ALL THE DREAMS YOU SHOW UP IN ARE NOT YOUR OWN
I’ve been listening to We're New Again, Makaya McCraven’s reworking - or ‘reimagining’, as he puts it - of the late Gil Scott-Heron’s last album, I’m New Here. It is the second such record, which indicates something of the significance of the original. McCraven’s arrangements, in many ways closer to Scott-Heron’s musical roots than those of the earlier albums, run from blues to ‘spiritual’ jazz, with the singer's voice given due prominence, and because he was starting with fragmentary material, he had to be much more than a conventional producer. That may have been part of the attraction of the project.
While working on I'm New Here, Scott-Heron was in bad shape, with serious health problems and addicted to crack; he had recently been in prison on Riker’s Island, which is where he was first visited by Richard Russell, the English producer who was to work with him on the original record. In a New Yorker profile, Scott-Heron later admitted that the finished album was more the producer’s work than his own, and that he had been happy to accede to Russell’s enthusiasm and direction. 'All the dreams you show up in are not your own’, he said. There was barely a handful of songs on the record, only one of them written by Scott-Heron; the remaining tracks were spoken or recited with musical accompaniment. I’m New Here had little of the socio-political content that Scott-Heron had been known for in the past, but it was engaging and unexpectedly emotional, touching on themes such as fear, mortality, and isolation, and it is perhaps not coincidental that Scott-Heron died not long after the album was completed. The record begins and ends with a poem entitled On Coming from a Broken Home, a tribute to the grandmother who helped to raise him, and the rest dwells sorrowfully on the consequences of his insecure childhood, revealing how a sense of caring and safety had been replaced by rootlessness and torment. Nonetheless, although I'm New Here is a bleak record, it is not without moments of wry hope and reconciliation, its tone set by the line in the title song, written by Bill Callahan, that ruefully remarks: ‘no matter how far wrong you’ve gone, you can always turn around’.
I’ve also just finished reading Wilhelm Waiblinger’s brief book, Friedrich Hölderlin, Life, Poetry, and Madness, an account of the poet’s sequestered life in a tower of the house in Tübingen that belonged to the carpenter, Ernst Zimmer, who kindly took him in after he was released from a clinic in 1806, diagnosed as incurably insane. The young Waiblinger, entranced by Hölderlin’s novel Hyperion (subtitled The Hermit in Greece), visited the older man over a period of four years and wrote the biography shortly before he died in Rome, aged only twenty-five. Describing Hölderlin’s decline into an eccentric who delighted in bowing to his guests, addressing them as ‘Your Royal Majesty’ or ‘Your Holiness’ and conversing in inanities, Waiblinger refuses to give up faith that his friend might yet recover his senses and return to his hitherto elevated state of mind. This was not to happen. Before his mental collapse, Hölderlin, Romantic poet and philosopher, had hymned the eternal values of art, beauty, and truth, inspired by nature and classical Greek culture, but after the breakdown his style, as well as his personality, changed. He continued to write poetry in seclusion, but it was simpler and fragmentary, often with unfinished lines and unconventional sentence structure, and yet, like shards of glass in sunshine, his verses sometimes emitted intense and unexpected rays of illumination.
Reflecting on these melancholy examples of breakdown and isolation, I turned to an alternative perspective sent to me by a friend, an extract from Inducements to Retiredness by the 17th century English metaphysical poet and mystic Thomas Traherne. As my friend observed, Traherne seems to suggest that the more cloistered our physical existence, the more potential there is for extensive vision.
All objects being most excellent which in Retirement we behold, it cometh to pass hereby that Retirement is the Sphere of Treasures, the Point of Concurrence, wherein all the Influences of Heaven meet, the Pupil of Vision out of which all the Rays and Beams of Sight disperse themselves and so, like God, an Invisible Sphere of all his Kingdom.
For further exploration:
We're New Again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jfvh07FIDM&list=OLAK5uy_niTp864avMp4Wy3m1_giuaEytm9o1iMdo&index=15
Gil Scott-Heron: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/08/09/new-york-is-killing-me
Makaya McCraven: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gil-scott-heron-makaya-mccraven-were-new-again-a-reimagining-by-makaya-mccraven/
Hölderlin and Waiblinger: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/friedrich-holderlin-poet-life-madness/