Mark Heard
Back around 1993, in my last years in high school, a buddy of mine turned me onto a musician by the name of Mark Heard, a singer/songwriter versed in a range of genres, playing and singing heartfelt, insistent, sometimes gut-wrenching, authentic rock/country/newfolk (how do you categorize these things?) music. I bought three of the albums: Dry Bones Dance, Second Hand, and Sattelite Sky (1990,'91, '92 respectively). That Bruce Cockburn was a friend and fan gave him even that much more standing with me.
A mutual friend of ours, whom late in my senior year I began to date, quickly grew tired of hearing us talk about this musician. Although I don't remember the exact words she used, the gist was something like "I don't like his music, and I shouldn't have to." It never stopped us from trying to convince her, however. He and I would quote song lyrics to each other, singing out the verses and refrains in the hallways, classrooms, and afterschool; on weekends...we were relentless; we were in love.
His music represented a complex middle ground, between the Panglossian simplicity of overtly 'Christian' artists and their primarily 'worship' or 'praise' oriented music, and the flatness of the secular remainder, which made no mention of any higher force, or calling; took no stand on the causes of 'the duality of our everyday existence' (as stated in link above). He sang of self-doubt, failure, the long ground between reality and our greatest hopes for it.
Mark Heard died in July of 1992, at the age of 40, from a heart attack; literally heart broken, though cholerserol and cigarrettes were the physiological cause. Although the lyrics on his later albums might be post-read as foreshadowing that event, it is no stretch to say that he was, at the age of 40, with a wife and a young child and little commercial success, grappling with issues of mortality; not only his own, but that of our entire culture: "They will dig up these ruins/make flutes of our bones/blow a hymn to the memory/of the orphans of God." In parallel, his lyrics struggle with both questions of self-doubt and his own legacy, and that of his generation.
That his music might appeal to only a small cross-section of the population is no surprise; that it would appeal so powerfully to two boys of roughly 17 years of age is far more so. I didn't listen to those albums for a long time following a tapering off period in the first years of college. It wasn't until I moved from the house I had been renting in Aspen, Colorado for four years (during which I had 13 roommates), to a cool basement one-bedroom down valley in Basalt that they emerged from the dust and clutter.
I should be more honest. They did not emerge passively, but were pulled out, on two occassions, and for two reasons. The first is that my move was precluded on my being there only a short time before leaving my job and the valley completely, and moving to South America. I had already been through the better part of a year of what might be termed an 'existential' (though perhaps it was more existentiell), 'early mid-life' or '1/3 life' crisis; unhappy with the job, recently separated (not for the first, or last, time) from my then girlfriend, and suddenly feeling time rushing by - what Mark sang of as 'the curse of the second hand - as my 29th birthday loomed before me. In the churn of the move I came back, literally, in touch with pieces of my own history - jounals, photos, yearbooks, and music - which I had not considered in a very long time. So I pulled the albums out and slipped them into the player; listened to a voice that seemed to come from very far away.
The second occassion was shortly after the move, when the same mutual friend came to visit me with her sister, who was going to work in Rocky Mountain National park that summer. Her sister wanted to know if I had some of the albums from that part of our lives - maybe The 77's; I don't think it was Mark Heard - that she could copy to her computer. So I dug through the CD's again, and went back briefly to that place.
I think she had it right, our mutual friend.
What sense did it make that two teenagers from New Jersey should have such an affinity for the internal struggles of a middle-aged man? And why should a girl of sixteen be subjected to that wailing and gnashing of teeth? Why were he and I so anxious to be ahead of our own teenage zeitgeist? Not content to be kids, we thought that we understood what he was singing about; his pain, the heartache, and the hope; but I'm not sure that I understand it, even now. It's problematic for me, this christian (in the direct sense of 'being christ-like') taking upon yourself the weight of the world; it seems almost arrogant, and I can't help but think of the Grand Inquisitor's criticism of Ivan Karamazov's Jesus, or that hurled at Kazantzakis' Christ.
Of course, it does make a certain sense. All three of us have preachers for fathers ('pastors', from the greek 'poimen', shepherd), and though I don't know their fathers well enough to make a definitive case, my own father has certainly been an example of the burden that comes with the self-chosen responsibility of leading others through a dangerous world. My friend's experience in south america (he was from Peru), and the experience of all of us growing up in northern New Jersey meant we were certainly not blind to the existence of good and evil - however simplistic that seems to me now - woven together in the fabric of our civilization. And in any ways (a phrase she used to use), you don't have to understand something to recognize it, if not as truth, at least as pointing toward it, asking relevant questions.
My life crisis passed, not because I solved the riddle, but because life quickly became again too full to carry the 'kaliedescope of brain-freight' Mark sang of. I recently found out that during my time in South America, the two of them got back together, after I sent him her e-mail address. Neither she nor I had talked to him during a long middle period, though I began to come out of it a bit sooner. I asked her just recently, through my surprise, what it was like, the two of them; she said "It feels like home."
Perhaps I should go upstairs and put on one of those albums, sit with a cup of tea, an early mid-fall cold, and my aching bones, and watch the waxing moon mark time as I spin backward through space. I'll think back to what it was I felt, we all felt, then; dig through pictures until I find that one of the three of us, standing on the corner where the sidewalk ended, the summer before I went away to college. As Mark sang, 'A thug who wins a kiss and misses finer things': face to face with my inablity to understand, explain, or carry the burden of the world, I can only steal the kiss Alyosha stole from his brother's Christ, before I walk away. There is no perfect tale, just the one story that is.
"I see you now and then in my dreams/Your voice sounds just like it used to/I know you better than I knew you then/All I can say is I love you/I thought our days were common place/Thought they would number in millions/Now there's only the aftertaste/Of circumstance that can't pass this way again...' Mark Heard, "Treasure of the Broken Land" - Final Track, Satellite Sky, 1992
A mutual friend of ours, whom late in my senior year I began to date, quickly grew tired of hearing us talk about this musician. Although I don't remember the exact words she used, the gist was something like "I don't like his music, and I shouldn't have to." It never stopped us from trying to convince her, however. He and I would quote song lyrics to each other, singing out the verses and refrains in the hallways, classrooms, and afterschool; on weekends...we were relentless; we were in love.
His music represented a complex middle ground, between the Panglossian simplicity of overtly 'Christian' artists and their primarily 'worship' or 'praise' oriented music, and the flatness of the secular remainder, which made no mention of any higher force, or calling; took no stand on the causes of 'the duality of our everyday existence' (as stated in link above). He sang of self-doubt, failure, the long ground between reality and our greatest hopes for it.
Mark Heard died in July of 1992, at the age of 40, from a heart attack; literally heart broken, though cholerserol and cigarrettes were the physiological cause. Although the lyrics on his later albums might be post-read as foreshadowing that event, it is no stretch to say that he was, at the age of 40, with a wife and a young child and little commercial success, grappling with issues of mortality; not only his own, but that of our entire culture: "They will dig up these ruins/make flutes of our bones/blow a hymn to the memory/of the orphans of God." In parallel, his lyrics struggle with both questions of self-doubt and his own legacy, and that of his generation.
That his music might appeal to only a small cross-section of the population is no surprise; that it would appeal so powerfully to two boys of roughly 17 years of age is far more so. I didn't listen to those albums for a long time following a tapering off period in the first years of college. It wasn't until I moved from the house I had been renting in Aspen, Colorado for four years (during which I had 13 roommates), to a cool basement one-bedroom down valley in Basalt that they emerged from the dust and clutter.
I should be more honest. They did not emerge passively, but were pulled out, on two occassions, and for two reasons. The first is that my move was precluded on my being there only a short time before leaving my job and the valley completely, and moving to South America. I had already been through the better part of a year of what might be termed an 'existential' (though perhaps it was more existentiell), 'early mid-life' or '1/3 life' crisis; unhappy with the job, recently separated (not for the first, or last, time) from my then girlfriend, and suddenly feeling time rushing by - what Mark sang of as 'the curse of the second hand - as my 29th birthday loomed before me. In the churn of the move I came back, literally, in touch with pieces of my own history - jounals, photos, yearbooks, and music - which I had not considered in a very long time. So I pulled the albums out and slipped them into the player; listened to a voice that seemed to come from very far away.
The second occassion was shortly after the move, when the same mutual friend came to visit me with her sister, who was going to work in Rocky Mountain National park that summer. Her sister wanted to know if I had some of the albums from that part of our lives - maybe The 77's; I don't think it was Mark Heard - that she could copy to her computer. So I dug through the CD's again, and went back briefly to that place.
I think she had it right, our mutual friend.
What sense did it make that two teenagers from New Jersey should have such an affinity for the internal struggles of a middle-aged man? And why should a girl of sixteen be subjected to that wailing and gnashing of teeth? Why were he and I so anxious to be ahead of our own teenage zeitgeist? Not content to be kids, we thought that we understood what he was singing about; his pain, the heartache, and the hope; but I'm not sure that I understand it, even now. It's problematic for me, this christian (in the direct sense of 'being christ-like') taking upon yourself the weight of the world; it seems almost arrogant, and I can't help but think of the Grand Inquisitor's criticism of Ivan Karamazov's Jesus, or that hurled at Kazantzakis' Christ.
Of course, it does make a certain sense. All three of us have preachers for fathers ('pastors', from the greek 'poimen', shepherd), and though I don't know their fathers well enough to make a definitive case, my own father has certainly been an example of the burden that comes with the self-chosen responsibility of leading others through a dangerous world. My friend's experience in south america (he was from Peru), and the experience of all of us growing up in northern New Jersey meant we were certainly not blind to the existence of good and evil - however simplistic that seems to me now - woven together in the fabric of our civilization. And in any ways (a phrase she used to use), you don't have to understand something to recognize it, if not as truth, at least as pointing toward it, asking relevant questions.
My life crisis passed, not because I solved the riddle, but because life quickly became again too full to carry the 'kaliedescope of brain-freight' Mark sang of. I recently found out that during my time in South America, the two of them got back together, after I sent him her e-mail address. Neither she nor I had talked to him during a long middle period, though I began to come out of it a bit sooner. I asked her just recently, through my surprise, what it was like, the two of them; she said "It feels like home."
Perhaps I should go upstairs and put on one of those albums, sit with a cup of tea, an early mid-fall cold, and my aching bones, and watch the waxing moon mark time as I spin backward through space. I'll think back to what it was I felt, we all felt, then; dig through pictures until I find that one of the three of us, standing on the corner where the sidewalk ended, the summer before I went away to college. As Mark sang, 'A thug who wins a kiss and misses finer things': face to face with my inablity to understand, explain, or carry the burden of the world, I can only steal the kiss Alyosha stole from his brother's Christ, before I walk away. There is no perfect tale, just the one story that is.
"I see you now and then in my dreams/Your voice sounds just like it used to/I know you better than I knew you then/All I can say is I love you/I thought our days were common place/Thought they would number in millions/Now there's only the aftertaste/Of circumstance that can't pass this way again...' Mark Heard, "Treasure of the Broken Land" - Final Track, Satellite Sky, 1992
posted by ddgregory at 7:43 PM
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