Manafon (2)

Half life
She moves in a half life
Imperfect
  --David Sylvian, 'Snow White in Appalachia'.



Resuming my recent peroration on David Sylvian's new album, I cannot but single out and fully endorse Sylvian's following comment in the aforementioned interview:


[R. S. Thomas] was a man with a strong but complicated personal faith. Does that resonate with you?

It's a matter of defining for oneself what gives one's own life its shape and form, what are its defining characteristics, its sense of purpose? By and large, we're all free to determine what these might be. With Thomas, the poet and the priest are inseparable but for me it's the poetry which best gives his life its true definition. The freedom, ability, and the process to openly question aspects of his own faith, which I can only assume helped his personal growth in some manner (in Hinduism they might say this was his sadhana, his personal means for developing his spiritual awareness), must've acted as a considerable release for him.
As a man of faith, as rector, his approach might have been too austere, out of touch, to the degree that it alienated people (by all accounts) but his poetry expresses his humanity which, at its best, rises above the specifics of faith and national identity to speak of the universality of the human condition. He dug deep into his own soul, as corroded and damaged as it might've been, and spoke with as true a voice as he could muster. This happens frequently in Beckett's work. These heavily handicapped individuals are merely reflections of ourselves.
In a sense Thomas might, on the one hand, represent some of the higher aspirations of the human spirit but, on the other, indicate how heavily handicapped each one of us is individually and what effort of will it takes to overcome that. Some of us bear heavier handicaps than others but as J.G. Bennett once said in a quote that is sampled on Robert Fripp's album 'exposure' "if you know you have an unpleasant nature and dislike people, this is no obstacle for work". Which I take to mean that, despite the most inhibiting of handicaps, work on oneself, in the spiritually disciplined sense, is always available to you. And again, same source; "it is impossible to achieve the aim without suffering". The cause of this suffering is of course, generally speaking, ourselves.


A timely reminder to those who too simplistically conflate the man and the work under the same harsh, snap value judgements, failing to realise how the redeeming power of art lies precisely in this: in personal salvation, in finding in art a haven that makes suffering and the inability to live and to love and to like most people less intolerable. How some deeply flawed individuals can only find life bearable via the written or sung word. How happy, balanced, well adjusted people seldom give birth to art that is worth the name of... art.

And, to (provisionally) conclude, here's the lyrics of that other song from Manafon that has struck the deepest chord with me:


SNOW WHITE IN APPALACHIA

Half life
She moves in a half life
Imperfect

From her place on the stairs
Or sat in the backseat
Sometimes you're only a passenger
In the time of your life

And there's snow on the mattress
Blown in from the doorway
It would take pack mules and provisions
To get out alive

There were concerts and car crashes
There were kids she'd attended
And discreet indiscretions
For which she'd once made amends

And there's ice on the windshield
And the wipers are wasted
And the metal is flying
Between her and her friends

She'd abandoned them there
In the hills of Appalachia
She threw off the sandbags
To lighten the load

As soon as the sun rose
The keys were in the ignition
Following the tyre tracks
Of the truck sanding the road

There had to be drugs
Running through the girl's body
There had to be drugs
And they too had a name

And the adrenalin rush
Had left her exhausted
When under the blue sky
Nothing need be explained

And there is no maker
Just inexhaustible indifference
And there's comfort in that
So you feel unafraid

And the radio falls silent
But for short bursts of static
And she sleeps in a house
That once too had a name

(Source: http://www.davidsylvian.com/texts/lyrics_and_poetry/manafon_lyrics.html)