Interesting timing: I read this immediately after reading today's NY Times piece exploring (among other things) how Alice Munro's stories revealed the secret at the heart of her marriage, that her second husband sexually abused one of her daughters from her first marriage. So your words rang startlingly true: "Even the most proper smarty-pants literary writers I admire cannot help but let the truth say something about them that they didn’t intend me to know. Truth can be terrifying, but dishonesty is, in this way, the enemy of art." Munro was surely more successful in her art than her life (or her parenting). Other thoughts: 1) Love your use of the word rumspringa!; 2) Can't wait to see you play in Los Angeles, the site of your rumspringa!
Honesty in letters (revealing the truth of a thing, no shading, no filter, no omissions) easier when writing to the dead perhaps, but never easy in my experience. The act of writing it down is a public act no matter that you keep your papers in a small shed behind the cabin or send them out or, now and then sing them to others, or cast them anchorless into the ether.
As I get older I also wonder about this sense of dishonesty towards myself. When I was younger I used to think that it just meant I have more time to figure out how to live more honestly towards who I feel like I am inside. Now I wonder why it is so hard for me to do so.
Can it be that it is just something that comes with being a human being? A much wiser friend told me once in the context of a similar conversation that “if you feel like you are swimming against the current of your own life, the moment you realize that this is happening you must change course, and swim with your own current.” I wonder if it is much easier for millennials and people younger than them to live dishonestly with their own selves, since it is practically expected of them that much of their existence in the virtual world will be a type of pretending, an expected dishonesty.
I hope to find my true voice one day. I feel that I’m getting there in my songwriting but I am often heavily influenced by what currently inspires me to the point where it seems to me that I’m just ripping it off in some way. I do think I’ve improved though. Well I’ll just keep going - keep trying and the progression comes
I find it notable that so many 'influencers' or just those operating in the online space to sell something, even if it is say a spiritual or personal growth course they're selling become more and more fractured in the attempt at creating a seemingly 'authentic' persona. Like the more energy they put into this the more they run headlong into a kind of fracturing almost as if the dissemination literally cuts them into bits as a little piece of them is funnelled down virtual tubes for consumption. I have danced with social media for years, trying to find a way to do it and then running away, so often getting a kind of icky feeling from it. I think it has hurt my writing and music 'career' by lack of visibility but it may also have preserved my sanity and sense of wholeness, a kind of actual integrity not faux authenticity.
It had been interesting watching the way you have dance with visibility and the ways in which my awareness of your work has danced in and out of my life. New albums coming out always seemed to reach me no matter how deep in retreat from the world I was. I learned to play guitar by learning your songs at just 14 and they have fed me and kept me warm at times when I felt lost and adrift from so much of modern culture. The years of a kind of self made hermitage at my parents house and navigating difficult psychical and spiritual illness until I was strong enough to come out the other side and back into an independent and true life for myself, my finding of 'the others' reaching out into real life and not just through the pages of books.
Thank you for this. I am going to read some of these letter exchanges particularly the ones between Rilke and Lou Andreas Salome appeals to me. Reading autobiography of unusual women used to do something of this for me.
Interesting timing: I read this immediately after reading today's NY Times piece exploring (among other things) how Alice Munro's stories revealed the secret at the heart of her marriage, that her second husband sexually abused one of her daughters from her first marriage. So your words rang startlingly true: "Even the most proper smarty-pants literary writers I admire cannot help but let the truth say something about them that they didn’t intend me to know. Truth can be terrifying, but dishonesty is, in this way, the enemy of art." Munro was surely more successful in her art than her life (or her parenting). Other thoughts: 1) Love your use of the word rumspringa!; 2) Can't wait to see you play in Los Angeles, the site of your rumspringa!
"I wrote you a letter / posted out of central L.A."
Honesty in letters (revealing the truth of a thing, no shading, no filter, no omissions) easier when writing to the dead perhaps, but never easy in my experience. The act of writing it down is a public act no matter that you keep your papers in a small shed behind the cabin or send them out or, now and then sing them to others, or cast them anchorless into the ether.
Inspired writing – thank you for that.
As I get older I also wonder about this sense of dishonesty towards myself. When I was younger I used to think that it just meant I have more time to figure out how to live more honestly towards who I feel like I am inside. Now I wonder why it is so hard for me to do so.
Can it be that it is just something that comes with being a human being? A much wiser friend told me once in the context of a similar conversation that “if you feel like you are swimming against the current of your own life, the moment you realize that this is happening you must change course, and swim with your own current.” I wonder if it is much easier for millennials and people younger than them to live dishonestly with their own selves, since it is practically expected of them that much of their existence in the virtual world will be a type of pretending, an expected dishonesty.
I hope to find my true voice one day. I feel that I’m getting there in my songwriting but I am often heavily influenced by what currently inspires me to the point where it seems to me that I’m just ripping it off in some way. I do think I’ve improved though. Well I’ll just keep going - keep trying and the progression comes
Great read, thanks for sharing
Having done a bit of Tarot study many years ago (before you were born, Laura) I find myself, after reading these, wishing I’d known you then.
I find it notable that so many 'influencers' or just those operating in the online space to sell something, even if it is say a spiritual or personal growth course they're selling become more and more fractured in the attempt at creating a seemingly 'authentic' persona. Like the more energy they put into this the more they run headlong into a kind of fracturing almost as if the dissemination literally cuts them into bits as a little piece of them is funnelled down virtual tubes for consumption. I have danced with social media for years, trying to find a way to do it and then running away, so often getting a kind of icky feeling from it. I think it has hurt my writing and music 'career' by lack of visibility but it may also have preserved my sanity and sense of wholeness, a kind of actual integrity not faux authenticity.
It had been interesting watching the way you have dance with visibility and the ways in which my awareness of your work has danced in and out of my life. New albums coming out always seemed to reach me no matter how deep in retreat from the world I was. I learned to play guitar by learning your songs at just 14 and they have fed me and kept me warm at times when I felt lost and adrift from so much of modern culture. The years of a kind of self made hermitage at my parents house and navigating difficult psychical and spiritual illness until I was strong enough to come out the other side and back into an independent and true life for myself, my finding of 'the others' reaching out into real life and not just through the pages of books.
Thank you for this. I am going to read some of these letter exchanges particularly the ones between Rilke and Lou Andreas Salome appeals to me. Reading autobiography of unusual women used to do something of this for me.
I wonder what you would think of Khalil Gibran…