legs of a big flirt named Kitten,
she sighed and muttered, "Honey, you could fall In a bucket of tits and
come up sucking your thumb.”
I was undaunted. I began to search the horizon, patiently waiting…and every
few years I would encounter one. The first was a fundamentalist Christian beauty
secretly hooked on PCP. The next was the raven-haired, mentally ill secretary
to the governor of Louisiana. To add volatility to the mix, these were no hags.
No, they were nothing short of great beauties (In fact some years later one
of them was actually named to People Magazines list of 50 most beautiful people
in the world! I shit you not!). I fell madly in love with each and every one
and agonized over the purity within them that Satan had co-opted for his own
dark purposes and devoted myself to the liberation of their very souls.
As I said, my compass was broken. I was doomed. You can imagine the life I lead.
No need to go into the sordid details. Let's just say that things got worse…and
worse…and worse. Decades passed and the Dan Fogelberg-esque magically haunted
romantic forest I imagined finding myself building lovelorn tree houses in degenerated
into something that more resembled a stinking gas station toilet overflowing
with the soiled toilet paper of poorly defined feelings. The world never ends
when you need it to. Or does it?
It's now 40 years later and, ah, I am free. Having run of the gauntlet of myself,
done with hacking my way through infinite permutations of hubris and self-serving
naiveté, I have come out the other side a different person. I no longer
listen to Dan Fogleberg's songs and cry, or even sigh for that matter. In fact,
although I now write songs for a living, unlike 99.99% of my colleagues, including
Dan Fogelberg, I write no romantic love songs.
Have I been cured of my affliction? No. I still yearn for representations from
the beyond of magical transportative love. Just not normal representations---no
Dan Fogelberg permutations, please. No magical forests of mopey love. The poetry
of the heart as represented in popular song these days leaves me feeling skittish
and out of sorts, not unlike how I felt all those years in church, impatiently
awaiting the rapture of the church. No, something went wrong in my brain.
The missives of love that now touch my heart must inspire in accidental, round
about ways. For example some years back I found a love note lying on a sidewalk
in New York City. It was from a woman who was begging her husband to come home.
They'd had a fight, apparently about there not being any cold milk for him to
have with his dinner. She told him she was so sorry and promised to always have
cold milk ready for his supper and to give him a hot kiss every night when he
came in the door from work. I wish I could convey the poetry of her exact words
to you, but sadly, I gave that letter to one of those shadow women that I used
to love. She read it and looked at me as if I'd lost my mind.
Here are the love letters
I found inspiring.
Listen to a sample
from Jim White's song The
Wrong Kind of Love.