Joni Mitchell: Woman of Heart and Mind

After a unexpectedly long and eventful hiatus from blogging, I'm ready to jump back into it.

What has inspired me this time is a DVD I watched recently: Joni Mitchell: Woman of Heart and Mind.

I hesitated for a long while before posting about it here, because the experience was so intensely personal. Was it appropriate to share about in a blog? Why would I want to? I still don't know, exactly, except some things must be said, whether or not we are able to say them directly, or as we would wish.

My birthmother, upon first meeting me when I was 21, gave several tapes she had made of the music that meant the most to her in her life. I fully understood the importance of the gesture - music has always functioned in that way for me as well - as carrier-wave of all that is inexpressible and vital in the evolution of the inner life. But I didn't understand the music itself: Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan, especially. My musical and political world at the time was in a different solar system entirely, and as much as I wanted to reach hers, I couldn't then. That failure has haunted until the day I watched this DVD. Suddenly, I got it. Completely. I wish I could tell her somehow.

I hesitate to recap the experience of watching this DVD for you - probably less is more when it comes to this kind of intensity. But rarely has something reached me on so many levels at once: musical, visual, philosophical, emotional, poetic.

So, some snapshots that are indelible.

First, I had to listen with new ears to get past my Joni Mitchell=folk singer prejudice. What I heard astonished me, as did how she describes it regarding I Had a King and Circle Game:

The chord are depictions of emotions - chords of inquiry. They have a question mark in them. There were so many unresolved things in me that those chords suited me.

I had been such an idiot. I could have written you an essay on how this works in Wagner or Beethoven or Schoenberg. But here is this direct, wise, sui generis woman telling me so simply how it is, if only I could hear.

Joni, whose "heart was breaking" because she missed Woodstock, sits down to write "a little song" that manages to capture the meaning of that entire cultural moment for everyone who was there, or wished they had been there. My mother missed Woodstock: it was all over 10 days before she gave birth to me. I became familiar with the song Woodstock from Eva Cassidy's cover of it, but I never made the connection to Woodstock itself . I was too lost in the metaphors like "back to the garden" and "we are stardust" to see the forest for the trees, much less catch on that it was a Joni Mitchell song. Understanding its history was like an electric shock going through me. David Crosby said "she contributed more towards people's understanding of that event than anybody that was there," and I just marveled.

I've never seen a documentary where the talking heads are so eloquent and unreserved in naming genius. Tom Manoff, a classical music critic for NPR got me right in the gut when he said:

"Throughout her work, there is an effort to make the music be sky bound, to relieve the body of temporality. And when she gets there, whoa. You know, it's almost a chant. This need for release and transcendence, to ride above the culture, to be in the sky, to reflect. To not be in it, but to look down upon it.

But Joni herself was best explicator of her work, expressing painful, complex things with such gentle honesty, directness, and clarity of heart and mind. The writing has been an exercise to face the clarity. Its very hard peeling off layers of your own onion. When you get to the truth - do you really want to say that in public? So you're really doing a tightrope walk to keep you heart alive, to keep you art alive, to keep it vital and useful to others - this is now useful because we have hit upon a human truth.

There is so much more to be said. Rent the DVD and you'll see what I mean.