Listen to this song, sung by George Jones: These Days I Barely Get By.
My goodness, could it be any more sad?
I have many of the songs George Jones recorded, and all the songs Hank Williams recorded. Yet, sometimes I’m not in the mood for them. How much sadness do you need in your life?
It occurred to me yesterday, though, that the value of these songs is that enable you to convert the pain of resentment to JUST sadness. This is progress.
The other night, doing some manual work I really didn’t want to do after a long day, I was having a first rate pity party. All but the most fortunate of you (I’m assuming plural readers, which in turn implies A reader; if I’m wrong, I’ll never know) have had the experience of bottled rage and resentment and anger and destructive impulses as a result of wounded vanity. Why do I have to do this? It’s stupid. It’s not fair. Things should be some other way. That’s what I deserve. I could just punch something. I want to break something. I want to scream.
As I have often commented, evil is born in this basic impulse. Is it not wanting more than others, just because you are you? Is it not lying, cheating and stealing to get it? Is it not taking pleasure in others submission to you? And is taking from others, and working to gain power over them a form of destruction? Are you not destroying trust, and love? Are you not taking both the tangible and the intangible?
Anyway, it occurred to me that country music helps to mute this impulse. Take George Jones: in the popular myth, at any rate, he was for many years a drunk. From what I understand, he was at times a bully. Country music is not for sophisticated people. It is not for people whose lives are full and complete and working really, really well, in general.
It is for people who get up early every day and go work a job that is tedious and at times painful. It is for people who have no reason to expect anything but a slow descent into physical decrepitude and a penurious old age. These people are not saints. I am in no way glorifying this lifestyle, except in this one respect: if you endure hardship without complaint, you grow. You will always grow. This is in my view the nature of the universe.
Thus to the extent country music enables people to avoid bitterness, it is immensely useful. You can bear sadness. It is very hard to bear bitterness.
Happiness, of course, is the ideal. For happy times, there is happy music. My personal favorite is probably Louis Prima.
Few thoughts on a Woden’s Day. I will stop doing that when it ceases to amuse and educate me. Interesting point here: according to them (and this is a site edited in large measure by precocious teenagers), Woden is related to the German word “Wut”, which means rage.
One can scarcely imagine the northern Europeans enjoying their lives in the cold and wet up there. Would this not be frustrating? Would enduring anger not be an obvious result? Given no reason not to, why NOT make your main god a personification of rage, and why not offer human sacrifices to him, as the Vikings did? You hurt, so someone else is going to hurt too. This is a very human impulse, to be seen the world over. In my view, this is in no small measure the impulse behind many wars. It is the impulse behind both Communism and Fascism.