is now to be willing to die, and to build the ship
of death to carry the soul on the longest journey.
***
And the little ship wings home, faltering and lapsing
on the pink flood,
and the frail soul steps out, into her house again
filling the heart with peace.
In those days she also used to ask me: "Now 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?" I didn't know what to say but would wonder where I would like to be buried, as if it mattered. I would be dead. Home. I don't think so. Not underground, so why does it matter where. Home isn't a place for permanently sleeping. It's the place from which we launch our ships out into the world. The place that we discover when all our sailings are done.
Where was the lightning before it flashed?
Kris Kristofferson, who is now an old man in his mid-80s, is an astonishing songwriter, a man of faith and conscience, and a humorously devilish performer with an on-stage persona of a spiritual satyr. He has written and performed some of the finest songs in the American songbook. A man's and a woman's man, he has written songs of exquisite passion and sensitivity and rough rollicking freedom that only an emotionless zombie would fail to be moved by. And in the last 10 or so years he has fearlessly confronted his mortality, writing many brave songs that bookend his earliest hits, such as Help Me Make It Through the Night.
I have loved and listened to his music for a long time and have wished to honor him for years.
This is my small tribute to a great artist.
Counterpose what is perhaps his most well-known song, Me and Bobby McGee, first made famous by the rocking swirling twirling wild dervish Janis Joplin, a former lover so I've heard, with his lilting poem that is little known: Shadows of Her Mind. Two meditations in very different song styles on love, loneliness, searching, loss, and the secrets of one's soul - a magician at work. Whether partly truth or partly fiction doesn't matter. Secrets are secrets.
Kristofferson broke barriers when he found success in Nashville's country and western scene in the early 1970s. He made explicit the sexuality and the yearning for love that underlay traditional country music. The endless yearning that never ends. Its secret. Not just sex in the back room of a honky-tonk, but the "Achin' with the feelin' of the freedom of an eagle when she flies," as he sings in Loving Her Was Easier. Something intangible. True passion for love and life.
He was an oddball. Here was a man whose inspiration for Me and Bobby McGee was a foreign film, La Strada (The Road), made by the extraordinary Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini. Not the stuff of movie theaters in small Texas towns. In 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. He later hears a woman singing the melody the girl was always playing and learns the girl has died. Kris explains:
To me, that was the feeling at the end of 'Bobby McGee.' The two-edged sword that freedom is. He was free when he left the girl, but it destroyed him. That's where the line 'Freedom's just another name for nothing left to lose' came from.
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