Since I published the liner notes for “In the Right,” I’ve somewhat surprisingly run into a couple things that seem related.
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The first connection, to my great pleasure, appeared in an interview by Ezra Klein with Brian Eno, about the new book by Eno and Bette A., What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory (a book I also mention in my post about my “round two” book purchases using retirement-gift money from my colleagues).
In the interview, while discussing the role and importance of “feeling” in creating or experiencing art, Eno says:
When you are making something, it starts to come alive when you start to have feelings that you didn’t expect from it. You think, “Well, I’m going to make this, that, the other.” And as it starts to form, it starts to change. It starts to become something that you hadn’t imagined.
In those liner notes, I wrote about something similar that happened to me when I was writing the song:
I wandered through a winding trail of false starts, mumbled fragments, emergent rhymes — limping toward something like a story, but not quite feeling it.
Things clicked when I switched the roles in the song, when I made him right and her wrong.
I don’t like to write about my life, per se (though I used to), but I do appreciate resonances. And that switch brought back — emotionally, and rather unpleasantly — an experience I’d had.
(My, there are a lot of italics in that quote….)
I felt almost giddy when I heard an artist of Eno’s caliber describe something about the art process that I had felt.
The second connection appeared in an article from the Washington Post’s advice columnist Carolyn Hax. Apparently I ended the song’s story more or less the way she might have.
I feel good about that because I’ve always written a bit, shall we say, overdramatically. It was true when I began writing, possibly arising from the sense of urgency I felt, way back when, as a Christian writer trying to “lead people to Christ.” It was still true in The Reign, even though I was consciously trying to move away from all that; it’s pretty easy to see in “Strip” and “Long Shadow,” for example.
And I still struggle with it — though, fortunately, I’ve learned that, as Truman Capote (allegedly) said, good writing is rewriting.
The version of “In the Right” that I sent Harold ended the first verse in high drama: “Does it really matter / Now that everything has shattered?” The change is subtle — “Given everything that’s shattered” isn’t a huge difference, but the destruction is a little more constrained.
But I was still unhappy that the argument ended with her leaving. I tried to rewrite it, replacing the word “leaving” with “seething,” but it just didn’t resonate. I decided that I’d have to live with my tendency to overwrite.
But the Carolyn Hax column described a woman in a vaguely similar situation:
I’m not sure how it happens, but my boyfriend “controls” our fights — whenever we have one, I feel like it’s only over when he’s done, and I can’t shut it down, ask to talk about it later or change the tone. Sometimes it feels like hours and is maybe only over if I abjectly apologize, whether I’m wrong or not.
Hax didn’t precisely advise the woman to leave, but it was one of the options — and an important one:
When you are willing to break up if you feel silenced, and if you can draw lines and hold them, then you are well suited to hold your shape within a partnership and won’t be easily manipulated.
I’d been imagining a woman unwilling to put up with the man’s need to be seen as right, and I liked the idea of her walking out before it became a pattern. Apparently, it’s not as high drama as I’d feared.
P.S. What Art Does is a brilliant book, and I’m sure it stands on its own (I’m only half-way through, as I write this, but I’m confident that it does). But I’ve also enjoyed listening to Eno and his collaborator, Bette A., explain and expand on the book. If that sounds interesting, you might check out the conversation between them at the British Library.
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