THE TWELVE COGITATIONS OF A PILGRIM'S CHRISTMAS: 2024

JONI MITCHELL, ELVIS PERKINS, FEMALE HAMLETS, THE BIBLE, AND A CAT FROM ITALY

1.

“It’s comin’ on Christmas, they’re cuttin’ down trees/they’re puttin’ up reindeer/and singin’ songs of joy and peace/oh, I wish I had a river I could skate away on …,” wrote Joni Mitchell, pictured above, in her lyrics for “River,” which she recorded on her Blue album released in 1971 when I was 15 and longin’ for any river other than the Mississippi since it shared a name with the state where I sat longin’ and listenin’ to Blue on my 13-year-old brother’s turntable having put a needle to my loneliness before years later finding another kind of needle to put to a more grown-up longin’ and loneliness that addicts, when we are active in our addictions, blame while doin’ the harm we do to ourselves and others, our 13-year-old brothers and little sisters who grow up wonderin’ why their love is not enough to help us heal since healin’ to them was found maybe in the deliverance of a manger and not in the need for metaphors. But that’s what Joni - who loved a few addicts as much as her metaphors - could do back then, does now this Christmas morning as I sit listenin’ to her sing this song as I type this first paragraph in this column: she both stirs the longin’ inside me and stabilizes it. I’ve always found a sense of stillness in her songs that she wrote maybe tryin’ to find it anew within herself, a stillness that once physically stifled her that was later metaphorically floatin’ about like her own deeply felt fog of breath right in front of her face she just couldn’t quite catch up to as her too-real heart proved it was there by poundin’ at the willful exertion it took for her to take on a frozen river with a pair of skates, the trust it took that the river wouldn’t break and crack like her heart that she as well could make so metaphorical that it actually mattered, the transformed stillness she poeticized in her own life and thus in ours stayin’ just out of reach like the “g” you know is there in those first lines of her lyric but you can’t quite hear, that unheard silence that hovers like seen breath, that matter of mist in the cold come-on of air, the matterin’ but not the matter all that is finally left. “ … I’m so hard to handle/I’m selfish and I’m sad … “ Joni wrote, no lyric from her, not one, just a gesture. She: never a jester herself, never. “ … oh, I wish I had a river I could skate away on …”

I didn’t know how to skate back during my Christmases in Mississippi - still don’t - but I knew - still do - how to escape.

And so I find myself here in Vienna this Christmas cat-sitting in a new Viennese friend’s huge, hauntingly beautiful loft above another river, the Danube, somewhere out there below me as I long as ever for an elusive stillness.

The cat’s name is Grigetto. He was a rescue found in Italy. Grigetto means “a little bit of grayness.” He is currently curled on the couch watching me write through the big open double doors between us as I sit typing all this at his real companion’s work table in his design atelier. I too was a rescue that he, his companion, found here in Vienna by way of that Mississippi childhood and New York City and San Francisco and Hudson and London, an escapee who could not skate but longed always for away, a pilgrim now seeking stillness who feels it finally stir not as a replacement for such longing but as its companion, that conundrum - the stirring stillness - of metaphors and mangers and a woman named Mitchell who had to learn to skate all over again before she could then skate away.

2.

Joni as my inspiration, I have not only redefined my life but also live anew within its redefinitions.

“For all her devotion to California, Mitchell was not a native of the canyons,” Gerri Hirshey, wrote in Rolling Stone. “Roberta Joan Anderson was born in Alberta, Canada, in 1943, to an ex-Royal Canadian officer and a schoolteacher. She was stricken with polio at age 9; the enforced stillness turned her toward the arts and left her with the urge to move.”

Reshaping stillness as an attribute and not a curse might lie at the heart of the ache in her songs, her voice, as does redefining that urge to move - to go - from one of escape to one of discovery.

Ann Powers titled her remarkable recent book about the singer and songwriter, Travelling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell. Powers redefined herself in order to write the book from one who considered herself a biographer to one who became a “mapmaker” and referred to writing it as a constant “uprooting” of herself. She doesn’t shy away either from Mitchell’s “thorniness,” or her own, and roots too around in that.

Mitchell herself in the second verse of the title song from her album Hejira:

“You know it never has been easy
Whether you do or you do not resign,
Whether you travel the breadth of extremities
Or stick to some straighter line.
Now here's a man and a woman sitting on a rock;
They're either going to thaw out or freeze.
Listen:
Strains of Benny Goodman
Coming through the snow and the pinewood trees.
I'm porous with travel fever,
But you know I'm so glad to be on my own.
Still somehow the slightest touch of a stranger
Can set up trembling in my bones.
I know no one's going to show me everything.
We all come and go unknown.
Each so deep and superficial,
Between the forceps and the stone …”

3.

My daddy died the August before the Christmas of 1963 - that’s what his stone will tell you. I was seven years on from the forceps they used on my mama when I came out refusing to breath until, I was told by those who told me such things, “they slapped you around real good.” Daddy was killed in a car wreck that summer of ’63. He was 32. I didn’t know that upcoming Christmas would be the last one my mama would be alive. That’s her in the photo above. She’d die the following November of the cancer that was starting to kill her somewhere in her esophagus. She’d be 33 by then. I’d be 8. “Almost 9,” I’d tell people already counting up the days of my getting older and giving an account. I didn’t know that Christmas in 1964 would be Mama’s last one but I did know this: since Daddy was dead I could ask for the doll I had always wanted Santa to bring me but for which I was afraid to ask since he’d been a coach and had always been foisting footballs and baseball gloves and all the unappealing apparati of boyhood in my frowning sissy face. I also knew early on how to play the sad-little-sissy card to get what I wanted. I detested pity but saw the utility that sympathy would yield in my life. I might have been a certain-sort-of-soon-to-be-completely-orphaned-boy who could never find the right fit for my hand inside a baseball glove when what I really wanted was just to put it, my hand, on my hip and hope for the best, but I did know how to be that utility infielder catching all the sympathy coming my way, especially that which I could gin up with just a hint of a tear without having to cry because I instinctively knew the economic cunning even then found in the best actors, something that I wanted to be myself, that conjured stir of faux stillness for which they serve as conduits. But the real thing - life, a tear, stillness - can’t be conjured. All that has to arrive - be - and you just have to settle into it which doesn’t mean you have, in turn, to settle or settle down. You do, however, have to be ready for its arrival. But, man-oh-man, I could always act it, all of it. I have always had the instinct for living life as narrative. In fact, living life as narrative is what instinctually saved me. Still does. But I have also thought a lot about that missing part of my narrative this Christmas - the readiness to be stirred by a deeper stillness when it arrives in my life - because Christmases are always about arrivals. Santa’s. A family's. The Christ Child’s. Some Wise Men. Shepherds. And sometimes - even once in Mississippi - snow. I remember the first time snow arrived down there and into my life. It was … well, divine … for I felt the divinity in its delivery to such a place - like stillness will maybe feel when it arrives in my life. I watch for it in the snow clouds over Vienna, that little bit of grayness - look, Grigetto - there on the morning’s horizon. Morning: another arrival. I wait.

3.

“For a while it was assumed that I was writing women's songs,” Mitchell told Hirshey for that Rolling Stone article. “Then men began to notice that they saw themselves in the songs, too. A good piece of art should be androgynous.”

4.

One of my pieces when I auditioned for Juilliard where I was accepted into its Drama Division as a member of Group 8 in 1975 was the “Now I am alone,” soliloquy from Hamlet. I had played Horatio in a college production at Millsaps in Jackson, Mississippi, the year before. The boy with whom I was then in love played the prince. The '70s. When longing became sexual. And a bit too often perhaps requited. I have ever since been fascinated by those who play the title role in this Shakespeare play since I have felt so drawn to it for so may reasons, the prince’s anger and grief and the staving off of them by staving off his melancholia and madness by his taking actions - acting - to do it. He also sees the sweep of his life as narrative and has a way with words. The guy talks to himself a lot which is sort of what writing is.

I have been even more intrigued by the women who have played Hamlet since I saw a former Juilliard classmate, Diane Venora, play it at the Public Theatre in New York in 1982. The last time I saw a woman cast in the role was Cush Jumbo at London’s the Young Vic in 2021. I wish I could have seen Frances de la Tour do it in 1979 in London as well. There is a radical interpretation of the play - a redefinition - in the 1920 Danish silent film version of it when actress Asta Nielsen, above, plays the role not as a man but as a woman raised as a man so as to sustain the royal lineage.

Hamlet/fromAct 5/Scene 2:

HORATIO:

If your mind dislike anything, obey it.

I will forestall

their repair hither and say you are not fit.

HAMLET:

Not a whit, we defy augury.

There's special providence in the fall of a sparrow.

If it be now, 'tis not to come;

if it be not to come, it will be now;

if it be not now, yet it will come.

The readiness is all …

4.

Mama made sure I got that doll that Christmas of 1964. But she also made sure I got a King James Version of the Bible. I long ago lost the Barbie-like doll. I still have the Bible. It is one of those red-letter ones in which what Jesus is purported to have said is highlighted in red. He was another guy with a way with words who talked to Himself a lot but - if you believe that He was God - called it prayer. In Matthew 10: 29, He tells his disciples when talking about His own Daddy (it’s complicated): “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.”

That Christmas my maternal grandparents’ house out in the Mississippi countryside was so crowded with cousins and aunts and uncles that Mama had to sleep on a cot by the silver aluminum Christmas tree with the rotating light at its base that caused a rainbow of colors to befall it as it befell me later on in my life when the gay flag would flap at parades and other places to signal I was accepted just as I felt accepted that night by my mama’s love, a mama whom I watched sleep and wondered if she were dreaming of my dead daddy as I’ve wondered ever since if she were dreaming too of her own approaching death. Watching my beautiful unmoving mama in a rainbow of light in the Mississippi darkness maybe yearning in her dreams to understand death is what Christmas will always be to me. She was so utterly still awaiting death’s next arrival, her understanding of it. I stared at the doll. Was let down by the Bible. But even then I knew the need for its balance. I wanted to wake my mama so utterly still there before me and love her back. But she was so still I didn’t do it. I couldn’t. Didn’t want to disturb her. Didn’t want to get in trouble. I watched her sleep instead.

I want that - to wake my sleeping mama - still.

Still.

Stillness.

A living mama’s stillness is the stillness that will never again arrive.

5.

When I was an actor, I played Alan Strang in Equus in a lot of different productions, one of which starred Tony Perkins as Dr. Dysart. Tony would talk to me a lot about his small sons back then named Osgood (after his own father) and Elvis. I became friends with the grown-up Elvis in Hudson, New York, when we both lived there. That’s Elvis above sitting in my loft six years ago on Christmas Eve after dinner which we shared with his godmother, Nuni Boylan, and her son, Wyndham. We sang lots of songs. The next day we all went to see the remake of Mary Poppins.

Tony Perkins died of complications from AIDS. Elvis’s mother, Berry Berenson, was killed on September 11th in the plane from Boston, American Airlines Flight 11, that crashed into the World Trade Center. Elvis is a singer/songwriter in the tradition of Joni Mitchell, and wrote about his own dead mama on his album Ash Wednesday, which in its wise and deeply lovely way is about the auguries to be found in loss.

6.

This is my neighbor Gerry. We spent every morning together when I lived in San Francisco for the last three years of my time there. She was fighting cancer and I helped her with her lymphedema, washing her legs and feet. Massaging them. Putting her compression stockings on her. We shared the intimacy of my service and her surrender to it. We also spent Christmases together. This is her opening her presents from me on one of those Christmas mornings. Gerry died after I moved to Hudson. In fact, she died as I was flying back to see her one last time when she was on her death bed. I think of her every Christmas. I miss her every day but especially this morning. She was a gift.

7.

A couple of years ago I wrote this on Facebook:

I usually go to a movie on Christmas but here in London even the cinemas shut down. The city completely stops. In NYC, I always looked forward to sitting in a packed cinema of Jewish folks festively relieved that they didn't have the pressure to celebrate the holiday. Sitting gratefully amidst their relief had become my solitary Christmas ritual.

Eleven years ago during such a December, a dear friend saved my life by walking me into the rooms where recovery begins then on Christmas went with me to see the Scorsese movie, Hugo. It starred Asa Butterfield whom I years later interviewed here in London. I was able to tell him how he was connected to my recovery and how I think of him every Christmas.

Last Christmas, I went to see West Side Story at a cinema in Hudson with a smattering of Jews and realized I, too, was longing for "Somewhere." My somewhere turned out not only to be London but, more important, who I am here and in the wider world that is where I now live my life. My somewhere was not a room where recovery begins nor Hudson nor a cinema nor a Sondheim lyric. My somewhere is just that: longing for somewhere. There are people in those rooms that continue to save my life even when they are manifested by Zooming in on a computer screen. They deeply need definitions though and the strictly built silos in which to place them. To them, I am "pulling a geographic” in the way I am now living my life. I am fine with that definition if that is how they need to define me.

8.

Toni Morrison: "Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined."

9.

From “Urge for Going” by Joni Mitchell:

“… Now the warriors of winter give a cold triumphant shout
And all that stays is dying, all that lives is gettin' out.
See the geese in chevron flight
Flapping and racing on before the snow.
They've got the urge for going
And they've got the wings to go …”

10:

"I still feel conflicted by the horror and violence of my mom's passing,” Elvis told The Guardian when Ash Wednesday was released in 2007. “Death is hard enough to understand anyway, but when you get totally insane people doing a totally insane thing … Does 'conflicted' sound glib? … well … ah … the trouble about being interpreted in an article is that it only conveys one thing, and there is no one thing … My aim is the acceptance of truth … Am I happy? Is my glass half full or half empty? Both. That's where it's at. The indescribable ‘it.’ I'd never call myself happy or sad."

11:

With Hejira, Joni Mitchell has said she was looking for a title that meant “departure with honor” and found the word in the dictionary where it told her it was about Mohammad’s own departure from Mecca to Medina in 622 AD - i.e. Anno Domini which is used to indicate that a date comes from the specified number of years after the accepted date of a baby’s birth in a manger. The word connotes an exodus. A refugee’s migration.

Joni redefined it as “a pilgrimage.”

And also said this:

“I was searching for something to make sense of everything. The road became a metaphor for my life … But if you see me in my songs and wonder about my life, then I’m not doing a good job. If you see yourself, then I’m doing what I was meant to do.”

12.

This is what I was meant to do.

Merry Christmas.

It has arrived.