Follow the Circle Down. Where Would You Be?

Here is a little essay I wrote on Townes Van Zandt.  It is not all-encompassing, but an introduction to his life and music.  The next few weeks I'll be writing about artists and scientists and people I have met who experience the world vastly different than most other people.  This could be because of brain damage, a disease, or simply the way their brains are wired.  The more I learn about these cases, the more I ask, Who is the real me?  Does a real me even exist?  And if not, what does this say about the soul...

Please leave comments if there is anything you'd like to discuss, and if you enjoyed it, felt bored, etc...

“Shame that it’s not enough

Shame that it is a shame”

                                    - Townes Van Zandt, The Highway Kind

Trying to sum of Townes Van Zandt in words is like looking at a mountain reflected in a lake and trying to figure out what it’s all about.  You might get an idea of what it looks like, the same as if you looked directly toward its peak, but you wouldn’t know how the plants smell, what the trees in the wind sounded like, or know the view from the top.  You stare into the reflection and try to figure all this out, and falling leaf sending out ripples reminding you that you’re merely looking at a pool of water.

I’d say Townes battled depression, alcoholism and drugs for most of his life, but these characteristics were so woven into the fabric of his existence that battled feels like the wrong word.  These things poured into him just as music did, weaving a rich and strong and intricate texture that was frayed at the edges.  I think of him often, not because of his struggles, but the staggering poetry of his music. Yet, if he were a simple, happy man, or if he were alive today, would I look for so much in his songs?

Townes, who grew up in Texas, Montana and Colorado, came from a wealthy oil family.  He started playing guitar at 12, after receiving one for Christmas and seeing Elvis Presley on television.  He did well in school and studied among the mountains of the University of Colorado at Boulder.  It was during these years that he was diagnosed with manic depression, and his binge drinking became more pronounced.  I try to imagine him not as a young version of one of my favorite singers, but the strange heir to a rich, powerful family fortune.  His illness was attacked with the best that western medicine had to offer, insulin shock therapy. 

Electroconvulsive Therapy first came to be in the 1930’s.  Researches found that epileptics rarely suffered from psychosis, and vice versa.  Rather than splitting hairs about the difference between correlation (two things are connected in that they are caused by a third thing) and causality (one causes the other), it was assumed that inducing seizures in psychotic people could cure them.  Even reading accounts of this procedure, it is difficult to imagine the horror experienced.  Being strapped down to a stretcher, wheeled into the ECT room, and consciously watching the doctors as they silently attach electrodes to your head, then a drug is administered into your blood.  You awaken later, with no memory of what happened, only a strange soreness in your body, mysterious bruises, and a headache.  You have no conscious memory of going to the ECT room, but some primitive part of your brain fills you with fear when you are wheeled there again.

It was a few years later that the Italian psychiatrist Cerletti began to use electrical currents, which were amazingly much safer than the metazol or insulin induced seizures.  These early versions of ECT were dangerous and often caused death.  Over time, the procedure has become much safer, and shown to be effective with people suffering from depression, though its’ effect on psychotics, the original purpose of the procedure, has been shown to be ineffective.

In the 60’s, mood stabilizers had yet to be discovered.  And ECT hadn’t yet given muscle relaxers and barbiturates to calm the body before inducing dangerous seizures that could cause fractures and dislocations.  ECT has been shown to be very effect with unipolar depression (a cycle which only involves the sad, dark state of depression), but this is not the case with manic depression (a cycle that involves the low state of depression and the high, frenetic, productive, energized state of mania).  Shock therapy did not have the stigma it does today.  Like most suffering inflicted on minorities for the bulk of history, the only ones who don’t like them are the ones experiencing them.  His family probably thought they were doing what was best for him.  Years later, his mother regretted her decision more than anything else.

I don’t know if the insulin induced seizures helped his depression.  I do know that he lost most of his long term memory from the process, and that songs began to come to him, fully formed, in the middle of the night.  I imagine him sleeping in his trailer in the middle of the woods, no running water, but a flood of words and music braided together, stirring him from sleep, pulling his hands like a puppeteer toward his guitar.  Did these songs come from the same cocooned, mysterious place that caused him to reach for the bottle and the needle?  Before he lost himself to the lighting in his mind, he played guitar and he drank.  Losing his memory seemed to cast spotlights on the strongest parts of his life, his music, his addiction, and his loneliness.  Or was his memory hollowed out by currents of electricity, and then filled with a new kind of music and poetry?

On The Highway Kind, he says

My days they are the highway kind

They only come to leave

But the leaving I don’t mind

It’s the coming that I crave

Pour the sun upon the ground

Stand and throw a shadow

And watch it grow into a night

A fill the spinning sky

He takes the image of the highway, the long road of the past before automobiles, and twists it into each day of his life.  Without a past or future he is alone on the road, making up the world as he goes alone.  His depression, his shadow, cover the world and makes it into night.  The evocative image of pouring the sun into the ground may be an attempt to control the spinning sky, time passing, and the earth that turns without us perceiving it.

The attempt to make sense of one’s life by living it in ever moving solitude gives way to an even deeper study of depression.

Shame that it’s not enough

Shame that it is a shame

Follow the circle down

Where would you be

One of the defining characteristics of depression and anxiety is the awareness of one’s strange and painful feelings, and the shame from having them.  I don’t just obsess about cleaning the house, but I know my cleaning is excessive and I feel badly about it.  I have these strange urges I can’t control.  As far as I know, this guilt for being himself is never stated so clearly again, but may be opaquely present, hidden behind the canvas of his sad stories and epics.

To Live Is To Fly, counterpoints the beauty of life with the trappings of the human condition.

We all got holes to fill

And them holes are all that’s real

Some fall on you like a storm

Sometimes you dig your own

The meaning in life becomes filling the painful holes that we feel.  Perhaps he knew this through his art, but it may be the comparison of himself before and after the ECT.  Is our life made up of filling these holes, wherever they originated?  Is everything we see in life, what we call reality, created by the filter of our consciousness.  I am reminded of a quote by the author Anaïs Nin at the Exploratorium, an interactive science museum in San Francisco.  "We don’t see things as they are; we see things as we are."

This brings to mind Franz Kafka, a kindred spirit of Townes who had the holes of tuberculosis and being a Jew in Europe fall like a storm onto his life.  His characters often explored the reality of their perception, or, their perceived reality.  He wrote stories about dogs, mice, moles, and most famously in The Metamorphosis, a cockroach, possibly to show that, like my friend Tom says, “We are all silly animals running around, trying to make sense of things.”  That is to say, a mole lives a moles life (blind, underground, listening for vibrations that warn of an intruder), a dog a dog’s life (seeing birds and flying dogs), and a human a human’s.  We either all are something special in the universe, or none of us are.

In the song Marie, Townes’ focused on the castaways again, this time the homelss.  The song begins

I Stood in line and left my name

Took about six hours or so

Well, the man just grinned like it was all a game

Said they’d let me know

This casts the image of one of Kakfa’s mysterious clerks who are always in the way, a piece of the inconceivable bureaucracy of the government, of life, that makes us feel small and powerless.  The man’s grin stretches long and wide in my mind, and is filled with sharp triangular teeth that fit between each other lke the monster of Where The Wild Things Are.  It is no surprise when, later in the song

Well the man’s still grinning says he lost my file

I gotta stand in line again

Perhaps the most poignant line is when the unnamed narrator imagines a happily ever after with his girl

Maybe me and Marie can find a burned-out van

And do a little settling down

Does he mean create a home or have some privacy when making love?  Can we, the audience of relatively comfortable people with homes imagine not just having a burned out van as a home, but not having it and wishing for it?

Perhaps his most famous song, Pancho and Lefty, counterpoints the story of the well known Mexican revolutionary general with that of a regular guy, the kind of person we don’t write stories about.  He doesn’t have a big exciting life and death, but a life that continues on into old age.

Pancho needs your breaks it’s true

But save a few for Lefty too

He just did what he had to do

now he’s growing old

We see the world in wide grand strokes, certain people stand out in history just as a large tree is more noticeable than the air all around it.  Yet the life we are most aware of I our own, a life we bend over backward to give meaning, and look for this mirrored in the great mena dn women of the world, even as we ignore those most like ourselves, the Leftys who blow through life.

Steve Earle called Townes “a real good teacher and a real bad role model.”  He also famously said “Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world, and I'll stand on Bob Dylan's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.”  Townes responded, ”I’ve met Bob Dylan and his bodyguards, and I don’t think Steve could get anywhere near his coffee table.”  Though privately Earle’s quote embarrassed Townes, and Earle later recanted, telling the New York Times, "Did I ever believe that Townes was better than Bob Dylan? No.”  Still, Earle’s words are filled with the adoration of a young man speaking of his hero, except lacking the romance, the sheen of perfection with which we immerse those we admire.  Townes made great music but was also a rambling man, plagued by alcohol and heroin.  Maybe the drink was the only thing that kept him alive though all those years after his mind was set alight.  When his surgery after a bad fall, he had to stop drinking.  After the surgery he was so plagued by the DT’s, the shakes an alcoholic has when deprived of alcohol, that his wife gave him a flask of vodka.  By the time he was home he was acting like himself again, talking and smiling.  He smoked a joint with a friend, had a few Tylenol PMs, and watched television.  Soon after, his old heart attacked him, as if he had held his breath too long under water and his lungs finally gave up.  He died on the couch, found by his youngest son.

Steve Earle has a great version of Marie, which doesn’t feel as overwhelmingly heavy.

Steve’s tribute to Townes written after his death.

Another of my favorites: My Proud Mountains