Last night, we watched a documentary called Searching for Sugar Man, about “Rodriguez”, a folk-rock singer-songwriter, a sort of Latin American Bob Dylan or Woody Guthrie who released two albums in the Seventies that critics loved but were a monumental flop commercially. After that, he drifted away. Some said he shot himself or set himself on fire after a particularly bad show, and that was the end of him.
Or was it? Turns out he was a massive hit in South Africa, where his music of rebellion struck a chord with young people who were sick of apartheid and a conservative, unquestioning culture of oppression. Years later, a journalist and a record shop owner who were big fans of Rodriguez got together to try and figure out who he was, and what really happened to him. In their search, they get hints that he might even be alive…
I won’t tell you the rest, because it’s really worth a watch, even if you’re not a music person.
The documentary calls into question what fame is for, especially when faced with a mythic figure who wasn’t just overlooked by celebrity, but perhaps wasn’t even interested in it.
What?! This on our telly, just hours after “The Voice”, a show where people young and old fall over themselves with nerves and hopes, desperate for acceptance by music stars and the hope of being delivered from their lives.
But delivered to where? There’s nowhere other than life to go, nowhere other than our own company where we can be. Ramp up your means, your surroundings, and what are you left with? The moment. Yourself. The same moment that was always here.
I’m reminded of that old saying “Many people long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a Sunday afternoon.”
Case in point, here’s a Sunday afternoon, a big, sunny Easter Sunday. When I woke up this morning, the chatter was already running in my head, asking what I was going to produce today — would I get any drawings done for the art show?
What do you have to say to anyone, anyway? the voices asked. That’s why you can’t write fiction or pick anything to draw: There’s nothing going on. Your experiences aren’t interesting enough. You don’t have any original insight or style.
I had my breakfast and, rather than surf the internet (“I’m so tired of it; I don’t want that right now”), I took some thin volumes of poetry off the shelf and read through them. The gentle grace of some Classic Haiku; funny mental twists from John Hegley, who I’d not heard of before (how great that I’ve married into a library); and biting lines from Graeme Hawley, a poet I did a reading with in Edinburgh. I heard a gong-like resonance in each of them, as these individuals simply looked at their experience and wondered about it. With a step back, a thought, and some words, they sent me a moment, an “A-ha” or a smile across time.
Then I turned to Cheri Huber, who writes self-help-y stuff from a Zen perspective. Her ideas are playful, but there’s a profundity to them that just stops the clock. “Oh my God, that really is what’s going on every second.” I read a bit she wrote about self-hate versus sub-personalities.
The little characters I’ve drawn for the voices in my head are what she calls “sub-personalities”. Each of these springs up at some point in life as a coping strategy, a way of getting by in a world that tells us we’re essentially flawed and wrong and need to be fixed. (Hello, Easter sermons about sin.)
“Self-hate”, though — that sounds too harsh. Really? Yet that’s the other bit of commentary that’s always going on, she says. The distinguishing feature about sub-personalities is that they can be quieted. They just need something — usually to be assured that they’re safe: I need order, I need inspiration, I need connection, I need freedom, all to be comforted and to know that I’m okay, I’m safe.
But self-hate, says Huber, is that bit of us that insists on suffering, on making something constantly wrong so that — wait for it — we can exist. The socially conditioned ego needs to be constantly having somewhere to go, something about ourselves to fix, or it doesn’t know what to do. When you tune into this constant commentary, the never-ending insistence on duality, it’s a bit maddening. But, Huber asserts, by distinguishing it we can stop listening to it like it’s us, like it’s real or true, and learn to ignore it. It’s never going away and, unlike the sub-personalities, it can’t be satisfied; we were raised to think like this, that there’s somewhere to go, that this isn’t it, that we’re somehow not-right. But by “disidentifying” from the voice, we can choose to bring our attention back to the here and now.
So here I am. All that pressure that wanted to wreck my day, to cover it in storm clouds and high-pressure systems, is at bay, and I have the chance to experience some freedom.
If you’re there, reading through all this navel-gazing stuff, thanks for persisting. I’m really just trying to articulate this for myself to see if I get it. Do you go through this? Does everyone?
The creative life seems to make this a particular hazard, this constant feeling like there’s something I should be producing or doing or achieving. The conditioned message is that I’m accountable (to whom?) for doing something. There’s constant comparison with others, with a resulting judgment (seldom in my favour).
I think that’s why this story of Rodriguez has struck such a timely, tuneful chord with so many people and got such acclaim, because the idea of this mysterious, monk-like musician is irresistible — a poet-wanderer who’s untouched by that insatiable hunger to advance, and instead draws his inspiration from within. How peaceful, the idea of attaining that state — which, of course, isn’t about attaining anything, but sustaining ourselves on what’s already here.