AT JIM MORRISON’S GRAVE, AN ORIGINAL

i’ll leave this one to you!

-liv

WICKED

i am about to ask you to hold some space for the soundtrack of wicked...please and thank you!

when i was really young, my auntie lived an era of her life as a devoted follower of the original broadway production of wicked. her stories of waiting on line for tickets, her name in the hat for the ticket lottery weekly, if not daily, to get seats, hanging onto every word of the story of oz and elphaba and glinda and the wizard. i think she saw it 64 times. wild right? but i loved how much she loved wicked. i admit i just admired how devoted she was to what made her feel seen. someone who goes the distance to feel that. i mean not everything we can devote ourselves to is good of course, right? but for my auntie, the story of elphaba was like medicine.

and since the movie has come out, i really get it now, i do. i have cried every time! I have listened to these songs every single day in the car for the last month, feeling things while singing i have not felt before, just constantly in tears! i dig a great story about courage. i found myself running through golden gate park the other day, singing “the wizard and i,” almost as shameless as elphaba. wicked tells of devotion to the greatest cause, of unconditional friendship, of shamelessness at all costs. a production that is as sparkling as a dream.

in the story of wicked, devotion does not always lead to the light, but it leads. i wonder for myself, by what am i truly led? changed? i’ll end with a line from the broadway production: “who can say if i have been changed for the better? but because I knew you, I have been changed for good.”

-sum

LAUGHING STOCK, TALK TALK

this album won’t be for everyone, even though there’s a universal quality to it – a spirituality only the heart can understand. i have honestly had so many otherworldly thoughts while listening to it. and if you put it on (listen all the way, straight through), i think you’ll hear how it manages to blot everything out, right up to the edges, and become the whole atmosphere. like seeing the world through a piece of colored glass.

if there’s a ‘next place’ – a heaven, a golden gate, a higher realm – this is what i imagine we might hear there. music coming from the other side of the hill. it’s beautiful if you’re patient with it, if you let it fill your head with its ruminations, its transcendental tumbles through visions of heart-wrenching pain and redemption and unparalleled beauty.

a particularly special stop on this journey for me is new grass. it’s like the audio version of watching spring come to life in slow motion, the world tending to old wounds and healing itself with the dawn of a new season, an awakening. i remember lying on my apartment floor a couple of years ago, writing a poem while this song played, and when i was finished i realized i had, without any thought, titled the poem after the song.

-liv

FLOWER OF DEVOTION, DEHD

when i discovered dehd’s first album, “water,” it just meant the world to me and it was really all i was interested in from them for a long time. i’m appreciating “flower of devotion” more now with this theme. firstly, i’ll just say this album really has this wistful feeling that i’m sort of attached to when listening to indie music. its just…so STRONG. i can HEAR how big the feelings are. I don’t know what other word to use? I mean it IS strong! the octaves of their voices alone give something to me. the hugeness of the self, a symphony of self…pure feeling, pure release.

they’re kind of owning the battle between the euphoria of independence and the desperation and whims of desire amidst attempts at self-acceptance. to want to be everything to someone, to need to be everything to yourself. the way feeling and choice fall out of step. what is it we stay devoted to? when we want something so desperately and we don’t know even what it is. god, i feel this all the time! unbridled yearning. at home in the aspiration more than in reality.

like kids on a playground sticking out their tongues like, “i just feel this way and you can’t do a thing about it! except i want you to!” dehd gives us these poignant musings on desire, time, running out of it, being in love while out of touch, but free. somehow alone in the dream, feeling it not coming true, going on, devoted to the dream nonetheless.

-sum

DUFT, HANNAH HÖCH

devotion is one of those concepts that is simply too powerful for words. it has to be seen to be believed – at the very least, captured. and this painting, i think, really expresses the softness and strength in devotion, and even more so, just how personal of a practice it is. devotion, ultimately, is a relationship.

the contrast of ‘place’ here is really striking to me. behind her canopy of flowers is a darkness that does not seem to be seeping in, but rather sits behind all of the color and the life, like it’s waiting for her to return. is this lush environment self-constructed, something she has conjured up in her mind? is it a moment of escape, of time travel? does it reveal the person she knows herself to be, or someone she longs to be? whatever it might represent, this place is where she seems to be at peace, where she is one with the fragility and endurance of these flowers.

here, i see devotion to many things at once. to the self, in its truest form, perhaps. to the body and its natural wonders, its monumental sacrifices. to the way things can change. there is a beautiful suggestion in this painting that we can choose to devote ourselves to the way things are not, to the way things could be.

-liv

DEVOTION, PATTI SMITH

though this is a quick read, i found a useful picture painted within. written for yale university press’ “why i write” series, patti gives us three chapters of unique yet complementary form, providing a real-time journey alongside a thread followed when attempting to deduce and capture meaning through her writing.

i understand this desire to communicate illustratively and urgently with language, and as a writer this is precisely the craft, the one that takes from sleep even without the pen in hand…especially without it. as if hand in hand, i remember reading this feeling like i was walking the streets then the wilderness of her mind, following her as she demonstrates how she reaches inside to find and then reveal the world, or at least a world that exists somewhere, even if in the mind. this could be read as an exposé on the unlimited quality of the self, coming to terms with the conviction of a writer and the sequence of observation and action, the crafting of meaning through experience and imagination.

i most appreciate her emphasis on our dreams, our coincidences and fates, and the revelation that they indeed contain all the meaning in the world. devotion to knowing the self can take many forms…but i think she is saying, regardless, it simply must take form for meaning to come.

-sum