The Heart of Saturday Night
Saturday nights are quieter than they used to be. There are probably a great many factors as to why, but likely the most significant one is the era of life in which I am entrenched —someone, as yet unmarried, in their mid-30s, surrounded by friends and contemporaries who are now a decade or more into marriages and the raising of families. Sometimes it feels like that discrepancy creates a sort of tension —a tension more likened to the pulling of a rubber band than to animosity; two cars headed in opposite directions, whose distance between them continues to grow, regardless of desires or intentions.
As I contemplate using this particular Saturday as a microcosm for all others, Tom Waits’ second album, The Heart of Saturday Night, fills the coziness of my office, alongside glowing lamps and an oscillating space heater. 845 miles away in New Orleans, Duke and North Carolina do battle in the Final Four. Consider the vastly different experiences of what is happening in my office and what is going on in that arena, and which one better encapsulates the “heart” of a Saturday night. I imagine your answer would depend entirely on the sort of person you are.
My mind is preoccupied with the building of a body of work. I romanticize that construction. I want it to be full of beautiful, crazy characters; joys and tears, great turns of phrase and embarrassingly bad ones. In its annals I want to house the story that changes the world, but also the story that no one cares to read. I want that body of work to have exciting points of interest and tourist traps, but also back alleys that only a certain kind of adventurer seeks. I want it full of music and stories and journals. Collaborations and solo adventures.
Not in some vain attempt at immortality, but that someone might look upon my body of work and maybe, in their smallest corner, feel a bit more at home in whatever world they’re living. I have almost nothing of this sort from the past generations of my family, and it is perhaps the one unattainable thing in this life that I don’t have that I wish I did.
In the Mark Knopfler documentary, A Life in Songs, he closes the interview with a statement about “going home and putting on the old songs, just to see how they’re getting on.” This is such a beautiful sentiment about creativity —as if each piece, starting from the quiet of a bedroom, eventually leaves the nest for a life of its own; that each piece is personified, and to sit with each over a cup of coffee now and again does the relationship good. It is this sentiment that allows for a wider embracing of whatever work you’ve done. When someone asked Nick Cave about his album, Nocturama, and about the wider public belief that it generally sucks, Cave simply responded that he was glad Nocturama was “still out there, causing trouble.”
I don’t think that such a perspective suggests that a person should just vomit out every piece of anything that they can without regard to quality, but so long as it passes your border check in the moment you share it, then it becomes a member of the team, no questions asked. Because in every sentence, every lyric, every character, every melody, every brushstroke, a tiny sliver of the piece is filled in. The piece will never be finished, but if we are lucky, in the end maybe it will be finished just enough that others can tell what it was going to be if we had just one more Saturday night to finish it.
North Carolina 81 Duke 77.