Teatro (1998)--take 2

For my recent trip to The High Hampton Inn, I made a new playlist of the 200 Willie Nelson songs (out of a possible 1600) that I marked as 5-stars in my ITUNES. I put it on shuffle and listened to my 5-star Willie Nelson mix. 200 songs distilled from 111 albums and selected from over 1600 songs. I also made a 4-star mix made up of all the songs I marked with 4 stars.

Today I begin working my way back through the 100 or so albums I have already reviewed. As I get my hands on the remaining albums I’m missing, I’ll review those, but till then, I’ll just re-listen to the ones I have already reviewed (in the same order). So I will start again in 1998 with Willie’s flamenco-inflected “Teatro.”

Willie opens with the instrumental “Ou Es-Tu, Mon Amour” (Where Are You, My Love?). He begins, like the play “Hamlet,” with a question. A wordless, instrumental question. A state of questioning, longing. Then he moves to the gnomic, paradoxical “I Never Cared For You.”

I know you won’t believe the things I tell you…

Your heart has been forewarned

All men will lie to you

Your mind cannot conceive

Now all depends on what I say to you

And on your doubting me

So I’ve prepared these statements far from true

Pay heed and disbelieve

I’m not even sure how to paraphrase these zen-like koans. I think he is saying, “I know you won’t believe me. You think all men will lie to you. But everything depends on what I have to say to you and on the fact that you will not believe me. So I have prepared false statements for you. Pay attention, but don’t believe them.” What can that possibly mean? Reminds me of the “All Cretans are liars” paradox. If a Cretan tells you this, what are you to make of it? Either way it’s true, either way it’s false. Willie’s songs are based on the desire for truth, but the recognition of lies, deception, and cheating when it comes to matters of the heart. Nothing is what it seems. Trust no one and nothing, even the advice to trust no one and nothing. Even that advice “ain’t necessarily so.” Willie here seems to be paraphrasing Hamlet’s famous “Get Thee to a Nunnery” scene in Act III, scene 1 of “Hamlet.” The question is, can we take Willie or Hamlet seriously? Are they crazy, foolish, mad (as they so often claim to be)? I reprint the entire scene at the end of this blog, but the key idea is that Hamlet says he loved Ophelia once, but then he says he never loved her. Just as Willie says, “I never cared for you.” Is he being ironic or serious? How can we tell? Should we (or Ophelia) believe either of them? And then the larger question raised by all of Willie’s music, is true love even possible in this fallen world, or should we follow Hamlet’s advice to “Get thee to a nunnery”?

This time around I have a sense of every song Willie ever sang as I re-review these albums, so I have a better sense of the whole in the part. In “Everywhere I Go” Willie seems to be referring to taking a memory of his love around with him in his pocket, in his mind. It’s another version of “You Were Always on My Mind.” Even on the road, at every show, the memory of your love will be with him. Is this true love? It is permanent, but it is purely mental, platonic, ideal. Does it really exist? Is it “just a memory.” “Darkness on the Face of the Earth” is another “she left me” song, but an upbeat, two-step sad song. In “My Own Peculiar Way” Willie describes an unusual kind of love indeed. He insists, “Don’t doubt my love,” and yet he and Hamlet asserted earlier that she should trust none of us, we are arrant knaves all of us. Though Willie’s mind wanders to yesterdays, to past loves, she should remain certain of her love living on in his mind? What kind of assurance is this? Should she take comfort that she will live always in his mind, but if his mind wanders, then what? Is there even stability in the mind and memory? “These Lonely Nights” is another teardrop song, another promise song: “I would love you till no end.” In other words, “I’ll always love you,” except of course if I never love you, and in either case, don’t believe me. “I Just Can’t Let You Say Goodbye” may be the scariest song in Willie’s repertoire. He kills his love so she can’t hurt him anymore by leaving him and saying goodbye. It is the scariest solution to the “she left me” predicament. It is the closest Willie comes to Keats “Ode to a Grecian Urn.” Here love is truly frozen in death, made eternal, perfect. And yet we see here perfectly, literally, that to freeze love, to make it last, is to kill it. This version of “Home Motel” may be the best, and the only song I know of where Willie sings solo vocals with just a piano and nothing else. I can’t make sense of Daniel Lanois’ “The Maker,” but it seems to be about man’s longing for yet separation from God. “I’ve just destroyed the world” could be the soundtrack for Hamlet’s nunnery scene with Ophelia. “Fools in love…never learn till it’s too late.” Hamlet has destroyed his own world and any hope of finding love. “Somebody Pick Up My Pieces” may be one of my top ten favorite Willie songs. As haunting and heartbreaking as he gets. This is the funkiest version of “Three Days” I’ve encountered. “I’ve loved you all over the world” offers the paradox that Willie will follow his heart wherever it takes him (which implies unfettered freedom), and yet he vows to love his woman “until death do us part” and “all over the world.” His love is boundless in every sense of the word. It can’t stay put; it is always flowing willy-nilly over all banks and borders, across geography and time. It can’t be tied down in both the good and bad sense of the phrase. He ends with another instrumental song, a technique he’s used before. Open and close in wordlessness.

Hamlet, Act III, Scene i

And lose the name of action.--Soft you now!

The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons

Be all my sins remember'd.

OPHELIA

Good my lord,

How does your honour for this many a day?

HAMLET

I humbly thank you; well, well, well.

OPHELIA

My lord, I have remembrances of yours,

That I have longed long to re-deliver;

I pray you, now receive them.

HAMLET

No, not I;

I never gave you aught.

OPHELIA

My honour'd lord, you know right well you did;

And, with them, words of so sweet breath composed

As made the things more rich: their perfume lost,

Take these again; for to the noble mind

Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.

There, my lord.

HAMLET

Ha, ha! are you honest?

OPHELIA

My lord?

HAMLET

Are you fair?

OPHELIA

What means your lordship?

HAMLET

That if you be honest and fair, your honesty should

admit no discourse to your beauty.

OPHELIA

Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than

with honesty?

HAMLET

Ay, truly; for the power of beauty will sooner

transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the

force of honesty can translate beauty into his

likeness: this was sometime a paradox, but now the

time gives it proof. I did love you once.

OPHELIA

Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.

HAMLET

You should not have believed me; for virtue cannot

so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of

it: I loved you not.

OPHELIA

I was the more deceived.

HAMLET

Get thee to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be a

breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest;

but yet I could accuse me of such things that it

were better my mother had not borne me: I am very

proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at

my beck than I have thoughts to put them in,

imagination to give them shape, or time to act them

in. What should such fellows as I do crawling

between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves,

all; believe none of us. Go thy ways to a nunnery.

Where's your father?

OPHELIA

At home, my lord.

HAMLET

Let the doors be shut upon him, that he may play the

fool no where but in's own house. Farewell.

OPHELIA

O, help him, you sweet heavens!

HAMLET

If thou dost marry, I'll give thee this plague for

thy dowry: be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as

snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. Get thee to a

nunnery, go: farewell. Or, if thou wilt needs

marry, marry a fool; for wise men know well enough

what monsters you make of them. To a nunnery, go,

and quickly too. Farewell.

OPHELIA

O heavenly powers, restore him!

HAMLET

I have heard of your paintings too, well enough; God

has given you one face, and you make yourselves

another: you jig, you amble, and you lisp, and

nick-name God's creatures, and make your wantonness

your ignorance. Go to, I'll no more on't; it hath

made me mad. I say, we will have no more marriages:

those that are married already, all but one, shall

live; the rest shall keep as they are. To a

nunnery, go.

Exit

OPHELIA

O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!

The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue, sword;

The expectancy and rose of the fair state,

The glass of fashion and the mould of form,

The observed of all observers, quite, quite down!

And I, of ladies most deject and wretched,

That suck'd the honey of his music vows,

Now see that noble and most sovereign reason,

Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh;

That unmatch'd form and feature of blown youth

Blasted with ecstasy: O, woe is me,

To have seen what I have seen, see what I see!

Re-enter KING CLAUDIUS and POLONIUS

KING CLAUDIUS

Love! his affections do not that way tend;

Nor what he spake, though it lack'd form a little,

Was not like madness. There's something in his soul,

O'er which his melancholy sits on brood;

And I do doubt the hatch and the disclose

Will be some danger: which for to prevent,

I have in quick determination

Thus set it down: he shall with speed to England,

For the demand of our neglected tribute

Haply the seas and countries different

With variable objects shall expel

This something-settled matter in his heart,

Whereon his brains still beating puts him thus

From fashion of himself. What think you on't?

LORD POLONIUS

It shall do well: but yet do I believe

The origin and commencement of his grief

Sprung from neglected love. How now, Ophelia!

You need not tell us what Lord Hamlet said;

We heard it all. My lord, do as you please;

But, if you hold it fit, after the play

Let his queen mother all alone entreat him

To show his grief: let her be round with him;

And I'll be placed, so please you, in the ear

Of all their conference. If she find him not,

To England send him, or confine him where

Your wisdom best shall think.

KING CLAUDIUS

It shall be so:

Madness in great ones must not unwatch'd go.