This page is dedicated to the Gypsy Scholar's favorite female singer-songwriter
Eliza Gilkyson
who holds a special place place among the troubadours/bards of the Tower of Song.
Dear Eliza,
I seem to be in the embarrassing position making the mistake of not what your music evokes for me personally, but of mistaking what you are yourself--what tradition of singer-songwriting--invoking; what's coming through you. Since I never got that interview you promised at the Kate Wolf Memorial Music Festival, I'm figuring what the hell, why not take a chance and give it my best shot. I throw myself on your mercy to decide whether what speaks to me in your music actually speaks to your inspiration (or at least a certain facet of your inspiration). If I'm wrong, I'll never bother you again, so please forgive my enthusiasm.
I guess the best place to start is the song you played at my request, 'Paradise Hotel.' Thank you, thank you, thank you!
I very much like what you said--it was kind of "dingy" . . . . I've always pictured a view out the window of a rooftop marque, with the lights going off and on and off and on . . . . the kind of archetypal run-down hotel that's seen better (halcyon) days. Given your temperamental preference for, shall we say, the "darker" side of the repertoire of popular song ("my disenfranchised life"), I think you'll agree that for the story of the song the more run-down the better; the (imaginal/symbolic) Hotel locus in "the dark side of town" (mythically, Persephone's Underworld, where you can hear Orpheus' magic song). It makes the internal paradox of the song work (with it's symbolic resonances). Not the spiritually saccharine, new-age paradise too easy to attain, but rather the hard-won paradise Thus the darker and dingier the hotel the better. Of course, none of this makes sense to those who are not at all familiar to what a psychologist mentor of mine calls "pathologizing and falling apart" of the soul in extremis (depression) for the deeper purposes of "Soul-making." [See section below.] But since you know about "Her Melancholy Muse," you would probably understand this.
Your song, 'Requiem,' is certainly a prayer. But since I also heard say that all your songs were, in one way or another, prayers, I want to fall to my knees more when I hear 'Paradise Hotel.' This is my kind of prayer. It's a more existential and meaningful prayer for my free-spirited sensibilities, even through it doesn't have the literal religious imagery (what was that song about "they took the scripture literally"?). Don't get me wrong, 'Requiem' is a great song, and you do it so beautifully that if I had a even one religious bone in my body I would have already converted to Catholic Mariology! But since I haven't, I still love the way you move from the sacred to the profane (even honky-tonk). However, there is an unrecognized spiritual power in the profane, and so with your songs there isn't a long way between sacred and profane love.
There is, of course, an ancient mythopoetic tradition of song that "profaned" the sacred feelings that were previously and exclusively directed toward deity--in this case Mother Mary--and redirected them to "The Lady," to a flesh-and-blood "Beloved," of the poet-singer. Of course, this secularization of agape and religious devotion became the tradition of eros-amor of the 12th-century troubadours and trobaritzes (female poet-singers) of Occitania (Provence, Languedoc, or south of France). The same secular/profane tradition that Italian troubadour Dante couldn't help picking up on and giving a "new life"--Vita Nuova--to in the 13th century and, hence to the world in his profane love for his ideal beloved (the "symbolic rose") and real woman--yes, both at once! (Scholars argue today whether or not Dante placed Beatrice on a higher pedestal in heaven than the Virgin Mary.) One can almost put these lyrics in the troubadour Beloved's mouth: I'm not some stone commission / Like some statue in a park / I'm flesh and blood and vision . . . ." JM) I don't want to bore you with this history of secular love song, but suffice to say that it's linked to our sixties and post-sixties folk-rock and rock (especially the genre of the confessional singer-songwriter) tradition of popular song, even in terms of its reaction of the religious authorities: this secularization of the objects of religious devotion by the new Andalusian and Occitanian poet-singers drew the wrath of the religious and cultural authorities in the same way that rock'in'roll did in the 50s and 60s, being condemned for perverting the young. (Is It Like Today?)
In any case, I'll stick by my assertion that there's something about your music that belongs to the great mythopoetic tradition of secular song (symbolized by the mythopoetic/hermetic songbird from Andalusia and Occitania)--my assertion of "musical mythopoetics with a twang."
So I would like to tell you about why I requested the song 'Paradise Hotel.' However, I can't do that directly--it's impossible! The only way is to have you look at the (musical) essay I wrote around your masterpiece-song (and other songs). If it's not too much to ask of you, I'd like to send it. (It's he musical essay you see listed on this page. And about the bird images you'll see on this page: I only added the one I found on your website just before your concert here for my listeners to see. So the image fit in perfectly with what I had already intuited some years ago.)
Will you be so kind as to let me send it?
Heartfelt thanks for the awesome concert performance. It was a wonderful birthday gift for me.
Sincerely Yours,
GS Sept. 22, 2010
For series of Essay-with-Soundtrack entitled:
The Dark Night of the Outsider Soul: On the Road with Today's Traveling Troubadours; Mythopoetic Songbirds, Archetypal Lovers,
& the Hotel at the End of the Road
This section is dedicated, with profound gratitude, to Eliza Gilkyson, who is the Tower of Song's most inspiring mythopoetic songbird.
This night's special radio program is the Gypsy Scholar's tribute to the magical singer-songwriter who recently performed in the Monterey Bay Area:
Eliza Gilkyson
The idea and inspiration for this Essay-with-Soundtrack came to me during a recent one-night stay in an historic hotel in Northern California. The next day, I ended up watching a sunset at a deserted, wind-swept beach with a vast horizon. ["Hotel Vast Horizon"] The entire experience provided the creative seed for my next series of essays concerning Andalusia, and I began writing about the journey between two archetypal hotels and their respective visions of hell and heaven. It later occurred to me that it was, in another way (the way of the connection that I had previously made between the multicultures two mythic lands, then and now), about two symbolic hotels in time—the Hotel Andalusia and the Hotel California.
Songs from the dark side . . . . [The song] is like that. We take this guy and make him like a character in The Magus, where every time he walks through a door there’s a new version of reality. . . . This guy is driving across the desert. He’s tired. He’s smokin’. Comes up over a hill, sees some lights, pulls in. First thing he sees is a really strange guy at the front door, welcoming him: “Come on in.” Walks in, and then it becomes Fellini-esque . . . . So, for us, [the song] was about thinking and writing outside the box. We were enamored with hotels. Hotels were a big part of our lives. The Beverly Hills Hotel has become something of a focal point—literary and symbolically. . . . We were just on the quest. --Eagles
I understand the archetypal role that the road plays in our understanding of man’s journey and its ultimate destination. To simply be put back in the Garden of Eden is impossible. The cat is out of the bag. Pandora’s box has been opened and we have seen the shimmering lights of the Hotel California - I mean the Emerald City. Or maybe I do mean the Hotel California. How does the line go? “And I was thinking to myself this could be heaven or this could be hell…” Indeed it could be. Remember that the traveler in that song starts on a road, on a “dark desert highway.” In fact the more Dante I studied the more I found the imagery that he uses in his great poem is still all pervasive in popular culture. –Mary Watt, "Dante & The Yellow Brick Road" (2005)
Hotel California
Conceptual Meme key or series of Essay-with-Soundtrack entitled:
The Dark Night of the Outsider Soul: On the Road with Today's Traveling Troubadours; Mythopoetic Songbirds, Archetypal Lovers, & the Hotel at the End of the Road
The soul sees by means of affliction. Those who are the most dependent upon imagination for their work--poets, painters, fantasts [singer-songwriters]--have not wanted their pathologizing degraded into the "unconscious" and subjected to clinical literalism. . . . The crazy artist, the daft poet and mad professor are neither romantic cliches nor antibourgeois postures. They are metaphors for the intimate relation between pathologizing and imagination. Pathologizing processes [e.g. "depression"] are a source of imaginative work, and the work provides a container for the pathologizing processes. . . . Pathologizing itself is a way of seeing . . . . Andre Gide said that illness opens doors to a reality which remains closed to the healthy point of view.
"Consciousness" means psychic reflection of the psychic world about us and is part of adaptation to that reality. As that reality darkens and divides, consciousness can no longer be described with heroic metaphors of light, decision, intention, and central control. Ego consciousness as we used to know it no longer reflects reality. Ego has become a delusional system. "Heightened" consciousness today no longer tells it from the mountain of Nietzsche's superman, an overview. Now it is the underview, for we are down in the [depressions of] multitudinous entanglements of the marshland, in anima country, the "vale of Soul-making."
Divinity is up at the peaks, not in the swamps of our funk, not in the sludge of depression and anxiety, the depths to which our life regularly returns. This is the alchemical soul-makers knew, as do painters and writers and anyone dependent upon the movements of imagination. . . . Oriental [new-age] transcendence will hardly look to pathology for what might be entering us through it, asking what door is opened into soul through our wounds. Instead it urges: rise above psychological hassles and tangles, be wise--not snared, court bliss--not affliction. . . . By turning away from its [the soul's] pathologizings they turn away from its full richness. By going upward towards spiritual betterment they leave its afflictions, giving them less validity and less reality than spiritual goals. In the name of the higher spirit, the soul is betrayed. . . . The psyche does not exist without pathologizing. . . . We try to follow the soul wherever it leads, trying to learn what the imagination is doing in its madness. . . . Pathologizing is a way of mythologizing--of "Soul-making."
. . . the soul's very being, a source of whose native insight is its native pathology. . . . Our falling apart is an imaginal process, like the collapse of cities [and hotels] and the fall of heroes in mythical tales--like the dismemberment of Dionysian loosening which releases from overtight constraint, like the dissolution and decay in alchemy. The soul moves, via the pathologized fantasy of disintegration, of too-centralized and muscle-bound structures which have become ordinary and normal, and so normative that they no longer correspond to the psyche's needs for nonego imaginal realities which 'perturb to excess.' . . . Falling apart makes possible a new style of reflection within the psyche . . . . Only when things fall apart do they open up into new meanings . . . .
--Dr. J. Hillman
Image:
This image is dedicated to Eliza Gilkyson--that folk-rock mythopoetic songbird--for touching the very soul of the Gypsy Scholar.
The image and the song, 'Paradise Hotel,' were the grand finale to my Essay-with-Soundtrack series "The Dark Night of the Wounded Soul: On the Road with Today's Traveling Troubadours: Mythopoetic Songbirds, The Archetypal Lovers, & the Hotel at the End of the Road."
"Love's Messenger"-"But the bird in my hand promises paradise"
