Spirit (1996)--take 2

This morning while listening to a RadioLab podcast titled “Beyond Time,” they of course played a clip of Elvis singing Willie’s “Funny How Time Slips Away.” In the midst of interviews with physicists discussing the many universes theory, they turn to Willie, who was there first, before the super colliders, to point out that time is slippery, elusive, and anything but linear. As Freud said (and I must paraphrase here from memory), “Wherever I go, the poets have been there first.” So not only is Willie a neuroscientist, he is a quantum-physicist.

Today I return to possibly my all-time favorite Willie album. If I have to pick one, this is probably it. I won’t re-cap my comments from my January blog on this album, but this time around I will focus more on the way Willie wrestles with time.

The opening track, “Matador,” wordlessly gets at the seductive nature of time. How we lunge for it, try to pin it down, try to put our fingers on it, but it always eludes us, slips away. This is Willie’s version of the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle that we can never measure both time and place with accuracy. We can only be certain of one or the other.

It strikes me now that “She’s Gone” may not be about a woman. In this case (and perhaps in every case), the woman is Time. Time is a woman, fickle, elusive, seductive, like the Fates in Greek Mythology. Maybe all of Willie’s lamenting for lost women is really symbolic, allegorical. What he is really lamenting is the passage of time, the way it slips away, Proust’s lament and search for “lost time.”

She is gone, but she was here,

And her presence is still heavy in the air.

Oh, what a taste of human love.

Now she’s gone, and it don’t matter anymore.

Again, the presence, the taste of love lingers in memory, ripens, becomes more intense in the mind than it was in the flesh. So is she really gone? Or is her presence even fuller, richer now than ever? And if this is so, does it matter whether she’s here or there?

Passing dreams in the night,

It was more than just a woman and a man.

It was love without disguise.

And now my life will never be the same again.

Love that is more than a woman and a man? Love that transcends the body? Love without the disguise and artifice of the body? A pure, platonic, timeless love. Again and again Willie seems to long for this perfect, guileless love. And yet again and again he acknowledges that so much of what we think of as love is guile, deception, illusion, in short, a lie, a fiction, a romance, in the medieval sense of the word, in the courtly love tradition of the Troubadours and Petrarch. And then comes “Your Memory Won’t Die in My Grave.”

Been feelin’ kinda free,

But I sure do feel lonesome.

Baby’s takin’ a trip,

But she ain’t takin’ me.

I been feelin’ kinda free,

But I’d rather feel your arms around me

‘Cause your takin’ away everything that I wanted.

There’s an old hollow tree

Where we carved our initials,

And I said I love you, and you said you love me.

It’s a memory today, it’ll be a memory tomorrow.

I hope you’ll be happy someday.

Your memory won’t die in my grave.

This is straight out of Shakespeare and Edmund Spencer. The desire for love to outlive time. And yet it is a conflicted, paradoxical desire, because he enjoys being free, feeling free, and yet he desires to feel her physical arms around him. He wants to be both free of those arms and embraced by them at the same time. It’s another “She’s gone” song, but it’s another song more about time than a woman. The only lasting love is carved in trees, written in songs and poems and novels, but never in reality. “I’m Not Trying to Forget You Anymore” continues the theme of memory. Here Willie just basks and luxuriates in his fond memory of a lost love. I picture him sitting in a warm bubble bath of memory. And even though it’s gone forever, he doesn’t bemoan the loss:

It did not last forever

Oh, but that’s alright…

And if I had the chance, I’d do it all again.

Here he seems almost indifferent (but tenderly so, if that’s possible) to the inevitable loss, the inevitable slippage of time. He has given up trying to hide from memories, and he has embraced the notion of enjoying them, coming to terms with them. “Too Sick to Pray” I treat pretty thoroughly in my January blog. It may be the most honest song in Willie’s entire catalog. Here he acknowledges a presence outside of time. From there he goes to another instrumental, “Mariachi,” where Johnny Gimble’s fiddle evokes whatever Willie’s voice cannot. Then he returns to the theme of always and forever in “I’m Waiting Forever”:

I’m waiting forever for you,

For this is my destiny, this is what I am to do.

But forever ain’t no time at all,

It’s only the time between telephone calls.

And the love that I hear in your voice is so clear comin’ through,

Keeps me waiting forever, waiting forever for you.

I’m waiting forever for you,

For this is my destiny, this is what I am to do.

But waiting is no waste of time,

I just play out the scenes on a stage in my mind

And I love makin’ love to your memory

It’s all that I do

While I’m waiting forever, waiting forever for you.

The paradoxes are everywhere. “Forever ain’t no time at all” reminds me of his line “How long is forever this time.” And, of course, “funny how time slips away.” Funny how forever slips away. But for Willie, “waiting is no waste of time.” He can keep love alive “on a stage in [his] mind.” Just as Proust and Gatsby and Petrarch and Shakespeare do. “Makin’ love to your memory” could be a defining line for Willie’s music. It’s all he does in every song. And it’s all always in his mind, the sound in his mind. The song. Because music is simply ordered sound, sound ordered in time. I’m not sure what to make of “We Don’t Run.” It seems to contradict so many of Willie’s songs. He’s always running, hitting the road. What can he mean when he says “We don’t run, we never do”? He lives on the road. I’ll need to puzzle over this song some more. In “I Guess I’ve Come to Live Here in Your Eyes,” the “place called paradise” seems to be his woman’s image of him. Willie sings, “I hope I’m here forever, but I think it’s time we both realize, that I guess I’ve come to live here in your eyes.” He seems to be saying that he wishes it could last forever, but realistically speaking, the best they can hope for is perfect memories, perfect images, perfect ideals of love in their minds. They shouldn’t hope for more. And that’s okay. Sounds like a compromise, which he insisted in the song before he never made: “We don’t compromise.” “Tears and doubts consume [him],” and he fears “someone will take it all away.” But no one can take away memories, the images we hold in our eyes, in our minds, and in our mind’s eye. “It’s a Dream Come True