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.
This journal entry is the perfect example of what an urge to write looks like. I have nothing to say, at least not yet. I think I began with the intention of waxing philosophical about the spiritual differences of the two varying Saturday experiences, or perhaps I only started down that road because I was feeling a little lonely on a cold and quiet Saturday. Maybe an entry like this is more important than all the ones that find me rambling about some piece of music I have written, or some life experience on which I am compelled to elaborate. Maybe it is important in a journal like this that the days that saw no particular creative lightbulb illuminate are as represented as any of the opposite sort of days.
My mind is always preoccupied, obsessed even, 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. My finest. My quirks. My flaws.
I want my nieces and nephews (and perhaps one day, my own children), and future descendants, to know a little bit of who I am, and when the time comes, who I was. Not in some vain attempt at immortality, but that they might look upon my body of work and maybe, in the 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.
Regardless of what sort of work populates my endeavors —I am seeing this journal, for instance, swing beyond the realm of my songwriting as initially intended— I take heart knowing that such an undertaking has room for all of it. Saint Augustine’s Confessions is as personal as any text. Thoreau wrote Walden from the isolation of the wilderness. It can hardly be said that these works were not self-indulgence of the highest order, so should I continue to wallow in that same self-indulgence, I ought to relax: It’s been done before. And on much larger stages.
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 remains one of the most beautiful sentiments 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 (it doesn’t, but whatever), 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 own 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