Songs for a Blue Guitar and the American Sublime [Work in Progress]

This Expansive Land Full of Emptiness and Echoes:

Songs for a Blue Guitar and the American Sublime

1

On the sixth page of Richard Powers’s 2018 novel The Overstory, the great-grandparents of one of the tome’s many protagonists, immigrants from two different parts of Europe, marry their fortunes together – as Simon and Garfunkel sing in “America” – and succumb to this country’s unique siren song: the call to become pioneers into not just the harsh unknown interior geographically, but also the crucible of character into which living here throws us all, ancestors and modern denizens alike, an empty basin made beautiful by the mirrored-facets we hammer into its curved surface, with just our bare fists, which the frustrating struggle to love and be loved in this alienating land has hardened into the powerful tool we call the arts.

They marry before Christmas. By February, they are Americans. In the spring, the chestnuts bloom again, long, shaggy catkins waving in the wind like whitecaps on the glaucous Hudson.

Citizenship comes with a hunger for the uncut world. The couple assemble their movable goods and make the overland trip through the great tracts of eastern white pine, into the dark beech forests of Ohio, across the midwestern oak breaks, and out to the settlement near Fort Des Moines in the new state of Iowa, where the authorities give away land platted yesterday to anyone who will farm it. Their nearest neighbors are two miles away. They plow and plant four dozen acres that first year. Corn, potatoes, and beans. The work is brutal, but theirs. Better than building ships for any country’s navy.

Then comes the prairie winter. The cold tests their will to live. Nights in the gap-riddled cabin zero their blood. They must crack the ice in the water basin every morning just to splash their faces. But they are young, free, and driven – the sole backers of their own existence. Winter doesn’t kill them. Not yet. The blackest despair at the heart of them gets pressed to diamond.[1]

Like the tragic northern California protagonist in John Steinbeck’s To a God Unknown, the man of this couple becomes obsessed with a great tree overlooking their farm. Once a month, he photographs this majestic chestnut – and then so do his successive male heirs. For his grandson, “there are months when, through the viewfinder, the spreading crown seems to his surprised eye like the template for meaning itself.”[2] A template is an empty tool, though, and the meaning to be yielded – for this character and all of us across America’s layers of space and time – remains elusive: “In the fall, the yellowing leaves fill Frank Jr. with nostalgia. In winter, bare branches click and hum above the drifts, their blunt resting buds almost sinister with waiting. But for a moment each spring, the pale green catkins and cream-colored flowers put thoughts into Frank Jr.’s head, thoughts he doesn’t know how to have.”[3] Generations later, you could almost say another member of this family was born – in reality – not far away, in Massillon, Ohio[4], a man just as obsessed with capturing, through a different kind of medium, the poignancy of the fact that we can’t truly hold still what’s important to us, for thorough contemplation, no matter if we sing into being a timelapsed vision of it until we’re blue in the face.

That idiom means breathless from failure, but that color also means artistic success, and so much more.

That man is Mark Kozelek, and his masterpiece – from a lifetime of musically circumscribing that cypher of a tree, the opposite of the tree of knowledge, the symbol of the inscrutable American Sublime – is his 1996 album Songs for a Blue Guitar.

2

[1] Richard Powers, The Overstory, W.W. Norton & Company, 2018, p. 6

[2] ibid, p. 15

[3] ibid

[4] https://www.allmusic.com/artist/mark-kozelek-mn0000241263/biography